BIKINI
Do you know where the word bikini comes from? Yes: the bikini swim suit.
It was the name given by an engineer, Louis Réard, in 1946, two weeks after the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to his more “risque” version of the two-piece swimsuits introduced earlier by fashion designer Jacques Heim, with a different name.
Because the bikini was more revealing, it was slow to catch on as a design and was made illegal in many places, before it became intensely popular leading into the late 1950s and 60s.
Human Zoos: Subconscious Global Color Lines
One of the strongest global collective memories, still operating in our world today as “the global color line between white and other,” is the Human Zoo.
These “zoos” were planned and constructed to exhibit “aborigines,” native “tribal” peoples, and “indigenous” darker-skinned peoples from around the world, for white and white wanna-be people to be amused and entertained and “discovered” by. Often, they were just added exhibits to existing animal zoos.
From the Asia-Pacific and Pacific Islands, African, European and American continents, the white formation of a “world” was being formed via the consolidating of global mapping and human social ordering through race science (white at the top) and the self-structures of modernity (future-oriented and primitivity connected to the past, ecology and less rational), through which the assumptions of superiority and inferiority are silently or overtly proven. From Burun and Atayal people of Formosa (Taiwan), Igorot and Aeta from the Philippines, Native American tribes including Inuit and Sioux from North America,The Sami of Finland, Egyptian and Congo tribal peoples, and many others, were exhibited.
Dewayne Everettsmith, Aboriginal Singer
Dewayne Everettsmith is one of the most popular singer-songwriters in Australia today. He speaks and sings passionately to the continuing struggles of his people and brings light to the histories that he feels people must know, and to pay tribute to the ancestors and the lands that birthed him and the Aboriginal peoples on the Australian continent and the diaspora. The song is entitled: Melaythina, and is available on I-Tunes. Here is the quote from the music video: “celebrating the Tasmanian Aboriginal people’s connection to Country. This is an edited version of a song written by Roger Sculthorpe, Heather Sculthorpe, June Sculthorpe, Chris Mansell, Di Cook and Theresa Sainty from the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and sung in palawa kani, Tasmanian Aboriginal language to school students on a TMAG program.”
Aboriginal Music Group from Australia: Black Arm Band
Black Arm Band is a group of some of the best-known music artists of Aboriginal Australia. Their piece: Dirtsong, giving homage to Australia’s land and spirit, has won worldwide acclaim.
If one understands the destruction of the Aboriginal communities that are ongoing in Australia, from the colonial period and continuing through today, we can understand the intense feelings, connected to land and memory, invoked in these presentations that have touched millions around the world.
In Order to Do Justice
With an education system that teaches us to memorize certain facts, but not to analyze and think, and with a failing structure that deserts ethics and life itself, one does not have to be blind to see that there are incredible changes going on now that are disturbing our sense of peace and security. For most of the world, there has not ever been “peace” and “security.” The global cognitive dissonance is real. For Europeans, South and Central Americans, indigenous cultures, Asian nations, and almost everywhere, a rise in anger, confusion, and disillusionment is going on. It speaks, from my point of view, at various levels of the success that the state (wherever and whichever) has had, in blinding people to the truths of history, culture, and certain factors of life. In fact, there are many who will die with an understanding that war, victory, and narcissism are normal and perennial.
New Video posted on YouTube: “BLACK PACIFIC ELEGY”
Here is the second installment of my video series.
It is a visual poem. Read, listen, feel, think.
Hopefully you will be curious, look up information and terms you don’t quite know or understand.
Be outraged? Become more understanding? Curious?
Watch this in HD for the best view!
If you prefer VIMEO – the same video is here: https://vimeo.com/153967699
Marshall Islands Nuclear Displacements – Al Jazeera Article: Invisible and Ignored Oppressions by the U.S.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the recipients of United Statian democracy with the Atomic Bombs dropped. Japan, like Korea would later, had almost all major cities destroyed in daily bombings on them in the great second world war. Now it was Hydrogen bombs. How large would the “democratic” United States build their destructive powers?
Preview by Wendy Cheng, of my upcoming book: Dream of the Water Children
A Black-Japanese Amerasian reflects on life in the present, with the traces of wars and their aftermaths. 2Leaf Press is pleased to announce the publication of Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd’s first book, DREAM OF THE WATER CHILDREN, MEMORY AND MOURNING IN THE BLACK PACIFIC, in June 2016.
CLICK THIS LINK: http://2leafpress.org/online/preview-dream-of-the-water-children-wendy-cheng/
