diwa'teh save us!
on trans*languaging
my lola sends me a chain message and it states:W A R N I N GPLEASE READ IT......It’s too long to read but it is important for us to know that ....what the BIBLE said is happening now.....Satan fulfills his promise!” LORD SAVE US! Rapture will take place any time from now. Everything hindering the rapture has been removed. Gospel has been preached almost everywhere. All the prophecies have been fulfilled. Angels physically seen and captured on camera @ Dansoman also gives a ‘sign’. The devil is working very hard to occupy Christians with the things of this world so that the day will catch them unawares. Please be prepared. There is no more time, Use the advantage of this free sms to send this message to at least all ur contacts. Do not ignore. This is also a source of evangelism. Souls are dying. GOD bless you!Let’s Pray Hard: 6 6 6 The Mark of The Beast Prophesy Finally Fulfilled… as Written By: Jonathan Annobil. The US Senate has passed the Obama Health Bill into law. The implementation would commence soon. This bill would require all Americans to be implanted with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip in order to access medical care. The device will be implanted on the forehead or on the arm. This is to fulfill the prophesy in the Book of Revelation 13: 15-18 concerning the MARK OF THE BEAST. Are you still doubting the END TIME? Do U know that the special car which was made for Obama is known as the BEAST? Get READY. The rapture is near! Revelations 13 is being played out right before us. Many are still unaware. Why is the chip being implanted exactly where the Bible says it would be? Why on the hand and forehead. Why not anywhere else? Why is it being connected to your bank account? Remember the Bible says you won’t be able to buy or sell without the mark 6 6 6. And guess what! The chip is connected to your financial details. What breaks my heart the most is that many people in the Church will not make it if JESUS comes now? Many are unaware that the end is near. Don’t tell me that it’s advancement in technology or development. If any area of your life is not in sync with GOD’s word, repent and be converted. If you miss heaven you can never miss hell….. think about it. Hell is not a pretty place. The worst part is that it is for eternity… He who has ears, let him hear what the Spirit says to the church. Please rather than post and forward senseless messages. Send this one to everyone you know. Do the work of an Evangelist. PLEASE SHARE THIS MESSAGE WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS. Have you ever wondered what should have happened if we treat the Holy Bible the way we treat our mobile phone? And we really can’t live without it. Only 7% percent will re-send this message. Don’t be of the 93% who will not share the message. Satan said. “I wonder how humans claim to LOVE GOD and disobey HIM, and claim they hate me yet they obey me” Do not send later. Share and send now. May Almighty GOD grant success to everyone who reads and sends this message. Tomorrow may be too late. Stay blessed.
Trans*Languaging
In 2024 got invited by Monty and Pablo to contribute to trans*languaging exhibit in Portland, Oregon. at the time i was learning the basics & origins to Beki (Filipino gay speak/swardspeak) and also trying to find a way to DEEEAL with my lola connecting with me infrequently through facebook messenger with these long, pointed catholic paranoid chain messages.
how does one even begin to (un)language the insanity of a lola’s madness masked as spiritual worry/care? how does a beloved bata baby like me respond to tech savvy lola who is oceans away? how do i have connection with my own grandmother who i’ve seen twice in my life? and what of the ways she contributed to the exile of my mother and tito’s queerness and by proxy my own? does she think i am the devil? (yes and)
trans*languaging is a way that people who grew up multilingually (no matter their fluency) read, write, imagine, dream and speak. in being invited to the trans*languaging exhibit, there was an extra layer of being gay and/or queer trans af. to me this looks like the way we talk with our hands, or have Tag-lish, Ilocano-ish, Spanglish verbiage.
Montreal Benesch curated the show based on this root system:
”Translanguaging is a theoretical approach to bi- and multilingualism that problematizes the idea of neat boundaries between languages. Borders of language (much like borders of gender, countries, etc.) are more social construct than linguistic (biological, political, etc.) fact. Trans translanguaging sheds light on the parallels between the relationships multilingual trans people have with gender and with language; the ways we live on, travel between, play with, and exceed both of these borders.”
i dream in languages i can understand only through the heart, i hear new words when my gender rages into a goopy disassocation or a hyper presence. i bleach english of itself so i can talk to my mother who’d do anything to rid of her accent. Beki opens the door for me and my mom to add glitter and cackle in the pain of language. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Creator as a buncha Filipino gay boys n girls creating a language that makes space for all the pop culture + Colonial fuckery + native language to make sense. beki is a language that exponentially evolves. whatever words you knew yesterday is probably old news because as all gays do, we create more language to remix, reduplicate, chop and screw.
