From Sea to See: An Islander's Di-Version

 

                                                                                                                     KK de La Vida

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“He who does not know how to look back at where

he came from will never get to his destination.”

― José Rizal

 

      

PART I: Sea

 

Between back and forth, I'm always looking behind.

 

(Confession: I have a tattoo of a sailor eye on my left butt cheek, a memory mark of non-sober, sophomoric decision-making. Nevertheless, I regularly introduce it as ‘my third eye looking out for my ass.')

 

Perhaps I do not know how to proceed because the past lacks home's coherency, constantly forcing my doors of perception to probe through distant peek holes without a key. The only pocket souvenir I keep sings in my blood and speaks in my words ― the 'colonizer's tongue,' they say, flickering in-and-out as shadowed consciousness. Perhaps the future’s golden code is in the mouth, words swallowed whole.

 

Born to parents from island provinces of central Philippines, the first gift of language I acquired (Spanish-saturated Bisayan Malay) already arrived with evidence of imperial corruption. Which is not to say that it nor I is a singular uteri utterance, but a string of letters and chromosomes enfolded in the body of a global storybook. I followed the flow of speech’s power, despite teethed resistance. At the age of three, I developed fluent command of English; at the age of five, I migrated with my family to another ex-colonized Spanish territory, to Florida of the continental Americas.

 

(Confession: My childhood nickname means ‘little crab,’ a mark of my bicuspid bite and unruly behavior to urban street kids as a wild playmate. But stuck in American suburbs, surrounded by do-not-step-on-the-grass signs of gated communities, I sealed my lips shut.)

 

On the subject of border identities and "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," Gloria Anzaldúa perfectly reiterates the colonial logic of castration ― just cut it off. And I did just this. I stopped speaking Cebuano slang and adopted proper talk from public school teachers, who would spit instructions through a Southern drawl. Day to day, I grew increasingly desensitized to the strict ritual of cultural erasure.

 

Inevitably, my play of identity became stiff like a blackboard. A distance to self spanned through strict lines. Only through the curvature of textual characters and upturned surfaces of page books could I move, map my vast imagination. I grew up inside the library reading stories from around the planet. I loved myths, legends, historical fictions, remnants of human footprints in recorded rumination. But in this way, I also caved myself in a corner, kept the length of a tall tale between my classmates and me.

 

(Confession: All my favorite writers have fallen dead; I have long daydreamed making love to their corpses in canon's grave. I interpret this childhood fantasy as evidence of how disconnected I became to the contemporary landscape of living minds, disembodied.)

 

My heritage, my hermitage is perhaps derived from familial origins on a small island in the center of the central Visayan Sea. Islanders have a notorious impulse for the internalization of belonging. On our island, we have five unique ways of saying the word ‘to know,’ because the unknown is an ontological otherworld beyond the realm of human word. But now, I'm an outsider from there too. After years of enculturation on American continental bedrock, I have transformed into an alien from ‘home.’

 

(Confession: On an island where I go back many generations on both sides of bloodline, residents have gossiped about me as either a rich Japanese tourist or a spoiled American princess. No matter where I go, my skin shines exotic ‘other,’ glossed over by ignorance.)

 

Perhaps it is true that I am more of an insider to American society than the small island community from which I got born and estranged. Wired local in the late 90’s post-mall dot.com bubble of dredged swampland suburbs and mega metropolises. Even more, having studied within the white walls of Ivy League towers, I am part of the elite educated class that all too easily erases how I grew up immigrant, isolated and impoverished. Then again, I've always challenged this totalizing trajectory of institutionalized identity. No matter what degrees of separation I accumulated, I never wanted to be consumed by bodies of authority.

 

In university, I focused on the subject of anthropology, a discipline of knowledge formulated, financed and legitimized by colonial regimes of control. As I peered into the opposite side of the world —the so-called ‘middle east,’ the mirror other of the western gaze —a sentiment of solidarity aroused against its projected exoticism. As I learned about world histories through imperial programming, I realized how deeply buried my uprooted condition lied under structures of power. As my understanding of humanity’s inequalities evolved, in proportionately did I resist divisions through underground research.

