before the earth had any reason
to permit feet
(her name whispered in the dark
over, and over, and over,
passed down as a warning, and
never in pious prayer)
wildness was her dress, a saya of
leaves, and
madness adorned her dark hair,
brown in the firelight stories of
despair
(in lore, malakas and maganda live;
in this, they do not survive her).
when the uniformed guardias came,
they gave us maria:
a virgin in white, mute and in tears.
they had none of this goddess
untamed, hidden in the woods
(let the mother stand for
love, their friars said,
“out with this engkanto,
she isn’t real”).
they banished you to mythology.
they replaced you with the
virgin mother,
stripped you of that hedonistic will,
and forced you into veils.
when they think of love now, they
think of rosaries and blushing;
they have forgotten your
capacity for
bruised thighs and bloodied lips.
stir from the forest, goddess,
there are those who remember
your name
(i want to fall in love the way
you’d permit it: in
destruction, and
fire).
sasabay sa lukso ng
aking dugo ang
pag-tawag ko sa’yo
sa pagnanasang ako ay
marinig;
buwagin mo ang kinatatayuan ng
bawat pag-halik.
(they call you diyan masalanta;
it means “be destroyed there”)”
-
- the spaniards have mistaken our goddess of love for their virgin mother || bsc (via bunnycorcorans)
After the Spaniards, we were told that to be a virgin was admirable and that sex was heinous and hedonistic.
Before the Spaniards, we were told that those who remained virgins in death could not pass into the afterlife.
Women wore no clothes above the waist because breasts were not obscene.
The men wore piercings on their cocks to pleasure women.
The women freely slept with others after their coming of age so they could know the joy of sharing pleasure with a loved one when they were wed.
There would be a man in the village who women could go to for sex, an “expert” for women of age who wanted to experience sex for the first time with someone who knew what he was doing.
Our most compassionate deity, most loving, who we prayed to for good fortune, had both male and female genitalia, and represented fertility. They turned her/him into a demon.
Our most protective god had a penis the length and size of a rice stalk.
Menstruation was celebrated rather than shamed and hidden, because it represented womanhood—and womanhood, in itself, was celebrated.
Transwomen were praised and welcomed, and could live their lives freely as women and even marry men in the community.
We embraced our sexuality and they feared and hated us for it. The only reason Catholicism still reigns in the Philippines now is because of how much effort they had to put into brainwashing and undoing us as a culture, because it was so far from their own that they couldn’t even begin to grasp how it was possible.
What white Imperialists consider open-mindedness and freedom now has been ours since the beginning, and it was taken from us by force.
(via muchymozzarella)