Traveling Seed, a blog post from April 25th

I started this post back in April 25th and added to it today.

Tonight we went to see Cherrie Moraga, one of my favorite writers!, and Celia Herrera Rodriguez's mixed medium production, "La Semilla Caminante/The Traveling Seed: A Multimedia Performance Work," in a theater in The Mission. It was a play about ceremony, particularly the kinds of gatherings indigenous women in the U.S. deliberately initiate to heal together using indigenous medicines, art and knowledge.

The central narrative in this play was the story of a middle-age woman struggling with coming to terms with healing herself. She attends ceremony after ceremony and doesn't wake up to what her role is in the ceremony yet.

As a young Tongan woman growing up in Utah, my friends and I held tight to the idea of ceremony. We imagined and dreamed with all our hearts, with all our might to gather with other Pacific Island girls in Utah who immigrated to this new country, just like us and who knew so well, just like us, how lonely it was to grow up in the shadow of memories that happened in the homeland.

Meeting at an Eek-A-Mouse show, on the steps of the Liberty Wells Mormon chapel or the Indian Walk In Center, those nights at the parking lot of the 'Unuaki Tonga Methodist Church on 4th South. When we met, we always tried to seize the moment, to continue the ceremony that is always created when we meet at the same parking lot to drink, bump music from our cars, just to be with each other. The ceremony that will fill the empty void in our lives for a moment before we returned to our white suburbs, our poor working class neighborhoods, the tokenism of our presence in white schools, the colonial teachings of our churches, the letters from our brothers in prison. We lived for those nights when everyone around us was Tongan and the jokes were Tongan; the perfume, strong and heady, smelled like a Tongan; and the hot breath of desire on the nape of the neck spoke Tongan.

It was in these gatherings that I held ceremony with Tongan and Pacific Island sisters. We stood in circles, wearing heavy coats in winter and sweatshirts in summer, with Big Gulps of Rum and Coke, passing around joints or sheets of acid, laughing out loud at Yellow Man's advice, "Girl, you can't do what the guys do you know and still be a lady."
This kind of ceremony lasted all weekend, doing beer runs after using up everyone's money. We wanted to to prolong being together, the feeling of belonging together. Everyone worked hard to pitch in and take care of each other but the void we wanted to fill with each others' presence just grew larger. Soon enough the void was partying together with us, which is no fun. You don't want to party with histories of your own pain.

I wonder what kind of ceremony would have helped to fill the void of isolation and self hate that was so prevalent within me when I was in my early twenties growing up in Utah?

What kind of indigenous Tongan healings are there available for young people in Utah, the Bay Area, the homeland today?

What role does ceremony play in my life today?




An ongoing post I'm working on: Why do I want to go to Harvard Law School?


it begins with my dad. it begins with my dad for me. all the places and things that my dad began with, is also my beginning.
i was seven, weeding my cousin Hiu's and I's taro plants in the garden. we lived in Kolomotu'a in Tonga. I saw a man standing down the road watching my home, the two room house my mother and two of my sisters lived in. this is before the two youngest siblings were born.
the man stared intently at our house, so i knew he was my father. he looked like he felt he had to come back home but really didn't want to do it.