GeoHumanities

ISSN: 2373-566X (Print) 2373-5678 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgeo20

“WALANG-WALA” (“Nothing is left”): Rituals for

Collective Grieving, Disaster Memory, and Social
Repair

Chaya Ocampo Go

To cite this article: Chaya Ocampo Go (2017): “WALANG-WALA” (“Nothing is left”):

Rituals for Collective Grieving, Disaster Memory, and Social Repair, GeoHumanities, DOI:
10.1080/2373566X.2017.1338419

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2017.1338419

Published online: 01 Aug 2017.

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 FORUM ON EMOTIONS, EMPATHY, ETHICS, AND
ENGAGEMENT
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“WALANG-WALA” (“Nothing is left”): Rituals for

Collective Grieving, Disaster Memory, and Social Repair

Chaya Ocampo Go
York University

Super typhoon Yolanda (internationally named Haiyan)—the strongest storm in recorded

history—ravaged through the Visayan Islands of the Philippines on 8 November 2013. In
this article I examine the transformative power of collective grieving in translocal and
transnational contexts postdisaster. Having served as a disaster relief worker across the
Visayas, and now writing as a transnational Filipina scholar, I inquire: How is disaster memory
shared from body to body, from the geographical margins of a nation-state to the rest of an
archipelago, and across the ocean to global diasporas? How might acts of remembering and
grieving together enable new forms of political agency in the wake of a super typhoon? In
exploring the relationship between disaster memory and social repair, I consider the creation of
ritual as an art practice, performance, and protest. I outline how my creative-critical engage-
ment with ritual in three different forms has facilitated the co-creation of spaces for the
individual to grieve together with the collective. This series of projects, together called
“WALANG-WALA,” explores the embodiment and experience of a state of absolute emptiness
and nothingness one is left with after catastrophic disasters such as Yolanda. In these rituals, I
approach disaster memory as a cultural practice of collective and active remembering of what
we love and lost. Key Words: disaster memory, social repair, super typhoon Yolanda/
Haiyan.

IN THE WAKE OF YOLANDA

On 8 November 2013, super typhoon Yolanda (internationally named Haiyan)—the strongest storm
in recorded history—ravaged through the islands of the Visayas in the Philippines. Yolanda left an
estimated total of 10,0001 bodies missing and dead in its wake, with millions still displaced from
recovering communities and ecologies nearly four years after. In commemorating Yolanda’s first

GeoHumanities, 00(00) 2017, 1–15 © Copyright 2017 by American Association of Geographers.

Initial submission, June 2016; revised submission, January 2017; final acceptance, April 2017.
Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
 2 GO

