[Exclusive Preview] Cicatrix — Elle’s Comic on The Philippines/American Complicacy

Panels from Cicatrix by Elle

The U.S.A. is a country built on war, feeding off of the unrest and upheavals across the world. In Cicatrix, indie artist Elle digs into America’s involvement — and the author’s family’s involvement — in propping up brutal regimes in The Philippines and atrocities around the world. Through beautiful illustrations, they poignantly unpack their own guilt as a young Filipino person born into a family that benefited from the Marcos regime, and how that materializes within the physical body.

WWAC offers this exclusive preview of Cicatrix, including an essay from Elle to help bring readers up to speed on what is happening in The Philippines. Cicatrix is available now for pre-order from Silver Sprocket. You can also purchase the related sticker pack, with 100% of proceeds going to BAYAN U.S.A., a grassroots alliance struggling for genuine democracy and sovereignty in The Philippines.

 

On May 9th, we voted in the 17th Philippine national elections. Not even before the day ended, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. was widely recognized as the obvious winner, with an unprecedented thirty-something million votes, according to the live (although partial and unofficial) count. Duterte, the current president, scored only around sixteen million votes in the 2016 elections.

It was a campaign season characterized by a rampant, malicious disinformation project funneled mainly through Facebook, Tiktok, and Youtube, all funded by the Marcos camp. Vote-buying happened in broad daylight. Journalists were harassed in broad daylight. Critics were “red-tagged,” or publicly accused as being communists or communist-allied. In some cases this is an invitation for state-sanctioned intimidation and sometimes even murder. Marcos Jr. himself never attended the debates and refused to talk to the media, both local and international. One of the presidential candidates, the socialist and labor leader Ka Leody de Guzman, was shot at by armed men while at a sortie with farmers and workers. The Commission on Elections never stepped in, and instead turned a blind eye to all of this.

On election day itself, voters were manipulated and intimidated. Some waited up to 24 hours to vote due to faulty vote-counting machines, and violence escalated in some precincts. Footage of police and armed officials tearing up shaded ballots went viral on Twitter. There are too many incidents I can name and it’s too painful to remember everything. They allowed people to be bought and killed.

The US-allied Marcos family has stolen billions from the Filipino people. Outside the money, I find that there’s more to that; they’ve committed crimes against humanity. They raped our land and stripped it of its natural resources. They tortured, disappeared, and murdered a whole generation of activists, student leaders, journalists, and artists. They sold our country and its people to the US Empire. They have effectively rewritten the story of the Philippines, institutionalized this bastardized version of our history, and successfully cultivated a culture of historical blindness and anti-intellectualism. They have hollowed out my country.

Marcos Jr.’s running mate for vice-president, Sara Duterte (daughter of Rodrigo Duterte), is also pretty much expected to win by a landslide. She’s set to become the Secretary of Education, and her only concrete plan is to make two-year military service mandatory for all students. All this, in a climate where most families can barely afford to send their children to school anymore. In a climate where Lumad (or indigenous) students and children in the countryside are murdered almost every week by the fanatically right-wing Philippine military— simply for being perceived enemies of the state. It doesn’t matter if you are. You don’t get to decide that.

Anti-communism is a rot that runs deep in my country, and it lies at the heart of why martial law was enforced by Marcos Sr. in the first place. Power, capital, cronies: these things needed to be consolidated. Through a neoliberal education system and massively well-funded disinformation campaigns (some aided by Cambridge Analytica), communism—and anything vaguely progressive or left-leaning—is used as the scapegoat to manufacture blame that conveniently explains away the ills of Philippine society, to sow paranoia, and to encourage alienation. That too has hollowed out my country.

I don’t know what the next six years will look like under a Marcos-Duterte administration. Just this morning, I read an article about how Biden congratulated Marcos Jr., and how he’s looking forward to working with this upcoming administration. And in true hypocrisy, one of the topics they discussed was the upholding of human rights. But when Marcos Jr., talks, he doesn’t say the “next six years.” He says, “the next several years.” They’ve played the long game and won. They will ruin our country forever.

But we will strike back! We do not recognize Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte as our leaders! We have other means of resisting outside of the electoral system, which has only ever been a band-aid solution to very real issues we face as Filipinos: neocolonialism, US-backed militarization, and an increasingly disjointed society deprived of truth and freedom. We have momentum on our side, and we have rage. We have farmers, laborers, activists, teachers, and cultural workers who have been fighting this protracted war for decades and decades. The tides will turn, and the Marcoses, Dutertes, and all their cronies and goons will answer to the Filipino people very soon.

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! Marcos Duterte Diktador Tuta! US Imperyalismo Ibagsak!

— Elle

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Wendy Browne

Wendy Browne

Publisher, mother, geek, executive assistant sith, gamer, writer, lazy succubus, blogger, bibliophile. Not necessarily in that order.

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