by Ericson
Acosta
Political
Prisoner
Despite the
grim reality of imprisonment, I have not, as of yet, been condemned to a total
state of ignorance as far as current efforts of various committed art and
cultural groups and alliances are concerned. Thanks largely to a good number of
artists and writers who have generously been sparing their time to visit me ever
since the very first weeks of my incarceration almost two years ago, I have
quite auspiciously been kept updated, however generally, on the developments
and direction of the struggle in the artistic and cultural front here as well
as in other parts of the world.
Last year
for example, in July, a delegate from the U.S. to the International Conference on
Progressive Culture (ICPC) flew all the way here as soon as the successful
launching of that conference formally ended in Manila. He related to me not
only the rich showcase of works and performances that capped the said cultural
gathering, but also the wealth of theoretical discussions and interface of
experiences through which was achieved firm common resolve to unite around a
general set of tasks. One among such tasks, in relation to responding to urgent
people’s concerns, was to subscribe to the International League of People’s Struggles’
(ILPS) declaration in 2004 making every 3rd of December International
Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War. It is that day
today and so from this tiny cell here at the Calbayog sub-provincial jail in
Samar island, or from this penal colony more popularly known as the Philippines,
I raise a clenched fist for solidarity.
DEFENDING
PEOPLE’S CULTURE
A visual
artist from the Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP) apprised me a month
ago on a major ICPC event in the works for early 2013, which I understand will
be a 2-day global action carrying the theme “defend people’s culture.” Very
good news no doubt which speaks much of how the ICPC, since its inception last
year, has so far been able to effectively keep its momentum of active
engagement.
The call
“defend people’s culture,” furthermore, presupposes that amid the crisis of the
world capitalist system, and side by side with the intensifying struggles of
the people for their basic democratic rights and for national and social
liberation, a formidable and dynamic movement of progressive artists, writers
and cultural workers is indeed in resurgence in the world today. This palpable
trend – arising from the people’s movements’ renewed recognition of the need to
combat cultural imperialism, and of the immense value of art and culture as
tools for progressive social change – we welcome with much eagerness. And with
the vast consciousness-building, organizing and mobilizing possibilities opened
up in social media – notwithstanding modern communication technology’s
otherwise dominant function as global accelerator of finance capital and consumerism,
and as nexus for pacifism, utopianism and anarchism, social alienation and
degeneration – this new wave of people’s culture can certainly develop in a
very profound, even unprecedented way.
Consequently,
however, such advance, in the face of the escalating attacks by states against
progressive artists and cultural workers, should entail a prompt consolidation
of ranks in order to be defended. I have just been recently informed, for
instance, of the killing of Argentine musician Facundo Cabral; other artists
meanwhile like Kurdish singer Ferhat Tunc and the Russian punk band Pussy Riot
have been sentenced to serve time merely because of the political contents of
their performances. Defending progressive culture, in this light becomes in
itself a legitimate urgent people’s concern.
In the
Philippines, there are at present some 400 activists and revolutionaries who
languish in various detention facilities as consequence of the state’s
long-running, institutionalized policy of criminalizing political dissent and
involvement in advocacies and movement for real and wide-ranging social
reforms. Mostly affiliated with national democratic formations and coming from
the toiling masses of workers and peasants, they are victims of illegal arrest
and torture. In order to justify their continued detention and to hide the
political context of their cases, they become victims as well of the patently
bogus modus of being slapped with trumped-up charges of non-bailable heinous
criminal offenses, even as court proceedings move in very slow dubiously
erratic motion.
While
imprisoned artists and writers comprise only a small portion of the current
statistics, it is timely and important to note that art and culture, especially
literature and songs, have long assumed a distinct part in the continuing
struggle of political prisoners for justice and freedom. In the context of
defending people’s culture, it appears that artists and writers who continue to
create even under detention, as well as those political prisoners who may not
have been active culturally before being imprisoned but who have now learned to
produce works of art and literature, do not only belong necessarily to those
who must be defended, but very interestingly are in fact at the same time among
our most ardent defenders.