 

(Confession: In college, I wrote seminar papers and presentations about the anal jokes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the feedback sounds of women’s orgasms, the informatics industry of internet pornography, the ‘crazy’ Kikiyu uprising of Kenya, the 1968 student protests of Columbia University and Harlem, etc. —I ‘got off’ the high horse of academia by challenging the curriculum’s limits.)

 

After falling in love with a globetrotting traveler, a classical post-college trip of hitchhiking the European peninsula, and a regretful but legally necessary return to the United States, I still did not find a semblance of home's shell until I turned south of the border —in Las Sierras del Sur, Mexico. From its fruits, foods, fiestas and cultural atmosphere of Catholicism syncretized with indigenous spirituality and American influence, it felt as if I flew ‘home,’ from Philippines to Mexico. Despite estrangement in fluent expression and suspension at face value as foreigner, there I gravitated and tuned into a familiar sense of dis/connection.

 

Thankfully, my wanderings and writings (realityenroute.blogspot.com) have kept me grounded inside a contiguous identity of text-techno-terrestrial shape-shifter. All the while, I have refused to participate in popular social networking algorithms, becoming a floating nomad in a digital see of selfies. Inverted virtual inside out, I continued moving, morphing, unearthing roots, seeking re-routed diversions toward cumming truths.

 

PART II: See

 

My vagabond deviations eventually converged with destiny. Hitchhiking alone through Mexico, looking for mind-metabolic mushrooms in Oaxaca, I met the collective from FuckforForest.com. The founders published their sexual adventures on a pornographic archive in which its participants could access free for life, while monthly viewers paid membership donations collected for grassroots ecological projects. Confronted with this cause of eco-erotic net-activism, almost immediately, I became the lover of the FFF founder and a kind of ‘e/porno.cyborg-doll.’

 

(Confession: I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When you have your back turned against the whole world choked in electric clouds and you meet your wildest dreams of sensual freedom, you run into the imaginary arms of a false savior, hanging silent wires on the crossroads.)

 

By good fortune, I joined Fuck for Forest when they were finally based in the forest, after ten years of on/off residency in metropolitan Berlin and paved pathways, looking for other ecological projects to fund with collected porno money or a psychedelic music festival to find fun and footage. I encountered them in a new phase of development: starting Rancho de La Manzana Podrida (Ranch of the Rotten Apple), protecting 30+ hectares of steep mountainside and turning its abandoned fruit and flower hilltop garden into a new center for creative ecological activism. They now situated themselves among the native Zapotec (‘Cloud’ folk) and Spanish locals, as flipped-out settlers from far sides of the universe, coming together to touch tongues without shame under the blossoming apple trees.

 

Finally, all those years studying strategies of embodied subversion made perfect sense. All those years typing academic texts on tabooed subjects finally manifested in present tense relevance. Except for this time my mind no longer wondered through wordy research. Now my horny body wandered through psycho-geographical investigations, a player avatar participating in hyper reel games of sexual abstraction. To say that my ‘studies’ left me unprepared for ‘the job’ is an understatement of higher education.

 

(Confession: In my habitual isolation, I honestly shied from human beings, bodies. My first crush on an anthropoid? A sixteen year-old girl. Years later I found out I could be fluid legs swimming bed sheets. Out of dim lit shadows, I emerged like the silhouette of night's sleeping lover. Still, most evenings, the trauma of tender touch remained in my empty hands, hungry for warmth.)

 

My borderline identity started to split, for good. There’s me by my professional birth name, and me by my childhood nickname, turned e/porn.avatar nom de plume. Still dissenting from digitality’s co-optation of the personal, I delayed truth-telling to family or friends about where I been and be headed. All I could think to communicate: “Maybe I am not me, not this body. Maybe I’m a combination of so many sources, so many voices —how can I let them all speak at once? How can I speak as all my selves now, naked, spread open?”

