ESSAY: MARY OF THE TOWER

"WHAT'S THE BEST THING I CAN DO?"

Real-time reflections on land grief
Written November 11, 2020


Last week, when it happened, I said I wanted to sit with the grief eventually. I wanted to feel it, know it, and honour it. The grief that had crushed me earlier in the day, that sent me back to sleep, back to a world of houses full of windows on water where nothing ever floods, was so monumentally gutting that I believed I could study it. Encapsulate it. Extract its contents, its essence, and call upon the memory of grieving my Motherland from un-natural disaster as needed on my path to becoming an ancestor.

But that memory is gone. It went as quickly as it came.  So quickly, terrifyingly quickly, I returned to the rest of my life and felt as if nothing had happened by the end of the week. I skipped through the weekend, feeling productive, feeling rested and in control. By Tuesday I recorded a video series in my story celebrating my huge millennial win of debt consolidation and how I’m now on track to be debt-free by my 30th birthday. I spoke of hope, change, and revolution, and I’m still riding that high.  I still believe the tide can be turned in my tiny, insular pocket of the universe that is still ravaged by a global pandemic but protected by all my privilege. Today, Remembrance Day/Veterans’ Day, I spent the day inside making a crock pot full of chilli and getting to work on a commissioned project from a friend.  The day has been slow and pleasant. My belly is full, body warm, mind and heart are well. And while I was lying in bed at 8pm, pleasantly stuffed with slow-cooked beans and veggies, it happened. Again. Not the event itself, because I’m far, far behind the vibration of time where I’m actually from, but the moment when the news of another typhoon made its way to me, halfway across the world. I suppose I got my wish, after all.  Here comes the remembering.
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Typhoon Ulysses is the 21st tropical storm to hit the nation currently known as The Philippines, which encompasses both my matrilineal homeland of the Bicol Region and my patrilineal ancestral territory of the Nueva Ecija province of northern Luzon. Last week, the 20th storm, Super Typhoon Rolly ravaged the Bicol Region and was recounted by locals to be the worst typhoon ever. That was the storm which induced my land grief. The colossal, crushing devastation that ruptured every cell in my being, every cell infused with the blood memory of these homelands that my mother left, my grandmother resented, and that all the women in me knew so intimately from sky to soil. In the same way bleeding reminds me of my biological obligation to womanhood, so does land grief remind me of my ancestral obligation to the Matriarchy.  It is pain that is unique and unfair; it is pain that is politicized, taboo, and told to hide in the shadows, even though so many like us know exactly what this pain feels like. Land grief is not only a pain I share with my Filipinx kin who observe, and directly experience, the destruction of our homelands.  Land grief is a pain that we as colonized peoples share. Land grief is a pain that runs through the bodies of all of us who come from the Land, whether or not we currently occupy that land, or merely remember it. Not all of us can feel this pain and not all of us know that this pain is grief.  It is the Matriarchs who speak for, grieve for, and bleed for the Land.  In the depth of my body, on the foothills covered in snow, there is screaming. There is suffocation. There is starvation. There is drowning. There is death.
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It is in this familiar vein of trauma, and land-based ancestral trauma, that the lateral violence in communities of colour is rendered null. Land grief is trauma, though the fact that I can name it as such speaks to my privilege and my distance.  My family who lives on the Motherland today is not grieving the same way. I cannot say they are not grieving, because their classification of what grief is likely differs from mine: primarily, it might involve prayer, and prayer to a deity I do not choose.  The grief I know is ceremonial, sacred. It is a sad ceremony I wish I was not so familiar with, and yet the circumstances of my life — my wealthy, privileged, diasporic life — have taught me to equate grieving to breathing. Grieving as more natural than loving, in the physical form. Grieving as more natural than celebrating, blooming, creating, birthing.  All of my strength has come from death, loss, and transformation. Grieving is the sad ceremony I have become a master at officiating.  Grief as a response to trauma, by extension, is a step commonly skipped for not only discomfort but lack of access. Said lack of access can be the result of a lack of time, a lack of stability, and perhaps most commonly: a lack of tools to support the grieving process in healthy ways. Trauma, without tools, support, and stability can very often manifest into addiction, dependency, obsession. I am certainly not perfect when it comes to these phenomena.  Yet learning to use grief as my anchor in the devastating and unpredictable storms of loss in my life, has become my superpower.  Grieving has allowed me to save myself.