anniversary, scholar-artists convened in Manila for Sa Tagilid Na Yuta (On Tilted Earth):
Performance in Archipelagic Space2 to ask: “What and how is it to live (and die) on tilted earth in
the ring of disaster?” (PSi: Performance Studies International 2014). The project employed perfor-
mance in all its creative and expressive forms as a means to explore the key theme of disasters in our3
islands situated in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Disaster scholar Greg Bankoff (2003, 2004) argued that
for a country like the Philippines, disasters must be understood beyond articulations of natural
calamities; instead, the root causes of peoples’ vulnerabilities remain deeply entangled in the
permanent crises of chronic poverty, dehumanization, militarization, and ongoing colonial histories
in the country. Having served as a humanitarian worker for seven full months in the immediate
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aftermath, and now a transnational Filipina scholar standing on unceded Coast Salish territories
(Vancouver City), I share in PSi’s urgent call to explore the emancipatory possibilities of ritual as an
art practice, performance, and protest for us, a disaster-weary people.
Yolanda survivors I have worked and lived with often said with heads shaking in lament,
“Baliw na talaga ang panahon,” repeating that panahon—the Filipino word that pertains to
both time and the weather—has indeed gone mad. The insanity of intensifying and unpredictable
extreme weather conditions is felt most severely in the Eastern Visayas region: The islands of
Leyte and Samar are not only at the front lines of every typhoon entering from the Pacific
Ocean, but they are also ranked with the highest hunger incidence in the country among a food-
poor and aging farming and fishing population (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2011; Regional
Development Council, 2011). It is also the region with the worst poverty incidence among
agrarian reform beneficiaries, and the lowest number of paid or fully paid farmers who often
work in privately owned plantations (IBON Foundation, Inc. 2015, 77). When Yolanda’s 300
kilometer per hour wind speeds and ferocious storm surges collapsed violently onto such
landscapes, already mired in preexisting social injustices, the disastrous lives of farmers and
fishers steeped in decades of militarization plunged deeper in what has since been ranked as “the
poorest province of the country” (Cayubit 2015). It is therefore no surprise that Yolanda “was
and continues to be the biggest humanitarian crisis in the Philippines’ history” (Packard 2015).
The report Disaster Upon Disaster published by IBON Foundation (2015) details a comprehen-
sive review of post-Yolanda relief, recovery, and rehabilitation efforts outlining cases of disaster
capitalism, the neoliberalization of disaster response, the prevalence of corrupt patronage
politics, and the making of Yolanda as “the world’s most militarized disaster response” (63).
Despite a wide range of sustained rehabilitation efforts by government and civil society
organizations, I observed that these maddening times also correspond to an impasse in current
political praxes due to the compounding of state neglect, corporatized disaster response, and
ongoing intensifying weather conditions. “Baliw na talaga ang panahon”—wrecked in the
devastating havoc of these crises, where people cry that they are left with nothing more to
have and live by, I argue that there must be ways to grieve and forge survival together.
In this article I examine the transformative power of collective grieving in translocal and
transnational contexts postdisaster. How is disaster memory shared from body to body, from the
geographical margins of a nation-state to the rest of an archipelago, and across the ocean to
global diasporas? How might acts of remembering and grieving together enable new forms of
political agency in the wake of a super typhoon? In exploring the relationship between disaster
memory and social repair, I consider the creation of ritual as an art practice, performance, and
protest. I outline how my creative-critical engagement with ritual in three different forms has
facilitated the cocreation of spaces for the individual to grieve together with the collective. This
 RITUALS FOR COLLECTIVE GRIEVING 3

series of projects, together called “WALANG-WALA,” explores the embodiment and experience
of a state of absolute emptiness and nothingness one is left with after a catastrophic disaster such
as Yolanda. Employing critical-creative methodologies to explore disaster memory (Connerton
1989; Halbwachs and Coser 1992; Edkins 2003) is an urgent call I respond to as outlined in this
series of three rituals. I approach disaster memory as a cultural practice of collective and active
remembering of what we love and lost.

#1 WALANG-WALA: AN IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE ON THE CUSP BETWEEN

