Being back in Manila from a UC-wide (University of California) strike for higher pay and better labor practices in UC Santa Cruz is a fever dream, heightened from exhaustion by an almost 19-hour flight from San Francisco to Manila with a 4-hour layover in Tokyo. I came back to Manila, my hometown for the winter break with an exhausted feeling, hoping that being home might allay some of my fatigue from dealing with institutions, my thesis, my practice, and the battles that I fight for progressive politics in the Philippines. Soon enough, this plan was derailed by men I encountered running around the city who addressed me as “sir”, straight man after straight man. I feel everything as pain in my coccyx.

I wonder if imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy manifests itself as blockages in meridian points, muscle knots, rheumatoid arthritis, or sciatica. My black neighbor in Santa Cruz has chronic pain in her lower back. It must be heavy in the back living as a black woman in America. I need to find a healer. I need a deep massage.

Viewing the facades of make-shift houses along the highway from the window of the car is a conflicting experience, like my position as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz. It’s confusing to be in the space between the elites and the poor, between institutions and the streets, the global north and the south, and between English and Tagalog. The experience is akin to how ancient and contemporary babaylans or Filipina shamans, healers, and diviners act as mediators between human and nonhuman worlds. A translator. An interpreter who speaks two or more languages. A dualistic existence perpetually in transit, always unsure where to belong to. It is tempting for me to find an easy way out and get lost in one extreme, but it is my duty as a babaylan to get a grip and don’t lose connection with either world. Looking at the landscape of the streets, I realized these structures are the vernacular Filipino architecture of the 21st century. The materials used are flotsams of modern consumer-capitalist refuse but still carry visible traces of architectural configurations and features from the precolonial and the 19th century. Banners of Kentucky Fried Chicken above bamboo chicken pens flushed in unfinished walls of cinder blocks. Patchworks of galvanized iron sheets, some painted, some not, on the second level; made of lighter materials than the first which reminds me of architectural hybrids of indigenous and Spanish in the 18th century. There is something prehistoric with the way urban communities settle in the city. Their rebellious and persistent occupation while evading municipal legibility (many addresses don’t appear on maps) makes me question why we keep on trying to apply European grids when they keep on failing in our context. While I am interested in bottom-up design by the people, I’m not discounting the fact that this is, in the end, a human tragedy, a national failure, a struggle by the working class to marginally survive. I caught myself weaving this analysis in my head in English, I guess I am predisposed as an interpreter to translate in real-time, for readers like you who speak the lingua franca, and have a certain educational attainment to understand these words.

This street is a classic case of situational irony. Kalayaan means liberty in the Tagalog language, but how the state sidelines these communities shows that freedom in this country comes with a hefty price tag. Necropolitics here is not some fancy theory buzzword, the system is killing us in a visceral way, like a medieval torture device, but slowly, invisibly, like sarin gas. Nobody has answers to the Philippine question, every definitive answer seems to collapse as soon as they’re constructed, like the passing storms devastating every tree and every building on its path on a yearly basis.