What has worked for me will not work for my family on the Motherland. They cannot anchor themselves to their grief in order to evade the effects of global warming.  They cannot hold ceremony for what is lost when all that is lost is essential. They cannot healthily process emotions while waiting on the roofs of their houses awaiting the uncertain promise of safety.  They cannot come to terms with death when they are surrounded by it. This is why I say my grief is a privilege. It is a form of healing that was unavailable to my ancestors and untaught to my grandmother and mother. It is a form of healing still inaccessible to my living kin across the water, because they do not live under, and cannot create, opportune conditions for healing. There is only colonized survival. To be well is a privilege in and of itself.  To transcend colonial trauma and heal the generations that came before me is a privilege which comes with great responsibility. I am responsible to the Matriarchy, and to the Land from which she comes, the Motherland. Two typhoons in one week, then, and two typhoons which squarely affected the Bicol Region of my matriline, is certainly devastating. It’s no wonder I’m overcome with land grief. It’s no wonder I feel hopeless, and opt-out of the scary headlines, the disturbing photographs, the GoFundMes and protests. It’s no wonder that instead, I opt into a rest that is not generative, but escapist: it is a rest of impossibles, because what is possible cannot rationally be believed.

I cannot save the Motherland. I cannot save its people. And even if I could, it is that dangerous colonial saviour complex that got us into this mess in the first place; the reason my people have lost everything, even our names, even our memories, even our most solid ground has been bought and sold by the colonizer.  It’s truly an awful thought, but to be of Bicolanx descent and alive in 2020 requires me to accept that my Motherland may disappear in my lifetime. The land from whence I came, which birthed my mother and her mother and all the women in me who remain, could be a place I only ever remember in pictures that mysteriously disappeared, whose fertile volcanic soil becomes a legend whose face I can never touch again. A land I can never bring my future children to, for them to experience the heat, the heavy air, the softness of compacted earth beneath their bare feet.  I may not have a place to point to when they ask me where I’m from. And that’s heartbreaking.  But as I sit here, in my warm and safe home, belly full and clean drinking water within my reach, I can hear my father, my aunties, my Lolos, and my Lolas asking me: “What’s the best thing you can do?”  It’s a question without any judgment or layers of manipulation beneath its words.  It’s presented to me plainly, in the colonizer language that is now my only, left to my own interpretation and bequeathment of meaning.

I cannot save the Motherland.  But I can heal the mothers. Because like land grief, a worldly wound that reverberates in the veins of every colonized human on this dying planet, my body remembers Mythic time.  My body runs on a clock that is nonlinear and interconnected, that breathes and moves and laughs and sings with the voices of my Titas, the determination of my Lolos, the charm of my father, the maarte of my Lola, the malakas of my other Lola, the playful ingenuity of all my pamankin, and gifts to be unwrapped by my years from countless ancestors I never got to meet in this lifetime.  It does not mean none of my qualities are mine. It means that I have a body and a soul, a sense of humour, and a wealth of talents that are mine and mine alone. With all of that, I have the power to bring my ancestors back to this plane in the flesh, through ceremony, through sleep, through pleasure, through creativity.  So upon learning of the second typhoon to hit the Bicol Region, I did the best I could do: I smudged. I prayed. I drank a big glass of water and sat down at my desk, turned on my lamp, and wrote.  The best thing I can do is use my gifts. The best thing I can do is use my power for good.

This is not the end. I’m not satisfied with ending it here, but I don’t have anything else to give. Not tonight.  Not right now. Not in the forever-on-edge liminal timespace between this typhoon and the next. But this is where I have to end it, because I’ve done the best I could. Now I need to grieve. Now, I need to rest.

Centred photo of the Mayon Volcano, taken in the early morning at a farm in Albay, Bicol Region, Philippines in 2016. There are rice fields at the foot of the dormant volcano and native greenery in the foreground.

Overheard view of Legazpi City, Albay, the capital city of the Philippines’ Bicol Region. It is a bright sunny day with a few clouds. The roofs of homes can be seen down below with native trees and greenery in the foreground. Green mountains and ocean are pictured behind.

Mary of the Tower (she/they) is a settler-born member of the Filipinx diaspora, with roots to the Bicol Region and Nueva Ecija province of Luzon. She is currently living and working on the traditional homelands of the Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee) and Niitsitapi Peoples, also known as Calgary, Alberta/Treaty 7 territory. She is the owner and creator of Studio Kanlungan, a web-based community incubator for intergenerational healing through creativity. She also works as an intuitive, developing her gifts in mediumship, astrology, and Tarot card interpretation.  She acknowledges her kinship ties to Treaty 6 territory (Saskatoon and Edmonton), Snuneymuxw and Quw’utsun/Tsawwassen/Hul’qumi'num territories, and Kwantlen/Katzie territory, where she has planted roots in the past and will continue to plant more, once this pandemic is over. Website studiokanlungan.co