"The First Night of Interrogation" (poem)

J., a friend of mine who runs a printing press published this collection of poems by the activist Axel Pinpin. Tugmaang Matatabil is a powerful piece of prison literature. The exclamations of Pinpin’s poems lit and ignite one’s perception of the systemic and systematic abuses of power by those in power. It takes guts to convert this personal detestation of corruption into subversion and to fashion from it an indictment of human rights violation committed by the government. The poems renew the tradition of resistance and protest in the writings of National Artist Amado V. Hernandez. 

"Unang Gabi ng Interogasyon" (The First Night of Interrogation) is a key poem in the book. The poet wrote the following as a footnote to the poem:

This poem was extemporaneously recited by the author at the end of his interrogation on the night of April 28, 2006, in an unidentified place in Metro Manila (near the airport and railroad tracks). The writer was challenged by unknown armed men to recite a poem when they learned that he was a poet. He recited this while blindfolded, handcuffed at the back, and with a gun pointed at his head. The poet tried to recall the poem from that time and he first wrote it on the 9th of November 2006 when he was already in prison.

Sebald extract

If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that, of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.

- Max Sebald on Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Before, Bolaño, and after

BEFORE

AFTER

César Aira's forward march

"I don't read very much contemporary literature. There is so much to read. In the past, I remember that one lady told Borges that she read him, that she admired him so, and Borges asked her: But how come? Are you already done with all the good writers? (laughs) I march to that drum."

—César Aira: My ideal is the fairy tale

The librarian's last interview

Related:

The Paris Review interview
Three conversations: "I remember what I've read better than what has happened to me. Clearly one of the most important things that can happen to a man is to read one or another page that moves him. It's a very intense experience, no less intense than others."
Profile of a Writer: Borges (1983): 80 mins. "The film consists of interviews in English with Borges, as well as short dramatizations in Spanish of several of his stories."
etc.

La villa