The Youth Is On Fire Issue 6: Rage by The Youth Is On Fire

Rage TYIOF Issue 6 Chalk Bedrooms by Rhick Lars Vladimer Albay p. 4 Dye, Bitch by Samantha Gonzales p. 9 Notes or The Narrative Essay I Couldn’t Write Because I Had Too Many Feelings by DC Mostrales p. 10 Smoke Signals by Jam Pascual p. 14 Growing Pains by Elise Ofilada p. 20 Pressing Matters by Danna Peña p. 21 8:42 by Bea Sacdalan p. 23

Cover art by Jan Alaba 2

Art by Ivan Jose

hen the dark and horrifying year of 2016 came to a close, most of us thought, well, surely 2017 will be better. It has not been. This year and this country have seen numerous atrocities committed from positions of unchecked power. The burial of a dictator in the hero’s cemetery. The continued genocide of accused drug users. Attempts to disempower the Commission on Human Rights. And if the recent flood of sexual abuse allegations coming from both Hollywood and Manila are any indication, the patriarchy has not been crushed. What you’ll find in this issue of The Youth Is On Fire, though, are the voices of those who have processed the state of society in their own unique ways, but always, always, from a place of fury. It can be hard to stay hopeful in the midst of all this, when some terrible event seems to make the news every damn day. But may the works of art here stoke the flames of unrest inside you and keep your anger burning. Lord knows that’s what we need.

Chalk bedrooms by Rhick Lars Vladimer Albay Art by Hannah Aquino

Let me draw chalk bedrooms on the pavement: Here a wall, here a door, trace a cardboard box for a bed. Close your eyes though the city does not allow sleep let the throb of your chest drown out the sirens, find shelter under bullet-ridden canopies. I don’t feel safe in my own home, the mother whispers under her breath making sure her child doesn’t hear. She knows the streets are plied by the ghost of drug lords tattoos on taxi hoods, wheels grinding under a driver’s blood shot eyes, lights flickering “vacant.” The boy who will die tonight feels the cold concrete against his spine and hears alley cats and stray dogs whimper before vanishing into the thick night. There is solace in tracing streets, Knowing Iznart intersects Rizal, and Rizal cuts a corner to JM Basa, and JM Basa slithers back to Iznart, as MulleLoney will always follow the shape of the Iloilo River but everything else changes too often. 5

Art by Jehu Pascua

DYE, BITCH! by Samantha Gonzales Art by Ivan Jose

Pulang kalsada, eskenitang marumi Pulang ilaw, sirenang nakaririndi Pulang mata, pulang bungo, pulang luha Pulang langit, pulang buwan, pulang dutsa Asul na kuwelyo, hawak ang mga baril Asul na ulap, padilim nang padilim Asul na diwang nawalay na sa pamilya Asul na gabing naluluha ang Ina Dilaw na kamay, laging hinuhugasan Dilaw na tao, laging hinuhusgahan Dilaw na bukas kailan ba liliwanag Dilaw na loob kailan ba mapapanatag Puting van darampot ng katawan Puting tela pangkubli ng napaslang Puting budhu, mga nagbubulag-bulagan Puting patay, naipon na, kunyari nanlaban 9

Notes or The Narrative Essay I Couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Write Because I Had Too Many Feelings by DC Mostrales

1.) Anger begins with care. 2.) The City. Or Too Many Assholes Who Cut In Line. Or Many Elbows in Close Proximity. Or If You Think Everyone Around You Is an Asshole, Guess Who the Asshole Is? 3.) I know a radical feminist who voted for Him. Her reasoning: regardless of who sits in Malacanyang, she will inevitably have to oppose them; she voted for the person most likely to address her specifically Bisaya concerns. One can’t presume to know the moral axis people subscribe to. 4.) On the demographics won over besides the Bisaya: Classes ABC, Mindanawon, Moro – yes, still largely true, despite the destruction of Marawi. 5.) I can’t account for all these voices, nor will I attempt to. You can ask them yourself. If you don’t have anyone to ask in your immediate circle, then that in itself is telling. 6.) We like to say how our anger, our voices are valid? But by the same logic of that tradition, have we considered that perhaps it is not our voices that merits the spotlight? “Taga-Mindanao ka ba?”

