Faye Cura
Keynote speech at the 5th Edel Garcellano Conference
Ateneo de Manila University, November 29, 2025
Magandang umaga sa lahat. Thank you to the organizers of the 5th Edel Garcellano Academic Conference for inviting me to deliver the keynote speech on the theme, “Committed Writing Now.” As a committed non-academic, I am super humbled.
I am honored that the organizers are interested in what the small, independent, and alternative Gantala Press has to say about this perennially important and relevant topic. It is Gantala’s 10th anniversary this year, and in the past decade we have also been constantly wrestling with this question (and continue to do so).
I would indeed like to talk about what committed writing may look like now, from the point of view of a small press publisher privileged to have worked with people’s organizations, with activists and political prisoners, with academics and students in producing mostly literary books. I hope that more writers are encouraged to reflect on committed literature not as an end in itself, but as an instrument toward the larger goal of national liberation.
In early November, I attended the launch of the End Colonial Control, Independence Now! campaign organized by the Resist US-Led War Movement. There, Sarah Raymundo described the Treaty of Paris as imperialism’s hijacking of the Philippine Revolution that started with the founding of the Katipunan in 1892. Ang galing ng sinabi niya, on how the Treaty of Paris first demonstrated the logic of imperialist accumulation by commodifying sovereignty. Ibenta ka ba naman bilang bansa ng ibang bansa sa isa pang bansa!
I borrow this metaphor of hijacking and apply it to the different ways that imperialism continues to sabotage said revolution, with the help of literature. Let us take a look at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair. Various investigations have shown how the Fair is complicit in Israel and the United States’ settler-colonialist project in Palestine. Imperialism “laying its body over the world”, to borrow Ghassan Kanafani’s words, is certainly aided and enabled by the indifference of peoples and writers to the expansionist projects of genocide, scholasticide, and ecocide, among others. Many delegates of the Frankfurt Book Fair explained their participation as maximizing the opportunity to be known and marketed internationally, in spite of the Palestinians’ call for solidarity against erasure. This I think demonstrates the neoliberal “globalist partisanship” that Edel Garcellano accused Filipino writers in English to be arrogantly pushing for, where they think that the standards and valuation afforded to writers in the West also apply to them.
But first, let it be established that the revolution launched by Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan has indeed continued, from the founding of the old Communist Party of the Philippines in the 1930s to its rebirth in 1968 to the current war in the countryside. It follows that the cultural revolution started by writers like Jose Rizal and the propagandistas is also ongoing. According to Patricia Melendrez-Cruz, PAKSA or Panulat Para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan was formed in 1971 as a sort of Second Propaganda Movement to carry on the unfinished task of the Philippine Revolution in 1896 and 1899. PAKSA aimed to vitalize a literature in Filipino that would help develop the class consciousness of the masses toward national emancipation. As stated by its chairperson, Bienvenido Lumbera, “The Filipino writer lives in a society where the exploitation of the many by the powerful inconscionable few cannot be denied. … [He] can always … attempt a choice: to recognize or not that he is responsible to the broad masses whose liberation from the unspeakable enslavement is prior and necessary.”
In a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society, the exploitation of the many by the powerful inconscionable few continues to this day. So does the choosing of sides by writers. I use “choosing of sides” here broadly, to mean serving either the ruling one percent or the masses.
Sabi nga ni Tagapangulong Mao Zedong,
“Sa daigdig ngayon, lahat ng kultura, lahat ng panitikan at sining ay pag-aari ng partikular na mga uri at nakatuon sa partikular na mga linyang pampulitika. Sa katunayan, walang sining na alang-alang sa sining, walang sining na nakapangibabaw sa mga uri, walang sining na hiwalay o nagsasarili sa pulitika. Ang proletaryong panitikan at sining ay bahagi ng buong proletaryong rebolusyonaryong simulain; ang mga ito, gaya ng sinabi ni Lenin, ay mga granahe at turnilyo sa buong makina ng rebolusyon.”
This “choosing of sides” can also be connected to what Garcellano discussed as the schism between formalist and nationalist poetry, which extends to the schism between literature in English and Filipino. The formalist school judges a poem for itself, as an artistic object separate from its context and even its author. It is idealist, dadaist and nihilist. The nationalist school meanwhile is materialist, insisting “on the historical and social specificity of the text” as explained by E San Juan, Jr. It is proletarian.
