When home has never been a single, unbroken place, belonging ceases to be a static location and becomes a practice. Or a state of internal residency I carry into every room and moment. It was and is an imperative practice in response to growing up feeling displaced and racialized in spaces that were supposed to be my home.
In the Philippines, I am an Amerikana, separated by divisions of language and geopolitical, cultural distance. I am different. There’s so much heartbreak and grief for me in this.
In the US, white supremacy dictates the terms of patriotism and belonging. No matter how many generations your family has given to the country or how hard your immigrant parents worked.
I asked myself, what does identity and belonging really feel like to me when I’m in my homeland? (I use the term homeland loosely because I can’t even locate the feeling of home clearly in my body, and especially within the place I was born). The rhythm of my diaspora experience feels like this: the constant oscillation between hyper-visibility (being reduced to a token, an exotic aesthetic, or a political caricature) and invisibility (having my ancestral history and humanity erased).
Since relocating to Europe, a homogenous white majority flattens all of that complex history into a single lazy trope. Completely blind to the irony of projecting the same white imperial privilege onto a brown second generation Filipina, who left the U.S. because it didn't quite feel like home to begin with and even more-so now. People have categorized me into whatever monolith of my identity feels most inferior to them: “Stupid American”, “I tried to imagine bringing a Filipino girl with tattoos home to my Italian mother”, “So you’re not really Filipino since you were born in the states”. I’ve stepped into another paradigm of racism and xenophobia. Those experiences are all fractals, all small-scale ripples of massive global systems of imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and borders. All implying that qualities inextricable linked to my existence are either scandalous or non-existent.
Could someone see me so wholly without disqualifying a part of my entire identity?
Existing at the margins or in the between (the diaspora, the bridge, the hazy space between countries) is also where the most creative, resilient, and adaptive life grows. Intentional adaptation is how we cultivate the capacity to be in right relationship with change... We are learning to adapt to the changes that are happening around us, and to shape the change that is emerging from within us.
Adrienne Maree brown urges us to adapt with Intentionality.
"Change is constant. Be like water."
In nature, an ecosystem doesn't ask a tree or an oak leaf to earn its right to exist; its presence and relationship to the soil is its belonging. Emergent strategy critiques the idea that dominant structures (like white Western European norms or nation-states) hold the key to our legitimacy. You will never get authentic belonging from systems or people who rely on hierarchy to exist. Belonging is emergent and co-created, not granted. Art, music, and performance all facilitate belonging. In it belonging becomes decentralized. It lives in the micro-sanctuaries you build: your queerness, your art, your movement, your trusted community, and your relationship with your own body. These micro sanctuaries are my utopias. It all begins here.
Never cease to cultivate these small, sovereign territories. Never cease to create new fractals and ripples in the world.
I will be starting a Utopia series, to bring you all into my visual and somatic utopias through my art: a collection of photography, dance, literature, and performance.
Cyber-smiles,
SPICY GOBOU
