by Alfonso Manalastas
The pitch-black swallow of a TV screen flickering off
You recount the dead until you fumble over the math
Fifteen hundred and one, fifteen hundred and two
From names, you regurgitate numbers and gigabytes
Headlines looking more and more like obituaries
Staggering from their appointed places on the paper
Straight to the front page, bold font, as if to say look!
And so you look, if only briefly, at all this expiration
How lucky you are to still be warm and breathing
To still be writing silly little poems about human grief
The sorry state in which we bleed becomes nothing
More than a punctuation, gunpowder and lush red,
Vibrating like a pulse engine right before it conks out
You recount the dead until you fumble over the myth
Recount until you run out of fingers to count them with
If written words could stutter, is this how they sound?
Like the static of a broken TV channel bubbling cold
In a manner at times more chilling than total silence
Where all our aches and grievances are distilled into a hum
You turn on the TV and find nothing, and on the streets,
More nothing. And from nothingness, you muster
Nothing. And when they try to devour us with a hunger
So infinite, we will wholly surrender to them nothing.
Alfonso Manalastas: “Country of Nothings” is a lamentation of the Duterte government’s state-sanctioned closure of the largest TV network in the Philippines happening alongside the railroaded passage of the Anti-Terror Law, which allows the state to arbitrarily crack down on critics and activists by tagging them as “terrorists”. The Duterte regime has successfully exploited the pandemic to justify its increased militarisation, from hijacking mass demonstrations under the guise of public safety and security, to targeting journalists and activists with trumped up charges, all in an attempt to curtail public dissent.
On top of these developments is the enduring problem of Covid-19 in the country and the lack of government support for our healthcare institutions—something that we are no longer able to openly critique and admonish due to the Anti-Terror Law corroborating with the state’s blatant and brazen assault on media, allowing impunity and abuse of police power to go unreported. “Country of Nothings” seeks to reimagine a Philippine context in which all channels of resistance, including media and protest action, are muted by an oppressive government’s active whitewashing of both its criminal negligence and deliberate perpetuation of human rights abuses.
With the looming 2022 elections opening up opportunities for more shameless political machinations by the ruling class, “Country of Nothings” is one of the poet’s attempts to take part in the larger conversation, to exhaust one’s grievances, and to approximate the experience of an activist living under tyranny.
Published: Tuesday 16 November 2021[RETURN TO WRITE TO POWER]
Alfonso Manalastas is a poet from Butuan City, now based in Manila. He won the grand prize for the 2021 Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards (English language category). His works have been published in LIKHAAN, Kritika Kultura, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among other places. He is a member of the artist collective Dakila and the cultural mass organisation Tambisan sa Sining.