Good Thunder Pod

2. mothering & empire

• Bianca and Jeff • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this episode, Jeff and Bianca examine the complexities of motherhood, family, and resistance in the imperial core.  We review some of the ways this genocide has ravaged Palestinian motherhood, and we discuss the impacts of colonialism in our own  stories of family and family-making. We explore the deep emotional debts, or 'utang ng loob,' that shape our families and politics, and look to alternative forms of collective care as we parent towards healing and revolution. 

Speaker 1:

I'm Bianca and I'm Jeff and you're listening to Good Thunder One, two three, four.

Speaker 2:

We're a Filipino and Chinese husband and wife duo talking all things, personal and political, because the personal is political and the political is personal.

Speaker 1:

We speak from our positions as Asians in the US, as new parents and as concerned citizens working to get free from American imperialism.

Speaker 2:

All right, second episode. How are you doing this week, Bianca?

Speaker 1:

I'm tired, I'm here, I'm alive, but I am a little sleepy. Our weekends are not what they used to be, because we have a baby now, and I also went out last night, and by going out I mean I sat in my friend's very comfortable home hanging out and I ended up coming home by 11. But that, in this life stage, is really going wild. I'm not considering that I'm usually in bed by like nine and I don't usually leave my house after our kid goes to sleep. So, anyways, it was a lovely time, but I am just recovering from a very social weekend.

Speaker 2:

How are you? Yeah, I've been really busy, but I think, overall, I feel grateful, grateful for community, a political home, and as well as for people that create communities of care. And this past week, I had the opportunity to be on a YouTube live thanks to the invitation of Amanda Seals and, yeah, she was a really great host. She not only knew her stuff but in terms of being able to ask the right questions at the right time to help clarify things that I was talking about as well as make a connection with the audience, like the timing, the hosting, it was impeccable and also it was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

Yes, it was awesome, and shout out to Amanda Seals because her name is actually getting dragged through the mud right now for ridiculous, nonsensical reasons, and she has been.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I can't think of another celebrity who has been going this hard, this consistently, on anti-imperialism, on the genocide in Palestine, and yeah, I mean we won't get too much into this, but it just shows how black women who put their necks out to speak the truth are often have actually, you know, a lot to lose and are not often protected in the ways that they deserve to be. So, anyways, the conversation was awesome. You did a great job, jeff, and the conversation is on Amanda Seals' YouTube channel. She also called you a certified smart person, which what an awesome compliment.

Speaker 2:

It was definitely an honor to be in conversation with her and to be called smart for once. I don't get that often, but you know, like my intelligence is not done through a conventional way.

Speaker 1:

Yes, what you talk about in the conversation, which is very cool, yeah, so today we are talking about mothering and empire and family.

Speaker 1:

We chose this for this week because this past week was Palestinian Mother's Day and we want to look at specifically how empire affects mothers and mothering, from how empire you know for lack of a better word brutalizes mothers and families, to how mothering is also a tool and an act of political resistance, how our ancestral communities, how communities under attack right now, have always approached mothering as a way to create life and to resist systems of violence.

Speaker 1:

And so in this conversation we refer to mothering not as something gendered or biological, but as a political act of deep care and nurture. And this comes from the reading I've done from the book Revolutionary Mothering Love on the Frontlines. It's an anthology by women of color, mostly black women, talking about radical mothering again as this political act. I'll be referencing this book throughout this episode, as well as the book Essential Labor Mothering for Social Change by Angela Garb. So this conversation is meant to just, you know, get this conversation started, but really I recommend those places as well as other. We might reference other recommendations throughout the episode for you all to continue your unlearning.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, like Bianca says said, this week is Palestinian Mother's Day, and which is why we're bringing it up, and just also, like we wanted to, yeah, discuss Palestine more in depth this week as opposed to last week. And you know, just what we've been seeing in Palestine is nothing short of genocide in real time, and specifically, not only the atrocities that Israel is committing to all Palestinian people, but just the systematic way that they've been targeting women and children and just Palestinian people's ability to make and create and protect family. So you know like just the death toll has been, yeah, really horrific. And just to give certain numbers and this data is, in particular, is from the Palestinian Red Crescent there are 37 mothers are killed every day, and mothers from Gaza make up to 28 of the 67 female detainees in Israeli prisons, and this also with regard to the data on children. This is coming from UNICEF. More than 13,000 children in Gaza has been killed since October 7. And at least 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip are unaccompanied or have been separated from their immediate relatives since the beginning of the conflict on October 7. And about 1% of the overall displaced population of 1.7 million people. Of course, the overall death toll has been over 30,000 for some time now. I think the closest estimates right now is 37,000. And each one of those people that have been killed and martyred is somebody's family and everyone is somebody's everything.