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DISASTER AND THEREAFTER

December 1st, 2014

In Precarious Life, Butler (2004) asked, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from
tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a
resolution for grief through violence?” (30). Filipino writer-survivors of typhoons Ondoy and
Pepeng who experienced how the record-breaking flood levels submerged Metro Manila in
September 2009 similarly addressed these queries and spoke to the importance of remembering
loss while persisting to move on with life. They argued that forgetting equates to learning
nothing from the tragedy, and that optimism is an insufficient form of resilience: “Gawi na
nating kalimutan ang mga masasakit na pangyayari upang mabati ang hinaharap nang may
ngiti sa labi. Pero hindi sapat and ngiti sa labi bilang pananggalang sa mga darating na bagyo.
Kaya’t mahalagang maalala ang mga nawala sa atin, mahalagang magbahagi ng kuwento at
saloobin.” [It has been our cultural habit to forget our painful experiences to greet the future
with a smile on our lips. But a smile is not enough to barricade incoming storms. That is why it
is important to remember what was lost from us, why it is important to tell these stories and felt
grievances] (Arcega 2010, 115).
On 1 December 2014, to commemorate super typhoon Yolanda’s first anniversary with the
Filipino diaspora from across the Pacific, I collaborated with MYSTERYFORMS4 and Dennis
D. Gupa5 in creating “WALANG-WALA/Point.Zero: An Immersive Discourse on the Cusp
Between Disaster and Thereafter” (Figure 1). The naming of the project took inspiration from
my field work in the Eastern Visayas, primarily among local communities who identified
ethnolinguistically as Waray or Waray-Waray. The repetition of the word waray, which literally
means nothing, seems to emphasize the people’s extreme ability to persist even when absolutely
nothing remains. This attitude of brinkmanship among Waray Yolanda survivors (Borrinaga
2015) is evoked in the title “WALANG-WALA” in the Tagalog language. Hosted by the UBC
Philippine Studies Series (2015) and the Liu Institute for Global Issues on unceded
xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam) Territory, the gathering explored the possibility of maintaining
grief as one of the ways in which we can maintain our transnational ties to islands, communities,
and ecologies affected by Yolanda.
At the center of the Case Room’s cylindrical space, our team installed an altar made of
objects from a typical Filipino household: religious icons such as the Santo Niño, statuettes of
the Virgin Mary, a bottle of agua bendita or holy water, which is often found in chapels or home
altars, and other common objects including rice, salt, a rubber slipper, and even bullets to
reference the combined sanctity and violence of the debris after a storm (Figure 2). As
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4
GO

FIGURE 1 Poster for “WALANG-WALA/Point.Zero,” 1 December 2014.

 RITUALS FOR COLLECTIVE GRIEVING 5
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FIGURE 2 Details of the installation. (Color figure available online.)

participants entered the room, this altar greeted them in the center of the space with an
assortment of lit white candles. After I gave the opening remarks to welcome the participants,
I invited everyone to walk around the altar and examine the details closer before returning to
their seats. The lights were then slowly dimmed, and I blew the candles out, one by one. At the
cue of the last candle, the room was in complete darkness, and a fifteen-minute video started.
The space was filled with surround sound, transformed by soundscapes of monstrous winds and
waters interwoven with field recordings from the Philippines and photographs taken in the
Visayas after the storm (Figure 3). The cylindrical room, including the more than thirty bodies
seated in the near pitch-black darkness, was bathed in these ominous surges of sound waves
 6 GO

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FIGURE 3 Stills from “WALANG-WALA/Point.Zero” audiovisual

installation, 1 December 2014.

flooding from the speakers. The only source of light was from the interrupted and erratic stream
of monochromatic images flashing from the screen: concrete houses ripped apart along the
coasts, fishermen’s phantasmal faces, headless coconut trees, a ship stranded inland. This
powerful immersion into an embodied experience of walang-wala, a state of emptiness, of
absolute nothingness that one is left with after a disaster, was interrupted by the lights that we
turned back on for a community forum. This emergence from a profoundly individual experi-
ence to regather as a collective to contemplate and dialogue the experience references the ways
in which survivors would often reconvene postdisaster to assess their collective situation.
The art installation did not intend to simulate a super typhoon. Instead, by creating a safe
space for all participants to gather together, our team of artists experimented with the possibility
of entering into and creating a shared experience of walang-wala, to be on a kind of “ground
zero” together. On what pivot point do we stand when the tilted earth shifts beneath us? On this
point zero, in uncertainty and perhaps confusion and anxiety, what do we hold on to? “After
loss, what then?,” asked Butler (2003) in examining the politics of mourning. Whether partici-
pants have witnessed the destruction of Yolanda firsthand or not, other crises and experiences of
trauma and destruction were recalled by each one during the open forum. These personal
understandings enabled each of us in that art installation to somehow connect with, by empathy,
 RITUALS FOR COLLECTIVE GRIEVING 7

contemplation, or other forms of feeling-thinking or sentipensante (Rendón 2009) experiences,