Again, choosing sides can roughly be equated with deciding on whether or not to become or aspire to become a committed writer; on whether or not to recognize and accept one’s responsibility to the broad masses. On one side are the writers who serve the status quo, such as Adrian Cristobal and Virgilio Almario who both spoke of the separation of literature and politics. Alongside them are the Frankfurt Book Fair apologists who have isolated the idea of literary validation from complicity. Then there are the petty bourgeois writers who, pagkatapos mamulat, are slowly and painstakingly battling their inner contradictions para magpanibagong-hubog, asking themselves every day: Am I first a writer, or am I first a revolutionary?
On the opposite side are the cadres who have long answered that question and taken up the gun along with the pen: Lorena Barros, Emmanuel Lacaba, Kerima Tariman, Ericson Acosta, Felix Salditos, to name a few. There are also the peasants who write poetry, as I will share later.
This is not simply moralizing, although it would seem that writers are actually morally obligated to moralize. Rather, it is showing that, as Jean Paul Sartre and Garcellano had insisted, writers, who are first of all supposedly committed to truth, are bound to be engaged. As stated by Petronilo Daroy, a writer’s stature is measured not so much by the volume of her works as by her capacity to assume public responsibility. “The writer’s concern for literature, for art and aesthetics, becomes continuous with his concern to recreate society, to establish institutions, and to elevate the quality of life of a people. The aesthetic concern finds its issues not only in art but in revolutionizing and society.” E San Juan Jr said that whatever a writer’s class may be, her primary duty is “to describe accurately the objective historical process, the unity of opposing forces” or the various contradictions that bring about change, and thus “inevitably commit herself to the cause of progress.”
Now, the horrendous corruption issue; the red-tagging and killing of activists, peasant leaders, and unionists; the selling of our land and resources to foreign investors; the mushrooming of US military facilities in the country; and the massive protests; the recently concluded International People’s Tribunal for Palestine; the continuous recruitment of young Filipinos to the New People’s Army; all show that the contradictions in society are colliding furiously toward havoc. Garcellano’s sharp assessment of the society in the 1990s still rings true: “The violence of elite and class differences is much too real to be ignored.” Writers are actually forced to choose their side of the anticipated upheaval.
But before we continue, let us first review: What is committed literature?
As discussed by Sartre, the committed or engaged writer “knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change.” For Sartre, the writer’s task is to drive herself and the readers toward reflection. “The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about.” Salvador P. Lopez wrote that literature is functional in character, proposing new human values in place of the old. Extending this function, Jose Ma. Sison said that culture has the task of preparing public opinion to make way for the revolution.
For PAKSA, committed literature addresses itself to the problems of its society, which in the case of the Philippines is the agony and dehumanization of the majority. According to Melendrez-Cruz, literature “must reflect social reality and align itself with [those who] bear the brunt of human suffering. … Such literature should be written from the perspective of the proletariat. … Committed literature is partisan. … A truly committed writer is an artist who [communicates] human values, and at the same time becomes a political activist by his identification, and integration, with the struggle of the masses.”
Despite its precise and noble vision, PAKSA in the end was critiqued by Garcellano as a failed endeavor to proletarianize literature. PAKSA was nipped in the bud shortly after its formation when Martial Law was declared in 1972, and the young activists who were there in the beginning had fallen victim to the prevailing economy run by bureaucrat-compradors. Garcellano applied class analysis in tracing where everything went wrong: he found that most PAKSA members were petty bourgeoisie who came from the peasant and/or the working class. “Because its members were economically wedged between the elite and the disenfranchised, PAKSA thinned out due to a silent exodus, a migration no less by its honchos to the other side of the fence, thus repeating what Lu Xun — quoted by Gelacio Guillermo — had known of the petty bourgeoisie: spineless, prey to counter-subversion, self-destructive.” According to Garcellano, these writers have also commodified their writing: “The rebels of the ’70s have become receivers of givers of prizes of the ’90s.” The decline of PAKSA was also made possible by the continuing hegemony of anti-Marxist discourse in culture and the academe, a discourse nurtured by the demonization of Mao’s cultural revolution and by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Garcellano was pessimistic about the literary tradition inherited by young writers after PAKSA and altogether dismissed the organization as something that ultimately failed nga to advance the revolutionary agenda. He said, correctly, “qualified resistance could have been only practiced in the hearths and hearts of the so-called underground. PAKSA or no PAKSA, the writing of the revolution could only be affected by the practitioners of it. … It is the writers of Ulos and the like who must now concretize the theory of engagement.” (Ulos of course refers to the cultural journal of the national democratic revolution).
