I suffered from vertigo in the middle of answering an exam question about the history and historiography of translation in Southeast Asia. The world spun. My guts hurled up. I threw acid fluid from my mouth. I closed my eyes. The light hurt. “Sayang, I need Dramamine” so my head could stop saying to itself that the world is moving back and forth. Imbalance in the amygdala disorients your stands. My feet stood on the ground but everything was shaky, waving. I released water and tears, drying up my body.

So, I wrote this paragraph:

At the beginning of his first essay in The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson starts his piece with a formal event in February 1963 at an Indonesian university in Jakarta, where President Sukarno gave a speech that mentioned Hitler as a nationalist. For Anderson, Sukarno’s ventriloquizing style of speech was dizzying. He tried to translate Sukarno’s speech for an elderly European diplomat during the event, and the diplomat agitatedly asked the same question over and over: “‘Are you sure that’s really what he’s saying?’”(2) Anderson tried to explain, but at that moment, he “felt a kind of vertigo.” Anderson’s moment of disorientation occurred between the Hitler content of Sukarno’s speech and the process of translating Sukarno’s style of Indonesian speaking into English for a European diplomat.

Anderson’s vertigo was an effect of languaging, of trying to make sense of Sukarno’s nationalist/fascistic position, of navigating a short three-some lingual relationship between him, Sukarno, and an old European man. Later, Anderson said he experienced a similar feeling when he read José Rizal’s Filipino nationalist novel, Noli Me Tangere.

But Anderson did not rest his vertigo. The dizzying moment of working with Indonesian and Filipino languages, which he calls “the spectre of comparisons,” leads Anderson to write a book that is no less dizzying. Under the Three Flags aims to map the force of global anarchism against the backdrop of militant nationalism. He re-narrates the historical insurrection of Filipino and Cuban nationalism in the late nineteenth century through the complex interactions of young intellectuals with subsequent episodes in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France, Italy, China, and Japan. Anderson’s book is partly a result of his admiration for José Rizal’s biographical life of moving around Europe and Asia and his literary work that “transposed, combined, and transformed what he had read” (51). Writing in the form of “roman-feuilleton” and “montage,” Anderson adopts Rizal’s writing mode and expects his readers to read the book like a “black-and-white film or a novel manqué of which the conclusion is over the tired novelist’s horizon”(5). Anderson, a stylistic writer and clipper, cuts and pastes his sources in the original language, combining it with his broad knowledge of European history and literature, weaving pictures and photos, and putting all of those in long chapters but fragmenting them in short, syncopated sub-chapters. He zooms in and zooms out in fast movement to create a sense of synchronic continuity and makes the protagonists appear to have teleportation skills, jumping out between times and places. Some readers may find this way of writing history confusing and might create an effect of motion-sickness or vertigo.

And one of the readers with literal and figurative vertigo is me.

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People close to me know very well how easily I get motion sickness. I cannot sit on a one-hour journey without feeling dizzy and nauseating. Ocean scares me. Sky dares me. Land is the kindest one. That’s why I love laying down or standing still. But I cannot be saved. Things move too quickly. Words flash out. Screen movements. Scrolling much.

“Reduce your screen time.”

I tried and fuck that. It didn’t help. Fidgeting.

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You put an object noun and add “in motion.” An Age in Motion. Words in Motion. Mind in Motion. Bodies in Motion. Illusions in Motion. Miracle in Motion. Love in Motion. Books in Motion. You name the movement. You identify qualities. Nothing ever stays still.

Passing, going through, 
                         driving, ebbing, 
         flowing, shifting, 
coming, moving
                                attending, stirring, 
        toing, froing. 

And you know very well that the histories of travels, of Atlantic slavery, of asymmetrical trades in Banda sea show the brutality of motion. Someone … no … many ones had had motion sickness. And you know very well that the histories of activism, revolution, and the radicals give another side of motion sickness in necessity. Disorientation, emerging from and as violence, demands liberation. Quivering, you might; trespassing, should you. And you know very well, histories.

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“You need to check it. Things will not get better,” said a senior faculty to me in the next few days after I canceled my TA class due to my bad migraines which had turned into severe vertigo. I nodded slowly; my head still needed recalibration.

It still does.