with those who survived Yolanda an ocean away from where we gathered for an evening.
The creative-critical methodology of designing sacred space challenges the capitalist-coloni-
alist paradigm of border imperialism (Walia 2013) that cuts up, divides, and fractures space and
time. When Yolanda is frozen to a singular date in the historical past, confined within the borders
of a nation-state, or limited only to the geographical zone of the Philippine Area of
Responsibility, the storm, its dead, and its survivors cease to be part of an ongoing global
climate crisis, and are cut off from the geopolitical circuits and social transnational relationships
to which they are intimately bound. One loses sight of the larger political economic histories that
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have shaped the preexisting oppressive vulnerabilities on Yolanda’s ground zero: where oligo-
polies in the coconut and copra industries perpetuate the dispossession of local farmers, where
armed insurrections maintain their revolutionary bases, and where the poverty incidence for
landless women ranks among the highest in the country. It is from these geographical peripheries
of a nation where disaster memories lie easily abandoned, as much as the Waray have been long
marginalized in a Tagalog-centric nation-state. A paradigm of borders that advocates for the
isolation of disaster events disables opportunities for multiple forms of solidarities among
Yolanda victims, non-Yolanda-affected islands, and overseas locations. Such borders disable
possibilities to call for social and climate justice. It was in putting the “WALANG WALA/Point.
Zero” installation together that fellow artists and I collaborated on a creative-critical engagement
with ritual that made it possible for the sharing of disaster memory from communities-ecologies
in the wake of Yolanda to members of the Filipino diaspora in Vancouver who arguably would
not otherwise be able to come together to remember and care for those destroyed by the storm.
How might acts of remembering and grieving together enable new forms of political agency?
Opaskwayak Cree scholar, Shawn Wilson (2008), underscored in Research Is Ceremony that
decolonizing research founded on relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility aims to build
stronger relationships or bridge the distance between aspects of our cosmos and ourselves (pp.
11, 137). Similar to visiting graves, or lighting candles in the church or on home altars, Filipino/as
in the diaspora and the general public were invited at this gathering to also pray for the dead by
sending them light through the lighting and relighting of candles as a responsibility we have to
continue to care for them. When we maintain this palpable sense of loss and human vulnerability
and mortality, our collective responsibility for each others’ lives serves a political purpose.

#2 WALANG-WALA: A ONE-WOMAN PRAYER

April 21st, 2015

On 6 December 2014, typhoon Hagupit made its first landfall on Eastern Samar, taking
almost the exact same route as Yolanda did just over a year earlier. Hagupit was primarily
classified under Category 5, the second most intense tropical cyclone to affect the
Philippines in the year 2014; it later decreased dramatically to a Signal Number 3 storm
as it moved further along its route, much to the relief and comfort of Yolanda’s survivors.
Personally undergoing severe anxiety in Vancouver on the days leading up to its landfall, I
wrote and posted this open letter to my friends and colleagues who were involved in
ongoing rehabilitation efforts in the Visayas:
 8 GO

December 5, 2014 Until I was pulled very strongly to return to a corner in

Typhoon Hagupit
Mga kaibigan at kalakbay,
To those I love and journey with,
Habang papalapit nanaman ang isang napakalakas na
bagyo, ako’y napupuno ng pag-aalala at takot para sa
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my room, unroll the mat, and was urged to move along
with the rhythm of my breath. Easily, my heart began
to soften and opened, tears flowed and flowed without
end, and I offered all my sadness and fears to the
ground. I kissed my forehead to the earth, and reached
my chest up to the sky. From here, light and strength
began to flow softly again, and I offer it all completely
to our people.

mga bayan na nasalanta ng Yolanda noong nakaraang
taon lamang. Ang mga maliliit na barangay sa tabing
dagat, ang ating mga mangingisda, magsasaka,
magniniyog, ang mga nanay at mga bata. Mula rito sa
Vancouver, para akong nag-call center agent at
tinawagan ang mga community partners sa Leyte at
Samar nitong nakaraang mga araw. Maraming
nakapaghanda na, ngunit may matinding pangamba at
takot pa rin sa tinig ng aking mga kaibigan. Mayroong
tunay na galak din na sila’y naaalala at hindi nag-iisa
sa mga panahong ito.
Huwag matakot, hindi tayo nag-iisa. Sana’y sama-
sama tayong mag-alay ng ating buong puso’t isipan, ng
ating buong paghinga at paggalaw, para sa ating
kapwa.
Do not be scared, we are not alone. I wish we can all
come together to offer our whole hearts and minds, all
of our breath and all of what we do, for our kapwa (our
self in others).
Mabuhay! Mabuhay tayong lahat!