“PRISON
MAKES US INTO POETS”
“Prison
makes us into poets,” says National Democratic Front (NDF) peace consultant
Alan Jazmines in one of his poems written in the early ‘80s, during the period
of his second imprisonment (he is now on his third since February of last
year). Jazmines is here however referring to poets mainly in the figurative
sense. Prisoners, he suggests, in many instances, apprehend prison life in much
the same way as poets usually set out composing their pieces. In rising above
the adversities of a bounded, compact existence, for example, prisoners are
just like poets who try painstakingly to achieve poignancy of meaning in the
barest minimum amount of verse. Political prisoners are all poets, he says,
Who struggle everyday
to break the dross confines
of image of life outside
compressed into a few such things
as the iron bars
you squeeze for thought.
Prison after all, is only
a frugal, compact version
of an outside world,
bereft of so much verbiage
and the prose of assumed life
with somewhat freer movement
And yet
quite self-evidently on account of this brilliant poem alone, and taking exception
of the the fact that Jazmines has had barely a literary background to speak of
prior to prison, we are made convinced that prison does make poets in the most
literal, practical and very important sense.
It is not
simply out of tedium or for lack of anything else to do that political
prisoners actually take to writing. For one thing, those who have been thrown
in jail for the audacity of their written works are quite naturally expected,
given their character, to employ nonetheless the very same methods of the pen
as one of their more immediate, self-acting responses to defy imprisonment
despite extremely difficult new challenges.
Accustomed
to the general strain of a relatively busier “outside world,” writers may
presumably have found forthwith in prison, and not without much irony, the
prospect of freer time to devote to writing. But such in any case is just as
quickly offset by the attendant weight of arbitrary restrictions,
ill-treatments of various kinds, and the tense chaos that takes turns with the
doldrums in defining the climate of misery behind bars. Far from being trivial,
their frustrations over having been deprived of otherwise standard essential
tools as a word processor or a dictionary or ready references to current events,
are pretty intense and justified considering how much of their former competence
or of the work process they have previously been inured to, is severely
undermined.
Many
times however, it is the emotional and psychological scars left by their
abductors and torturers that prove to be the more daunting impediments. For
some, it is the hounding dread from clear and present threats of murder by
state agents – or what they call “accidents” around here – that makes it seem
impossible to write altogether.
All these
of course, in the viciously tiresome scheme it seems of things, are but stuffs
themselves that beg to be written about in earnest. The urgency of writing under
such circumscribed circumstances – of giving full account of the machinations
of injustice no longer expounded from observation alone or from one’s sound
grasp of theory, but as something that now grips one very tightly in the neck –
is so compelling that the imprisoned writers on the whole, despite all
deterrents, are able to will themselves to write.
Though they
may usually have to start from a practical non-guarantee that what they write
could immediately reach their audience beyond prison walls, they write
perseveringly just the same knowing that their works, as documentation of a
continuing real social, human experience, should be able, in one way of
another, to hold their relevance and cogency over time. Temporarily in such
cases, the general inmate population becomes their immediate audience; which
should serve them just as well and not in the least significant way given the
political prisoner’s task of organizing the imprisoned masses – themselves a
collective embodiment of the extreme dehumanizing effects of social injustice –
into politicized prisoners.
And
always, the imprisoned writers are themselves are their own works’ necessary
audience – they who at all times must be reminded of the true socio-political,
even historic essence of their ordeal; they who continually must be
strengthened in militancy, ideology and spirit. The urgency of writing in
prison is such that even the previously non-writers among the political
prisoners strive to learn to write and become people’s artists and writers in their
own right. In the history of state political repression, prison transformed as
veritable workshops not only for but of writers has built its own living legacy
of militant literature and culture.
I am
still quite uninformed as to how precisely this category of the imprisoned
writer is operationalized by PEN International. I see no reason, however, how
such could possibly differ in any basic way from the progressive or militant
sectors’ own definition. Anyway, I am very much thankful to the PEN International
and its Philippine Center for their continued support, especially those who
just last November 15, led a successful forum in Manila on the International
Day of the Imprisoned Writer – Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, Elmer Ordoñez, Jun Cruz
Reyes and many others. I extend my gratitude as well to Katia Canciani of
Canada, and Tom Eaton of South Africa who represented me in their respective PEN
events on the said date.
POLITICAL
PRISONERS AND U.S. HEGEMONY
One
particular issue that a Filipino-American cultural worker brought up during his
visit here in prison last year had something to do with the rather general
difficulty of American artists and intellectuals (even those in fact in
progressive circles) in imagining the phenomenon of the political prisoner.
This notwithstanding, let’s say, Assata Shakur’s already legendary pre-eminence
in the counter-cultural consciousness of some of hip-hop’s more relevant
quarters, or the popular mainstream MTV and concert circuit advocacy for Nelson
Mandela’s freedom in the ‘80s, or for Aung San Suu Kyi’s in the last couple of
decades.
The
national democratic movement in the Philippines could readily suggest as basic
reference the documents of SELDA, a human rights group which focuses on cases
of political prisoners in the country. There are of course international
organizations like Amnesty International whose work on those who fall under
their category of “prisoners of conscience” is more expansive and worldwide.
But I think must be given stress here – especially if what is commonly invoked
to explain the inability of U.S. artists and intellectuals to comprehend the
discourse of the political prisoner is the assumption that such discourse in
fact is absolutely alien to the general political landscape of purportedly
advanced democratic societies like the U.S. – is this: that political prisoners
in many so-called weak democracies like the Philippines or say, Colombia, are
as much the political prisoners of the monopoly capitalist state of the United
States as they are of their respective reactionary governments.
The
politico-military dominance of the US through which the monopoly bourgeoisie
and financial oligarchy are able to impose upon the starving peoples of the
world the rapacious economic system of neoliberalism to rake in superprofits
and accumulate capital, is the very same global hegemonic presence that allows,
and in fact guides puppet states to design and implement with alarming
impunity, repressive fascist policies against the organized resistance of their
people.
President
Benigno Aquino III’s Oplan Bayanihan (Operation Plan “Cooperation”) is one such
U.S.-Pentagon instigated “counter-insurgency” (COIN) policy. Under Oplan
Bayanihan, state force systematically carry out extra-judicial killings,
enforced disappearances, abduction and illegal detention of activists, and forced
evacuation of whole communities, all in the name of state and imperialist imperatives.
Through Oplan Bayanihan, the U.S.-Aquino regime has already accomplished in
just two years an awesome track record of flagrant human rights violations –
most recent and gruesome of which is the massacre of anti-mining activists and
families of indigenous peoples in Tampakan in Mindanao island.
CULTURAL
FASCISM
Oplan
Bayanihan moreover has its own cultural component. No longer content with corporate
media or traditional state cultural and propaganda apparatuses dutifully
performing their usual sabotage job of blacking-out information about military
atrocities, the regime still very much consistent with the pervading COIN
doctrine of the U.S. has directed the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to
reorganize and beef up its media and public relations (PR) machinery. The AFP,
with more spin, savvy and persistence than in the past years, has now been able
to establish closer and more constant working relations with practically the
entire milieu of PR sectors and potentially PR-rich institutions – TV and radio
network producers, publishers and corporate advertisers, the church and the
academe, national agencies such as the Department of Tourism or even the Commission
of Human Rights, local government units, and shady non-government organizations
(NGOs) – all for the chief purpose of aggressively re-imaging the military
establishment as far as possible from its actual savage practice.
While
artists and cultural workers of the national democratic open mass movement are
vilified and persecuted as “Leftist propagandists” and terrorists, the AFP’s
civil-military commanders and other fascist publicists, impresarios and
stylists are now vigorously trying to sustain a campaign of mobilizing directors,
writers and actors for such ubiquitous media productions as Christmas network
IDs, drama anthologies, short films or public service programs, to project the
false idealization of the militaryman at once as humble everyman and as
selfless patriot. An AFP website has commissioned poets (those of the mercenary
type themselves) to calibratedly emulate militant peasant literature as a
cunning but rather desperate ploy to gloss over the fact that the military
itself is the single most powerful instrument of the big landlord class in
crushing the aspirations of the peasant masses for genuine land reform. While
no less than eight (8) battalions of the Philippine Army continue to sow fear
and havoc in the towns and barrios of South Quezon, a platoon, for good measure
as a sort of blocking force, is deployed to a noontime TV variety show to dance
the Gangnam Style. And, as declared by the AFP in a high-profile event a few
days ago, the most popular celebrity diva in Philippine show business today, is
now also the official Oplan Bayanihan ambassadress.
The culture
of impunity in the Philippines, as a state policy, is not only contingent on a
juridical system that is by nature grossly complicit. It requires at the same
time for a particular fascist contrivance of deception to permeate the general
moribund feudal, bourgeois and colonial culture – a mode through which, as we’ve
seen, certain segments of the art, culture and media professions, however
unwittingly, are enlisted and implicated in state repression and terror.
BREAKING
THE (STEREOTYPE) CHAINS
But
again, the growing strength of the organized art and culture sector that is
determined to speak the more consequential truths in society and advance the
course of freedom of expression along with the people’s struggle for
liberation, democracy and social justice, is undeniable. This, despite the
rather enduring inaccurate assumption that singles out the artists and writers
as among the toughest, almost impossible to organize. Cultural organizers in
the main are able to rectify the attitude of inordinately amplifying the
tendency of artists and writers toward individualism, liberalism or careerism,
as if these were, in the class context of the petty-bourgeoisie, qualities that
are perpetually irreversible.
They are
aware that the state and the monopoly capitalists are only too happy to get
help from whomever in perpetuating this stereotype. It is in the interest of
the ruling class to constantly prop up this myth in order to spoil the objective
potential of artists and writers in participating in radical social movements
and in truly serving the people. For imperialism, it is important for artists
and writers to remain blind to this class potential amid the culture of
consumerism, elitism, mysticism and decadence, and even as their talents,
skills and labor themselves are exploited in the service of fascism and
neoliberalism.
With
social investigation and class analysis, appropriate methods and patience, and
in working for the artists and writers’ particular democratic demands, the resurgent
worldwide people’s cultural movement can organize cultural activists in great
numbers. They must continuously be consolidated through an efficient system of
political and theoretical education, collective work, and practical integration
with the lives and struggles of the working classes. This should enable them
not only to create more socially truthful and potent works of art and culture
but also to effectively do battle with their own petty-bourgeois ideological
fetters.
In
prisons meanwhile around the world, people’s art and culture remains a viable
ideological weapon of intense power. In Batangas in Southern Luzon,
Philippines, Charity Diño, a peasant organizer and public
school teacher, has just recently taught herself to write poetry behind bars.
Impelled by the need to exorcise the demons of torture in hear head, to
reaffirm herself the militant principles of service to the people, and to
exhort those outside prison to fearlessly carry on the fight against fascism,
social injustice and imperialism, she writes:
This heart heavy with grief vows
To melt away these iron bars
To ensure justice for those
Stripped of their rights
These tearful eyes vow
To tear down these walls
To ensure the meeting of fists
Out to forge freedom
…Shackled, out of breath
Threatened with death
I vow ever to be loyal to you,
the toiling masses!
-Ericson Acosta
Calbayog sub-provincial jail
Western Samar, Philippines
December 3, 2012
