‘The Gumamela Is Still Red’

Harsh Thakor

Joven Obrero’s ‘The Gumamela Is Still Red’, published earlier this year in March, as the sequel to her Warriors, Poets and Friends is a lucid, creative and comprehensive narrative of the revolutionary struggle of the people for national and social liberation in Mindanao. It navigates a very wide horizon of factors governing the uprising.

Like its antecedent, ‘The Gumamela Is Still red’ is mainly a book of poems but appropriately gravitates towards prose, such as narratives and correspondences, in order to dissect and categorise the poems in historical, class, and personal terms from the revolutionary perspective of the proletariat, all toiling masses of workers and peasants and the Lumad communities.

The author chose the Red Gumamela to epitomise the beauty, utility, and unbreakable strength of the People’s War in the Philippines–a war fought for more than half a century against the most vicious and powerful enemy in the world. Obrero’s use of the Gumamela is an appropriate choice as a metaphor for the revolutionary struggle of the people. It is a plant with large, vibrant red flowers that grows abundantly on the mountains, hills, and plains of the Philippines. This key metaphor symbolises and conveys the turning points of the revolutionary movement, reminiscent of weeds being cut off to plant a lotus. The author diagnoses or demarcates what is meaningful and beautiful in what many other people may overlook.

It is Red because it symbolises the communist spirit of our revolutionaries–their unwavering loyalty to the Party and the working classes, and their unequivocal dedication to the revolution in the face of so many odds.

Written as a personal, biographical account, ‘The Gumamela Is Still Red’ is a narrative of guerrilla life in Mindanao and of the revolutionaries who alight it.

The book inspires all freedom-loving Filipinos to never waver in their commitment to serve the people.

The current book of poems of Obrero deserves to be read by all patriots and revolutionaries and by all foreign friends in solidarity with them. The poems are crafted with finesse to do ample justice to the heroism, hard struggle, sacrifices, and aspirations of the communist cadres, Red fighters, and the masses.

Similar to the great Marxist revolutionaries, Obrero writes poetry in the legacy of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Pablo Neruda, and Maya Daniel (Felix Salditos), grafting the literal expressions to the actual direct language of the masses and to the need for underlining the specific problems that afflict them.

The book concludes that the Gumamela is still glittering red and urges the youth to revolt against the autocracy of Duterte and the entire repressive apparatus under which the broad masses of the people are trapped under intolerable conditions of oppression and exploitation. Obrero blesses the Communist Party of the Philippines, led a protracted people’s war, and does not express impatience or anxiety as long as all efforts are exerted to give birth to a liberated society.

The author justified why she chose to be in the mountains, among the peasants living the torturous and hazardous life of a guerrilla, forfeiting the luxuries of life.

While it is still a very incomplete picture of the People’s War, this book manifests the never-ending dream that will never be eclipsed by the test of time, typhoons, pandemics, and the merciless attacks of imperialism and its puppet regimes.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 52, June 22 - 28, 2025