While another intensifying storm draws in closer, I’ve Life! Life to all of us!
been filled with so much worry and fear for those who
survived Yolanda just a year ago. The small barangays by
the oceanside, our fishers, rice farmers, coconut farmers,
our mothers and little children. I turned into a lone
call center agent here in Vancouver, and have been calling
some of our community partners in Leyte and Samar
these past days. Many of them have made preparations
they said, but there was certainly great worry and fear in
their voices. There was also a very real joy in being
remembered, and knowing that they’re not alone in these
times.

Nagising ako nitong umaga na mabigat at madilim ang

pakiramdam, tulad ng makulimlim na langit dito sa
kabilang dulo ng mundo …

I woke up this morning feeling very dark and heavy, like

these gloomy skies we have here at the other end of the
world.

Hanggang sa malakas akong hinila pabalik sa isang

sulok ng aking kwarto, nilatag ang banig, at naisipang
gumalaw sabay ang aking hininga. Agad-agad ay
lumambot at bumukas ang aking gitnang-puso, lumuha
ng tuluyan, at inalay ang aking lungkot at mga takot.
Hinalik ang nuo sa lupa, pinaabot ang dibdib sa langit.
At mula rito, madaling dumaloy muli ang liwanag at
lakas, na inaalay ko ng buong-buo sa ating mga
kababayan.
 RITUALS FOR COLLECTIVE GRIEVING 9

a b
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FIGURE 4 Stills from “WALANG-WALA/Point.Zero” virtual vigil.

From this moment I was interested in a solitary and personal investigation into the disaster
memory I know my own grief body holds from firsthand encounters with the death and
destruction laying waste in the wake of Yolanda. I recall Eduardo Galeano (1991), the
Uruguayan master of subversive histories, who wrote that to remember in Spanish is recordar,
from the Latin re-cordis—to pass back through the heart (1). In Filipino our word for memory is
ala-ala, also like the beating of the heart, or the pulsing of waves, returning again and again,
back and forth, in and out. MYSTERYFORMS and I collaborated again on a sequel to the earlier
installation to create “WALANG-WALA/Point.Zero”6 (Figure 4), a three-minute video docu-
menting my one-woman performance in another installed ritual space in the attempts of explor-
ing what Tal (1996, 3) wrote in Worlds of Hurt as the connection between individual psychic
trauma and cultural representations of the traumatic event. This project was an experiment with a
form of bearing witness and testifying to the collective disaster trauma I shared in.
MYSTERYFORMS and I ultimately designed the video and audio track to be played on loop,
and this might be done so infinitely, as is the practice of remembering.
Memory is labor. Great effort is required of a Filipina overseas to remain connected and
one with islands and ancestors, waters apart from her, when forgetfulness, distraction, and
apathy might be easier tasks. Amnesia is as much an agentic choice as remembering is. To
illustrate this work of piecing together that remembering serves, the video used recitations
of a prayer by Visayan fisherfolk (Ushijima and Zayas 1994, 245–46) chanted in the same
 10 GO

communities that survived Yolanda; this audio recording was interlaced with my photo-
graphs from field work, patterns from woven mats, and indigenous musical instruments, as
if weaving threads of past and present together into one singular plane. Creating sounds-
capes for this video performance was in itself a trying process to consciously evoke place
and memoryscapes. Taking inspiration from Cruikshank (2005) and Basso’s (1997) work
on sentient landscapes, I similarly labored to inquire: If our ravaged islands could speak,
how do we hear them? What would they sound like, and what would they teach us now?
In meditation, I heard the the gabbang (a bamboo xylophone), the agung (gong), and the
gandang (a double-headed drum) as played on the song “Bulong” (Whisper) by my friends
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from the musical group, SangHabi (One Weave).

