Opinion: against silence—the literary necessity of showing up at the Frankfurt Book Fair

The audibility of grief

Palestinian suffering was present not as a whisper but as a pulse, threading every conversation and performance, a proof that art translates tragedy more forcefully than speeches. Nowhere was this clearer than on the Philippine Pavilion stage.

Panaghoy ng Pinakamiserableng Babaeng Katha ni Rizal (Lament of the Most Wretched Woman Written by Rizal) held the room captive. Sisa, Rizal’s tragic heroine, no longer a relic of the past, moved among us as a ghost who refuses to expire, calling untiringly for her disappeared sons, Crispin and Basilio. Her lament now carries all the world’s grief. She is no longer only a victim of colonial cruelty but the living embodiment of modern suffering. I realised in that moment that theatre, like literature, can carry both the weight of a nation and the hushed pain of a child’s name spoken aloud, and it can stretch across oceans to touch a grief you have only ever known from the pages of a newspaper or a fleeting headline.

In the monologue, theatre artist Camille Abaya played Sisa, whose mothers, keeping vigil in the dark corners of modern-day Manila, beseeched to speak the names of their lost children, victims of the drug war. Then she began calling the names of boys killed in Gaza—Majed Al-Yazouri, Salman Abu-Hazein, Ibrahim Al-Shami, Kahlil Owaida, just four of the many names of Palestinian children she called. The room went still. Sisa’s grief became legible, carrying Gaza’s weight and the hush of a nation inching toward illiteracy. The piece proved imagination is not a refuge but confrontation. It reminded me that grief travels, that it can be witnessed and carried and returned through art, and that presence is a kind of prayer, a conversation without words that insists on being heard.

On memory as property and right

In the endless trading of rights and contracts, memory revealed itself as property, a thing to be guarded, contested, claimed and defended. In Frankfurt, I watched people trade rights to stories. It made sense suddenly that the most contested jurisdictions are not those over manuscripts in production but those over legacies already sealed, whose original authors cannot speak except through the living heirs who refuse to surrender the final narrative. The fight, then, is not merely for the book’s contract but for the custody of the finished life. I thought of the libraries I have visited, the old family collections where each worn spine is an argument, a claim, a memory, and I understood that the real fight is not only in words but in the protection of the life those words represent.

The struggle became concrete in the clash between the heirs of León María Guerrero and Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson. In the early sixties, Guerrero produced English translations of Rizal once celebrated around the world. Three decades later, Anderson critiqued them as politically distorted, which is a debate. But he crossed into personal territory, calling Guerrero “the alcoholic anti-American diplomat,” a permanent stain printed without evidence.

David Guerrero, son and literary trustee, answered with precision and dignity in defence of his father. Anderson conceded the personal blow in a private email. He maintained his scholarly critique, yet he died in December 2015 without publicly withdrawing the published accusation. The line was clear. The freedom to argue about books does not extend to inventing vices and setting them down as truth.

Philippine law, Article 353 of the Revised Penal Code, allows descendants to defend ancestral memory, permits critique and forbids fabrication. In a culture where family forms the spine of identity, the living guard the dead. It is not censorship. It is an insistence on truth.

In Frankfurt, watching rights change hands, I understood the lesson. Our greatest fight is not for books still being written but for lives already finished, and our presence, carrying grief, ghosts, literature, and law, became protest itself, a demand for the freedom to tell one’s story, the right to mourn names others would rather forget. The choice had never been between purity and complicity. It was between silence and audibility, between absence and assertion. To show up was to reject the convenience of quiet. It was to vote against forgetting, with the only instrument a writer has, which is to stand in a room and speak.

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