For every American, the tragedy of 9/11 gives each person a chance to feel new value. The attack was most likely caused because of meddling American imperial interventions in the Middle East, and their support of regimes that many Muslims feel are corrupt such as Saudi Arabia, but the media response and the political discourse which will be presented to the public will be something further from the truth and more propagandistic in nature.
In the first edition of the PDN following the attacks, an editorial was published covering what was known at that point. “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,” were the words of the president. The day after the attack, Senadot Frank Aguon Jr. was quoted saying, “There are times when being the greatest and most powerful nation in the world has its risks.” In the September 16th issue of the New York Times, the lead analysis of the 9/11 crimes was that “the perpetrators acted out of hatred for the values cherished in the West, such as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.”
Ultimately the consensus in the media and in your everyday discourse was that we had been attacked because we are democratic, we are free, and they hate our way of life. It suddenly gives new life to lives around the country, as the way we live is something people are willing to die for, willing to kill for. The discourse of danger also is created. All of a sudden people want to kill me, kill us. All these thoughts, while rarely spoken out loud work inside each individual, feeding into their ego.
Yanggen un aksepta este na hinasso, pues insigidas gumof impottante
hao. Sa’ pa’go malago-na Si Osama Bin Laden pumuno’ hao. Hagu I enimigu-na.
Sa’ Hagu rumepresesenta hafa mas ti ya-na, freedom, liberty, justice,
capitalism, modernism. AI NANALAO!!
All this works within the Chamorro psyche, and the local bonus is that through the participation in the fervor of patriotism unfettered for the time being, we get to be part of the American fold. Through our empathy, our sympathy our unasked for support, our placing of the American flag in our front yards or on our cars, we get to be Americans, regardless of what history, what politics have kept us from reaching that point. In a September 15th PDN article, “Residents rally behind Old Glory,” A sales associate at a radio station comments on how “even though Guam is so far away from the sites [of the attack], they had much impact…the outpouring of people displaying flags here shows “how personal it is.”
In the September 22nd PDN, in an article entitled “Schools shine with patriotic pride,” school officials and students discuss their patriotic responses to the World Trade Center attacks. The principal of George Washington High School stated “It seemed like a good idea for the students…to give them a chance to be part of something big like this. Part of a whole.”
By wrapping ourselves up with the American flag, covering our eyes and mouths, we can suspend, not the colonial relationship, but our belief in that relationship. We can blind ourselves to the fact that we belong to a country that doesn’t care about us, that wants only our land and its strategic presence, that tried to destroy our culture and language, that says that democracy, freedom and justice are so vitally important but has denied us for so long, in large and small ways, those very things.
In a time of crisis these are exactly the things that must be questioned, before we react, before we reach for the flag we must remember, that that flag represents much more than freedom, liberty and justice. It represents colonialism, imperialism, militarism and ignorance. But Chamorro identity is so complex, that it is easily overwhelmed. The benevolence of the US, the fact that we are rarely confronted at gunpoint with American demands, or that the association with the colonizer has reaped us huge short term gains, make critiques of the US/Guam and Chamorro relationship difficult in the best of times, and impossible in the worst of times.
Former Kongresu Robert Underwood, speaking to a University of Guam class said that Guam is somewhat unique in the world because of the way it reacts to a crisis, such as the current economic one. In most places around the world, when things are as bad as they are on Guam right now in 2003, people begin to grumble, they being to mumble. They start to talk about the leadership, the government, the politics of their particular place and they probably start to demand change. Well, on Guam, ideas of culture, identity, political status, they can only be dealt with when things are fantastic, when the economy is wonderful. Only then can we afford to deal with issues such as our relationship to the United States. But when things are bad, then everyone screams and shouts, “DON’T TOUCH THE POLITICAL STATUS! We can’t afford to mess with that now!”
That is the nature of the colonized mind. Yanggen todu maolek munga
mafa’maolek. Yanggen todu dimalas, CHA-MU fafa’maolek! Mappott maeskapa este.