In a state of walang-wala, of an aching emptiness and lament, how does the body grieve and hold
memories of disaster? How can breathing and movement transform trauma from one’s body and our
collective memory? How does the sacred help us find rooted balance during times of crises, loss, and
despair? I explored these inquiries through an actual movement meditation. I realized that I fall on
my knees and that my back caves in when completely overwhelmed by exhaustion. When my head
bows down in surrender, the ground below feels less unstable, and it once again offers some
ontological stability. The back of my heart, the bare back, is where I hold breath heavy and grief
most tightly. The entire body holds structures of feelings: It remembers, aches, cries, gathers strength,
and hopes. The video offers silences and blackouts to share in the unspeakability of violence, trauma,
oppression, resistance, and resilience. The use of performance as decolonizing methodology upsets
the privileging of printed work in the archive over the embodied memories stored in a repertoire
(Taylor 2003). Breath and movement—just as the hammering of new roofs or the planting of rice
seedlings when the skies clear after a storm—offer nonverbal, embodied, and active ways of insisting
on survival when speech and other literacies fail.
How may acts of remembering and grieving together enable new forms of political
agency? In exploring the relationship between disaster memory and social repair, I con-
tinued to look into the creation of ritual as an art practice, performance, and protest in this
one-woman prayer. As memory is done together, I uploaded this solitary performance
online:7 This format allows for disaster memories to emerge from the margins of the
Eastern Visayas, surpassing the capital of Manila and moving swiftly across the Pacific,
radiating simultaneously from the intimacy of an individual prayer and outward to mem-
bers of a larger public network across the globe who are invited to join. By viewing this
virtual vigil online, one takes part in a ritual that is simultaneously translocal and
transnational, unbounded by space and time, and joins in the remembering of Yolanda in
an infinite loop, persisting to bear witness, refusing to freeze the storm as a disaster
already resolved by humanitarian aid or as a crisis forgotten by government neglect.
Like the rolling of waves, ala-ala, memory, flows in and out: My closed fits turning a
wheel in motion, my spine arching backward and forward, lifting up and giving in, like
fishermen paddling with both grief and trust in dark waters. “Baliw na talaga ang
panahon!” In these maddening times of compounding chronic poverty and intensifying
freak weather conditions, an act of prayer—which in turn opens a virtual space for others
to gather together—offers some emancipatory possibilities beyond the political impasse
that succumbs us to inevitable death and destruction. In the desolate state of walang-wala,
of having absolutely nothing left, perhaps lies more. Just as Filipino relationship-oriented
virtue ethics is “dedicated to strengthening and preserving human relationships” (Reyes
 RITUALS FOR COLLECTIVE GRIEVING 11

2015), I argue that social repair in a Filipino worldview includes caring for relations that
are social and more than human. Spiritual traditions across the Philippines teach us to light
candles in home altars, shrines, or cemeteries to send light to the departed as our relations.
By joining in this ritual, we remember that ontologies can be pieced back together and that
we can stand with the living who persist through the storms of everyday life, where and
when no “post” exists after a disaster.