 

(Confession: I’ve never not been a kind of kinky queer bisexual-a/sexual sex-xXx-freak. Shy, lazy and gifted with bookish looks of seduction, I both resisted and submitted to standards of sexual behavior for those female gendered educated. Yet, I constantly confronted my own hetero/narrative and homo/normative affections. On pixelated stage, I projected all sorts of delusions and dreams of selves desired.)

 

Energetically, we exercised remote control in the exile site atop the mountains. The first months of a permaculture project should never involve much impulsive action, since its inhabitants must primarily point attention to the land's seasonal shifts. Between content production and conflict destruction, we simply waited and watched the flow of sunlight and rainwater flood our day-by-days. Isolated in our interior worlds, we started to become a bit loopy. Moreover, I began participating in a people’s project —helping upload pornographic photos, videos and diaries —with social dissidents from Berlin’s punk underground. As rebellious and raucous in their external expressions as I was in mine, we consistently met halfway, butting heads.

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(Confession: Well,  we city folks didn't know shit about sustainable permaculture, unless you count chit-chat about the cooped-up chickens. I certainly did not know how to take care of plants, let alone myself without electricity and high-speed Internet for higher self-cultivation in the virtual hive. I regularly mantra’d the morning call to catch my madness: “Cuckoo-cuckoo!”)

 

As much as I tried to activate my academic knowledge, sensual skills and intuitive talents to help the FFF collective, it always felt like I was replaying the same story of unprocessed trauma. Of working bitterly sentimental under systems of oppression, body ostracized from direct senses of belonging (a lack of space). Of representing the face of diversity within white-washed upper-middle class walls of comfort (a full-frontal freak show in co-opted dreamtime). Of becoming an immobile memorial statue standing for once-upon-a-culture’s-existence (the embodiment of my people’s erasure). I could not stop the hallucinations from haunting me. So after many misadventures and miscommunications about the representative ethics of social difference transgressed on the erotic screen, I got kind of exiled (this summary is for future stories to free).

 

(Confession: Maybe I don’t know how to merge with peer groups or be an obedient server. Maybe I’m not fit to ‘fit in’ with other humans, despite my fascination with this ‘species of animal’ as a subject of study. Maybe I’m off the textbooks, an outrider of history, an outsider at heart, an alien looking inward, writing her insides out.)

 

Having now faced the mission of radical representation —flashed naked in the flesh —I feel more than ever to re-align the (w)holes in my anti-hero auto-ethnographic story. How can I use my avatar body to hark/hack distant worlds of sexuality and ecology, both logically censored from the voyeur’s screen? How can I conjure the phantom reality of diversity in cinematic real? How can I challenge people about the de-sexualization of nudity, anti-suppression of sexuality, normative structures of kinship and monogamy, creativity of digital and ecological activism, power of queer and people of color cultures of resistance? How can I expose naked truths to the hollow(/holo)graphic ‘I?’

 

(Confession: I have no certain way to answer these conjectures, not having inherited any islander information on esoteric fortune telling. I compulsively read astrology and numerology reports to get a grasp of what’s to come, blind like a prophet’s believer.)

After too many years staring into the computer screen, my eyes honestly cannot penetrate the fog that clouds my future. But looking back at the past, embodied memories of resistance float to the skin’s surface, reminding me to link corporal roots of rebellion to the core source: the shared ocean of my origins mapping a vast vision of collective horizons. It is only through this rearward-and-forward, hindsight-foresight movement that I can portal door the w/hole in my diverted perspective, shift from me to we, from sea to see, and back.

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KK de La Vida is the emerging e.porn-avatar/naughty nom de plume of Kk & lover's company. An islander at heart, Kk floats along the Atlantic Ocean and south of the border as an xXx eco-erotic artist/activist from FuckForForest.com. Though no longer with the FFF collective, Kk continues to explore the creative power of the human body to help ecology, currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School. Read Kk's re-search on suppression on Uncensored-Eco-Sexed.tumblr.com and follow zer fairy trail of pixel dust on instagram@kkdelavida.