The Guerrilla Is Like a Poet: Ang Gerilya Ay Tulad ng Makata
Jose Maria Sison
- Foreword by Jonas Staal
Published on September 27, 2013 by Uitgeverij, an imprint of punctum books
- Pages
- 296 pages
- Languages
- English, Filipino
- Dimensions
- 5.25⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-90-817091-8-7 (Paperback)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: POE009000, POL005000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: 5TFM-PH-A, DCF, JPFC, JWCG, NHTR
This book is titled after the world-renowned poem of Jose Maria Sison, “The Guerrilla Is Like a Poet,” which celebrates with natural imagery and in a lyrical way the Filipino people’s revolutionary struggle for national liberation and democracy against foreign and feudal oppression and exploitation. The book contains poems from Sison’s Prison and Beyond, which won the Southeast Asia WRITE Award, as well as new poems that further develop the theme of struggle for national and social liberation as well as exile. It also carries articles of creative writers on the significance and relevance of his poetry. Sison is a Filipino revolutionary with extensive guerrilla experience and has been a recognized poet since his student days at the University of the Philippines. The publication of this book has been sparked by the effort of the Academy for Cultural Activism of the New World Summit to present the people’s culture in the national democratic struggle in the Philippines.
Biographies
Jose Maria Sison (1939–2022) was a Filipino poet, political theorist, and revolutionary. A professor of literature at the University of the Philippines, he founded the reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968 and its armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA), the following year. Captured by Marcos's forces in 1977, he was imprisoned and tortured for nine years before being freed in 1986. He subsequently went into exile in the Netherlands, where, despite being designated a terrorist by the United States and the European Union, he continued to lead the CPP, pursue peace negotiations with the Philippine government, and write poetry and political theory until his death in Utrecht in 2022.
Jonas Staal is a Dutch visual artist and theorist whose work investigates the relationship between art, democracy, and political propaganda. He is the founder of the New World Summit (NWS), an artistic and political organization that builds alternative parliaments for movements and organizations banned from mainstream democratic processes, and the New World Academy (NWA), a collaborative educational project bringing together artists and political organizations engaged in emancipatory struggle. His practice spans installation, performance, and publication, and has been exhibited and staged internationally. He has published Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (2019) and Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (2024), both at MIT Press.
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Genres
- Fabulations
- Languages+Translations
- Manifesto!
Keywords
- anti-imperialism
- art and politics
- bilingual poetry
- Communist Party of the Philippines
- Philippines
- political imprisonment
- revolutionary poetry