#3 WALANG-WALA: ACTIONS FOR SOCIAL AND CLIMATE JUSTICE

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September 2014 to May 2015

What use do we put memory to? Our farmers and fishers’ vulnerabilities to climate change
are caused by persisting colonial histories and feudal pasts alive in the present day. The
battles for social and climate justice have become one and the same in our islands that are
caught in the violent intersections of sociopolitical inequalities and environmental cata-
strophes. Indeed, disasters linger on (Bautista 1993), just as Yolanda was followed by
Hagupit in December 2014, and by the tropical storm Chedeng in April 2015. Panahon—
both the weather and time—is increasingly deviating from familiar patterns following the hot
and rainy season of Habagat (southern winds) and the cool and dry season of Amihan
(northern winds). To insist on remembering Yolanda disrupts the normalization of poverty
and the unthinkable madness of increasingly more frequent monster storms. Tal (1996)
argued that psychic trauma as cultural-political inquiry may serve to “move back and forth
between the effects of trauma upon individual survivors and the manner in which that trauma
is reflected and revised in the larger, collective political and cultural world” (5), thereby
allowing for disaster memory and collective grieving to be catalytic for social
transformation.
I participated in public protests that served to establish connections between environmental
activism from unceded Coast Salish Territories and the impact of these extractive industries on
our islands in the Philippines. This land acknowledgment of the traditional territories on which
Vancouver City and the university are built is not merely an empty recognition—as a Filipina
migrant scholar, recognizing settler colonialism in Canada provided me ground on which to
draw distinct transnational interconnections between Indigenous-led resistance movements
against colonial-capitalist extractivism and the climate crisis extractivist industries have
unleashed on our islands across the same Pacific Ocean. At a protest against an oil spill in
Vancouver’s harbors on 25 April 2015, I joined my friends in a noise demonstration and effigy
beating at English Bay by sharing the Visayan fisherfolk’s prayer (Ushijima and Zayas 1994,
245–46)—the same verses recited and recorded in the earlier video performance. We stood in
front to address the assembled crowd of protesters remembering our families from the island
provinces of Leyte and Samar. As a friend and I recited the following prayer in Bisaya, another
friend played a bamboo percussion instrument. We were witnessed by other Filipino/as in the
diaspora grieving the tragedies in our islands across the water’s horizon. A prayer spoken with
the beating of the bamboo at a noise barrage: in this ritual, we evoked disaster memory as a
cultural practice of collective and active remembering of what we love and lost.
 12 GO

Mga amigo sa kadagatan nia kami karon ug mo halad

na’ay ihalad namo sa inyo …
mga tawo sa habagatan
amihan, katondan, ug Friends of the sea
kadsapan elders living of the earth
we are here today to offer to you
Friends of the sea
we have an offering to make diay akong bayad sa inyo
people of the north, taga-an ninyo ug grasya
south, west and ug di ninyo ako lisud-lisuron.
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east monsoons
I have payment for you
Mga amigo sa kadagtan give us blessings
mga kagulangan gayupo sa yuta do not drown me in hardship.

Later in the evening, the Kathara Pilipino Indigenous Arts Collective Society in Vancouver gathered
to celebrate Lapu-Lapu Day in honor of the Cebuano leader recognized as the first hero to resist foreign
rule in the Philippines. Apart from celebrating this historical memorial, the collective decided to host its
celebrations in urgent solidarity with the Secwepemc Women Warriors’ Society’s call for a National
Day of Action against the Mount Polley mining tailings spill disaster by Imperial Metals in British
Columbia. Cebu was one of the islands devastated, too, by Yolanda, and where fishers continue to pray
to the sea for blessings. When one recognizes that the historical battle in the Visayas from more than 500
years ago persists in struggles to survive the climate crisis today, very clear opportunities for transna-
tional solidarities come alive between those affected by Yolanda and those across the ocean leading the
same resistance against the expansion of fossil fuel empires and extractivism as state economic
ideology. To bring attention to these translocal and transnational connections, I once again was invited
with two other friends to share the same prayer during the Lapu-Lapu commemorative event. While I
spoke, another played the kulintang (a row of horizontally laid gongs), and the other a bamboo
rainmaker.
A choked sob on the microphone, tears, heads shaking, and bodies holding each other in silent
embraces. Rather than thinking that grief is privatizing and depoliticizing, “what grief displays, in
contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or
explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in
ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control” (Butler 2004, 23).
When mortality and this common corporeal vulnerability are recognized by a collective gathered in
these spaces of ritual, shared oppressions and injustices are in turn also politically recognized—and it is
perhaps this recognition that allows for such vulnerabilities and states of walang-wala to be trans-
formed. Yolanda survivors, their relations in the Philippines, and those across the global diasporas in
turn find one another among other numerous front-line communities to stand and work with for ongoing
social and climate justice.

