[Cwgrad-announcements] Thank You (from Melissa Roxas)

[Ching-In Chen]

Dear friends,

Several members of this community were very supportive and signed
petitions, spread the word and held Melissa in their thoughts.

I wanted to share words that she wrote to the Kundiman community we
are part of -- and thank you for caring.  Melissa wanted this to reach
those who supported her so please feel free to forward to others who
might have done work on her behalf.  If you want to know more about
her time during her abduction, here's a link to an affidavit that she
gave: http://philcsc.wordpress.com/

Ching-In

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Melissa Roxas

Dearest Kundiman Family,

I want to thank all of you for your love and support.  Please know
that I have received your concerns and your words that are very moving
to me and is helping me heal.  I am very much grateful to have a
concerned community of fellow artists and friends.  Your support was
important in helping put pressure on the Philippine military for my
release.  Thank you for believing in truth and justice.

Below is a letter for you and others that supported me through all of
this.  I also wanted to share with you how much I do believe in
communities like these.  Kundiman means an art song, traditional
filipino love songs... I think it is so appropriate for what it means
to create a safe and truthful way of creating a community of fellow
poets and artists, and for me it has always also meant truth, as all
love songs are...

When I was abducted and tortured it was also the music of poetry that
kept me sane, along with the knowledge that I am aware there are
people out there that will fight for me and fight for my release.
Here are some words that kept rising out of me during that time they
held me... poor poets words, but words nonetheless of my truth during
those hours.

Come before the Night Hour
Come and Sing
before Night
Comes. I am Flame
to the Body.
The Incipient Wing
that can’t Fly.
The Open
Skin on a Foot
that Bleeds
Black. Tonight
I will learn to Die
a Thousand Times
and Be Resurrected.

Much love,
Melissa Roxas

********

The recent birth of my niece reminds me that life is something more
than just presence, it is the earth rising inside of you, the earth
that has been there since the beginning, but taking a different form.

I started to think about all the other babies I had seen as a
community health worker in the Philippines before my niece was born.
The marking of before and after, beginnings and endings. I remember
their mothers taking them in for health screenings and basic check
ups.  Infants who went untreated for days with a fever, the softness
in their eyes gives way to a hardness, their skin was tight from
dehydration, they were so tiny, their hand in mine was as little as my
thumbnail.  I remember how much I wanted them to get better and be
alive.  With so many babies, children and families that I’ve met, I
realized that the disease they had was more than an epidemic of
typhoid fever, cholera, or malaria, it was the disease of poverty and
oppression.

When I started to work more with particular issues of human rights
violations I also met different babies, babies and children who had
lost their mothers and fathers to a different death.  A horrible and
preventable death that takes the life not only of its victim, but robs
the whole family and the world of their presence, all because they
advocated and fought for a better world where their children have
genuine freedom, a just peace, and true democracy.

Each day I was with the community, I learned how precious a birth can
be, how to appreciate life, and I slowly began to understand what they
meant when they whispered me their names and told their stories.
There are no deaths that are forgotten, no fathers, no mothers, no
sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles, or cousins that are forgotten.
They live in the births of new babies each day.

When my own experience of abduction and torture ended and I was
reunited with my family it was not a second birth for me, I realized
that it is a continuing journey for the search for truth and justice.
Repressive governments and military use torture as a form of control,
to instill fear in people in debilitating ways, so they stay quiet and
lose their light inside.  But I realized no amount of pain or
suffering or fear can stop that earth in me to keep rising.  Instead
it gave birth to new births.  My experience has convinced me even more
of the value of freedom and justice and the importance of fighting for
and upholding the principles of human rights and human dignity.

Me being able to write this right now is testimony of how your
collective love, support, prayers, and action is helping me and others
like me through this experience. I know that your support is also part
of a larger movement to create change towards a world free of poverty
and oppression.  Thank you to friends and family, family and friends
of other desaparecidos, progressive people’s organizations, human
rights groups, lawyers, civil rights advocates, church people’s
organizations, concerned individuals, fellow poets and artists, and
all believers in human rights and justice.

There are many more desaparecidos, more abductions, torture and
extra-judicial killings going on in the Philippines and around the
world.  Let the new birth come where there is an end to all of the
killings, abductions, and torture.  Let the noise come from all
directions—they are no longer whispers but shouts for justice.

Love,
Melissa Roxas
-- 
~~~~~
Ching-In Chen
THE HEART'S TRAFFIC (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press 2009)
http://www.arktoi.com/books/heart.shtml
http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalog
www.chinginchen.com