Introduction to THE ARMED PARAMOUR IN A TIME OF TERROR by E. SAN JUAN, JR.

 Jack Hirschman presents the Introduction to

The Armed Paramour in a Time of Terror by E. San Juan, Jr.

(UST Publishing House, 2024)

BOOK LINK

INTRODUCTION

To introduce this most important book of poems by E. San Juan, Jr., it is essential that I quote one of the most incredible paragraphs of political insight written by the late, great American Revolutionary Nelson Peery in his book, Black Fire:

            If the Americans had never committed genocide against the Indian; if they had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples of this land; if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never developed the most widespread, brutal, exploitative system of slavery the world has ever known; if it had never held carnivals of torture and lynching of its black people; if it had never sundered and fractured and ground Mexico into the dust; if it had never attacked gallant, defenseless Puerto Rico and never turned that lovely land into a cesspool to compete with the cesspool it had created in Panama; if it had never bled Latin America of its wealth and had never cast her exhausted peoples onto the dung heap of disease and ignorance and starvation; if it had never financed and braced the Fascist dictatorships; if it had never pushed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the jaws of hell—if America had never done any of these things—history would still create a bar of judgment for what the American people did to the Philippines.

 

The Armed Paramour in a Time of Terror is a brilliant extension of Peery’s words. Its author and translator, the Filipino poet is Sonny San Juan.  

Indeed Sonny, who was born in Manila, Philippines in 1938 has been one of the most international revolutionary thinkers and poets in the academic world of the U.S. for a whole generation.

In the years after his graduate studies at Harvard University, San Juan became involved in the anti-U.S.-Marcos dictatorship movement and the organizing of progressive Filipinos in the U.S. He participated in UGNAYAN, in Attica Brigade, Committees of Correspondence, and wrote for the radical Guardian, Left Curve, and other journals. He has lectured in various universities in the U.S., the Philippines, Belgium, Italy, UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.

He has written brilliantly about the great Filipino revolutionary writer Carlos Bulosan, as well as about the El Salvadoran communist poet Roque Dalton, among many other cultural essays. And now his own marvelous Filipino poetry is at hand.

The Philippines and its colonization by the U.S. is one of the great tragedies of the modern era. Sonny San Juan’s poetry is a fighting response to that tragedy and should be hailed in that context.

             Jack Hirschman

      Emeritus Poet Laureate of San Francisco

 

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Jack Hirschman is a celebrated American poet, activist, and teacher. Information about him can be found HERE and HERE.