Anyone who wishes a more concrete analysis of my point need only look to the November 5th, 2001 PDN, and the revoltingly revealing editorial by Joe Murphy. Murphy, rambles about nostalgia, and how the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is still living in the past, and creates an odd almost baffling local connection to his thoughts. “Sometimes I think that the Chamorro activists yearn for those days of continuous fishing, sailing and fiestas. When everyone spoke the same language. That was before terrorists and airplanes and computers and television and shopping at Kmart and Gov Guam Layoffs.” How can we afford to be Chamorro when there are terrorists in the PI? Or how can we afford to be Chamorro when there is a K-Mart on the island and the Taliban oppresses women? When did Chamorro culture become a crime or a sin? When did finding value in simpler things become, or even in identifying with your culture and family become something we don’t have time for, or can’t safely do in this post 9/11 world?
After reading this I recalled during the 2002 races for the Legislature how candidates had been invited to come to my Chamorro class at UOG, and each pitch to us in Chamorro as best they could, the plans they had for Guam. It was for the most part an enlightening and inspiring experience, save for the speeches given by one candidate (who I shall leave nameless. But I’ll tell you his name if you ask). The candidate responding to a question about Chamorro culture and language responded oddly that “if you want to be a Chamorro then start wearing a g-string (I think he meant loin-cloth).” He also stated that people who want to speak Chamorro should go back to Inarajan (I think he meant Umatak). And as if he hadn’t dug a deep enough hole for himself, he said that his children were not Chamorro, because being Chamorro meant them living at the lancho and using outhouses.
I bring up these statements because they exhibit a fundamental symptom of many Chamorros today. And that is, an unforgiving discourse of self-depreciation, the constant marginalization of everything Chamorro, and attributing of most if not all progress, all intelligence, all positive notions to outside influences, in particular American influences. Where do the politicians statements above come from? They come from a psyche that feels that his own culture has nothing to offer the world. His ideas about Chamorro culture are so skewed that he can’t conceive of Chamorro language and culture as anything but antiquated, anachronistic or dead. His racist statements allude to an identity in which all he values, he believes comes from outside of Guam, outside of Chamorro.
I am reminded here of the words of South African activist Steve Biko, when he discussed ideas of inferiority and colonization for Africans in white controlled South Africa: [when studying to be accepted for a black job in South Africa] he suddenly realized that it wasn’t just all the good jobs that were white, but all the history everywhere, was the history of the white man, written by the white man. Television, cars, medicine all invented by the white man…In a world like that, it’s not hard to believe there’s something inferior about being black.
Where Chamorros, as a people find value for their existence needs to be redirected. At present, we derive most of our value from our relationship with United States, with its ideologies and institutions. We find self-merit from our strategic presence in the pacific, from our strange heritage of patriotism and loyalty. From our hospitality to tourists, to the way our education and economic systems are run, we derive most of our value from outsiders, from outside of us. Aside from the vast and fortunate resources of the US, what makes them an effective, even though fragmented people is that they are extremely self-centered, and obtain nearly all their value from themselves; the elementary school rhetoric taking myriad sound bytes from the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, though eventually meaningless later in life and in terms of US foreign policy, is constantly invoked to justify the United States as the greatest country in the world.
It is also impossible for colonized peoples to attain this level of taimamahlao as the term self-centered within this framework means the “focus on the Center” which means a focus on the colonizing body, in this case the United States. Even if colonies are self-centered, the term reveals literally, who is in control of the situation.
And if you don’t agree with the above paragraphs or even with the entire tone of this paper, then I congratulate you. Prove me wrong. Discussion, competition, disagreement and dissent are at the core of the vitality of any culture. Discussion of these issues should not be left to professors, anthropologists, psychologists, historians or would-be academics like me. We ultimately control where we get our worth from. When we speak of privatization of the Government, we need to think about why we want it so bad, why it seems so right, why it seems to necessary. When we conceive the military presence on island, we need to think about our responses to wars, to armed conflicts, to increased military presence. Think hard about the way we think about our economy and our culture in relation to that. All these issues are intertwined with our perceptions of the US and more importantly our perceptions of ourselves.
The energy of our culture must not be attached to military spending or construction projects for the National Guard. Our dreams should not be imported, especially not from America. Every time a Chamorro thinks about settling down, buying land, and building a house, raising a family, he or she should know that that dream is not solely an American one. For Chamorros it was a reality for generations, to own and work your land, raise a family and so on. It was American intervention which disrupted all that, their intrusion which suddenly made the life my grandparents speak of in pre-war Guam not just a fading memory, but a distant impossibility.