Parmata Epilogue from Dr. Hadje Sadje of University of Hamburg, Germany

 

WHY ONLY THE POETS CAN SAVE US NOW?

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“WE ARE TOLD TO REMEMBER THE IDEA, NOT THE MAN. Because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten. But four hundred years later an idea can still change the world.”

- V FOR VENDETTA

 

“REVOLUTION, IN ORDER TO BE CREATIVE, CANNOT DO without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.”

ALBERT CAMUS

 

“THE OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE EARTH ARE NOT OBJECTS for the exquisite turmoil of European consciences. They are subjects from which to learn how to exercise political intelligence and action. Obviously, colonial arrogance is a long time dying.”

ALAIN BADIOU

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R. B. ABIVA IS A NEW BREED OF LITERARY PARTISANISM.

Abiva’s “PARMATA at iba pang PROSA Kontra- HEGEMONYA” is a powerful book inspired by a radical tradition of cultural resistance, produced to instill a revolutionary consciousness and mobilize mass action in the long march towards emancipation. He rejects the notion of writing literary only for the sake of literary. He is not seeking for profit and popularity. In fact, after being silenced and tortured, Abiva was resurrected for our redemption. His literary works speak about the brutality of Big Brother. It encapsulates, as Giorgio Agamben describes, an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of an emergency.

I began this book with an emphatic question, why only the poets can save us now? I think there is no simple answer.

On the other hand, when I started to read the book I realized that the prose of Abiva shows me how to live and die well, more importantly, to speak and hold the truth in a perilous time.

Interestingly enough, I found three important points that I have learnt from the book.

First, Abiva shows the brutality or tyranny of Big Brother. The book takes the reader beyond the bottom line of profit or the stagnation of bureaucracy to a political-economic ethic rooted in the system of oppression. For Abiva, to question the authority and legitimacy of the Big Brother, they will persecute, perish, and die. For political dissenters, he demonstrates that there are serious political consequences. Violent, as Abiva shows, is inherent in various levels of Big Brother’s social order. He exposes that the Big Brother can even decide who lives and who dies, who is wise and who is an idiot, who is a saint and who is a sinner, who is blessed and who is a curse, who is worth saving and who is not worth saving. He acts like a God or a messiah and supported and endorsed by the majority. As Abiva writes:

Sa ganitong punto-de-bista, hindi tuloy maiwasang ikumpara ang tokhang bilang isang proseso rin ng culling. Sa siyudad ng Davao halimbawa, binanggit ng mga namumuno ang ganito: “Slaughter these idiots for destroying my country,” “Davao I used to do it personally”, at “Cleaned up the streets” na wari bang susumahin ng kongklusyong, “This war will be bloody.”

Dwelling on his powerful prose, it works to disestablish the worldview that naturalizes suffering and justifies the exploitation of the poor for the advancement of the social elite. Like hermeneutics or the art/science of interpretation, unpacking, and reflecting on the meaning of Abiva’s life struggle and writings is a complex intellectual and academic undertaking. His proses speak the language of philosophical, social, and existential responsibilities that nobody will dare to speak and criticize.

Second, his ‘prose’ speaks about stories and the struggle of ordinary people under the authoritarian regime. As we live in the age of re-emergence of populism, Abiva shows people become willing to tolerate state violence, state control, accept their tragic life condition, and sacrifice their fundamental rights on the altar of Baal. As Abiva writes:

“Kaso, sa mahal ng mga bilihin ngayon, kulang pa itong limandaang piso, itatabi mo ang 150 piso para panggasolina, ang 100 piso pandagdag sa buwanang hulog sa kumpanya at ang natirang 250 piso, pilit ko na itong pagkakasyahin. Dito ko na kukunin ang pambibili ng bigas, ulam, gatas, pambayad sa kuryente, alawans ni Misis at gamot ko” daing niya habang putak nang putak ang mga imahe sa telebisyon. Ang mas inaalala niya, ang kanyang asawang namamasukan bilang katulong sa karatig bayan. Paano na raw niya mapagkakasya ang kakarampot na sahod nitong 3,000 kada buwan kung tataas na naman ang halaga ng mga bilihin gaya ng gatas at bigas.