Following the standards set by Garcellano and the other nationalist writers I have quoted so far, the best persons to exemplify a committed writer would be the writers-turned-NPA soldiers, or those who are writing from the boondocks. (Actually, Garcellano’s model committed writer was Ruth Firmeza.) As Garcellano described, they would have “actively participated in the struggle, enlisted no less in the national democratic revolution, and made the Word the material for combat.” Full-time activists in people’s organizations also qualify as committed writers. But like the cadres, writing is just one of their tasks and not their main work.
Ironically, actual committed writers are not primarily writers or full-time writers (except of course for the journalists in alternative media). It is not writing per se that actual committed writers are committing to. Rather, it is to the much, much larger revolution that they are dedicating themselves, and writing is just one of many weapons used in waging that revolution.
All the rest of us who remain within our petty bourgeois trappings, can only aspire to become committed writers.
Sabi nga ni Sison,
“Nabubuhay tayo sa isang lipunang malakolonyal at malapyudal. Di maiiwasan na sadyang lahat ng ating kadre sa larangan ng kultura, sa isa o iba mang panahon, ay naimpluwensyahan nang malaki ng kulturang burges at pyudal, at hanggang ngayo’y patuloy na naiimpluwensyahan sa iba’t ibang antas. Burges ang nananaig na pananaw sa hanay ng nagsipag-aral sa kasalukuyang sistemang pangkultura.”
What we petib’s can do, where we are, here in the cities, in the academe, in the media and social media, as maybe aspiring committed writers, which means that maybe we are also aspiring full-time activists if not aspiring revolutionary fighters, is to always challenge, whenever we can, the idealist, capitalist, individualist hegemony that imperialism feeds off of in suppressing and decimating the revolution which, if we remember, is ongoing.
We begin by facing our own personal contradictions as members of our class. It would be worthy to quote Sison again at length here:
“Tungkulin ng ating mga kadre sa larangan ng kultura na tuluy-tuloy na hubuging panibago ang kanilang makauring pananaw. Kailangang bakahin nila nang buong-tatag, sa pamamagitan ng Marxismo-Leninismo na siyang malinaw na ideolohiya ng proletaryado, ang lahat ng maling kaisipan at mga tendensyang makasarili, at kailangang makisalamuha sila sa masa sa praktikal na rebolusyonaryong kilusan. … Dapat silang humakbang nang unti-unti tungo sa panig ng mga manggagawa, magsasaka at kawal, sa panig ng proletaryado. Magagawa ito sa pamamagitan ng pakikisalamuha sa hanay mismo ng masa at pakikilahok sa mismong mga praktikal na pakikibaka, at sa pamamagitan ng pag-aaral ng Marxismo at ng lipunan. Sa ganitong paraan lamang tayo magkakaroon ng isang panitikan at sining na talagang para sa mga manggagawa, magsasaka at kawal, isang tunay na proletaryong panitikan at sining.”
We begin by studying, and we get better by continuous learning, on our own or with comrades. As Garcellano quoted Domingo de Guzman: “In our specific context as a neo-colony, [the] demand for the basic education of the poets means that Cirilo Bautista or Gemino Abad should first of all be intelligent enough to know what imperialism means; what the IMF-WB and the multinational corporations do to the sacadas, the factory workers, the local politicians and to himself as a petit-bourgeois intellectual.” Studying will need a lot of humility and hard work; indeed, it will need a lot of commitment, writing and rewriting because it is lifelong.
How does committed writing look like in the Philippines, now? We include here the literature produced by the guerrilla poets, by petty bourgeois progressive writers, and by peasants.
Fortunately, university presses also publish literary works on the ongoing revolution, such as Lualhati Abreu’s Agaw-dilim, Agaw-liwanag (2009); Ericson Acosta’s Mula Tarima Hanggang (2016); and Maya Daniel’s Binalaybay (2021). More recently, there are the works by urban-based writers such as Isabela by Kaisa Aquino, Kampuhan by Ma. Cecilia de la Rosa, and Michael Beltran’s literary non-fiction on exiled revolutionaries. Universities can print and even reprint thousands of copies of a single title. The books are also automatically archived in university libraries. Pero siyempre, university presses also publish counter-revolutionary and reactionary books, even more so than they do revolutionary literature.
