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<div><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Forwarding 4 outputs for Saipan Tribune this week. The usual caveat; curious, you are welcome, not, see you at the next bend.</font></div>
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<div><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Jaime</font></div>
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Whangara’s whale
rider</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal">I did not make it to Whangara when my second wife and I
drove around the North and South Islands of New Zealand one half-a-month a
zillion years back. My second daughter
with my primal spouse spent her last year in High School in a town in the South
Island near the ferry town of Nelson in the 90s, and I recently visited her
family (Irish husband and two boys) in Concord CA by the Diablo mountain where
she let me watch her copy of the movie, the <i>Whale
Rider,</i> set in the novel, and filmed, in Whangara, North Island, New Zealand.
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<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">I recently celebrated the <i>bonne femme </i>of colleagues who gathered in Bonham, Texas a few weeks
back as we recognized once more that we are as a specie way behind in walking
our talk on gender equality. For those
of us who benefit from the shadows of patriarchy, we can never be confessional
enough about our active participation in ignoring the Chinese sage’s wisdom that
declares: “women hold half of the sky” <i>(</i><i>fu
nu neng ding ban bian tian).</i><span style="font-size:13.0pt; font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;color:#424242"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">The movie. The main character, played by a young Aussie girl
Keisha Castle-Hughes who three years later showed up in Star Wars III, and a
year later, Mary in <i>Nativity, </i>is
named Paikea “Pai” Apirana. In the
movie, she is the daughter of a young Maori father Porourangi, whose wife, and
son, a twin to “Pai”, die at childbirth.
Porourangi is strained from his father, the chief warrior of his
community; he refuses to follow after his father’s footsteps, and will not
allow his father to “use” him again to sire another child. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">The
father, Paikea’s grandpa, is Koro, dye-in-the-wool stuck in the male
prerogative to lead the Maori. But not
just male prerogative; he must be the first son, for his second son is just as
able but he refuses to bestow on him the privilege to train as the new chief
warrior. While he was emotionally close
to first born granddaughter Paikea, he resisted letting “Pai” grow up to lead
the community, although she was willing and able to play the role.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">Koro
prepares the male kids to be warriors; Pai learns how to be one on the side,
including the ability to utter traditional Maori chants without grandpa’s
assistance, in spite of grandpa’s disdain for her progressive assertiveness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">The
Maori of Koro’s chants claim to have come from the island of Havai’i, which
would be in Tahiti of French Polynesia, previously from Sava’i in Samoa. From Havai’i, legend had it that a warrior
rode a whale to lead the Maori to the island.
Thus, the whale rider.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">Koro
takes his students to the ocean and drops the chief’s main symbol of a whale
bone into the deep water, admonishing the students that whoever brings it back
up gets to be the new chief. Two boys cannot
locate it, another two fight over it, subsequently dropping it on the way up
for air. Koro’s #2 son who was with the group
when the whalebone was dropped takes Pia to the site, and, of course, she comes
up with it, alongside with a live lobster for the pot for good measure!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">I am
going in details here because this story, more than a decade old, is couched in
the metaphor of a Polynesian culture that may easily be dismissed as a relic of
the past. In reality, the ascendancy of
the female of the specie to be at par with the social status of their male
counterpart is clearly non-existent even in supposedly enlightened civil
society like the United States. Worst,
females getting beaten up globally seemed to have gotten more prominence in the
reporting of late.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242">Back
to the movie. A pod of whales strand
themselves on the sand of Whangara to die, resistant of any attempt by the
Maori to get them back into the water.
Pia decides to ride the biggest one, and ride she does, holding her
breath under water as the rest of the herd heads out to the open sea. Koro meanwhile gets his whalebone back
informed that it was retrieved by the granddaughter!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:#424242"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">A melodramatic
tale, it is. Controversial issues are
often better dealt with in metaphors rather than objective logical
discourse. My life has been surrounded
with feminine presence throughout my existence so far, and partly matriarchal
in my upbringing since Dad went to graduate school in another country when I
was but ten, the matrilineal line of our Pacific culture (as opposed to the
Spanish patrilineal bent) got accented.
That’s probably why I have sensitivity to my own contribution in the
dastardly affair of reflexive cultural machismo.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">What has become
clear, like any liberation movement of note, is that the outsider cannot hold
the fort. The insiders will have to plot
their own assertiveness to succeed. But
like the Caucasians and non-Africans during the U.S. civil rights movement, we
were but a useful fodder to assault the “guilt” of the dominant white society;
it took the blood, flesh, and broken bones of descendants of former African
slaves in the South to finally get the point across.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:12.0pt">The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the U.S. was costly. With an African-American President, Obama
crowns a journey that was costly. As to
the <i>bonne femme</i>, Pia notwithstanding,
I’d be lying if I say, you’ve come a long way, baby! </div>
<br>
<div style="clear:both"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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