so often, we perpetuate violence by stealing language, popularizing it and then collectively not give a shit for the creators of said language (take AAVE for example, or how much of “gay slang” is rooted in Black and Brown Trans sacred linguistics). how are you celebrating your own dimensional tongues?
what that mouth do?
in my book Waling Waling Palpitations, a line appears in poem @kuyadaverichard sports his marriage on IG that admits that i don’t even want to write some of my own inherited language down:
suka, he says.
the next word he utters means spicy vinegar.i don’t write it down here because
i can’t remember my knowledge about it;
not everyone should know my tongue so intimately.
i’ll make you beg for me to annunciate.
even when you do,my mother is a chicken stretching
her neck, widening her
eyes
in my
eyes,
removing the roof
of my ngiwat
brick housing molars
in river gold ahead
of my tongue.
shhhhhhhh.
there are so many ways language gets created. i know i “make up” words all the time on the basis that i grew up with a chopped multi-lingual tongue, probably swallowed up by a buwaya (crocodile) some time ago. these words flex fluency or exist as an endless tease/denial of the tip of my lengua.
there is an internal pressure that i & many qtbipoc babes experience which is to perform our cultures, or our trans*languaging. i feel that the reason i performed without the verbal use of language for some time is what created the ephemerality of my embodiment and art. you have to be there, the archive is in the compassionate gaze, it is not something that always should be written or is meant to be there. it is both hyper visible and inaccessible. some language is private. like the lexicon of love-language developed from inside jokes with friends or romantic partners. or!! the mix-mix halo-halo ache of knowing some ancestral words but not all.
our mouths are literally formed by the languages we speak. i wonder at times what shape my lips or tongue would be by now. i am haunted by how both my language and my gender got to be so displaced.
it is even sacred, the way i misspeak or mispronounce. it is sacred the amount of words or the erasure of language to describe my gender. the way i tear up when i make every noun a verb. because a mountain is not just a mountain. it is a bundok. it is mountain-ing. it is not simply a destination or a thing. it is a constant being.
the syntax in which my mother languages speaks to me is one of many verbs, one that honors the subjugation of time with the double triple time of a single syllable. one where the verb comes first and the who/what/where comes second.
i create language when the english syntax is in dissonance with the ones that i’ve acquired:
the syntax of dance, the phrasing of movement.
the syntax of ilocano. the language spoke a song itself.
the humor of Beki.
the syntax of tagalog.
the way all “a” are “ah/awe” sounds.
the syntax of trying to meet my mother in language, the syntax of language barrier therefore relying on a hand movement, or a lip point, a hug or a breath.
the syntax of a harana or a kundiman. it’s specific measurement of lines and level of ache.
resources: https://www.cupoftyh.com/blog/lets-talk-bekenese-a-guide-to-beki-lingo
so in natural moonyeka-fashion i collage’d some shit to cope. this piece Diwa’teh Save Us is an attempt for me to add to the beki lexicon, or maybe just my own lexicon, words as playful balms.
Diwa’teh Save Us! takes Filipino words Diwata (spirit, fairy), Ate (older sibling – feminized), ‘Teh (Beki version of Ate) and interrupts a catholic propaganda chain message on rapture (sourced from Moonyeka’s last correspondence with their Lola on Facebook Messenger). Beki here is a tool applied to erase, reduplicate and toy with pointed colonial violence and to reclaim power in a way where its original source is no longer legible.
photo of WWP edition of DIWA’TEH SAVE US by mohala ༻❁༺
i am not a Beki expert nor am i positioned at the center of Beki culture. i write this as a diaspora baby who has spiraled again and again back to the origins of queer and trans culture that are both of me, beyond me, and not mine at all. with that i add to the lexicon with sacred attitudes.
a lot of Beki was about hiding in plain site. from what i recall in oral-talking story space, Beki language grew out of gay boys talking in code infront of literal catholic priests. the counterpoint of this recalls a memory of history centering “Indio"(read: indigenous)-Filipinos getting together for Catholic study or Catholic “prayer”, when in fact they were using the colonial tool against Spanish colonizers to plot freedom or revolution.
Beki is the ability to play in the face of God by subluxing the tongue, by botching the language, or heightening the bakla-fuckery of it all.
St. Maripunyitasubverts Catholic saint imagery and meets Beki in an expanse of language exploration. Both the images and the text play with Beki language aspects of: reduplication, remix and covert meaning. Moonyeka is saintified with cheap jewelry as an exploration of spiritualism as class drag and spiritualism as innate embodiment as trans people.
here’s the backstory on St. Maripunyita. firstly, i was learning who i was as a choreographer and visual artist. one of my mentors reflected back to me: do you know about assemblage? your praxis does a lot if it. assemblage, to me, is the resourceful street kid turned bog brujx looking at the abundance around them and thinking: wow all the things that could be created out of this whole bin of treasure. my spouse calls me a trash panda. for example, i must stop by every free library, or look at the free pile on the corner. i grew up re-selling clothes from a friend’s dumpster dive haul so i could have some lunch money. my mother takes a stack of napkins from every diner or fast food restaurants growing up. i take the stack of hot sauces for free condiments. assemblage is a kaleidoscope of skills i’ve hodgepodge’d together, it’s the ache of having to learn a lot while growing up fast and letting those skills run free in a play ground.
So…. when mi nanay showed me 60 boxes of old nordstrom rack re-sell jewelry from a community tita who was purging i:
first, redistributed and let my friends pick through
second, kept a bunch of pieces for myself. what would i use them for? a costume? would i finally learn how to sew? or is the karmic completion of my lola y lolo being the town seamstress and tailor mean i am all good on that?
some of the jewelry you can see adorned on me as a halo. this is my humor poking fun at my given name and it’s catholic nature, “angel.”
then, i began a free write / tongue twist / word association list. here’s a quick failure at defining all of them. or perhaps my knee-jerk reaction to overexplain :)
MARI - a name i could’ve been named
MARITES - town gossip
THESS - a nickname of my libra mother… also similar sounding to town gossip
ST. TERESITA - not actually a saint name but inspired by Saint Therese, the lady who ecstatically came for God and who my mother is named after.
PUNYETA - something my mother calls me, especially under her breath, or anyone she is mad at. a word i fantasize is tattoo’d by Writing Like an Archipelago right above my pubic bone.
PUNYITA - cuter and somehow more bitchier version of punyeta.
MARIPOSA - word for butterfly en espanol… also shares the same four letters as
PUSSI - similiar to the last four letters of POSA but make it more aura
MARIPUSA = MARI + PUSSI + POSA
MARIPUSITA - same as above but add the "-ita” to make it even more charming? a butterfly who sluts out for the tiniest flowers?
MARICÓN - the word my tios used to call my favorite friends, and now my friends call eachother as a way to cope with f-slur wounds.
CONCHA - shell, but also… but also delicious pastry my tios/cousins put me onto
MARICÓNCHITA - both botching and disrepecting spanish f-slur while also exalting it and being cheeky about it :)
**so many ways to define, how would you define tese words?
so i realized here, that some of the humor of my syntax is influenced by Beki and the ironic crude humor that comes out of the paradox of a deeply Catholic colonized archipelago. take for example, barrel man:
face palm.
my trans*languaging appears by intentionally fucking up colonial language and find beautiful relief in messing it up. i can’t find the video but there used to be this Australian (?) Filipino lesbian on a reel who was like “when Filipinos learned spanish” and re-enacted a spanish missionary teaching words like “Nobia/Nobio” just for her to gremlin out (as an act of a resistance) to (mis)pronounce those words as NOBYAAA or NOOOBYOOOO. (PLS SOMEONE COMMENT THE LINK IF YOU KNOW WHAT I AM TALKIN ABOUT <3)
…. as for the remaining jewelry from my mom’s friend aka my tita’s stash… i continued on my path to sanctifying it by of course decorating a clear dildo as if it were the pope or some other shitty patriarchal symbol of spiritual leader in all their regalia or get up.
Thank Gaud! altar object uses a QT Filipinx principal on extravagance (“maarte”/ “OA”) as a tool to both conceal and amplify. Using gaudy vintage jewelry, a clear dildo is adorned towards a point of extreme decadence – amplifying feminized strategies of distraction to evade detection and surveillance of gender expression.
i am sharing this all to say: we get to hone the way our multi-lingual, trans*language’d bodies express. they’re inherent ways we create, speak and exist. we also get to create new language, and evolve old language. the more we can feel inspired by our own roots the less we have to rely on colonial strategies of language to co-opt cultures not our own. our own words known/unknown and language that has yet to become is fruitful, gay, and extraordinary, and enough. perhaps our own language creates distance, makes us not palatable. to that i say: THANK GAUD!
there is a beauty to the plain language.
there is beauty to a chimeric tongue.
there is beauty in the reclamation of our trans*languaging, even if it has to birth through a (mouthy) gender so old, it’s only option is to be renewed.