Scars: Inter-generational Perpetration
Currently, there are many articles regarding the passing down of trauma in DNA. I am particularly focusing on trauma as a result of war, genocide, mass violence, and social oppression leading to refugee-making and exile, as well as such things as domestic violence. Inter-generational trauma is real. I did not need a scientific research paper to tell me this. However, as usual, I find that this kind of research, and these kinds of articles, have contradictory effects, like mostly everything in public life. Especially, if it has to do with oppression. Thinking about my own life, and the trajectories from what I know of my father’s life and mother’s life, and their parents’ and the conditions through which they survived and thrive, I see many issues. For now, I want to discuss five (5) distinct ones first, in relation to this “thing” we are beginning to mainstream: intergenerational trauma, the internal scars passed through time. The five I want to mention here are:
Militarized Mama Amerasia – an International Women’s Day Reflection
Today, according to a few sources, there are an estimated two million Amerasians–children and adults of local women across Asia who have been sired by United Statian military and civilian men and abandoned by the men. If we are to include Ameri-Pacifics–those born in the Pacific and South Seas Islands, the numbers would, of course, be higher. Often, in these stories, the harrowing and rough stories of Amerasians are told, and must be continued to be told. But the stories of the mothers, are backgrounded.
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
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/
2014 – VIDEO: Korean Hapa Tour – Homelands, New Lands, Healing
In the Fall of 2014, a group of Mixed-Korean Amerasians, mostly adoptees from Mixed-race orphanages in Korea, went on a small tour organized by the tour group Me & Korea, back to Korea, to the orphanages, and to meet Insooni 김인순 — Black-Korean pop-star/diva, who was partially responsible for this event.
Hint: Patterns – Legacies – Self
We are both governed and we govern. We govern ourselves, to some extent.
We are also governed, in some extent.
When we don’t know histories, and the history of our own ancestries and legacies, we are ignorant, then of certain patterns and therefore reasons and connections.
We are connected.
Dream of the Water Children — Video Series Launch: Episode 1
This is the first in a series of ongoing video projects based on my personal family history, historical memory, Asia-Pacific postwar ethnography and the historical present. It is on my channel at YouTube.
Short Comment / Thoughts on Social Justice, Generations & Memory
Memory’s Destruction and its twists and turns, are present in many forms.
The links between personal forgetting/remembering dynamics and social forgetting and remembering can also be linked to proximities to Dominant Nation-State maintenance and social engineering.
