Motherland
On a white sand beach, the jewelry vendor knelt by my lounge chair and held a flame to a strand of pearls to prove to me they were real. Only ten dollars, and I will wait for you, mam, she repeated as she lay the strands of polished white beads across her brown arm. Like pearls, it is hard to distinguish false memories from real ones in the embellished stories of my aunties and uncles in the Philippines.
My mother was a real pearl, a queen of her baranguay, stoic and as elegant as the Ifugao ebony wood carved lady in the mountains. I am not a pearl or jade or even moonstone. My mother did not raise me to be on display and worn like an ornament. I can be burned and broken like the fake pearls in the beach stores that cater to tourists. Burned like my grandparents’ house in town that I visited as a child, now only charred brick walls that hold dark secrets, long vacant and invaded by relentless tropical weeds, waiting to be rebuilt with promised funds that will never be enough.
But in another part of town is my family’s ancestral home, my mother’s childhood home that still stands in the old barrio of San Nicolas. A home where children’s laughter filled the air as they slid down the wooden staircase when they were supposed to be doing chores, where they slept on banig mats under grand wooden beams in rooms with woven mat walls and capiz shell windows, where teenage sisters whispered about boys until my grandmother scolded them for being up late the same way my mom scolded me and my sister when I would sneak into her room after bedtime and giggle loudly until we woke her up, robbing her of her precious few hours of sleep.
In my aunties’ stories, my mother is a hero, brave, adventurous, and rebellious. I am my mother’s daughter. I choose my own path and keep moving forward, bearing the scars left by the colonial occupations and wars and death marches that stripped my ancestors of their identity. I heal the wounds passed down from my grandparents and their grandparents that caused my head to bow in deference to a cross that I was made to bear.
I am on a pilgrimage to find the truth of who I am and where I belong. I am Filipina. My skin is as gloriously brown as the vendors and farmers and fishermen of this island. My soul was born in this ancestral land and lived in San Nicolas where my mom swam in the river, leaving her clothes on the shore, wild and free. My heart belongs to the mountains, the rice fields, the islands, and the seas. I laugh easily and smile broadly like my people because I have learned the secret to happiness.
Lisa Nacionales
I wrote piece in my journal this while traveling in the Philippines during my sabbatical. While this piece is highly personal, the themes of loss of identity and belonging in displaced peoples are what emerged for me during my travels.