NINOTCHKA ROSCA   BIO   |   MORE POSTS
After Barack Hussein Obama said “so help me God,” I went outside to check if the earth had been rent asunder, trees had fallen, buildings had sat on themselves and the sky had cracked open.

NINOTCHKA ROSCA   BIO   |   MORE POSTS
Years ago, I used to wonder how Israel could do what it was doing to the Palestinians, or even to ally itself with the apartheid government of White South Africa – but since then, I’ve seen the abused take on the persona of the abuser – prisoners doing the guards’ work, women maligning other women – all to align themselves with brute authority.

NINOTCHKA ROSCA   While lining up for kona coffee ($1.95 per 8-ounce Styrofoam cup) at the central kiosk of the food court of the Ala Moana Center, I suffered a mild fugue. Like palimpsest, the image of the food court at the Ali Mall in Quezon City, Philippines, seeped through the environs; surely, that must have been the ancestor of all food courts in the world.

NINOTCHKA ROSCA   It’s no longer physically fun. I have to lug an iPod, a laptop, a Nikon, a photo-lens, a smaller camera, digital tape recorder, a cell phone, a hotspot detector, and – good lord – all the batteries, chargers, connectors, USBs, earbuds, accessories, etc., that will keep them useful.

POLITICS   By Ninotchka Rosca |  Semantical analysis will show it’s all driven by fear of a strong intelligent woman. Will she take orders? Whose foreign policy will it be – hers or Obama? Will she be working for him or for her own political interests? Blah, blah, blah.

By Ninotchka Rosca |  In my New York neighborhood, a 20-block run takes you to Argentina, Chile, Columbia, India, Pakistan, Philippines; 30 blocks and you’re in Africa, Jamaica and other places whose names escape even a geography fan.

Still watching the Repubs and feeling uncharacteristically drained of energy; something about the spectacle is deadening. I can’t even take seriously the debate about Sarah Palin, the shrill outcry of “sexism!” whenever her credentials as a politician and/or as a soccer mom are questioned. Seems to me that there’s sexism in here, all right, but everybody misses what it is, exactly.

We Filipinos needed to re-calibrate our understanding of what’s usual or normal, the instant we began to move out into the world en masse. Unfortunately, that has been difficult, because of the re-feudalization accompanying migration, particularly for women.

By Ninotchka Rosca

New York lost its governor, he who rode to victory on 70% of state votes. Eliot Spitzer, who was reputed to be the scrubber – he would clean corruption out of every aspect of state politics – resigned after revelations of sex trysts with (a) prostitute(s) which reportedly cost him as much as [...]

By Ninotchka Rosca

The temptation is great: put one’s self behind one candidate and explain the choice with a simple but incontrovertible truth: she’s a woman; he’s African-American; I want someone different. That he couldn’t be summed up in a simplistic tag-line made for much, I think, of John Edwards’ difficulties. I was sorry to see [...]

By Ninotchka Rosca

Making leche flan was a skill I picked up over two decades ago in Honolulu, Hawaii, where the potluck was common practice. My sister gave me a round aluminum pan (cost $0.70 in Chinatown), some instructions and let me loose. Years later, having done with the chores of another marriage, I threw the [...]

By Ninotchka Rosca
Holiday and year-end greetings to everyone.
The last month has been difficult, what with the deluge of emails, text and video messages, letters and phone calls, asking how a woman’s organization could contend with closed-doorism threatening the very reason for which 500 women were engaged in political activism. In the midst of this was [...]

By Ninotchka Rosca

NEW YORK — A 12-year-old girl hangs herself (allegedly) and suddenly, she is the face of a city, a province, an island, an archipelago, a country. Her death is followed by screams and yowls of denial: she couldn’t have killed herself just because she was poor; she had been abused (perhaps), raped (perhaps), [...]

The most pernicious and the most grievous of political sexism is that which disallows women the right to effect historical signification, which has led, through 7,000 years, to the loss of women’s history and social amnesia regarding women’s ability to effect social change.

Joma’s arrest will have long-term impact, not on the revolutionary movement in the Philippines, but on the ability and inclination of Filipinos overseas to self-organize, to work collectively for better job and living conditions, for legalization of their presence and for protection against sexual violence and sexual exploitation. If the Philippine government can buy, with mining and oil exploration licenses, the cooperation of a host counry like Holland in its policy of political repression against political dissent, how then can overseas Filipinos struggle against economic abuse, racism, sexual abuse and gender exploitation?