CONCLUSION

When nothing is left, in the most despairing state of walang-wala, what remains to hold on
to and live by? Throughout this article I examined the transformative power of collective
 RITUALS FOR COLLECTIVE GRIEVING 13

grieving by exploring the many emancipatory possibilities ritual can serve as an art
practice, performance, and protest. I outlined three different projects that serve to transmit
disaster memory from the geographical peripheries of the Philippine nation-state, across
the ocean to members of the Filipino diaspora, and from the intimacies of one woman’s
prayer radiating out to larger public networks as an invitation to remember solidarities
together. The creation of sacred space through an altar installation and soundscapes, the
creation of a virtual vigil through an online video performance, and the insertion of prayer
and music in public protests together serve ways of remembering historical and persisting
disasters across the Philippine islands. Super typhoon Yolanda ceases to be confined within
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national borders or frozen to a singular date; it remains unresolved by humanitarian aid

and resists being completely forgotten by government neglect. Instead, when disaster
memory is revived, remembered, and re-embodied in multiple translocal and transnational
contexts, we recognize that indeed “there is no such thing as a natural disaster” (Hartman
and Squires 2006). Oppressions and vulnerabilities could be mourned for and transformed:
“To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to
inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of
identification with suffering itself” (Butler 2004, 30). In these maddening times—“baliw
na talaga ang panahon”—paralysis due to fear and unimaginable scales of compounding
destruction result in devastating loss and a despairing sense of walang-wala, of having
absolutely nothing left. This impasse in current political praxes, new modes of feeling-
thinking, of being, and of relating with, I argue are in urgent need. This series of
“WALANG-WALA” rituals for grieving together offers many emancipatory possibilities
for us, a disaster-weary people.

NOTES

1. The controversial figure of “10,000 dead” reported by Philippine National Police Chief Superintendent, Elmer
Soria, was denied by the Malacañang Palace in the immediate aftermath. The Government of the Philippines
reports a casualty count of 6,300 (Government of the Philippines 2015), whereas a grassroots alliance of
Yolanda survivors in the Eastern Visayas, People Surge, reports 18,000 (People Surge 2015). This contention in
body count is inscribed in the politics of mourning where power determines the historical truth to the scale of
death and devastation.
2. The author participated in the Philippine chapter of the Performance Studies International Conference to present
“WALANG-WALA/Point.Zero: A Video Ritual” at the Manila Conference in November 2015 to commemorate
Yolanda’s second anniversary.
3. I write with the pronouns our, we, and us to signify my primary identification with Filipino/as in the Philippines as a
transnational Filipina.
4. MYSTERYFORMS is an audiovisual artist who emigrated to Canada from the Philippines in 1993. His current
portfolio (http://seekersinternationalx.blogspot.ca) features a combination of soundscapes and multimedia
installations.
5. Dennis D. Gupa is currently a PhD student of Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria. He presented on the
“WALANG-WALA” installation at the PSi#22 Performance Studies International Conference: Performance
Climates, Melbourne, Australia on 5 July 2016.
6. This video project was reperformed in Dis/Quieting Desires Endnotes Conference in UBC on 15 May 2015, and in
Sa Tagilid Na Yuta (On Tilted Earth): Performance in Archipelagic Space PSi Conference in Manila on 8 November
2015.
7. The virtual vigil can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/125476214.
 14 GO

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CHAYA OCAMPO GO is a research fellow for the Citizens’ Disaster Response Centre in the Philippines, and a PhD
student at the Geography Department of York University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada. E-mail: chayago@yorku.ca.
This article was written over the course of her graduate studies at the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice
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at the University of British Columbia. Her transnational work remains committed to life and resurgence in ravaged
ecologies and communities at the front lines of the climate crisis.