Then there are the books and zines produced by underground and small presses, such as the works of Kerima Tariman, Axel Pinpin, and Joven Obrero. Urban-based artists also contribute to revolutionary cultural work through artist-activist advocate groups such as Rural Women Advocates (RUWA), Sama-samang Artista Para sa Kilusang Agraryo (SAKA), Artista ng Rebolusyong Pangkultura (ARPAK), Tambisan sa Sining, and many others. Writers and artists from these groups help produce campaign and propaganda materials for people’s organizations. Eventually, some join the organizations full time and assume more responsibilities that go beyond art.
Garcellano said that the “proletarian writer requires political orientation and class consciousness, both not easily achieved without deep study and observation.” As an activist press, Gantala endeavors to be proletarian. By persisting within the constraints of our size, we also strive to engage in deep study and observation that then inform our publishing work. Because we do not make ambisyon to grow big, our time is not depleted pursuing celebrity authors, foreign publishers, or awards. Rather, we try to contribute to the people’s movement by consciously helping in campaigns for human rights, land rights, and national sovereignty, whether in the form of publications or of other educational activities. We are of course able to do this with the support of a wonderful community of collaborators, readers, and small donors.
SP Lopez described proletarian literature as a literature of hope and growth. It is revolutionary; “the proletarian writer is not satisfied with merely describing, reporting, or exposing, he must interpret it in terms of the past, present, and future.” It is an instrument of social influence; it is realistic, by the very nature of the material and function. Dare I say that Gantala Press has been publishing beautiful books of hope and growth, and aims to continue doing so.
But it is not enough to produce progressive writing; the question is, are these works able to reach the proletariat, the laborers, peasants, and fighters that Mao and Sison said should be our primary readers (and creators)?
It will always be an honor for Gantala Press to have collected Kerima’s poems. Distribution-wise, it would of course have been more advantageous for this important work to be published by a traditional press. There would have been more copies of the book, which would have made it cheaper and more accessible.
But what would have been lost had Sa Aking Henerasyon been published by a big press was the intentionality in the practice of publishing. For Gantala Press, publishing Kerima was a natural progression from producing zines, comics, and cookbooks on the struggle of agricultural workers, indigenous women, and peasant women. Kerima’s poetry, which I like to call her research output on the life of the masses, shows that the revolution to overcome all of these struggles indeed persists.
Publishing Kerima likewise prepared us to bring out the works of the writer and activist Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, who as you may know was arrested on trumped-up charges in Cagayan province in 2020. Being small, we were easily able to integrate into the Free Amanda Echanis Movement, joining its meetings and events and now actively campaigning for the immediate release of Amanda and all political prisoners.
Publishing Kerima and Amanda helped establish Gantala Press as purposeful in its work, committed to advancing political causes rather than driven by profit. Publishing these committed writers were two giant steps taken by Gantala Press toward the proletariat, as it paved the way for releasing Marites N. Nicart’s Nanay Magsasaka, which is one of the first if not the first poetry book produced by a peasant woman in the Philippines.
About peasant poetry, Garcellano also had much to say. He criticized the experts’ focus on peasant poetry’s form, on its so-called “technical crudities” and “ideational simplicity”. Garcellano explained that matters of style are also the result of a writer’s material conditions, history, and the prevailing influences in her society. Thus, instead of focusing only on form, “The poetry should instead [be] viewed in the context of radical shift in peasant consciousness.” Nicart’s poems do reflect this “historico-materialist understanding of social and natural phenomena.” See, for instance, her “Makasaysayang Lupang Ramos”:
Karaniwang lupa ngunit di karaniwang usapin,
Kung ang mga kuwento ay iyong pakikinggan.
Dahil dito, marami ang umaangkin,
May Ramos, Ayala, Central Bank, Roxas
At KASAMA-LR din.
Dito, maraming isinilang na mahal na mahal ko sa buhay,
Na dito na rin namuhay hanggang sa kasalukuyan.
Marami ang dito na rin binawian ng buhay,
Kasama na ang mahal kong magulang.
Dito ay may samahan, KASAMA-LR ang ngalan,
Tunay na reporma sa lupa ang kinakailangan
Upang maraming magsasaka ang makinabang.