Speaker 2:

And even with all these numbers, you would think like this is horrific. How could it possibly get worse? And it does. And if you've been following the news, you would see that Israel attacked Al-Shifa Hospital and, just wanting to put this out there, this is a trigger warning. We'll be discussing sexual violence and if you would like to skip this part, you could forward 30 seconds to a minute. But just going back to the theme of how Israel has been systematically brutalizing family and mothers, and in particular, when Israeli IOF forces came into Al-Shifa Hospital, not only were they rounding up everyday civilians, as well as doctors, and executing them, but they orchestrated mass rape and there was even eyewitness testimony of pregnant women being raped and brutalized by IOF forces. And this is atrocious and horrific, especially since in the beginning, in October 7th, there was wild allegations of mass rape by Hamas without any evidence, and this has led to the defunding of UNRWA and used to justify the attack on Gaza that we're seeing today.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, which those allegations of rape on October 7th have been thoroughly defunct but continue to be used as fodder to commit mass genocide.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and also there is this theme of attacking hospitals that Israel has been doing, not only in this genocide but also in the many decades that Israel has been occupying Palestine. And this attack on hospitals is an attack on just Palestinian people's ability to care for their sick and wounded and also it's an attack on the ability to give life. There's been stories of pregnant women lacking anesthesia while giving birth, or even C-sections, or even children being or infants being left and incubators because Palestinians were forced out of that specific hospital and forced to evacuate by IOF forces under the threat of being killed. And even with this current siege of aid coming into Gaza, we're seeing things like baby formula being banned. And this is part of just the way that not only Israel but empire seeks to destroy the families and the mothers and the children of the people that they are occupying and have colonized.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so this is a lot. Yeah, it's kind of hard to even conceptualize. Sometimes I don't know if folks are listening, if this is all stuff that you've been reading, or maybe it is stuff that has been. You know on your algorithm, but we're only touching the surface of the inhumanity of what we're seeing and I know. For me, like in my lifetime I've never had, I don't think I've ever witnessed or had to reckon with such depth of people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And going back to the sexual violence thing, I mean it's, the fake allegations are a slap in the face to actual survivors. You know, yeah, it's just a lot. You know, thinking specifically about the construction of the family and the attack on the family, imperialism has always attacked and weaponized the family for their own political gains and so, you know, in everything that Jeff just talked about, it is a very explicit, violent, physical and psychological attack on Palestinian families. But in the US context, this political construction of the quote family has been weaponized by Republicans, especially in the last few years, to dismantle things like ethnic studies, to ban books by authors of color, to justify the drag ban, to strip away reproductive rights. Right, we see, you know, in white Christian nationalism, with the rise of white Christian nationalism, this colluding of these extremist evangelical views on family with the state. And so you know, we see again family being attacked very brutally in Palestine and we see it in another form on the policy level in the United States.

Speaker 1:

But I think less explicit and maybe less insidious but still very pervasive is also this hyper-individualistic construction of the family here in the West, and I think we are experiencing that a lot as new parents. Our kid is less than a year old and this is our first child and I think for me like it's been isolating and my friend Angie texted me last week and she reminded me we aren't meant to parent alone but so many of us have to and I feel like that's so true that this siloed, individualistic structure of the nuclear family is so distinctly American and Western and so hard Like we are meant to parent in community and we are meant to have help and we are actually very lucky and privileged to have some family where we are now and different support. But I just think of our child's godmom, for example, who had her first child in the Philippines and her second child in the US, and when she talks about it she talks about the latter, the second child in the US, as a pretty jarring and even traumatizing experience because she had no support compared to in the Philippines when she had a village in this multi-generational, multi-family household, which I think is the more common arrangement for most people in the world and for many of us too, and so you know, on this I wanted to share a quote from the Angela Garb's book. She wrote A lack of shared responsibility and interconnectedness makes it difficult to find solutions for needs more easily addressed in community, such as childcare, meal preparation and household maintenance.

Speaker 1:

It leads to isolation and, in every family for themselves mentality. It leaves parents feeling common domestic strains as personal problems rather than structural ones. So that last line is really the crux of our podcast. Too right that the personal is political and it's not just an isolated incident that, like so many of us are struggling with childcare, so many of us are struggling with how to figure out maternity leave. These are structural and political problems and that are exacerbated by this, again, super individualistic framing of the family. So you know, these are just a few different ways that empire affects families and mothering, whether by violently making family untenable, by brutalizing mothers and children, to weaponizing the construct of family for extremist right wing politics, to this normalized hyper individualism that leaves so many of us without support or safety nets. So, jeff, you know you recently were on Amanda Seale's YouTube talking actually a bit about your personal story, about how US Empire affected your own experience with family and mothering and your mom. Do you wanna talk about that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely yeah. As Bianca said, I was on this YouTube live and, you know, started sharing more about my decolonial journey and for many people, you know, empire affects us even before we are born. And this is true for the Philippines, which was a colony of the US Empire and even now it's a neo colony and you know it is occupied by the United States, having military bases over there. And also, throughout the history of the Philippines, America has installed their own, either direct puppet dictators or have influenced the elections and influenced the ruling class, to where the Philippines have been exploited of their and had their natural resources extracted from them, leaving the ruling class of the Philippines to hoard the resources to themselves, which is whatever little is left, and then the people and the masses having to scrounge around for crumbs. And there is this actual term in the Philippines called OFW, because you know it stands for overseas Filipino worker, and there are just so many and in the tens of millions of Filipinos that actually go all around the world to work in order to find a living because they can't earn enough money in the Philippines. So this is a system where, you know, parents, mothers, have to be separated from their children in order to provide for their family, because, economically, the Philippines has just been ravaged by imperialism. And that's my story.

Speaker 2:

I was actually born to an OFW it was just me and my mother in Saudi Arabia, and she had to give birth to me on her own. She didn't have family around her, she was by herself and, you know, only a month or two after I was born, she had to travel from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines and eventually leave me there as she went back to work and for like the first four years of my life, like my mom was absent and because she had to work overseas, to the point that every time she came back and picked me up from my aunt's house and where all my cousins and uncles are, I would tell her like no, I don't want to go with you, because you're not my mom and you know my aunt, she's my mom. I even called her mom a poem and you know that's like a consequence of empire and it's something that I know. My mom still feels a lot of pain from. You know, whenever I talk to her or ask her questions about her birth story, like she doesn't say much and you know, if you know my mom, she has a lot to say. She's a woman that is strong and full of opinions and I think you know she's had to be that way because of her experiences with empire and you know, and I see the pain that she still has today when I ask her questions and I see how that pain not only affected her but affected her ability to mother me.

Speaker 2:

And, yeah, like there is this concept in the Philippines and in Filipino culture called utang ng loob. It's like it means inside debt, like the debt that I feel inside towards somebody else, and it could be a positive way in terms of how we are accountable to each other. That's a healthy way to that it can manifest. It just shows the communal aspect of Filipino people.

Speaker 2:

But it also can be a really painful way of like feeling how you still are lacking because of something that you did long ago and that's, you know, something that I feel like my mom still feels, when I asked her about this experience or how I see her in not only the way she's parented me but also wanting to parent my, our own son, that that pain is still there because you know she was absent for most of my early childhood. But I want to take it back to like the fact that my mom had this opportunity to provide, not only because she had access through her nursing degree, but because she did have community back home. I think, like you know, having multiple mothers is a beautiful thing in itself. You know, that's how it was before empire in the Philippines, that everything was done in community. But because of empire, you know, having multiple mothers apart from my mother was a necessity and it was a painful experience when it's also something that was the norm, but with my mother present.

Speaker 2:

In traditional Filipino culture, there's always this talk about how empires would come to another place and bring civilization with them, but in reality, they brutalize the culture that is there, that is more civilized and humane than what empire had to offer. Yeah, and that's just a little bit of my story in terms of the mothering that I experienced for my mom, the pain that was and is still there, but thankfully, yeah, I believe that through us working on ourselves, and also just the ways that my mom and I have learned to communicate and care for each other, a lot of these wounds have been healing. But it didn't have to be if it were not for empire itself.

Speaker 1:

I mean, this is the colonial wound on the family and it just goes to show. There's obviously the horrific, violent, explicit ways that we see, and then all of the costs of colonialism that we don't see for generations and decades and generations afterwards that continue to affect and hurt families unless you really face the wound and that work, the decolonial healing is also painful work too, right? Yeah, I think for me it's like since giving birth man, it's like if you know, you know if you've gone through it, you don't know until you've gone through it. And after you go through it, I'm like, oh my God, like what the hell? Like my mother-in-law did this on her own in Saudi, like without much family support, it sounds like.

Speaker 1:

And even thinking about, you know, the mothers that have given birth since October 7th, I just feel because my own birth was really hard, really traumatic, really unexpected, and I am an English speaking US citizen that had family with me that you know. I have health insurance, I have safety nets and I'm just like damn like if it was so world upturning and traumatic for me with all these safety nets. And you know, nine months out I'm still like. I still have like triggers, I'm still trying to figure out how I, you know, move on and integrate and heal from this traumatic medical event. Like I just feel like my heart has broken in a new way. Because of my experience, I have, like I don't know, just like kind of a new connection to like birthing people. I feel like and when I see a traumatic birth or I hear about a traumatic birth, it's like just I don't know, I clearly don't even really have the words to articulate it right now, but it's just a lot to process and to think about. Like how do we heal collectively and how do we make sure, like women stop needing to give birth without anesthesia? You know things like that. Like how do we make conditions like that completely, you know, irrelevant when they are actually right now so salient and common, and that is like such an assault.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, yeah, so I think for me thinking about mothering and empire, I think about, well, I actually do think about my own mom too, and you know the individualism we talked about earlier and how she had the privilege, I guess, to be able to take care of me full time. She didn't have to go work in another country, but she did really suffer from the social isolation of, you know, being a new mom and a new immigrant in America, without support and without a village, she, I'm pretty sure, had postpartum depression, pretty severe, and obviously at that point didn't have a diagnosis or support for that. And I also have been thinking a lot about, you know, the lack of actually opportunity for her to have a vocation or have work outside of being a mom, because culturally in our family that's what was expected of her. And I think about that because in my experience of becoming a mom it has been so important for my mental health for me to actually go back to work and I know that's not the case for everybody and I'm all for the necessity of more paid leave, but just in my particular experience it happened to be really important for me to have, like, other things going on. And so, you know, this hyperindividualism, this lack of choices is, you know, I think, a through line here that we're seeing. And so what does it mean then to mother against this isolation, to mother against this hyperindividualism?

Speaker 1:

Again, this individualistic nuclear family structure is a relatively recent social structure that we, I don't think we have to accept it, but at the same time, like, how do we aspire and work towards these values of like having the collective village and having social support and thinking beyond the nuclear family, when our structures and our cities and our infrastructure of our society and all the norms of our culture are so individualistic? Right, I think about how we're you know where we are located right now like the car culture, we're so physically far from friends, like it's just practically hard to imagine this. Like co-parenting, village utopia, because I can't even make it out to lunch with my friends, you know, like because we're too far, or like I can't even make it to like Palestine rallies or events to show up for this community, because I'm gonna be stuck in traffic and I need to figure out bedtime and I need to figure out grading papers for the next day and getting my shit done. And you know, practically it's just I feel like my values and my vision and hopes for my life are at odds with the practical realities of my life right now. And so, anyways, those are just some things that I've been wrestling with.

Speaker 1:

But, again, I think it's possible to parent against this individualism and I think about this community in Oakland that my friend, suzanne Ngales, you know, told me about through her Instagram. She basically it's this communal living situation where there are 19 adults and four babies living in a 10 unit compound in Oakland and the vision for this compound is communal living. So they do everything from shared meals and it's built into the infrastructure of the house, so shared living space, shared kitchen, shared garden. I know, you know, along with this kind of shared living conversation, there's also been more conversations I hear about co-buying homes with friends and again just these alternative forms of family making and chosen family, and I feel like that's not really in her per view or life stage right now, given where we are.

Speaker 1:

But I think like that kind of imagination is what it means to mother as a political act of resistance against these systems that isolate and violate our visions of collective child rearing, family.

Speaker 1:

And I guess, just to close this episode on mothering and empire, mothering against empire and toward interconnectedness, I wanna leave us with this James Baldwin quote the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.

Speaker 1:

And I'm beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. And so when I think about right, like how do I get to this rally because I need to figure out bedtime, I also think about like we need to figure it out because we have an indebtedness to each other, and that's what it means to parent against empire is really to take responsibility, to show up not only for our children, but for the children of Palestine and Congo and Sudan, right, these children who are experiencing this completely preventable suffering due to our settler colonialism and greed and capitalism. How do we make small and big choices to try to be in solidarity with them? And that might mean showing up to protest, but that also might mean just choosing out of consumerism at the level that we've been consuming, or it might mean co-buying a house together and figuring out communal living. I don't know, but yeah, I just feel inspired by these stories of, again, alternative, imaginative ways of caring for each other.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, thanks for sharing, Bianca.

Speaker 2:

Like I think it really does require an imagination, because for so long we've lived in terms of inside this imperial core, or even the empire has affected our homelands and all we've ever seen is this empire and while we have ever seen this drive towards capitalism but I think one of the positives that's have arrived came out of what's happening in Palestine is just seeing the empire's mask come off and how the choices that we're making here makes an impact to the mothers and to the children of Gaza.

Speaker 2:

And I think, like for the first time well, not the first time, but like in this time, in this season, as we're witnessing this genocide we're seeing that our interconnectedness and also our resolve to choose into each other and to create these communities of care, these communities where we show up for each other and I've seen that just in this past week, where I've seen people who, from different backgrounds, make spaces for one another in terms of organizing or conversations online or even in real person, and I think these are the necessary steps that we have to take while here in the imperial core. So, yeah, once again, thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you guys next time.

Speaker 1:

Yes or not?

Speaker 2:

guys, but see y'all next time.

Speaker 1:

Yes, gender inclusive Rate and subscribe. If you are into these conversations, tell your friends and thank you for listening.