by Roger B. Rueda, PhD
There is a poem haunting me this
morning, like the ghost of a revolution that refuses to shut up. Its name is “Ang Paraiso ni Amado.” The Ilonggo poet
Alain Russ Dimzon offers us not paradise but paralysis. And the protagonist,
Amado—whose name ironically means “beloved”—returns home not as a hero, but as
a man nailed by his own memory to a marble floor. When creating names for
characters, I recall Dr. Leoncio Deriada being the grand master of irony. He understood
that a name is not a tag but destiny waiting to happen; whether or not someone
takes it as their own depends on who they are and what they want out from life.
In Deriada's stories, names are not just adornments but triggers, each syllable
packed with intentions that tell us who or where someone is going to be born. A
name is in Deriada's moral universe both an omen and a sentence. It tells not
only what you are but also what disaster is inevitable approaching for you. And
like his literary forebear, Alain Russ Dimzon names his "Amado" with
no trace of feeling but a most exquisite irony: the "beloved one" who
is anything but what he claims to be. With that single paradox, Dimzon proves
to be the real disciple of Deriada's school—skillfully molding one word into an
entire religion of fate, faith, and failure.
Ah, marble. The favorite flooring of
the rich, the corrupt, and the dead. It is the surface upon which history slips
and holiness pretends to stand upright. The poet writes: “Daw ginlansang ang iya mga tuhod sa
batobusilak nga salog.” His knees are nailed, not by Roman soldiers, but
by conscience and colonization.
In the Philippines, we are experts
in kneeling, aren’t we? We kneel before crosses, before bosses, before
politicians who distribute spaghetti during campaign season. Amado kneels
before a cross—but his mind betrays him. He tries to erase the flag imprinted
with the sickle and hammer. Imagine that: even in worship, ideology stalks him
like an unpaid debt.
What exquisite irony. We are a
country that loves revolution, as long as it is safely contained within poetry.
Once it demands real sacrifice, we run to the church and confess our subversion
away.
The poem stages a wrestling match
between Karl Marx and the Miraculous Medal. Amado dips his hand in holy water,
yet still feels his finger curve around a trigger. The body remembers what the
soul denies. In psychology, that’s called trauma retention. In politics, that’s called post-revolution fatigue. In the
Philippines, we simply call it Tuesday.
His vision of “golden stars in vast
redness” is pure cognitive dissonance—faith filtered through ideology. He sees
heaven through a red flag. The poem turns his gaze into a battlefield—between
belief that consoles and belief that commands. What he beholds is not just the
night sky, but the lingering afterglow of a dream that promised paradise and
delivered penance.
Then the question comes: “San-o pa madula ang kadena kag latigo?
San-o ang duta mangin paraiso?” When will the chain and whip go? When
will the earth become paradise?
That is the same question every
Filipino asks while waiting in line at the Bureau of Immigration. The poet’s
genius lies in his simplicity. He does not preach. He prays. But his prayer
trembles with protest. The repetition of kneeling and returning mirrors our
national cycle: faith, failure, forgiveness, repeat.
Nietzsche once said that eternal
recurrence is the greatest burden of existence. The Ilonggo version is simpler:
Kon indi ka kabalo magtindog, pirmi ka
gid magluhod. (If you don’t know how to stand, you will always be on
your knees.)
Our ancestors would have laughed at
Amado’s marble piety. The old babaylan prayed on earth, not on tile. They knew
that divinity lives in dirt, not in imported polish. Duta is sacred, because it remembers the sweat of laborers and
the blood of ancestors.
But here we are, worshipping on
marble. We have traded the fertility of the soil for the sterility of status.
Our temples are cold, our gods imported, our revolutions rehearsed. The poem
reminds us that paradise is not a reward; it is a responsibility we’ve
neglected—like unpaid taxes and unfiled graft cases.
In the olden days, the Panayanon
believed that when a man lost his connection to the earth, his spirit wandered.
Amado is that spirit. He bows
to a cross yet dreams of a hammer. He is torn between Diyos kag Duta—God and soil, salvation and struggle. The poet
does not condemn him. Instead, he makes him the mirror of our collective
confusion: pious but powerless, faithful but famished, revolutionary but
retired.
