I wrote this poem on the 4th March, 2024, a week after Aaron Bushnell martyred himself afront the Israeli embassy in Washington, screaming as his final words "Free Palestine!" It was with these words and a few more immediately preceding them, which I will subjoin hereunder, in mind that I ended the poem with "Paano't paano man, Palestina'y lalaya rin!" (By any means necessary, Palestine will be free!). That line was later adopted as the title of, and the poem itself featured in, a zine compiled, edited, printed, and sold by Kabataan Partylist's Negros Oriental chapter at the XXL Zine and Print Fair in Dumaguete from the 21st to the 23rd March in collaboration with the Siliman University English Society. Half of the income generated by that zine and others sold during the Fair was donated to the Philippines-Palestine Friendship Association (PPFA) as part of a broader campaign of solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle for national and social liberation, which in all instances and in all analyses is one fatally intertwined with the Filipino people's own.
For the imperialism which has thus far murdered 200,000 Palestinians--a conservative estimate: in death as in life, the oppressed are denied the right to simply be, even statistically--is the same imperialism which in its youth murdered anywhere from a quarter-million to a million Filipinos who had dared for a moment--that glorious, epochal moment being the Revolution of 1896--to dream of a country free and independent after 333 years of colonial rule and to act upon that dream with all the vigour and violence of a people so violated and so deprived that it was only in the decade of their first and last liberation that they began calling themselves (as a national collective) "Filipinos," rather than "indios" (Indians, literally) or, as The Hon. W. H. Taft (who, being honourable, helped pioneer in the Philippines such atrocities as the water cure, which one observer called "plain hell," and such tactics as the use of natives as counterrevolutionary military auxiliaries and the internment of suspected "insurrecto" sympathisers, which in at least two provinces included the vast majority of the population, in reconcentration camps, all of these of course replicated in Vietnam through "Vietnamisation," "strategic hamletting, &c., &c.) referred to them, "little brown brothers."
Even now, as it continues patronising Israeli efforts to starve, rape, mutilate, and butcher Palestinian men, women, and children in more streamlined and labour-efficient ways,--as one particularly vapid columnist points out, the "new" (and, incidentally, wrong) "maxim of modern warfare" is that "technological advantage trumps numerical superiority,"--the US, having since February last year built four new military bases in the Philippines (three facing Taiwan by their situation in northern Luzon and one near the China-claimed Spratly Islands) in addition to the five already there by virtue of the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, stands ready to sacrifice the lives of some 100,000,000 Filipinos to nuclear holocaust upon the altar of Capital and Empire. Recto, that great poet-statesman of the Filipino national bourgeoisie, illustrates in the final paragraph of his 1951 speech "Our Mendicant Foreign Policy" the "radioactive waters of the Pasig," "the broken arches of the Quezon bridge," and the other propitiations made by a "sacrificial race with a mysterious urge to suicide, who, being weak and weaponless took upon themselves the quarrels of the strong" in some dark, might-be age with far more eloquence and grace than I ever could.
But such potentialities, however probable or instructive, are just that: potentialities! In the end it is still the people and the people alone who make history, and not external goings-on and external conditions but internal contradictions and internal wills which are decisive. Bushnell proved that by his martyrdom, by his refusal to partake in oppression on the side of the oppressor, by his ultimate sacrifice on the side of the oppressed. He has gone from a particular moment, a context and a life peculiar to his own, to a kind of revolutionary universality in the bosom of the world's imperialised majority, who for as long as they are imperialised, for as long as they cannot yet be in the fullest and most human sense of the word, will never forget the words with which he ended one existence and commenced another, infinitely weightier (as weighty, one might say, as Mount Tai) one: