Annamarie Rillamas Gayla
Hello, my name is
Acknowledgements
Thank you, first and foremost, to those that have trusted me with their names and their stories. I hope this does you justice.
Thank you to my classmates and instructor for all of your help and support. My gratitude to all of you cannot be expressed enough.
And lastly, thank you to Dr. Isao Fujimoto. Your words are simple and endlessly inspiring.
Project Description
Names are often thought of as something that is variable-it can change or be changed depending on the situation and person. However, a name is more than that: many hold meaning for the individual, whether that be culturally, religiously, or within one’s own family. They are symbolic of a person and their identity. Names are not intended to be changed to fit better into another’s mouth-not without the permission of the name holder. This project focuses on people in my own life that have experienced this for themselves. It was inspired by Dr. Isao Fujimoto’s book, Bouncing Back, and the way in which he told of the meaning of his name and how it reflected the hopes that his parents held for him. The medium is paper, clay, and acrylic paint.
Bio
Annamarie Gayla is a third year studying Biological Science and Comparative Literature at UC Davis.
I am a worker on my grandfather’s side. He taught me that what you earn is with your own two hands. I know the earth and how to tell when the roots of the plants are ready to be planted, and when they are thirsty. I remember thinking that a shell fell from the sky and dreaming that that was why you had to use a plane to fly to far off places. We lived in a world where reality was stacked and islands lived in the sky.
Filipino. American. Filipino-American. Two things that hold earth’s history in their bones. I don’t know which culture I fit into-if I can rightfully say one or the other, so I learned to always look both ways before crossing. Early Saturdays on the couch before browning under the hot sun on some nice, strange adult’s lawn.
Since birth.
Standing on church pews in mass and being ashamed because God could see me, a head above the masses-eyes faced straight when the olds told you to look down, cradled in my grandma’s soft dress as she knelt. Forehead bruised from after mass blessing, I tried to escape, hiding with my brother.
Turn over a new leaf. I was just born when my grandfather entered the room, memorizing my arms, my legs, my weight before he allowed the nurses to take me. Giant, earth brown, calloused hands remembering me, turned me over. When I was older, I asked him why. He smiled and said nothing.
He knew this country’s habit of misplacing people’s children.
(To this day, when I’m lost in a crowd, he still sits on the ground and looks for a mole on a left leg somewhere in the masses.)
I walk up to my grandmother crying because the medicine from the doctor doesn’t work. She smiles and sighs and says “strong blood”. I am five. She turns on the small, brown heater and showers me in hot vinegar water with a tabo. She ilots me with lana-pek-pekeling the heat and cold from my body. She sprinkles on white baby powder as a finishing touch.
Thinking back now, it makes me feel tough knowing that my body is beyond the reach of modern medicine. And then I think about how easily it listens to the herbs and the lana. How my heart is calmed hearing my grandpa’s voice calling my spirit to come home from a long day of playing in the fields. Natural selection, where you at? I’m waiting.
Ideas and stories passed down from each generation live in my veins. Rice cooked over a fire, a little ashy, a muddy swimming hole, and a hard wood bed in the field under the stars. Does this answer the question? Lights out because the bill wasn’t paid, so we always had firewood and candles and learned to live with and without the light.
Now I’m here.