7.) I am Mindanawon. But I will make a presumption: most of my readers are not. Here’s the confession: I am glad you didn’t “take your seat.” 8.) Who has the right to be angry? If everyone is angry? 9.) The City. Or The Nation. Or We Really Need to Learn How to Talk to Each Other. Or I Am Not a Fan of Using “Experience” to Bludgeon Discourse. 10.) Pornography makes a spectacle out of the excess of body fluids. Semen, of course. But also blood, sweat, tears. 11.) Pornography: Blood. 12.) Go ahead, be angry. It is natural. It is valid. However, don’t confuse it for substance. One can be angry and substantial but anger is not a prerequisite to speech. Language is our mutual task. 13.) Do you disagree with me or do I just sound like a person you don’t want to be friends with? 14.) The Nation is much too big for “friends”. Or Twitter.

15.) On the Algorithm: I once called out a friend who was shookt that anyone from his immediate circle was admin-critical – this despite my consistent ingay since Day 1. Don’t trust your feed. 16.) It is important that a politician is not the Beloved. Even if you have married a politician. Especially when you have married the politician. (In which case, you make love to a person - still not a politician.) 17.) Pornography: Sweat. 18.) No, I am not offering apologia nor am I reiterating that old anodyne about how we shouldn’t judge “bobotantes” too harshly because they have suffered. Nobly. “They had little choice”. Or “it’s not their fault they think that way.” I don’t believe in treating adults like children, 19.) No, what I am offering is exactly judgment. Yes, to listening. Yes, to empathy. But, afterwards, judgment. 20.) The zone between contemplation and action and how those categories are false how we can commit to one without losing the other. 21.) Poetry makes nothing happen.

22.) Neither does the essay. Or music. “Political” literature is one that discourses the political, but consumption cannot itself constitute the political act that which necessarily occurs in the public. Outside of your home. 23.) Nope, nothing happening here either. 24.) On the private sphere: Knock-knock. Who’s there? PNP. PNP who? *BANG* 25.) Ece Temelkuran says, “Times of oppression create the spectacular oppressor and the spectacular victim. I am now supposed to fill the shoes of this person called “the victim.” It is a full-time job, a non-stop act... [W]hen a woman from the audience, holding her hands together with the graciousness of the Pope washing the feet of the poor, asks me, “So what CAN WE do for you?” I answer: “I feel like a baby panda that you’re trying to adopt on a website!”” 26.) Once, I took a plane home. As my father and I were driving away from the airport, we saw a still-steaming corpse and a bullet-ridden SUV by the roadside. My dad asked me about what I plan to do after college. 27.) I posted a status on Facebook about it. Friends from Manila were horrified;

they offered words of concern and encouragement. Friends from home where delighted I was back. “Where do you wanna hang out!?” 28.) Horror is a luxury. 29.) Typhoon Sendong hit Iligan City over Christmas. There was a great debate on how to properly show solidarity and mourning for the displaced. “How dare they celebrate when some people can’t.” Truth is, the displaced couldn’t care less about how anyone else felt. A kind of future had disappeared. They wanted someone to give that back to them. Otherwise, the only thing to be done was to keep walking forward. 30.) Dorte Jessen working in Dadaab, Kenya during a 2011 famine, in the account of Mathew Sweet: “They didn’t talk or express any emotion. They just kept walking. Once you are past a certain point of exhaustion, there is simply no energy to spare to get emotional.”

34.) Martha Nussbaum: “The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching, and we therefore have reason to fear a similar reversal.” 35.) Secetary Vitaliano Napeñas Aguirre II: ““We should be scared, if they can do it to me, they can do it to anybody even to the Senators themselves.” 36.) Pornhub is the most earnest place in cyberspace. When you could become rubberDaddyxXXXx, the idea of performance starts to vanish. Honesty emerges when everyone wears a mask. Here, there are no “friends”, only hunger. 37.) Disclosure: at one point, I seriously considered voting for Him, too. I didn’t. This is not meant to exculpate me – but to highlight that when, I speak of the fragility of the human heart, I am really talking about me.

31.) Sorrow is a luxury, too.

38.) Jesus said, “Become passers-by.”

32.) Pornography: Tears.

39.) Anger begins with care. But Wrath is slavery to ourselves.

33.) Maybe, politics is not what we feel. But what we do.

40.) Begin.

