The Groom Will Keep His Name Quotes

“Unlearning the colonialism I was taught, the stories I've been told and I've told myself, is a daily practice, like learning a new language. You learn it by watching films, listening to the radio, reading books. Your ear gets attuned to it. You pick up the vocabulary, learn the system's grammar and mechanics. From there, you can understand and deconstruct it. Sure, learning a language is a solo task, but it helps to have conversation partners.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Colonization works by cutting off peoples from their own heritage-be it traditions or languages, orthographies or names...They taught us Spanish for the same reason Americans taught us English: to homogenize colonial subjects under one tongue, one fist. ("You're in America," we're told-not only as immigrants to the US but as erstwhile property of the American empire. "Speak English.")”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“On that ordinary Sunday, I did not think loving myself was enough.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“every day, I chose the name Ortile as a prose, a vow, a commitment to resit further assimilation, to who I am, and what I am fighting for. Just as my mother foretold, I am glad I kept my name.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“I had no plans to become anyone else.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“This lonely city teaches the importance of befriending yourself. It reminds me to be kind to my body and mind, my spirit and heart- even as they tumble out of me and onto the sidewalk every now and then.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“While we do, we must resist the American drive to prioritize nuclear families at the expense of the community and act instead in the spirit of kappa of radical togetherness with others.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Now, they feasted as I scrounged. I was unwilling to reach out precisely because I felt unloved.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Loneliness can feel like what's private has been made public, as if your belly button has come undone and your liver, lungs, and beating heart have spilled onto the sidewalk.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“And I had been indoctrinated by American culture to believe that social bonds like marriage and a biological family are the pinnacle of personal happiness, friendships are consolation prizes, and singled is a life unfulfilled. With that mindset, my personal pie wasn't delightful because it was the right fit for my life. It was pitiful by virtue of being a pie for one.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Did I only eat joy because I was starved for it?”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“It's no wonder that this land, even when we are deemed worthy and granted entry, can make us feel unwelcome. It all begins before we even cross its borders.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“What could a postscript, or even fake explosions, staged gunfire, and well-rehearsed screams tell the predominantly non-filipino audience about what had happened in my birth country?How could they even come close to understanding what had brought me to tears, what still lived in my body-not as my firsthand experience, but as my psychic inheritance-and what we remember: the historical traumas that do not, cannot leave a people?”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“It's a blunt articulation of the way American culture privileges the remembering of white deaths, white suffering, and is all to eager to forget the historical and continued violent oppression of people of color-especially in cases where the US is the oppressor.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“In both episodes of American Philippine history, white men were written as victims, saviors, and literal comeback kids, either succumbing to, saving, or defeating a nation in the 'Far East'-one dangerous, another helpless.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“But certain memories never leave our bodies, even when we wish to be exorcised of them and the pain they carry...The trauma she (Dr. Ford) experienced, the very thing to which she bore witness, was used to frame her as an unreliable narrator of her own story...As ever, those in power got to assert their own version of history.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“I'm sometimes reminded of my Filipino American friends with Filipina mothers and white fathers. I tell myself not to project my own colonial mentality onto them; just because an Asian woman marries a white man doesn't mean she's the perfect submissive wife of his fantasies. But sometimes I wonder if her husband knows that.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“So I'm voting in November, I answered them finally, in service of the interests of black people, as well as those of the undocumented, the poor, and women, because their interests are mine too.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“To counter that 'all lives matter' is to dismiss the specificity of antiblack racism, how the gradations of violence inflicted on nonwhite bodies is dependent on the darkness or lightness of our skin.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Instead, I let my queerness and my internalized colonialism run free in the hemisphere of my colonizers... Do I want to fuck that white guy or do I want to be him?”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“In this schema, as in today's, your lot in life is determined by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin. So the current use of 'mestizo' isn't so far off from the original...To dismiss the world's current popular usage is to deny the racism, classism, and colorism in this country's past, as well as their continued prevalence today.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“The term 'mestizo,' in the Philippines today, refers to mixed race filipinos, often those who have a white parent. the term, and the beauty standards that follow, were passed down to us over three centuries of Spanish colonization. Mestizos dominate the media landscape...In short, Filipinos, myself included, look to lightness to know what to desire.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“In casting him as me in my book, I wished for the same privilege of passing, even if only in art.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Sometimes, men who wrote such slurs fucked me anyway, reminding me how racists might make exceptions in the name of conquest.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Underwear ads alone don't dictate the gay male obsession with whiteness and masculinity; various cultural phenomena also teach racism and internalized femmephobia.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“It's a snap judgement, yes. One that saves me the psychic burden of sitting through dinner with a boy who might insist, "But ALL lives matter." It's to optimize the experience, to reduce the friction, to make the slide into a relationship as seamless as possible.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“To posses an ideology that's right of left evinces a heart that considers the lives of queer people, people of color, women, the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and refugees, and combinations thereupon as lesser than one's own.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Like most Filipino immigrants I knew, I traded my accent for class anxiety.”
― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“Our clothing, our bodies, and even our names were reframed as inferior to those of our colonizers.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“As Las Islas Filipinas, Spain placed us into castes based on how Spanish one's blood was, colorism by DNA. It's why Filipino pop culture today still puts light-skinned celebrities on a pedestal (just look at our Miss Universe winners.)”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance