Against the Dying of the Light:

The Filipino Writer and Martial Law

By Ed Maranan

This article is based on a talk given by the author to students and faculty of the University of London 's School of
Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in September 1999. Translations of Filipino poems cited in this piece are all by the
author.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light
—Dylan Thomas

Those who are awake have a world in common,

but every sleeper has a world of his own.
—Heraclitus

T hese epigraphs have something in common: the theme of vigilance, wakefulness, and in the realm
of literature, the social responsibility of the writer in a time of historical necessity.

The first, the two concluding lines from a villanelle of Dylan Thomas, has had an interesting history of
allusion in Philippine writing. The poem was anything but political, a grieving son's exhortatory but
pained message of encouragement to his dying father, whose blasphemous temper had died out long
before he did, and which the poet would have wanted the father to retain with his last breath. But the
lyrical apostrophe had the ring of transcending the personal, and the second line especially lent itself to
an almost predictable appropriation as a clarion call, as it were, to some "higher" humanitarian cause.
Thus, in the ominous days before the declaration of martial law, an editorial appeared in the Philippines
Free Press—up to that time the most uncompromising proponent of adversarial journalism in the
country—using the words of Dylan Thomas, with an appropriate editorial cartoon by that estimable artist
Esmeraldo Izon.

...protest literature
...and the literature
about it comprise a
continuum: full
appreciation can only
come with discussing
the origins and rise of
social realism during
the last one hundred
years...

It is in this context and spirit—the well-founded warnings on the impending imposition of martial law
seen as the twilight of freedom and democracy in the Philippines, and the determined response of many
of the country's writers in doing battle with the regime—that I have done my own appropriation for the
title of this piece.

The second is derived from the writings of a pre-Socratic Greek materialist. My first encounter with this
statement was in Georg Lukas' essay, "The Intellectual Physiognomy of Literary Characters", and I had
occasion to quote this in a journal article "Metaphor as Social Reflection: The Poetics of Federico Licsi
Espino Jr.", a poet whose works I shall refer to later in this discussion.

The third is attributed to the best-known nationalist statesman in Philippine history, Claro M. Recto,
whose writings on the American domination of Philippine politics and society serve as a kind of bridge

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between the nationalist literature of the earlier periods and the activist literature of the 70s and up to
the present, although critical literary writing on imperialism and neo-colonialism in recent times have
been more influenced by the likes of Renato Constantino and Jose Ma. Sison.

The main discussion in this article is focused on literary works written during martial law, with only
occasional references to literary-historical antecedents and what came after. The delimitation is
necessary because protest literature—the operative or generic phrase for our purposes—and the
literature about it comprise a continuum: full appreciation can only come with discussing the origins and
rise of social realism during the last one hundred years, the foreign literary and ideological influences
which helped shape a distinctive radical canon, the tradition of 'propaganda and revolutionary literature'
against both Spanish and American colonizers from the 19 th century up to the Commonwealth period,
and the permeating crisis of underdevelopment which informs Philippine post-colonial—or what the Left
would call neo-colonial—history.

Short stories and

poems continue to be
written on the martial
law experience, proof
that those fourteen
years are destined to
be the most deeply
etched trauma in the
collective Filipino
psyche well into the
next millenium.

In brief, we are only looking at 14 years of critical engagement in the arena of writing with more than a
century of tradition behind it. In a very important sense, also, the protest that characterized social and
cultural movements during the period of martial law hardly abated with the end of martial-law
dictatorship. It certainly did not die down with the "democratic restoration" under President Aquino—
whose regime's much-vaunted "democratic space", according to writings critical of her dispensation,
included a few killing fields and hardly a historic structural change at the grassroots level—nor with the
onset of "people empowerment" and "globalization" during the turn of President Ramos. We do not
expect that in the brief period served so far by the present populist but erratic president, Joseph
Estrada, the protest genre would have prematurely sunk without a trace and become history. It
continues to be relevant, given the barely changing structure of Filipino society and all its discontents.

In recent years, there have appeared several novels that are either semi-fictional or semi-
autobiographical accounts of the martial law period. Among these are Azucena Grajo Uranza's Bamboo
in the Wind (1990), dealing with the historical events and social factors that came together to produce
the political firestorms of the early seventies; Linda Ty Casper's two political novels, Awaiting
Trespass (1985) which re-creates the scenes of state-authorized torture of detainees and citizens during
martial law and Wings of Stone (1990), recounting the events following the Aquino assassination; F.
Sionil Jose's Viajero (1993), which fictionalizes the revolution through the supra-realist mystical figure of
intellectual-turned-messiah Salvador de la Raza ("savior of the race"), as reconstructed from the point of
view of Doctor-Colonel Simplicio Verdad ("simple truth") of military intelligence; and Jose
Dalisay's Killing Time in a Warm Place(1992), a first-person roman a clef and reconstruction of an
activist's life under martial law, in which historical necessity and personal circumstances can be as much
in contradiction as are opposing political forces.

Short stories and poems continue to be written on the martial law experience, proof that those fourteen
years are destined to be the most deeply etched trauma in the collective Filipino psyche well into the
next millenium.

But in this article, the purpose is to recollect and reflect on a more or less representative sampling of
the responses of Filipino writers during the period itself of martial law, as they personally
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witnessed or lived through a difficult period of repression, censorship, and resistance. Martial law was
the state policy adopted by the Marcos regime in September of 1972, when it imposed authoritarian rule
upon a society perceived to be in political, economic, and social crisis. As far as the regime was
concerned, the root of the crisis was the Communist insurgency. To the broad spectrum of oppositionists
to the regime, however, the crisis in Filipino society was brought about by the rule itself of Marcos and
the elite structure he represented but also dominated.

BACKGROUND OF PROTEST LITERATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES

Protest literature—at other times, in other contexts, referred to as revolutionary literature, literature
of engagement, combat literature, committed literature, literature of resistance, proletarian
literature, people's literature, socially conscious literature, and perhaps a Philippine contribution
to the taxonomy, the literature of circumvention (simply defined as "a body of works that expressed
social and political protest in veiled terms")—has had a long history in the Philippines.

Three periods of great social unrest which produced a more or less sustained body of protest literature
may be identified as the following:

• the latter part of Spanish rule in the late 19th century, and the first years of the American take-over
in the 1900s;

• the period covering the Philippine Commonwealth before World War 2 and the 1950s, during which
peasant and worker issues began to gain pre-eminence, particularly with the introduction and spread of
socialist thought and writing and the rise of social realism, and

• the decade of the late sixties and the early seventies, which saw the rise of radical student activism,
and then throughout the fifteen-year period of martial law, in which the literature of circumvention and
the literature of revolution sought to shake the superstructure of the New Society ordained by Ferdinand
Marcos.

The declaration of martial law on September 21, 1972 temporarily put a damper on the resurgent and
insurgent writing being done by writers who belonged to literary organizations which openly promoted
progressive objectives: critique of social inequality, landlordism and peasant oppression, workers' rights
and capitalist exploitation, etc. The issues that generated the polemics and poetics of the period were
not confined to Filipino society: it was the height of the Vietnam War, and writers—together with
academics and students from Manila 's teeming universities—demonstrated before the US Embassy as
frequently as they massed in front of the Philippine Congress.

Several years before the onset of martial law, student activism became firmly rooted in the political
landscape of the Philippines. Youth groups such as the Kabataang Makabayan and Samahang
Demokratiko ng Kabataan, as well as other sectoral and mass organizations, were organized for political
teach-ins and street demonstrations, and not a few writers were drawn into activist circles, publishing
their essays and poems in campus newspapers like UP's Philippine Collegian and UE's Dawn, and
alternative broadsheets such as Ang Masa, edited by the redoubtable Amado V. Hernandez, labor leader,
pioneer of social realism in the Filipino novel, and poet who wrote his celebrated poems as a political
prisoner in the 1950s. Manifestos distributed in the streets or plastered on walls captured the incendiary
spirit of the times, the unequivocal partisanship of class struggle and class-consciousness, and
sometimes, the flavor of literature.

Sometime in 1971, soon after the First Quarter Storm which saw students almost taking over the
presidential palace after a series of fierce street battles in Manila, a writers' organization with a
programmatic vision for social change came into being. This was the PAKSA (Panulat para sa Kaunlaran
ng Sambayanan, 'literature for the people's advancement')—whose literary and ideological influence
continues to be felt up to the present, and has probably survived the splintering and oft-reported
'subsidence' of the Left in recent years.

During its founding congress, PAKSA—an innocuous Tagalog word which simply means "topic" or
"subject"—a message from an absent poet was read to set the tone for the proceedings. The message
was entitled "The Tasks of Cadres in Cultural Work", and the author was Jose Ma. Sison, founder of
Kabataang Makabayan and the modern Communist Party of the Philippines, who had gone underground
to lead the armed struggle in the late sixties. The message borrowed heavily from the ideological
fountain of the Philippine Cultural Revolution—Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature
and Art". As literary historian Elmer Ordoñez has summed it up, the message, from the two Marxist
poets and Communist leaders, called "for the creation of a revolutionary culture and art to
oppose the culture and art of the ruling class," and in the process, "literature becomes a
weapon and an instrument for arousing and mobilizing the masses against the oppressive

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few." (Ordoñez, 1995:xix)

In his message, Sison started off by quoting a couplet from the Chinese poet Lu Hsun:

Fierce-browed, I calmly face a thousand pointing fingers;

Head bowed, like a tame ox, I willingly serve my brothers.

This is by no means stating that the writers of PAKSA were all party members, but simply that the call to
create proletarian literature, "literature for the masses", was too strong to ignore. It was deemed
unimaginable, for the committed writer doing political work, to still think of poetry as "beauty recollected
in tranquility"—a hoary legacy our Anglo-American literary acculturation, among other things—or to
write love sonnets, while workers, farmers, and students were being mowed down by the police and
constabulary in demonstrations all over the country. This was clearly a reprise of the Literature and
Society discourse initiated by writers like Salvador P. Lopez during the American colonial era in the
Philippines.

The first years of Martial Law

Thousands of activists were thrown into prison after martial law was declared. Many writers were among
those jailed, and those who escaped the dragnet were forced underground and got themselves
integrated into units or cells which carried out clandestine publication of anti-regime books, booklets,
pamphlets, newspapers. For the writers aboveground, or those who had also been critical about the
regime but had not been tagged by the military establishment as dangerously subversive enough for
arrest and detention, the problem of publishing outlets was most pronounced. Apart from newspapers,
magazines had been closed down, for a number of them had printed some of the best protest literature
being written before martial law. And then there was the censorship. As F. Sionil Jose recounts it:

The first instrument of censorship in 1972 was the Army Office of Civil Relations which granted licences
for new magazines and newspapers. It also imposed guidelines which were often arbitrary. Under these
guidelines, the President, his family, and the Armed Forces could not be criticized, only praised. Before
any manuscript was published, it had to be examined by the Army censors. (Ong,1994:325)

He cites actual instances of censorship which he experienced first-hand as a publisher:

Bienvenido Santos' novel, The Praying Man, was banned outright because it portrayed a corrupt government
official. A history book, The Propaganda Movement, by (the Jesuit scholar) John Schumacher almost failed to
see print. The major who went over it objected to the title which, he said, was itself subversive. A play by Nina
Estrada Puyat which was already in page proof for my journal Solidarity was banned outright; it portrayed what
was happening in the country, the corruption which Marcos said he would banish in the New Society. (Ong,
1994:326)

For the activist writers, the dearth of outlets was not absolute. Even with scant resources in the
beginning, the protest movement was able to get some underground printing going. In time, a booklet
called Ulos ('blade strike') appeared, which contained poems satirizing the regime or expressing
revolutionary optimism, vignettes or sketches about how people were surviving under the repression,
essays on the culture of liberation, news about victories in the people's war, and other items.

