As an extension of Aurelio Solver Agcaoili�s longstanding project of enacting poetry as memory, interrogation, and intervention, I Have Seen This: A Poetry of Witness, the third book of his The Negros Trilogy, enacts poetry as an effort to keep the human record open when political power, historical convenience, or collective fatigue would close it. Logically and aesthetically intertwined with The Arsenal of Words and We Left & They Kept Dying, the three works now stand complete, their pages speaking to one another, a conversation always about the obligation of poetry in the face of the normalized tragedy that has become the problem of the Philippines today. At once aesthetic and ethical, these poems of witness implicate both poet and reader. To remember is to resist; to speak is to insist that what happened matters, that the dead remain within the moral imagination of the living, and that poetry can stand against the violence of forgetting and bind us together in remembering. Those of us who have witnessed the more recent past are reminded of the dangers of seeing, of becoming witnesses. And if one has seen, can that person ever unsee? Here, we ask one difficult and heavy question: What is it to become a poet and a witness at the same time?
Junley L. Lazaga University of the Philippines Baguio
I Have Seen This: A Poetry of Witness, the third in Aurelio Agcaoili�s The Negros Trilogy, is animated by a poetics of witnessing, where seeing becomes an ethical obligation and remembering an act of love. Moving across colonial conquest, Martial Law, militarized violence, and the afterlives of empire, these poems listen for what remains after the violence has passed: the names, the bodies, the silences, the songs. Their lilt, at once incantatory, elegiac, and insistent, pays homage to the dallot, an Indigenous form of remembering, and gathers the scattered fragments of lives that history has tried to forget. As counter-archive, the collection bridges the Philippines and Hawai�i, making language a place where the living meet the dead, and where witnessing remains unfinished pact with both.
Mark Louie T. Ibunuan University of Northern Philippines
Artwork: Brenda Subido-Dacpano