Bilanggo: Life as a Political Prisoner in the Philippines 1952–1962 (review)

The true measure of freedom lies in one’s capacity to embrace the necessity to defend people’s rights to sovereignty, a life of good health, safety, and freedom. This is the great theme of William Pomeroy’s Bilanggo: Life as a Political Prisoner in the Philippines 1952–1962. A brave progressive and internationalist, Pomeroy embraced the goals of the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), which during the 1940s led the “country’s most effective guerrilla organization, the Hukbalahap” (213). Of working class origins from upstate New York, Pomeroy was one of the US soldiers who took part in the landings of the US army in October 1944. When the war ended, coming back to the Philippines as frequent as he could became his singular goal.

Pomeroy fell in love with the country and its struggling people. He studied at the University of the Philippines and became one of its respected writers. The spirit of internationalism pushed the power of Pomeroy’s pen and ink to their logical conclusions: the armed rebellion and a passionate love for one of its most brilliant and brave daughters, Celia Mariano. Together they lived through the most violent attacks on freedom. Yet through it all, theirs was a partnership that was made strong and constant by the struggle for national liberation against US imperialism.

The book documents their capture in 1952 when they were sentenced to life imprisonment, “and served ten years before being pardoned by President Carlos P. Garcia” (213). For all its honesty and relevance to the current struggle to free political prisoners, one cannot but be astounded by how Bilanggo reveals the uncanny yet resilient anti-imperialist standpoint of a white man. Pomeroy came all the way from the belly of the beast right into the fray. The Philippine national liberation movement and its armed component were sincerely embraced by him in all their compelling urgencies, actual dangers, and genuine promises:

When we joined the guerrilla struggle, it was with the full awareness of the possible consequences, which for thousands of our fellow Huks was death. While we were in the mountain forest, we had repeatedly faced death in many forms. If Celia had died in the open struggle, I would have mourned her, but it would have led to fiercer dedication; it would have been the same for her if I had been killed . . . But we were captured alive, and the alternatives were blurred . . . For us, there were two main concerns: our responsibilities to our movement and our devotion to each other.

(2)

Bilanggo contains eight chapters in which Pomeroy captures the paradoxical dispositions that radicals embrace: their hopes, fears, joys, frustrations, and loves. The moving moralism and asceticism of organized collectivities—a strength for Pomeroy—is captured in all their human richness as he tells his readers about internal conflicts, unbeatable sorrows, and relished joys. Bilanggo’s chapters are well thought out in that they consistently conjure images of space and time. Chapters refer to places while their subtitles point to time. Indeed, to live a life in incarceration is to deal, at the very least, with the tediousness of consciously counting the hours while being present in a constricted space.

All throughout the book, Pomeroy is mindful that acts committed against him and his comrades by prison personnel and men in uniform are all but concretizations of the impact of US imperialism on the people’s fight for freedom and sovereignty. In a sense, Pomeroy asserts a way of reading one’s experience in prison as both a direct result and a parallel condition of what is happening outside prison walls. And this is none other than the struggle between the conflicting interests of a global superpower and the anticolonial movement, which with Pomeroy’s participation had, by then, been clearly a global struggle of and through class waged by the exploited.

As if a constant reminder of the class component of the national liberation struggle...