A handful of Filipino authors made public their decision to refuse the horror “honor” of being invited to the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF), especially after said event declared its Zionist position of standing “with complete solidarity on the side of Israel” back in October 2023, punctuated by the indefinite delay and eventual cancellation of the awarding ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli, and her novel Minor Detail. This “ethically indefensible decision” in effect censored a literary work that “juxtaposes the true story of the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by an Israel army unit in 1949 with the fictional story of a female journalist investigating the crime in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.”
Not content with a low (and somewhat defensive) blow against freedom of expression, FBF director Juergen Boos launched a predictable scripted offensive and decried the crocodile-tear-inducing accusatory “anti-Semitism.” He also announced the staging in the Fair’s cultural and political pavilion of the pacifist-sounding but actually remorseless event called “Out of Concern for Israel”
More than 500 publishers across the globe, through the collective Publishers for Palestine, demand organizers of the FBF to essentially cut ties with Israel and particularly “to condemn Israel’s regime of genocide in Gaza and affirm the human rights of the Palestinian people; to refuse collaboration with complicit Israeli book publishers, including their participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair; to denounce the attacks on Palestinian writers, journalists, and academics and acknowledge that such attacks are part of a genocidal project seeking to erase Palestinian life and culture; and to create programming that prominently features Palestinian writers, publishers, and narratives.”
The genocide-complicit Frankfurt Book Fair shrugs off what UN experts called a “scholasticide” that left an unprecedented trail of blood and rubble, of academics and research infrastructure. Israel targeted and killed Sufian Tayeh, leading researcher in theoretical physics and applied mathematics and the president of the Islamic University of Gaza, along with some of his family members. Sufian Tayeh is just one of the many Palestinian scientists, academic scholars, and artists killed by Israel as part of the occupation entity’s scholasticide campaign.
But Filipino writers attending the FBF—some of whom filled slots vacated by those who declined the Zionist-wrath-farmed laurel wreath—turn a blind eye and/or cope by convincing themselves and their projected national readership that visibility in a renowned international platform is a much-needed break to introduce Philippine literature to the world.
Eyeing the “guest of honor” status of the country come 2025, the apolitical literati plays the dangerous game of superficial representation politics as means to promote homegrown “genius” via an international stage. This time-to-shine chance of a dispossessed people (such as ours) relegates another dispossessed people (such as the Palestinians) to collateral irrelevance, in contradistinction to the aspirational call “From Palestine to Philippines, Stop the US War Machine”—a call of solidarity that might be unfamiliar or worse, deemed “anti-Semitic” and “violent” by FBF enjoyers, echoing their un/intended Zionist patrons.
A few were even wearing gear emblazoned with indigenous motifs, never once blindsided by the fact that the apartheid, the ethnic cleansing, and the genocide in Palestine were consequences of the Western colonial landgrabbing of Palestinian indigenous land. And that the struggles of almost all indigenous groups on earth are almost always land struggles. For these delegates, markers from indigenous peoples’ cultures in the Philippines are ornaments to a costume party, not expressions of solidarity with the associated struggles for self-determination of indigenous peoples. Twelve percent of the overall Israeli arms exports go to the Armed Forces of the Philippines, whose various units operating in the Philippine countryside are responsible for the destruction of indigenous people’s schools, homes, and lands–where almost all the lands are ancestral lands needing to be ethnically cleansed for privatization.
Boasting of more than 60,000 new book titles in 2023 alone, Germany rightly deserves the reputation of hosting (and regulating) the world’s most celebrated book fair. But as the great-power-great-responsibility cliché goes, FBF is again far from being fair, serving as bad breath of air freshener overpowered by the tang of burnt charcoal and saltpeter that rises from imperialist-prompted war zones in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon.
The Frankfurt Book Fair, as an institution has never once distanced itself from, nor is it critical of, Germany’s avid role in and unconditional support of the Palestinian genocide. On 14 October 2024, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, expressing uncritical support for Israel, said that “Israel can kill civilians”. And the statement was made around the same time period as the release of a video of a Palestinian hospital patient, a nineteen year-old teen who was shown still connected to an IV drip and flailing helplessly while being burned to death by an Israeli airstrike.
Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power emboldened some writers of Southern Philippines to express a warped sense of relief with militarization in Mindanao, after the Marawi Siege and the series of bombings that forced the closure of Lumad schools. The degree of complicity of supposedly enlightened lot of artists and writers with state violence varies. To categorize a few: (1) Palanca apologists who disregard the award’s La Tondeña roots that prompted a historical labor strike; (2) COWARD “cultural renaissance” advocates that supported Ferdinand Marcos Sr. as their “only guarantee for survival at this point” in the 1986 special elections to legitimate the extension of tyrannical rule through a “democratic” exercise; (3) National Artist (NA) groupies that gloss over the said “most prestigious” national award as actual Marcosian legacy due to the sub/conscious ambition that someday it will be their turn; and (4) the FBF enjoyers—that I believe to be the worst of the lot. Worst enough to drag me out of my unintended and indefinite DavaoToday hiatus. The most abominable ones of them being those who return to the country and live their writerly lives without having to think about the genocide they deodorized–yet to no avail as the sulfuric stench of gunpowder lingers and aggravates our apocalyptic climate situation.
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This recent disinclination to comment on matters dear to me differs from prominent literary stalwarts who weighed in on certain national and international issues, with regards to literary accolades. Jose Dalisay, for instance, was compelled to write in Filipino just to say that let’s all just write, I wanna write, I wrote a lot because I didn’t waste my time arguing, etc tl;dr version: Let’s just all get along and chill. Rather than writing a poem for another politician (or perhaps a commissioned biography a la Dalisay), Virgilio Almario wasted a few minutes of his time to lecture MJ Rafal that anti-war poetry and peace advocacy should hear both sides (a derisorily callous take that means one must listen to both the Nazi’s victim and the Nazi and that the IDF bulldozing pregnant women in labor is somehow equally wrong as Hamas fighting to stop the IDF from bulldozing pregnant women to death and annihilating the Palestinian people).
Not being a Palanca awardee hence never on the way to Hall of Fame breakthrough then National Artist rockstardom then towards the wettest of the wet dreams of Philippine literati: the Nobel Peace prize world-domination, I am (objectively speaking, esp. in stark contrast to the two aforementioned greats) a nobody who is just somebody preoccupied (even fixated) with matters other than literary éclat. This article is driven by a simple and basic (not really–or rather far from–“radical”) humanist position that the likes of Dalisay and Almario might (feign to?) share with the rest of the nation and the world. Isn’t the “liberal” stance to let everyone speak and not discourage criticism? Critics of the Palanca, who likewise deserve to be heard, remain voices in the wilderness that reach a few people compared with the reach of award-winners and wet-dreamers. Isn’t the supposed “nationalist” stance to be in solidarity with nations in the same boat as ours? What was thought as fence-sitting and both-sides-ing is tilting the power dynamics in favor of the dominant positionality–a “centrism” that is rather illiberal and faux-nationalist. Dogmatic pacifism amid genocide is closet fascism.
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Resonant with Junior’s Marcosian Bagong Pilipinas, the surface-level apolitical participation of Filipino writers in a genocide-complicit literary affair such as the FBF champions a hegemonic politics that privileges careeristic survival over basic humanist compassion.
Does grabbing the opportunity to promote novels, anthologies of short stories, collections of essays, chapbooks of poetry, komiks, picture books for children, take precedence over censorship of author by virtue of race, lives of fellow writers cut short hence denying them of writing more books, children robbed of their future, and destruction of cultural life through bombardment of libraries and schools?
How do the apolitical literati and intellectuals still have the audacity to romanticize Europe and the benevolence of the West, after supposedly studying (and teaching!) literary history? Will their treachery ever dawn on themselves, with “a vulture of silence” going through their viscera a la aswang? Will their misery gnaw at their souls enough for them to fall silent and be ashamed of themselves? Will the guilt of drinking Buchmesse kool-aid drive them to walk the talk and make amends by linking arms with Publishers for Palestine and other anti-imperialist efforts? Or will they chest-thump and kayumanggi pride their way as a coping mechanism?
What to do with literary careers that licked the blood off of the hands of genocidal maniacs worse than perpetrators of drug war and cronies of martial law? Isn’t it time to bite? No? Are congratulations still in order as courtesy to our esteemed writers, envied by naysayers, greatest wordsmiths of the Malayan race, the best offerings of Philippine letters? Mabuhay? Padayon?
Frankfurt Book Fair, israel, palestine, philippines