The underground press was indeed active, if not in samizdat-format or mimeographed hand-outs, in
tabloid form. But not even the state machinery of censorship could be eagle-eyed all of the time, and it
was in the precious little space afforded, wittingly or unwittingly, by certain publications and institutions
sanctioned by the martial law administration, that the so-called 'literature of circumvention' began to
appear, with rather devastating psychological effect.

Sometime in 1973, a poem entitled "Prometheus Unbound" appeared in Focus, a magazine published
and edited by an established and respected writer who had chosen to be associated with the Marcos
regime. The author of the poem was one Ruben Cuevas.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

Mars shall glow tonight

Artemis is out of sight.
Rust in the twilight sky
Colors a bloodshot eye,
Or shall I say that dust
Sunders the sleep of the just?

Hold fast to the gift of fire!

I am rage! I am wrath! I am ire!
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The vulture sits on my rock,
Licks at the chains that mock
Emancipation's breath,
Reeks of death, death, death.

Death shall not unclench me.

I am earth, wind, and sea!
Kisses bestow on the brave
That defy the damp of the grave
And strike the chill hand of
Death, with the flaming sword of love.
Orion stirs. The vulture
Retreats from the hard, pure

Thrusts of the spark that burns,

Unbounds, departs, returns
To pluck out of death's fist
A god who dared to resist.

(printed in Focus Magazine, Manila, 1973)

To the formalist critic, or any poetry tutor, this poem may sound too sophomoric by half, with its
profuse, seemingly overwrought treatment of the theme from Greek mythology—the renegade Titan
called Prometheus who stole fire from Mt. Olympus to give to mankind, surely the mother of all
liberation theologies—but as it turned out, it was, more importantly, metaphoric or semaphoric—a
claymore-mine of a poem which brought down the anger of heaven not upon the Promethean poet, but
upon the publisher of Focus Magazine which printed the seemingly harmless poem. It featured an
acrostic, the first letters of the lines spelling out the favorite war-chant and taunting slogan of
demonstrators all over the country: "Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta", the last two words among the most
common sobriquets applied to the strongman: 'dictator' and 'puppet'.

Word spread around, the poem and its aftermath becoming a cause celebre, the furore raising the
morale of all resistance writers, and of course ruffling a few feathers in the Palace. The editor was
certainly not chained to a rock in place of Prometheus, and no vultures came to tear out her liver for all
eternity, but she must have had a hell of a reprimand. The Oxford dictionary, by the way, defines
Promethean as "2. creative, original, or life-enhancing". Ruben Cuevas, a pseudonym, was in fact a pre-
martial law journalist and poet-screenwriter who had been heavily tortured in the constabulary jail soon
after the issuance of Proclamation 1081 putting the country under martial law.

The name Lacaba has become a literary by-word, for a number of reasons. Pete Lacaba's contributions
to journalism, poetry, and scriptwriting have become identified with both literary excellence as well as
social relevance (another pivotal phrase in the canon of protest literature). His two most famous poems,
"Ang Pagkain ng Paksiw na Ayungin" ('How to eat the ayungin fish') and "Ang Kagilagilalas na
Pakikipagsalaparan ni Juan de la Cruz" ('The incredible adventures of Juan de la Cruz') have served
different purposes. The first one is a pungent, quite tragicomic, instructional on the proper, painstaking
way of eating the ayungin fish—a common fare for the poor—so that the nutrients from its eyes, bones,
and meager flesh could be optimized to stave off hunger for at least a few hours. The second is a brief
narrative on the misadventures of the archetypal Filipino Everyman, Juan de la Cruz, who is frustrated at
every turn, de-humanized and ridiculed in his urban-poor existence, until he seeks salvation in the
distant hills. The poem lent itself not only to endless public readings but also to performances in the
popular genre of mime and street theater.

In the Philippines, writers can easily shift from poetry and fiction to writing for television and film, and it
is as a screenwriter that Pete Lacaba has really created an impact on Philippine popular culture. His
screenplays produced during the period of martial law constitute further examples of the literature of
circumvention, barely squeezing past the censor's nose, although they depicted brutalized lives, social
injustice, and the political awakening of people from all walks of life. Typical of his films were "Jaguar"
(1979), "Angela Markado" (1980), "Sister Stella L." (1984), and "Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim" (1985).
(Tiongson,1994v9:651)

And there is another Lacaba, Emmanuel, three years younger than his brother Pete, who is a literary
legend of iconic status in protest literature. In the late 1960s, Eman was a "flower child", a hippie,
bohemian writer who crafted prize-winning short stories in English, before he turned to writing poetry
and plays with socio-political themes and, in one of those nodal transformations or Damascene
conversions with which the history of intellectuals is replete, Eman found himself gravitating towards the
national democratic movement. Eventually, he went underground to join the guerrillas of the New
People's Army, and continued to produce literary works, including revolutionary lyrics in Visayan—a
language he had to learn, being a Tagalog—which replaced the words in popular folk songs, reported to

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be still sung today in the guerrilla zones of the NPA in Central Philippines. (Tiongson,1994v9:650)

While Eman's colorful youth (he was an American Field Service scholar in his teens and already an
accomplished poet) was testament to the intellectual exuberance of university life during his time—he
was a brilliant Ateneo student with the broadest of interdisciplinary interests (sociology, humanities,
science fiction, religion, political theory, primitivism, poetry, philosophy, among others)—his life
underground during martial law exemplified the enthusiasm and total commitment with which the
revolutionary convert devoted his energies to the liberation struggle. Sylvia Mendez Ventura wrote in her
essay, "Emmanuel Lacaba: Poet-Warrior":

Peasants in Tucaan Balaag (in Davao) knew Eman as a poet, lyricist, storyteller, ex-teacher, champion of
workers' rights, freedom fighter, bringer of fun and enlightenment into their deprived lives.
(Maramba,1997:182).