If I were to give my judgment, this poem is worthy not only of a standing
ovation -, it should be resurrected at the national level. After all, it needs
to be read aloud in temples and in classes, in the vast marble corridors of the
Capitol, where faith is proclaimed, and honesty is forgotten. The task of this
poem is what few others dare: its verse lets the Filipino conscience in its own
contradictions. “Ang Paraiso ni Amado” is not its author loudly flattery but
condemnation. So quiet that condemnation feels like a revelation. The voice of
the poet is not it preaches and not its protests. The poet’s voice is poetic.
His pen does not shout loudly, but pierces. His verse is soft bullets in the
hands prick rather than body. This is not a poem for relaxing. This is a
spiritual rebellion that has received the guise of prayer. The image is cold
but the highest quality. The line is naked nerve, no rhetoric or excuse. It’s a
lean, knife-clean truth. “Daw ginlansang ang iya mga tuhod sa batobusilak nga
salog.” No adjective to protect, no multiplying elements to distract emphasis –
the poet believes only in the weight of the image he applies, the surrounding
silence. It’s already shown here that he’s a professional. This is the highest
compression poetry – the art of counter-play when meaning is not added; it is
removed. That’s how a sculptor carves or how a surgeon operates: remove the
unnecessary to see the vitality that is left. Each pause is calculated, every
echo is bloody. The structure is slow and sensual; it mimics the act of
penance, as though each line is a whispered mea culpa, each quote a
genuflection.
The gift is rare that can make language at once austere and alive,
simplicity throb with spirit.
Its repetition is not redundancy, but ritual—an incantation for a country
that no longer knows the difference between prayer and paralysis.
The lines repeat like the chime of a bell in too self-mourning of a church.
Every return to the cross is therefore a return to the marble floor, and to the
nailed knees; both memory and meditation. It teaches that history,
unexpurgated, becomes liturgy—that the greatest sinners aren’t those who act
wrongly once but those who rehearse evil over and over in ceremonies of
devotion.
But the brilliance of the poem is that it salvages this repetition. It turns
circularity into conscience. The reader does not become tired; the reader comes
awake. As with all great liturgical work, it cleanses through repetition. The
poet turns memory into an act of resistance.
What that this poem accomplishes is nothing less than theological surgery.
It tears open the body of Filipino faith and exposes the cancer of fear growing
within.
And yet it is no parody of religion; it is the consecration of heroism. The
poet understands as the faith that wont question is submission clothed in
rosary beads. By making Amado kneel and remember the hammer and sickle, the
poem stages its most sacred struggle of all: that between conscience and
comfort, God and government, redemption and restraint.
In its hushed rebellion, “Ang Paraiso ni Amado” assumes the role of
scripture for the thinking believer. It tells us prayer is not obedience—it
does more, it is conversation. This faith that is not on guard is not holiness:
it is hypnotism.
Oh, yes, this poem deserves a standing ovation, all right; if only we could
still stand. But... may I humbly suggest we the audience all stand up? We rise
not to applaud but to acknowledge our deepest, most innermost nature. For we
stand not simply to honor this poem but to bow our heads in reverence before
it. The poem is constitutional in its fairness, a speech that condemns the
Senate to silence. It is a compact of conscience, wholly jurisprudential in
nature. For what does the poem court the artist otherwise but moral and
aesthetic courage? And that is what is sufficient about it. Today’s verse
belies the flag-waving and plays to the nation. Today’s poetry escapes the
suffering that so scalds us; it invites its in and asks it to be seated and
explain itself. That is where his greatness lies. So yes, I say: it is not
ordinary honor I have given this poem I know, if only we knew the verb to stand
I may then sit just like that, that hushed quiet available for that art alone
who can settle our souls. For “Ang Paraiso ni Amado” does not just read. It is
satisfied like in incense that reeks in your nose after a mass, or if even more
and guilt that you cannot finally wash away.
And to those who still ask, “When
will the earth become paradise?” my answer is simple: When Filipinos stop kneeling on marble and start standing on soil.
Because paradise is not up there,
nor in ideology, nor in the illusion of imported whiteness—it is beneath our
feet, in the duta nga ginpas-an naton pero wala naton ginhawiran. The earth we carry but never hold.
So rise, Amado. The cross does not
need another kneeler. It needs a farmer, a fighter, a believer who knows that
even paradise requires work.
*****
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