The Houses Are Flying

Abstract

“The houses are flying” is an exercise in what Trinh T. Minh-Ha calls “speaking nearby.” Minh Ha is referring to an indirect use of language that addresses subjects without objectifying them. She is referring to a “speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without … seizing or claiming it.”1 This essay is an exploration of an ethic that is deep, ancestral, and embodied. In language legible to academia, it prioritizes opacity (after Édouard Glissant),2 refusal (after Audra Simpson),3 and incommensurability (after Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang).4 These resurgent praxes hinge around uses of language that are in service of the refusal of colonial avenues of recognition. I have visited the Philippines three times: once at fourteen with my mother and twice on my own since becoming an adult and being financially stable enough to. I am now estranged from my mother, and she is estranged from hers. Colonial dislocations and violences have fractured what Audre Lorde calls the “elegantly strong triad of grandmother, mother, daughter … with the ‘I’ moving back and forth flowing in both directions as needed.”5 I feel the presence of this ancestral I between my ribs, but it is often intangible because of the stories, experiences, and proximity to kin and land that I lack. This essay is an attempt to write into that place. Further, this essay is an endeavor to connect to lineages of work that have made my writing possible. I’m working in the tradition of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Shireen Seno’s Big Boy, and Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot, to name a few—all works by Black and Brown artists who have constructed their own histories and lifeworlds from the few fragments available to them, blurring colonial distinctions of fiction and nonfiction in acts of ecstatic creation: Lorde’s narrative elaboration from her mother’s mention of the place Carriacou, a place that Lorde was unable to locate on the map for many years. Emezi’s steadfast grounding in their ontology and refusal of colonial pathologies. Seno’s attempt to recreate her father’s childhood based on stories he shared when she was growing up. Tatay Kidlat’s magic realist imagining of his life. In my work, I am attempting something similar by assembling a world out of what I can find. Professor Sneja Gunew has written of the role of the writer in diaspora as “the inventor of community where community is conceived not in the sense of the nostalgic return to the past and a lost place but as the impulse forward, the potential carried by the seeding of diaspora hybridity.”6 Further, she calls such works endeavors to create ways of belonging that have not yet been established. It’s the highest aim of this piece (and this vein of work, larger than this essay) to at least denaturalize or, at most, rupture nationalism and its restrictive modes of belonging.