Acclaimed while still alive as one of the best Filipino writers of his generation, Eman Lacaba and his
guerrilla comrades were killed and disposed of with the brutal dispatch and cruelty that became the
trademark of the Marcos constabulary. Days after receiving information that Eman was with an NPA
group that had been slain by government troops and hastily buried in an unmarked grave, relatives and
friends were finally able to reach the Tagum municipal cemetery in Davao escorted by soldiers. Mendez
Ventura recounts the discovery:

The cemetery caretaker led them to a paupers' grave where he remembered having seen four bodies dumped
side by side, minus coffin or wrapping paper, about two weeks before. The grave was shallow, the better to dig
out any corpse a relative might wish to claim.

Marks of his friend's posthumous degradation drove Freddie (Salanga, another writer) to near-hysterical
tears. Eman's hands and ankles were tied with rope, and the flesh on his back had been macerated by the rocky
terrain over which he had been dragged like a dead cow. (Maramba,1997:182)

Eman's works have been anthologized in two books, Salvaged Poems (1986) and Salvaged
Prose (1992), representing the "writings of a passionate poet and fictionist deeply committed to his craft
and political principles." The word "salvaged" as used in the titles can have two contexts: one, rescued
or saved from destruction or oblivion; two, summarily executed. "Salvaged" entered the political lexicon
to refer to extrajudicial murder carried out by the police and military on subversives and common
criminals. (It even figures in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, with an
appropriate attribution in the epilogue to an "ancient" Philippine practice, which of course can be
historically dated to the martial law years under Marcos.)

One of Eman's poems—a tryptich of "Open Letters to Filipino Artists"—is considered a literary benchmark
in the form-&-content paradigm, a passionate testament from a bourgeois intellectual who had, in the
oft-quoted formulation by Marx, transcended his class origins and "raised (himself) to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole", in the well-known passage found in
the first chapter ('Bourgeois and Proletarians') of The Communist Manifesto. It is, as one account put it,
"the ars poetica of the radical tradition in Philippine letters." The worldview of other Third World poets,
like Otto Rene Castillo of Guatemala, whose poem "To the Apolitical Intellectuals" formed part of the
education of an entire generation of Filipino writers and activists, finds resonance and validation in Eman
Lacaba's lines, written over a period of almost a year in various places in Mindanao.

The poem begins, fittingly enough, with an epigraph quoting another Asian poet-warrior, Ho Chi Minh,
and includes in its concluding stanza, interestingly, an acknowledgment of debt to the American poet,
Robert Frost, on the phenomenon of life choices.

A poet must also know how to lead an attack.

—Ho Chi Minh
1
Invisible the mountain routes to strangers:
For rushing toes an inch-wide strip on boulders
And for the hand that's free a twig to grasp,
Or else headlong fall below to rocks
And waterfalls of death so instant that
Too soon, they're red with skulls of carabaos.

But patient guides and teachers are the masses:

Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers;
Of plowing, planting, weeding, and the harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf
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This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois origins.

2
You want to know, companions of my youth
How much has changed the wild but shy poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barrelled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside.

Like husks of coconuts he tears away

The billion layers of his selfishness.
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and a song within his chest.
Now of consequence is his anaemia
From lack of sleep: no longer for Bohemia,
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, yes.

He mixes metaphors but values more

A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains: not because they are there,
But because the masses are there, where
Routes are jigsaw puzzles he must piece together.

Though he has been called a brown Rimbaud,

He is not bandit, but a people's warrior.

3.
We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all homes are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
To the fascists we are the faceless enemy
Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:
The ever-moving, shining, secret eye of the storm.

The road less travelled by we've taken

And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We should all be in time.
Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here, among workers and peasants, our lost
Generation has found its true, its only, home.

Benigno Aquino's assassination and the Filipino writer

On August 21, 1983, Benigno S. Aquino Jr.—the most popular political opposition leader who was for
many years in exile in the United States—was gunned down as he climbed down a staircase of the
jetliner that had brought him home. He had decided to come back to Manila to lead the political
movement against Marcos rule, and was promptly assassinated by a group of conspirators whose
ringleader or mastermind, up to this time, has only been hinted at, but not yet officially unmasked.
Never has a killing been more dramatically staged in the country—with the possible execution of national
hero Jose Rizal in 1896, thus the attempt at parallelism between the two events—never had there been
as large a funeral and an outpouring of public grief for a public figure in Philippine history, and never has
there been more copy written about the sensational assassination and its political aftermath.

Alice Guillermo reminisces on the impact of the event on Philippine literature in her essay "The Temper
of the Times":

"A clear turning point for many writers and poets in English was the assassination of former Senator Benigno
S. Aquino Jr. As a result of this incident, protest—which had earlier been timid or diffused—now became full
and orchestrated. The bourgeoisie of the Makati enclaves, including rich society matrons, took to the streets.in
an unprecedented show of oppositionist fervor. Likewise, the visual arts and literature formed a swelling tide of
protest centered around the figure of Aquino." (Ordoñez, 1995:343)

Note that Guillermo here conflates the pro-Aquino groundswell of opposition to the Marcos regime with
the tide of protest in the visual arts and literature, and it might seem that the writers in English—or any

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of the other Philippine languages—had found their political voice for the first time. What she actually
wanted to bring out was the fact that writers who, theretofore, had not ordinarily found common cause
with the radical movement seemed to have suddenly been conscience-stricken. A group of writers put
together a volume entitled In Memoriam, Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., 1932-1983: a poetic tribute by five
Filipino poets. The five poets featured in this memorial were Gemino H. Abad, Cirilo F. Bautista, Alfrredo
Navarro Salanga, Ricard M. de Ungria, and Alfred A. Yuson, all founding members of the redoubtable
Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC).

Except for one of them, these writers wrote almost exclusively in English and did not explicitly write
about socio-political issues. The assassination crisis, according to Guillermo, produced this collection
which "proves that our poets in English cannot long maintain a rigidly formalistic stance but will, sooner
or later, recognize the pressures of reality on their art". (Ordoñez, 1995:344) But not even the poets
who created this chapbook would readily concede to a facile description of themselves as suddenly
'partisan', a point they took pains to clarify in their introduction:

The poetic genius is a strange entity; so is the mechanism of human events. The energies of the former may be
accidentally released by the latter, creating an unplanned explosion. These poems, then, are the explosion of
the authors' poetic genius as it was mysteriously affronted, challenged, and seduced by Aquino's death. We
tried to grasp at some meaning in the language of heart and tongue, and wrote not as partisans in a partisan
game but as witnesses to a universal drama. (Abad et al,1983:1)

This particular collection of poetry was a watershed of sorts in Philippine poetry in English. Except for
Alfredo Navarro Salanga—who was already well-known for critical writing in journalism, social and
cultural history, and literature—the four other poets were established belletrists and arguably the
country's finest craftsmen in the English language, and who had now reacted with political passion over
the assassination of a revered and even iconized—albeit always controversial—political figure. For one of
them, at least, it signaled a measure of disaffection with a regime which had lionized him as a literary
champion, as the voice of aestheticism unencumbered by political ideology.

Indeed, Cirilo F. Bautista two years earlier had written an essay, "Philippine Literature: From National to
Aesthetic Liberation", in which he stated:

This aesthetic liberation is going on in the literary and artistic fields. The constraints to its flowering
appear only as such to those writers and intellectuals who are trapped in the network of Western
concepts of aesthetics and liberty. What is undeniable, however, is that the present Government has not
only removed the obstruction to this aesthetic liberation but also initiated and encouraged it. Its
democratic revolution is the father of this cultural revolution that is transforming the Filipino
consciousness. (In Diwa: The Philippine Journal of Ideas,quoted in Maranan:1985)

In marked contrast, here is the same author writing about "The Emperor and the Foolish Writers", part
of a series called "Political Parables" which are reminiscent of the so-called "paralogical" and surreal
pieces of Italo Calvino and his confreres, or highly politicized 'Urban Myths' of the Guardian. After the
publication of In Memoriam, he and his literary comrades were forced to resign their government
consultancies. An excerpt:

Because it was not a country for writers, five poets were dismissed from government service when they wrote
about the death of a leader of the opposition party. The Board of Censors for Literature found their poems
contravening the State ideology, and forthwith placed them under house arrest, confiscated their books, and
cut their long hair.at the same time, it established a network of vigilant critics tasked with harassing,
threatening, and frustrating writers known to possess anti-government convictions and sentiments. When a
group of writers demonstrated against these restrictions, the Board, with the help of the Integrated Military
Police and the Fire Department, dispersed the crowd with horse-manure pellets and water from the Pasig River.
The Emperor, upon recommendation of the Board, signed a decree providing for the confiscation of all
typewriters in the country, old and new, working and not, of whatever brand. (Salanga,1993:37)

In recent years, Bautista—who won the 1998 Centennial Literary Prize in poetry—has gone beyond his
erstwhile formalist criticism in his writings on literature, and has turned out a body of works—in his
regular column in Manila Bulletin's Panorama magazine—on literature and society, a discourse that was
pioneered by Salvador P. Lopez in the Philippines as early as the Commonwealth era of the 1930s, and
later taken up by other Filipino writers such as Arturo B. Rotor, Amado V. Hernandez, Jose Ma. Sison,
Epifanio San Juan Jr., Luis V. Teodoro, Bienvenido Lumbera, and a younger generation of critics who are
also creative writers. The questions that Bautista engagé and the more radical literary critics continue to
raise proceed from the fundamental issues now familiar to those who have gone through the canon of
hermeneutics, literary theory, and cultural history: from Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art and Arnold
Hauser's Social History of Art to Jean Paul Sartre's What is Literature?, from Bertolt Brecht's dramaturgy
to Peter Weiss' The Necessary Decision of a Writer and Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed.

But to go back to In Memoriam: the publication of this poetry collection was spectacular only because it
8
was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a revolt by establishment writers. That its cover was colored yellow
immediately identified it with the pro-Aquino protest movement that would gather momentum in the
years that followed. In Memoriam was followed by Caracoa V (Sub Versu), more protest poetry
published by the Philippine Literary Arts Council to which these writers belonged.

[A brief note on the phenomenon of the 'primary colors' of the revolution and the political spectrum in
the Philippines: red, yellow, and blue. Yellow was the color of the anti-Marcos protest movement of the
Aquino forces. Red was, and always has been, the signifying color of the Left, although at certain
periods, it was also appropriated by the so-called Marcos loyalists. Blue became an alternate/alternative
color for the Left when Bayan, the mass organization, came out with a blue flag with its name inscribed
in red. Interestingly, there were a few red and blue flags flown by forces of the Left during the four-day
mass gathering of people on EDSA, many of them waving yellow flags and sporting yellow headbands
and other paraphernalia. The marginal presence of the non-yellows in that event had a clear subtext: it
echoed the disagreement in the Left on the issue of participation in or boycott of the 1986 snap
elections, and whether or not to support the Aquino-led and RAM-supported "People Power Revolution."
The only relevance of this note in our discussion here is the ideological resonances of the yellow-color
poetry book and the usually red-color books of the radical and the underground press.]

Prison literature

Not a few writers ended up behind bars from day one of martial law. Journalists and prominent political
opposition figures were the first to be ensnared in the dragnet cast by the Marcos intelligence and police
apparatus, followed by militant activists, including academics who were also noted for their critical
literary writings.

Among the writers and academics who were imprisoned—at various times between 1972 and 1986—
were Bienvenido Lumbera, Luis Teodoro, Ninotchka Rosca, Jose Lacaba, Mila Aguilar, Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.,
Macario Tiu, Agustin Pagusara Jr., Aida F. Santos, Ricardo Lee, Bonifacio Ilagan, Alan V. Jazmines, Fr.
Edicio de la Torre, SVD, Isagani Serrano, Felipe Granrojo, Maria Lorena Barros, Dolores Feria, Bonifacio
Ilagan, Ed Maranan, Lilia Quindoza, and Jose Ma. Sison. At the Bicutan Rehabilitation Center—intended
to "rehabilitate" presumably wayward elements of society who had dared oppose Marcos and his
oligarchy (the place was also called Camp Bagong Diwa meaning 'new spirit')—political prisoners held
poetry readings, writing and drama workshops, and staged political plays under the direction of eminent
theater artist Behn Cervantes who spent some time in the place. Prison songs were composed, using
newly written lyrics or adaptations of patriotic poetry from the country's revolutionary past.

Many of the poems written in prison were later collected and published in Pintig sa malamig na
bakal ('life pulse in cold steel') published in Hong Kong, as well as in The guerrilla is like a poet / an
anthology of Filipino poetry published in Canada. One of the most celebrated writers of the martial law
period was an underground poet whose writings appeared in various revolutionary publications under
the nom de guerre Clarita Roja. It would later be revealed that she was actually Mila Aguilar, a former
teacher of English literature at the University of the Philippines. She had joined her future husband in
the guerrilla movement at the beginning of martial law, and after he was killed in an armed encounter,
she continued her revolutionary work as writer and propagandist for resistance. She published several
books of poetry during the martial law period, including two under the name Clarita Roja: Dare to
Struggle, Dare to Win! (1974) and The Mass Line /A Second Remoulding ( Manila 1977), and the rest
under her real name after she had surfaced and continued the struggle above ground— Why Cage
Pigeons? (1984), Pall Hanging over Manila (1984), and A Comrade is as Precious as a Rice
Seedling (1984, 1985 and 1987). Below is one of her poems:

Pigeons for my son

I gave the boy

a pair of pigeons
born and bred
in my harsh prison.
They had taped wings,
and the instructions were
specifically
to keep them on for weeks
until they'd gotten used
to their new cages.
He never liked
the thought of me
in prison, his own mother,
and would never
stay for long
to visit.
So perhaps I thought
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of souvenirs.
But the tape on his pigeons
he removed one day,
and set them free.
You'd think
that would have angered me,
or made me sad at least
but I guess we're of one mind.
Why cage pigeons
who prefer free flight
in the vaster, bluer skies?

(Majzels,1988:80-81)

The best-known radical poet who became a political prisoner of the Marcos regime was Jose Ma. Sison, a
former English instructor at the University of the Philippines, who spent ten years in prison, and wrote a
whole volume of poems (much later set to music out of which a CD would be made) which spoke not
only of his privations during his incarceration, but of his steadfast political views. Sison was arguably the
most important political prisoner under martial law, for he was the chairman of the reestablished
Communist Party of the Philippines. After years spearheading the radical movement in the Philippines
since his university days, he would seal his place in Philippine history as the moving spirit behind the
Marx- and Mao-inspired movement that has always been described as the 'longest-running communist
insurgency in the world'.

While still behind bars, his friends in academe and fellow writers put together his poems and published
them in a book, Prison and Beyond. One of the pieces in this collection speak of the prisoner's faith in
the power of his writings, and of his certainty that outside his prison cell, the struggle which he helped
launch continues.

Poems and rest

Since a long, long time ago

Incantations and prayers
Have been a comfort
To those who suffer.

Lying down at night,

I recite my poems
Until my throat runs dry
And I fall asleep in comfort.

But my poems are different.

They appeal to the people.
I put my trust in them
And in their firm struggle.

While at rest I am sure

That the struggle goes on.
And when my rest is over
I will do what I can.

Solitary confinement
Is torture so vicious.
But the poems I compose
Are my ardent companions.

(Majzels,1988:97)

Years after his release from prison, and while already living in exile in The Netherlands, Sison was
interviewed by a graduate student at De La Salle University for her master's thesis. Among other things,
he was asked about the role of literature in the protest movement against martial law.

How important was protest literature during the Martial Law years, especially those written by members of the
party?

Protest literature in English, Pilipino and various other Philippine languages were exceedingly important during
the martial law years. The biggest amount of revolutionary literature, in the form of poetry, lyrics for songs,
short stories, plays and some novels, was written by communists and revolutionary mass activists.

The creative works were carried by national and regional underground publications of the revolutionary
10
movement. In urban areas, poems were recited and performed in lightning mass actions and in large mass
actions, especially from 1979 onwards. In all the years of martial rule, the revolutionaries produced and
performed creative works in the guerrilla fronts.

How effective was it in fighting the dictatorship?

The protest literature was very effective in fighting the dictatorship. Poems and lyrics of songs could circulate
most easily. They were inspiring and they could circulate fast and nationwide, with the help of underground
revolutionary organizations, including cultural organizations. They were so much easier to circulate than
political tracts and much more easily understood by the masses. The enemy had no effective way of stopping
these. Without the protest literature, the revolutionary movement would have been drab and dull. But with
protest literature, it became lively and militant. The protest literature was effective in spreading the
revolutionary message because it could move instantly the hearts and minds of the people. The message
reached the masses in a form that they could easily grasp.

Other writers, other works

After PAKSA, a new generation of writers came to the fore during the period of martial law. Many of
them became members of a society called GAT (Galian sa Arte at Tula—Ceremony on Art & Poetry),
whose poetry workshops, public readings and performances, collectively written plays, and published
anthologies belonged to the 'circumventive'—circumvention & inventiveness—type of literature. They
produced a series of books called Galian, one issue of which was boldly entitled Gatilyo, a wordplay on
the society's name and the Tagalog word for 'trigger'. By this time, tension was building between the
more radical writers, many of them members of GAT, and those writers who were more or less identified
with the establishment either through appointment to sinecures, or those writers who were associated
with them. It was unfortunate, because most of them had started out as close allies in the literary
movement before, and in the early years, of martial law. Doctrinal differences, personal frictions, career
concerns, and other reasons certainly contributed to the rift.

The GAT continued its mission of cultivating poetry and other literary works, and strove not to neglect
the classic combination of artistic expression and critical metaphor. Jesus Manuel Santiago was an
acknowledged master of the poetic form during this time. His poem "kung ang tula ay isa lamang" ('if a
poem was just'), deceptively simple in construction and elemental in prosody, has been held up as yet
another fine example of protest writing that does not suffer from the sloganeering, poster-&-placard
style which proliferated during the First Quarter Storm:

If a poem was just

If a poem was just

a bouquet of flowers,
I'd rather be given
a bundle of swamp shoots
or a bundle of sweet potato tops
gathered from a mud puddle
or filched from the bamboo tray
of a vegetable vendor,
because I hunger
and my innards have not a nose,
they have no eyes.
Want has long benumbed
my taste buds,
so don't, revered poets of my country,
don't offer me verses
if a poem was just
a bouquet of flowers.

The late Romulo Sandoval, a GAT mainstay, wrote a poem which, for all intents and purposes, summed
up the social critique of the developmentalist state propped up by martial law and cosmeticized with
beautification campaigns and the foisting of cultural renaissance myths. The poet, who died a couple of
years ago still unforgiving, reportedly, of former literary comrades who had been part of the Marcos
cultural "democratic space", in his poem "Tumatayog, lumalawak, ang mga bilding at resort" ('As the
buildings rise and resorts expand'), juxtaposes, in sardonic litany form, the trappings of infrastructural
progress in Third World Philippines with social realities in the margins and peripheries of national life,
such realities having been culled by the poet from true-life horror stories which came out almost daily in
the broadsheets, presumably for their "human interest" value.

Thus, in Sandoval's poem, images culled from headlines and tabloid news features are given a poetic,
elegiac rendition:

11
• while tourists traipse around, and foreign carpetbaggers take over the exploitation of the country's vast
natural resources, an impoverished mother in Manila offers up her baby to a beauty shop for adoption

• while politicians jockey for choice committee positions in the new legislature, an ill-clothed tramp who
carries around his wooden crate of a house is run over by a rich man's dark limousine

• in a dumping area ironically called Constitution Hill where flies feast on garbage, a hungry old man is
discovered in his shanty devouring the intestines and liver of a grandchild who had died of hunger earlier

• a farm worker, having been fired by the landlord from his sugar mill, comes to Manila to look for his family's
subsistence; finding none, and having gone beyond despair, grasps his hungry, youngest son by his legs and
smashes his head against a concrete island on Recto Avenue in Manila

• a factory burns somewhere in Manila: security guards frisk the workers scampering for safety to prevent
goods from being taken out by them; other workers jump off the burning floors to their death below; and the
capitalist later distributes token compensation to the victims' families, the amount not enough to even buy a
coffin with

And with each exposition of human misery and injustice, the poet intones:

At nagtatayugan, nangagsisilawak
ang commercial complex, ang hotel at resort
ang convention center.

(And still they rise, they grow apace

the commercial complex, hotel and resort
the convention center.)

Here is the poem in Filipino in its entirety, as it now appears in Sandoval's blogspot created by his
comrades in the literary circle which he was a part of when he was still alive:

Tumatayog, lumalawak ang mga bilding at resort

Habang naninila ang mga turista,

negosyanteng Amerkano,
Hapones, Aleman,
luwa-matang nananagpang
ng abubot
at tanawing katutubo
bukod pa sa likas na yaman ng bayan,
may tulirong inang nag-alok ng sanggol,
ng sariling sanggol,
sa Ermita, dahil ayaw
na ang kanyang bunso'y dilat na tupukin
ng apoy ng lagnat.

At nagtatayugan, nangagsisilawak
ang commercial complex, ang hotel at resort
ang convention center.

Palotsinang kahon, kalawanging pala na sinunung-sunong

ay tumapon
nang ang sintusinto'y tumpok ng basahan,
tumpok ng basahang
masagasa
ng itim na kotse sa Welcome Rotunda;
samantala, sa Batasan
ay nagbabangayan sa piling pusisyon
ang sandakot
na de-susing pulitiko.

At nagtatayugan, nangagsisilawak
ang commercial complex, ang hotel at resort,
ang convention center.

Sa Constitution Hill—kapirasong lungaw

na pinagtapunan
sa nakararaming ayaw bigyang-puwang sa bayang
sarili,
tambakang ang laging nangagbabangkete't

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nabubundat
ay ang mauugong na bangaw at langaw—
may gusgusing ingkong,
lupagi sa lupang sahig-barumbarong,
na nakitang
ngumangatngat nang tulala
sa bituka'y atay ng bangkay ng apong namatay sa gutom.

At nagtatayugan, nangagsisilawak
ang commercial complex, ang hotel at resort,
ang convention center.

Pinatalsik
ng poong-maylupa sa asukarera,
o tulad ng kapwa dustang magbubukid
ay kinulimbatan ng tahana't lupa
ng isang higanteng dayong korporasyon;
katutuntong lamang sa lubak ng lunsod
magbuhat sa dawag ng iniwang baryo;
walang ipakai't makain ay wala,
isang ama ang naghampas
ng ulo ng anak sa pader ng Recto
habang hawak-hawak ang dalawang paa.

At nagtatayugan, nangagsisilawak
ang commercial complex, ang hotel at resort,
ang convention center.

Sa liyab ng sunog sa isang pabrika sa South Diversion

Road,
mga manggagawa'y pilit kinapkapan
bago palabasin;
maraming nagasak;
maraming nasawi, tigmak pa ng pawis,
nang mangagsitalon mula sa mataas na mga palapag,
at ang inilimos ng kapitalista—
ng kapitalistang ayon sa dekreto'y bawal
pagwelgahan—
ay hindi pa maibili ng abang kabaong.

At nagtatayugan, nangagsisilawak
ang commercial complex, ang hotel at resort,
ang convention center.

The technique and theme in Sandoval's denunciatory poetics find an echo in the works of Malaysia's
Cecil Rajendra, who wrote about the Transistor Syndrome of development, and the fundamental non-
humanity of multi-storey inanimate stone, steel and wrap-around glass which fail to move the persona
as poet and singer, unlike a blade of grass, a grain of rice, and a wild flower. Thus, Sandoval's
denunciation of anti-people development is echoed perfectly by Rajendra's oft-quoted poem, "Until they
right the wrong, I shall sing no celebratory song".

This paper does not begin to do justice to the topic because it has excluded so many more outstanding
writers and literary genres of the period, the folk and traditional or indigenous forms or methods used in
the countryside to express resistance against the dictatorship, plus we have not even touched on the
writings done by cadres in the nationwide and organized insurgent movement. A more organized and
thorough-going survey and critique of Philippine literature is needed. But as a concluding example of the
kind of writing done during the period, I would like to mention Federico Licsi Espino Jr., who seems
never to have belonged to any literary organization, certainly not any of the highly politicized ones such
as PAKSA and GAT, and whose literary career has been one of the strangest in Philippine literary history.
He has probably spent nearly as much time in psychiatric wards as he has in the outside world, and in
his moments of lucidity, has no agenda but to write poem after poem, whether in English, Tagalog,
Spanish, Ilocano, Visayan, or whatever new language he has managed to learn. In 1978, he came out
with yet another book of poetry entitled Punlay at Punlo (Seed and Bullet)—the translation loses the
near-homonymic irony of the original—which opens with the poem "Pahimakas" ('Farewell').

In the original Tagalog, the poet deftly uses a technique of run-on metaphorical construction, a
clustering of imagery, with subtle allusions to what a more explicit poem would refer to as 'the masses'
or 'the people':

Farewell

13
Should the drum cease to beat in my breast
When the triggers, unsolitary, are prest
While the wind courses through the greenest
Pavilions, gently wafts in a season of heat,
May you not forget, may you let grow and yield
The chaste principle I sowed in the field
Of your mind touched by raindrops of sorrow
That is never alone, never a lone drop of woe
In the deepening river that shall soon overflow.

(Maranan:1985)

No reference to martial law here, not in the least, and one can only extrapolate from the fact that it was
written during the period, that it appears in the company of poems steeped in social awareness, the
message the poet wants to convey in a time of crisis. In my attempt at the poem's exegesis, I took the
view that the power of this short poem derives from the dialectical interplay of interior (the poetic
reflection, the poetic memory, affective images, political philosophy) and the exterior (reference to social
forces, allusion to the countryside, the river as symbology for the historical tide, etc.); I also see in it the
persona of the poem talking about consciousness transcending individual solitude, and finding fulfillment
in merging with the larger "solitude of the multitude". Understood in this context, the overflow in the
last line might be interpreted as the historical high tide, sweeping away the rotten and the dead, but
otherwise fertilizing the land to create or renew life. (Maranan:1985)

By way of a conclusion

One year before the February Revolution toppled the dictatorship, put an end to martial law, and
brought Corazon C. Aquino to power, art and literary critic Alice Guillermo wrote:

Doubtless, the vigor of protest literature lies in the sharpening of the artist's perceptions of the issues involved,
with protest that goes beyond the purely personal to the public, a concrete audience to which the writer makes
an appeal. Thus, sharply honed and focused, the literature of protest that is the predominant cultural
manifestation of the times will not be a merely diffuse and sporadic phenomenon, but a formidable gathering of
voices, of the city as the countryside, signifying that the people have at last spoken. (Ordoñez,1995:344).

Celebratory literature certainly abounded in the aftermath of the February or EDSA or People Power or
Yellow Revolution. Since then, a lot of things have happened in the field of culture and literature in the
Philippines. For one, literary competitions continue merrily, with the 1998 Centennial Literary Awards
giving away prize money in the millions of pesos, rather than the pittance of a few thousands of the
more established competitions, which is probably something to protest about. But on a more serious
note: poetry and stories and novels continue to be published, plays continue to be performed, which
partake of the nature of protest, though not on the same level of ideological intensity seen in the sixties
and seventies, though in a large sense, the literature of resistance has not ceased to exist, precisely
because so many issues remain unresolved under the present Philippine social formation. The
insurgency persists, and revolutionary literature is still being produced, if only because there is still
perception and acceptance in certain areas that the present social formation remains in the "semi-
feudal, semi-colonial" mode. If proof be needed, the durable Ulos underground cultural-literary
magazine continues to be published to this day, its national-democratic orientation undiminished, its
socialist vision steadfast.

During the period under study, Filipino critic and literary historian Lucilla Hosillos wrote that the
seemingly perennial Philippine crisis pointed to the road that writers must take. Rather than the rosy
lane of lyricism, the thorny path of liberation: "rather than hark, hark, the lark, it ought to be hark,
hark, the dark!" But employing the principle of what the protest writers were wont to call "revolutionary
optimism", and borrowing a felicitous title from composer Vaugh Williams, perhaps one could reconfigure
that into an aphoristic couplet that attempts to encapsulate the undiminished spirit of freedom-seeking
during those perilous times:

If martial law was the Dark Descending,

the voice of protest was the Lark Ascending.

Source: http://www.oovrag.com/essays/essay2007b-1.shtml

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