On protest poetry according to Lumbera

By Noel Galon de Leon

I find myself once again in the familiar, almost ritualistic act of reading manuscripts for the San Agustin Writers Workshop, this time for its 22nd iteration to be held in January 2025 at the University of San Agustin in Iloilo City. This is already my third year as Workshop Director, and yet the experience never becomes routine. Each batch of manuscripts carries with it a sense of urgency, as if every writer is quietly asking to be heard, understood, and taken seriously.

What I deeply appreciate about this work is the privilege of proximity. I am close to the pulse of contemporary writing in Western Visayas, and increasingly, beyond it. I encounter new voices, familiar anxieties, recurring angers, and evolving forms. At the same time, I am fortunate to listen to fellow panelists whose critical insights sharpen my own thinking. These exchanges remind me that literature does not grow in isolation. It grows through dialogue, friction, and disagreement.

Over the years, it has become clear to me that the San Agustin Writers Workshop can no longer be described as merely regional. Writers from other parts of the country continue to apply and participate. This consistent interest suggests that the questions raised here resonate nationally. It also means that the responsibility of shaping conversations within the workshop has grown heavier, especially when dealing with politically charged forms such as protest poetry.

It is in this context that protest poetry has returned to the center of my attention. While reading a Filipino poem grounded in activism, I felt a familiar intellectual pull, a return to formative texts that shaped my understanding of political writing. Almost instinctively, I thought of Bienvenido Lumbera. His work has become a kind of ethical compass for me whenever protest poetry is discussed.

I first encountered Lumbera’s protest poems when I was a college student studying Communication Arts at the same university. At that time, I was still discovering what poetry could do. Lumbera’s poems startled me. They did not whisper. They confronted. They demanded attention, not through grandstanding, but through clarity and conviction.

What impressed me most then was his language of protest. Lumbera’s vocabulary was precise, grounded, and unsentimental. He did not romanticize suffering, nor did he dilute anger. As a reader, I felt transported into the very space of dissent. I was not observing a protest from afar; I was standing in the middle of it. That experience permanently altered my expectations of what poetry could accomplish.

Now, years later, as I read new poems that attempt to grapple with activism, I realize how enduring Lumbera’s lessons are. His work continues to ask difficult questions of writers who claim political engagement. It is no longer enough to write about injustice. The real challenge lies in how one writes, and more importantly, from where one writes.

In Poetika/Politika: Tinipong mga Tula, Lumbera articulates, both implicitly and explicitly, a framework for protest poetry grounded in three interrelated concepts: pakikiisa, pagtutol, and pakikibaka. These are not decorative themes. They are ethical commitments that shape the poem’s direction, tone, and purpose.

At first glance, these concepts may appear straightforward, almost instructional. But Lumbera does not offer them as a checklist. Instead, he presents them as a way of rethinking poetry itself, not merely as an artistic practice but as an intervention in social reality.

Protest poetry, in Lumbera’s view, is not a genre that exists comfortably within creative writing workshops. It is a call to action, a refusal to remain neutral. It insists that poetry has a stake in history, that it participates in the struggle over meaning, memory, and power.

One of the most provocative questions his poetry leaves us with is deceptively simple: so what if you write a protest poem? This question destabilizes complacency. It forces writers to confront the possibility that their work may be politically correct yet ethically hollow.

Do our poems genuinely stand with those who suffer, or do they merely borrow the language of suffering? Do they resist injustice, or do they aestheticize it? These are not questions about technique alone. They are questions about integrity.

The first concept, pakikiisa, demands that the poet locate themselves clearly within the poem. For Lumbera, there is no such thing as a detached protest poet. The poem is an extension of the poet’s convictions, shaped by lived experience and conscious alignment with the oppressed.

Pakikiisa requires self-examination. Writers must ask whom they are standing with and why. It also requires humility. To write in solidarity is not to speak for others, but to speak alongside them, aware of one’s own limits and privileges.

This is where many protest poems falter. They speak loudly but stand nowhere. They gesture toward injustice without committing to a position. Lumbera’s work reminds us that solidarity must be felt, lived, and sustained beyond the page.

The second concept, pagtutol, is equally demanding. Pagtutol, for Lumbera, is not confined to rhetoric. It is not satisfied with clever metaphors or biting irony. It is a conscious refusal to accept violence, corruption, and inequality as normal.

Poetry, in this sense, becomes a site of confrontation. It questions official narratives, exposes silences, and insists on remembering what power would rather forget. But this resistance must be embodied. A poet who writes against exploitation must also reject it in their own life and choices.

Lumbera’s insistence on lived resistance challenges writers who treat protest poetry as performance. Anger in a poem is meaningless if it is not matched by anger toward real injustices. Critique loses its force when it is disconnected from action.

The third concept, pakikibaka, brings everything into sharper focus. Pakikibaka implies movement, risk, and continuity. It acknowledges that writing alone is not enough, yet it also affirms that writing has a role in sustaining collective struggle.

Lumbera’s poems suggest that struggle can take many forms. It may mean marching in the streets, standing at historical sites of resistance, or speaking persistently through poetry when other platforms are denied. What matters is the refusal to be silent.

There is also an implicit faith in the future embedded in this idea of struggle. Poems are written with the hope that they will be read later, that they will ignite conversations, provoke discomfort, and inspire action in contexts the poet may never witness.

This temporal dimension of protest poetry is often overlooked. Writers are not only addressing their present moment; they are leaving traces for future readers. In this sense, protest poetry becomes a form of testimony.

What I find most compelling about Lumbera’s approach is its refusal to separate aesthetics from ethics. Beauty, in his poems, is inseparable from truth. Craft serves conviction, not the other way around.

This challenges the way protest poetry is sometimes taught or evaluated. Too often, political poems are either dismissed as propaganda or praised solely for their message. Lumbera shows us that rigor and commitment can, and must, coexist.

For young writers especially, his work offers a necessary corrective. Writing politically is not about sounding radical. It is about being accountable, to one’s subject, one’s readers, and oneself.

As a workshop director and teacher, I am constantly negotiating this tension. How do we encourage political engagement without prescribing ideology? Lumbera’s work offers a way forward by emphasizing responsibility rather than dogma.

Protest poetry, at its best, unsettles both writer and reader. It refuses comfort. It insists that art is not exempt from the demands of justice. Lumbera understood this deeply, and his poems continue to challenge us to rise to that standard.

Returning to his work now, I realize that these lessons are not merely literary. They are ethical guideposts for navigating a world marked by persistent inequality and manufactured forgetting.

To write protest poetry, then, is to accept a burden. It is to recognize that words matter, that they can wound or heal, conceal or reveal. Lumbera teaches us to choose revelation, even when it is inconvenient.

This is what I carry with me as I read new manuscripts and mentor emerging writers. We do not write simply because we can. We write because poetry remains one of the most human ways of searching for truth, and once truth is found, it demands to be spoken, clearly, courageously, and without retreat.

(This essay was composed last month, before the commencement of the 22nd San Agustin Writers Workshop. An excerpt was subsequently presented by the author during a craft lecture at the workshop.)