Kerima Lorena Tariman: A Creative. A Revolutionary.

Kerima Lorena Tariman: A Creative. A Revolutionary.

By SAKA (Sama-samang Artista para sa Kilusang Agraryo)

May 29, 1979–August 20, 2021

It is with utmost grief that we from SAKA mourn the passing of a poet and revolutionary, Kerima Lorena Tariman. She was one of the two revolutionaries that were killed during a clash between the New People’s Army and the 79th Infantry Battalion of the AFP last August 20, 2021. She shed her blood in the lands of Hacienda Raymunda, Barangay Kapitan Ramon, Silay City. In the eyes of the reactionary state, she is a terrorist. To her friends, family, comrades, and the people she unselfishly served: a heroine has fallen. Ours is a profound loss.

Hers is the acuity of verse—poems she wrote with the masses by living with the masses. Hers is the sharpness of analysis whether in prose, reportage, or discourse. Hers is the unwavering commitment to live and die for the sake of liberation of the democratic majority from the shackles of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism.

As a civilian activist in the legal national-democratic mass movement, Kerima was an accomplished writer, researcher, and organizer. She led an integral role to the development of bungkalan: the militant occupation by farmers and agri-workers of idle agricultural lands for their sustenance amidst dismal wages and lack of livelihood. What started in Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, is now a nationwide mass movement—in haciendas, plantations, and even in urban poor communities—not just for food security and land rights but also an agroecological response against corporate agriculture.

As a cultural worker, she understood very well the necessary role of art and culture in the struggle for land and rights. As such, she was dedicated in arousing, organizing, and mobilizing cultural workers not just among urban professionals but among the basic sectors as well. She helped sow the seeds and nurtured the growth of several progressive cultural initiatives. One of these is SAKA which she helped form in July 2017.

As a revolutionary, Kerima broke away from what it means to be creative in all its bourgeois limitations. She knew from experience the limits of what art and activism alone can do in the face of outright violence perpetrated by the state itself. With a deep sense of urgency, she understood very well that her praxis can be emancipated to further serve the toiling masses—in the wide field of the countryside. Thus, as Ka Ella, she chose to participate in the armed struggle that takes the lead in breaking the shackles of the historical and systematic oppression by the few against the democratic majority. A true creative ahead of her time; she dedicated her life to take part with the collective authorship led by the proletariat that struggles to realize a genuinely just and free society.

We from SAKA are in deep gratitude for the guidance she provided us before taking the path less travelled. We will always carry with us the lessons she imparted just when we were starting out. And as we push forward to further broaden and strengthen our ranks for the peasantry, we’ll share these lessons among our fellow creative, cultural, and knowledge workers.

We are not left with a gaping void in the wake of her passing. Rather, she opened up a field of possibilities of what it means to create as an artist; one that is not beset by the limitations of a medium, the individual, and the reactionary; one that didn’t simply study the passing of time but actively held out her hand in the steering of our history, of our fate. The fascists haven’t won that fateful day by way of her murder. Guided by her shining example, many others will inevitably follow the path she cleared. As long as there is injustice, as long as there is violence perpetrated by the ruling class, there will always be someone holding a gun in one hand while holding a pen in another.

Long live Kerima!
Long live her revolutionary legacy!