Sila ay samahan, samahang legal
Dahil kapakanan ng marami ang ipinaglalaban.
This poem shows that the farmer determines her own condition and emancipation. In Garcellano’s words, “No longer exists the mediator who must create for him his paradise on earth — and thus abandoned, his will blazes the creative route to freedom. While not pronouncing himself god, he assumes for himself the responsibility to create his own just and humane history.” I would just like to point out that in contrast to this sort of lone hero figure, Nicart’s poems, like many poems written by organized women, always speak of collective struggle. In her poems, the farmer is never alone. In “Lupang Ramos,” the poet recognizes her kasamas: “Salamat sa mga taong simbahan, mga estudyante, mga kaibigan, / Mga nais tumulong at handang dumamay. / Magsasaka ay masaya dahil ang laban, / May pag-asa na.”
All of this is not at all to disregard the question of form. As Mao has consistently reminded, if a piece of art is weak in form, it will fail to connect to the people even if it is politically strong. Mao spoke of popularizing and raising the standards of works of art, which ought to be done by cultural workers through working closely with the masses. “No revolutionary writer or artist can do any meaningful work unless he is closely linked with the masses, gives expression to their thoughts and feelings and serves them as a loyal spokesman. Only by speaking for the masses can he educate them and only by being their pupil can he be their teacher.” Thus, activist small presses should think about how our work can elevate literary form as well.
Actually, hindi naman sinabi ni Edel na huwag nang magsulat tungkol sa non-materialist things. In fact, he expressed some sort of excitement about the merging of bourgeois and proletarian elements, of bourgeois form and socialist content. Sabi niya, “emerging art … reflects the ideational marriage of classes and affirms a language that mirrors the bestiary of the present and the unfolding future. Certainly literature is not static — and the electrifying evolution and fusion of the metaphysical (feudal, cosmological) and the dialectical (socialist, materialist), the schema of liberated consciousness, gives rise to a comprehensive and radical art, the production of alternative reality.”
Garcellano also pointed out that writing in a poor country signifies class status. The fact that peasant writers, inclined towards an oral literature, “have begun to break into text is a development that inevitably challenges the bourgeois hold on the print medium and directly the nexus of dominant culture.” By being mindful and intentional nga of its practices and processes, small presses like Gantala have a big role to play in the peasant class’ seizure, so to speak, or hijacking, of writing as a means of creative production and as important political work.
Gantala Press and other small presses can also contribute further to advancing proletarian literature through translation. Garcellano and Lumbera have both written on how Filipino must be the writer’s tool in re-educating the masses. Filipino is enriched and strengthened through translation of revolutionary women’s literature from other countries, of literature that is ignored or deliberately silenced in spaces like the Frankfurt Book Fair. Solidarity is activated when translating Filipino women’s work to English and other foreign languages. With translation, language is indeed converted to bullets used in combat.
Certainly, there is still a lot of work to be done. Like any kind of commitment, committed writing may take a long, and sometimes lifelong, process. The good thing about the people’s movement is that it is always humbly learning from its mistakes and rectifying; it is always staying true to the mass line which is “Mula sa masa, tungo sa masa.” I think that as long as writers are committed to the masses, they will remain committed to literature.
Another stark and fundamental difference between committed and non-committed writing is the dissolution of the individual author figure in committed literature, so that it is a whole people that is writing history and changing the world. Ang mga tula ni Kerima ay hindi lamang kanya, kundi mula at para sa sambayanang Pilipino. Writers commit to fighting for the revolution alongside their comrades and the masses. Together they study, do criticism and self-criticism, struggle and resist.
With that, I would like to end with the words of an exemplary Filipino committed writer, Jose Ma. Sison, words that I feel could also have been spoken by the brave, brilliant, and revolutionary Edel Garcellano:
“Hindi natin kinatatakutan ang kritisismo dahil ang ating layunin ay lagi nang paglingkuran ang sambayanan, kaya naman kailangang handa tayong lagi na ibigay sa kanila ang pinakamahusay na magagawa natin. Sa hanay ng mga kasama at kaibigan, kailangang angkin nating lagi ang kababaang-loob ng maamong kalabaw na minarapat ilarawan ni Lu Hsun .… Gayunman, sa kaaway ay mabangis tayo at hindi natin siya dapat pakitaan ng munti mang tanda ng pangangayupapa.”
Maraming salamat po.
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