At the heart of his brilliant, humane, and revolutionary prose, readers are all called to resist the sublime longing for spiritual mediocrity and aristocrat.

Lastly, Abiva succeeded in developing an astoundingly fresh tone in contemporary prose that disrupts the imposed representation of reality, especially the political and economic order. It enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between "the personal troubles of milieu" and "the public issues of social structure". Abiva uses prose to (re)tell all the truth in a powerful and memorable imaginary. For example, he writes:

Ang aking natitirang bagabag ay paano kung ang pandemikong COVID-19 ay isa ring anyo ng culling. Isang covert na paraan upang mapuksa ang mga pandaigdigang hinaing/protesta ng mga duhagi at dinuduhaging mamamayan at bansa. Hindi tuloy maiwasang maiugnay ang COVID-19 sa iba pang plague gaya ng Bubonic Plague at Spanish Plague na kumitil din ng milyong buhay. Hindi ko tuloy maiwasang isipin na bahagi ito ng isang malaking proyektong ibahin, o dili kaya’y wasakin, ang dati nang nakagawiang relasyong panlipunan sa loob ng globalisasyon. Maaari namang mayroong nais ipakilalang bagong anyo at tipo ng pamumuhay sa paraan ng social distancing. Anuman ang dahilan, gaya ng Holocaust at Tokhang, ang COVID-19 ay hindi apolitical na pangyayari sa ating kasaysayan.

His style must therefore be understood as a form of aesthetic force but also offer a functional and realistic. Hence, Abiva’s prose as an aesthetic force disrupts and alters the imposed representation of reality, especially the political and economic order. This reminds us of Santiago Zabala’s notion of aesthetic force. Zabala writes:

The agents that seek to disrupt the framing powers are the weak, the remnants of Being, that is, every person and idea forced to the margins of this frame and that inevitably strives for change or, better, for an alteration of the imposed representations of reality. This alteration is necessary not only politically and ethically but also aesthetically. An aesthetic force is needed to shake us out of our tendency to ignore the “social paradoxes” generated by the political, financial, and technological frames that contain us; the “urban discharge” of slums and plastic and electronic wastes; the “environmental calls” caused by global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation; and the “historical accounts” of invisible, ignored, and denied events. These aesthetic forces, like Žižek’s four powerful antagonisms, will disrupt not only capitalism’s indefinite reproduction but also realism’s metaphysical impositions.[1]

Abiva’s work demonstrates that contemporary prose occupies a domain different from the public sphere of newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet. His life of struggles is an embodiment of a consistent and active search for peace and justice. Abiva draws up conflict lines between rich and poor, oppressors, and oppressed, and then reflect the causes of this conflict in terms of colonialism and imperialism. This puts Abiva’s work in the context of North-South conflict, Western imperialism, and Western hegemony.   

As a way of concluding this epilogue, we should like to emphasize again that the particularity of Abiva’s prose in its different forms and faces must provide the epistemological lens through which the prose can be read. I believe that only this approach seems to recognize the brutal reality under the authoritarian regime. In these perilous times, a truth-seeking literary artist like Abiva is essential. His literary works are free from the influence of hegemonic dominance --- this makes the poet CAN SAVE US NOW! Let’s make the most, be disturbed. His prose epitomizes harsh reality by depicting mundane, everyday experiences as they in real life. It depicts the hegemonic tales-stories that sustain and reproduce existing relations of power and inequity- and subversive stories-narratives that challenge the taken-for-granted hegemony by making visible and explicit to the untrained eye. Never get the chance, to love without sacrifice, to theorize without praxis. Resist the absence of emergency and its deadly curse!

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[1] Santiago Zabala, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (US: Colombia University Press, 2017), 6