Lorena Isang Tulambuhay by Pauline Mari Hernando (review)

A photo shows a timidly smiling woman standing against a wall that bears words deeply associated with the activist struggle against imperialism and feudalism, while emblazoned on this picture is her name, "Lorena," written in bold letters. This image is the cover of Pauline Mari Hernando's work, which one can easily dismiss as a simple biography. Stemming from Hernando's master's thesis as a student of Filipino in the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, the project highlights the personal and political life of Ma. Lorena Morelos Barros, a Filipina activist-revolutionary during Ferdinand Marcos's regime. Leaning on the notion that one's sociohistorical background exerts an influence on their literary production, Hernando analyzes the relationship between text and context by highlighting Barros's poetry—particularly the themes and imageries she used—in reconstructing a narrative of her life as a daughter, leader, wife, mother, and most especially as political activist turned revolutionary.

Encapsulated by the term tulambuhay, Hernando's approach to biography writing (talambuhay) is rooted in treating the subject's written poems (tula) as historical notes that help pinpoint significant events and are woven together to narrate the poet's life story from the poet's own point of view. Hernando recognizes and celebrates Lorena, first and foremost, as an intellectual whose literary and cultural works mirrored her increasing political involvement in progressive and later on revolutionary undertakings.

Barros began as an individualistic artist who wrote poems based on models she learned from petite bourgeois writers she encountered through the country's American-dominated education system and her participation in literary workshops. Later on she increasingly became aware of her responsibility to respond, through her writings, to the systemic violence that women and vulnerable classes experienced. Hernando traces Barros's radicalization from being a poet with bourgeois ideals to her pinnacle as a writer worthy of being tagged as an artista ng bayan (artist of the people), a radicalization that Barros underwent by joining and then leading progressive organizations and movements in UP. She got involved in the progressive women's movement, specifically the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA), and later on in the armed struggle against the Marcos regime, thereby becoming an aktibista ng bayan (activist of the people) as well (xvi). Barros's works as a renewed woman-poet emphasized the value of revolution, which could be brought about by her realization that the root cause of all of the nation's social ills, particularly those that afflicted peasants and urban workers, was the imperialist, feudal, and capitalist system that the ruling political and economic elite maintained.

The book consists of fourteen chapters that are divided in two parts. The first part, composed of chapters 1 to 8, deals with Barros's biography in the conventional sense. Here, Hernando weaves together various texts, both oral and written, that she has accessed through years of archival research and rigorous collection of stories and anecdotes via interviews. In a texturized, thorough, and ingenious manner, Hernando begins narrating Barros's revolutionary origins by looking back to the almost mythical figure of Barros's great grandfather Gervacio Eusebio, who, family members believed, was the last standing member of Andrés Bonifacio's Katipunan. At a young age Lorena heard stories about Eusebio's experiences as a revolutionary (2). Featuring this detail at the start of the book is vital because it situates when and how Lorena was awakened to a revolutionary sensibility and its painful and complex realities; at the same time, it highlights Hernando's ability to build a layered narrative by offering vivid historical facts that persist into the succeeding chapters.

Barros did not become a revolutionary overnight. Through discussions on her life in the first part of the book, Hernando shows how Barros's decision to join the revolution was molded and influenced not just by her sociohistorical background but by her personal relationships and experiences as well—a decision that culminated in her death at the hands...