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Albert E. Alejo. Sanayan Lang ang Pagpatay. High Chair, 2016. 154 pages.
A brief survey of Tagalog poetry in the twentieth century shows how poets have been shaped by a vibrant tradition of protest. By “protest” is not meant the outright excoriation of the status quo through the use of general statements and unambiguous demands for society’s transformation.
Far from assaulting the reader with formulaic images and a self-righteous tone, the most significant poets of the twentieth century engaged the world and drew on complex experiences and materials, fashioning these later into literary constructs.
For example, Lope K. Santos’s “Ang Pangginggera” was a brutally ironic study of a vice to which millions of Filipinos were addicted and which was a cause of dysfunction in the family. Jose Corazon de Jesus’s classic “Bayan Ko” imagined the nation’s colonial condition as that of a bird struggling to be free. Amado V. Hernandez’s masterful “Isang Dipang Langit” re-creates the travails of a political prisoner whose contact with the outside world was reduced to a stretch of the sky. In the postwar years, such poets as Lamberto Antonio, Rio Alma, Rolando Tinio, Jose Lacaba, and Ruth Elynia Mabanglo, to name a few, offered damning critiques of the unrelenting victimization of the people by the very institutions that should have protected them. They did so in ways that manifested a highly self-conscious exploration of their craft that displayed the influence not only of Balagtas and Hernandez but also of such writers as T. S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Ezra Pound, and Bertolt Brecht.
Albert S. Alejo is a product of his milieu—the turbulence of the Marcos presidency and its aftermath, the tragic fate of what was once called the glorious revolution of 1986, the relentless tug of war among sociopolitical forces, the desperate struggle of the marginalized to free themselves from the grip of poverty and violence, and the worrying reality of a nation in a downward spiral, more obvious today than ever in our history.
In this collection, Sanayan Lang ang Pagpatay, Alejo crafts his narrative in five interconnected movements, where the poems in each section constitute a powerful reading of concerns both deeply personal and spiritual, and which invariably weave their way into the fabric of the more obviously political poems. For Alejo, what is personal is political and what is political inevitably shapes an individual’s life. This encounter invariably leads to conflict.
This is the reason why the poems appear to be riddled with fissures, dissonances, uncertainties, and indeterminacies, as the different personae seek to comprehend what is essentially the contradictory nature of life itself. When the persona is a minister of God, the contradictions between the ideal and
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the real become sharper, as in “Paminggalang Krus,” “Araw-araw,”“Examen 1,” and “Apolohiya ni Pareng Bert.” This concern runs through this volume.
Alejo is not a one-issue poet. His versatility as a poet is aptly demonstrated in the range of themes he explores—a devastating sense of loss in “Isang Magandang Sining ang Pamamaalam;” erotic love in “Eros;” the connection between poetry and painting in “Ang Kinupot,” a poem which contains some echoes of the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins; the relationship between the state and female representations in “Hindi Bayani si Tetchie Agbayani;” or his ars poetica, “Kung ang Tula Ay Wala,” where the persona makes his call for art that goes beyond the exquisite artistry; and the never-ending battle for justice in the forceful “Buntong-Hibik ng Anakpawis.”
Alejo unleashes his powerful energy in numerous poems that are unflinching in their graphic description of disturbing images of poverty and exploitation and that also appeal to the mind in their examination of why these problems persist, often achieved by his juxtaposition of these against the state’s deployment of its awesome power to suppress individual rights.
His studies of murderous sprees committed by state apparatuses, the beggar child with leprosy, a political detainee’s turbulent inner life, bloody scenes at demonstrations and rallies, the assassination of Aquino and the death of Marcos as defining moments in history, are riveting and haunting.
A poem written more than two decades ago proves how prescient the poet is, how his art still resonates with the contemporary reader. In “Sanayan Lang ang Pagpatay (Para sa Sektor Nating Pumapatay ng Tao),” the killing of a lizard is rendered so casually, even humorously. But it is precisely in the horrific details of the killing, in the gaps and interstices between the words, that the reader discovers a more chilling reality. The willful snuffing out the lives of people takes practice. Killing eventually becomes ordinary. What is worse, the poem wryly concludes, is the eventuality that as the murder is being committed, the reader becomes a passive observer.
Most of the poems appear to express controlled fury at the conspiracy among different sociopolitical forces that continue to perpetuate repression and injustice. But all is not darkness and woe. In some selections, especially in the last section, entitled “Salmong Pasipol,” the poet offers a more restful tone, a muted celebration of the numinous in our lives. This is Alejo’s contemporary version of the Biblical psalms.
The last poem, “Bagong Kristo,” is a moving meditation on the murder of Fr. Godofredo Alingal, a Jesuit missionary, in 1981. In this evocative piece, Alejo places the life and death of the priest front and center as an exemplar of how life is to be lived for others.
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The sense of unease that the poems create is traceable not only to the materials out of which Alejo weaves his craft. It is the poet’s careful and intelligent choice of specific events, objects, and characters, and the consuming desire to expose what lies hidden beneath the surface that move his poetry beyond what is usually expected of protest art. The poems shock because in a process that makes full use of an exceedingly critical imagination Alejo takes the reader by the hand. He leads the readers through a tortuous path teeming mostly with grim and revolting details. In the process of reading such constructs, the readers are empowered to view what is familiar and transform the experience into a heightened, more startling comprehension of reality.
Soledad S. Reyes Professor Emeritus Department of Interdisciplinary Studies Ateneo de Manila University [email protected]