Art by Willem Dimas 13

Smoke signals Artist collective Ugatlahi demonstrates that rebellion is an art form. by Jam Pascual Photos by Noel Celis

hen President Rodrigo Duterte announced that September 21, 2017 would be a “national day of protest,” the mood leading up to that day was a boiling cauldron of unrest. There was the rage, confusion and anxiety, exacerbated by hints of possible martial law declaration and memories of the First Quarter Storm. It seemed though that for artist collective Ugatlahi — whose members can be as young as 17 years old — the response was clear: do what they’ve always done, and disparage the image of the powerful and corrupt. And that’s what they did on September 21 with Rody’s Cube, a makeshift Rubik’s cube made of three spinning layers, its four sides depicting Duterte, Adolf Hitler, Ferdinand Marcos, and a generic tuta. And like any good effigy, it was burned to the ground — the artwork fanning the flames of rage in the process. We spoke to the NCR coordinator of Ugatlahi, Max Santiago, about how they do what they do, and what the artist’s responsibility should be in these strange times. Can you describe the creative process behind the Rody’s Cube? How did you come to the idea, and what was it like actually making the thing? We’ve been quite busy prior to the production of Rody’s Cube. We’ve just finished an effigy for the rally at the US Embassy on September 15, so coming up with something huge and aesthetically pleasing was a big challenge since there was only just a few days left. The

construction of a paper mache effigy usually takes up seven days, and we had less than seven days for the Sept 21 rally. And on top of that, we also had other tasks at hand. We are an organization and not a just a typical small group or barkada. It is also our duty to mobilize people for the September 21 rally. We immediately held a quick consultation on the 16th and one of our lead artists, Luigi Almuena, floated the idea of constructing a huge 3D Rudy’s cube. The concept was initially meant for an editorial cartoon. The concept was lifted from a popular chant in the seventies “Hitler, Tuta, Diktador, Pasista”. But he suggested it was more fitting if it were a real, tangible cube. Being a flatsurfaced cube meant that we no longer had to sculpt a clay mold and apply paper mache... which is the usually the timeconsuming and labor-intensive part in effigy construction. All we had to do was to construct the cube. We immediately contacted Reynaldo Wenceslao, otherwise known as “Mang Naldo,” a master carpenter who’s been making armatures for the UGATLahi’s effigies for the past decade. He was responsible for the structure, which took two and a half days to make. The painting itself was done in just in a day. The effigy is a breakthrough in itself because it marks the departure from the paper mache effigy our audience is accustomed to. Teamwork is crucial in making effigies. No single artist takes center stage. And that’s the beauty of making effigies. The end product is the result of collaboration. No single artist could claim it to be his alone.

The cool thing about political effigies is that most, if not all of them, are meant to be burnt. Can you tell us about the artistic significance of burning what you’ve created? An effigy represents despicable personalities in society, usually of those in seats of power. They are usually rendered as grotesque beings; as enemies of the people. They are created out of easily combustible materials, unlike our heroes which are painstakingly carved out of stone or sculpted with durable metal. It is satisfying to watch an effigy burn. The process of effigy construction could only be complete when it is finally consumed by flames, otherwise, an effigy not burned is like a baby unborn. We know that art can be a tool for activism, but for the sake of deepening the discussion, what are the limits of art in terms of bringing about social change? There is a pressing need for artists to produce more powerful works that challenge the status quo. Thousands were brutally killed in the government’s war on drugs. They were deprived of the most basic of all human rights: the right to live. Tough questions needs to be asked: Is genocide the solution to the drug menace? And all this is happening even without the nationwide implementation of Martial Law.

There is a pressing need for artists to produce more powerful works that challenge the status quo. Thousands were brutally killed in the government’s war on drugs. They were deprived of the most basic of all human rights: the right to live. At the end of the day, art in itself is not enough to bring about social change. It engages, challenges and inspires the viewer. Art is a weapon, yes. But it could only do so much. A painting, no matter how politically correct, in itself, will not bring about social change. Revolution is a science. And in order to change society, the artist should realize his role in it. It is not enough to produce socially relevant art in the comfort zones of one’s studio. To change society, the artist should step outside, to learn more about the lives of the marginalized; the toiling peasant; the underpaid worker, the homeless vendor, and be amongst them in their struggle. They are, after all, the majority of the Filipino people.

Growing Pains for Kian Loyd delos Santos by Elise Ofilada Art by Jehu Pascua

Baby’s first political scandal summons a man who is named in reverse; On local TV, there is every noise. Plunder rhymes with sense of wonder. My mother takes my hand. Joseph Estrada steps down. Slowly. As all babies do, I learn to walk. VHS tapes start to die. I kick my brother, make him cry, but it is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who is saying I’m sorry, eyes dead, center on the camera where my mother is so angry. She is going to teach me a lesson: ABC is to ZTE, is to Hello, Garci. Whatever that means. In the third grade, all we studied were the words to Taylor Swift’s Fearless and I don’t know, she sings. How does it get better than this? My teacher asks me to join the school paper. In Maguindanao, Thirty-four journalists are murdered. There is radio silence. There are no songs about massacre. My mother changes the station, but all they are playing is Manny Villar’s jingle on infinite loop, asking kung nakaligo na ba ako sa dagat ng basura? No. All I’ve done is fold my fingers in the shape of my mother’s; in the shape of her mother’s; in the shape of an accusation that my classmates think is funny to put up on their foreheads. But, come election day, the letter Is not a symbol for loser. It only means we’ve elected too many ghosts. It only means my classmates and I do not go to high school because PNoy says it doesn’t exist, anymore than the forty-four, whose Exodus goes unaccounted for, like the time my best friend transferred schools to Antipolo. I took their hands and kissed them. This, too, is political. The PNP give a boy a gun, tell him to go run. When my mother asks me, what I want to be after Senior High, I must hesitate, before I say: I want to be alive. I turn eighteen to the sounds of thousands being shot every time Digong opens his mouth. This is the last juxtaposition. He says my god I hate everyone, while wiping blood off his hands with the viral headlines the media churn out, until they are clean. But the bodies are still swaddled in garbage bags, too dark for this time of day, I think, these poor people. The cardboard is still screaming. This corpse is an example of our progress; our justice, without justification. Tell me, Digong. What’s it like, on the losing side of the war? If you can call this a war. If it’s not just that no one’s getting any older. There is no growing up in a country that has yet to do the same. If my inheritance is babies crying because the government killed their fathers, you raise angry children who believe there is little left to lose.

Pressing Matters by Danna Peña Photo by Kris Cuaresma

In the darkest hours of the night, do you know this feeling? You come to me as a weightless punch. A crowdless riot, a causeless grief, a hollow ocean. That’s what you are to me— A tourist with no destination. A question with no answer.

8:42 by Bea Sacdalan

8:00. The moment I opened my eyes in the middle of the night, I was immediately disturbed because my mother turned off the lights again while I was sleeping. I found my pillow at the floor and my bed sheets messy. I felt a lump in my throat for some reason and it felt dry. I opened my lampshade; my windows welcomed the wind as they made the curtains sway. I felt the coldness but I was still thirsty. I got up and looked myself at the mirror of my old grandmother’s cabinet. I saw myself and noticed that I’ve been taking care of my eyebags for too long and I saw my body changed because of my weight loss. My last haircut was two months ago; my body was sulking. 8:13. My right foot ready to walk when I heard a gunshot though as if it happened right in front of ne because of the massive sound it created, I hurriedly looked ourside through my window and saw him dead with blood spilling out of his body. Frightened, I gathered all my courage to look at his face. His eyes. His eyes were open as if they were still alive asking me for help. Asking me to save him one last time. People rushed into the area, I heard my mother asking us if we were okay. “A-Ayos lang ako, Ma..” was all I could say while she hugeed me tightly. But, I know I was not. I was not okay. The moment I heard her shut the door was the moment I felt hot spilling tears running down. I heard people crying outside and crying for justice. But, I didn’t even dare to make a

sob. I was just crying silently though as if I was afraid someone could hear me. 8:24. “Why?” was all I could think of. Why does it have to be my friend? He was just trying to make his dreams work for him and for his family. He was just like a student like me. He was just like a son like me. He was just like me. He could be me. 8:29. Just as everything happened in the blink of an eye, I gathered all my strength to look outside my window again. No one was there anymore, even his body but the authorities examining the scene. It was as if another body was just to be killed, another person to sell. Another person to kill and be another contribution to the tally. 8:40. I looked intently to each person until my eyes lingered on this man wearing a well-ironed uniform and he was wiping off dust in his pants and his hands playing with his gun. At this, I dazed off, and only then he seemed to be aware of me and looked at me, sharply. But, I did not take off my stare. Until then, his lips turned into something else. He flashed a smirk as my lips shivered again. 8:42.

Photo by Nelissa Chua

Photo by Alphonzo Paco

Contributors Rhick Lars Vladimer Albay Samantha Gonzales DC Mostrales Elise Ofilada Danna Pena Jam Pascual Bea Sacdalan Jan Alaba Hannah Aquino Ivan Jose Jehu Pascua Nelissa Chua Kris Cuaresma Back cover by Neal Corpus

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