This is an homage to Mary Oliver and her poem Ghosts - her moving sermon for the lost bison herds of the American pioneer west, killed to starve the Native American tribes out.
It is also a eulogy to the sakadas of Negros Island - the migrant Filipino farm laborers who watched their children helpless as they starved to death, at the height of the Marcos martial law sugar plunder.
| Bayan Negros protest streamer says, "behind the smiles of MassKara lie hunger and poverty." |
In a decade of deliberate historical distortion the dictator's heirs have returned - brandishing their ill-gotten wealth in a bid to retell the tale of their ugly, nasty past into a burnished fable of their own making.