Teng Mangansakan, editor
Today one of my social media posts was deleted due to what was deemed a ‘violation of community standards.’ The post was in support of Gaza and Palestine in the ongoing military aggression committed by Israel. This is not an isolated case. Prejudiced silencing of voices critical of Israel and its Zionist agenda has become rampant. Not only do critical posts disappear but entire social media accounts are either banned or deleted too.
J, a friend of mine, suggested using the watermelon emoji to refer to Gaza or Palestine in posts. After all, the fruit was used by Palestinians when Israel banned the display of their flag in the Occupied Territories. The watermelon bears the same colors as the Palestinian flag, she said. I told her that I know of a technique that we used last year in posts critical of the current president during the election campaign. To avoid trolls ganging up on us, we used the slash sign to evade detection when talking about B/BM or B/ongbong. Maybe it will work when writing about G/aza.
Now more than ever, we need our writers to speak up. The precarity of social media is a challenging one but we need to learn to navigate through their checkpoints and make use of them the best way we can. We should never tire of the flowing stream of watermelons on our smartphone screens. Despite their bias, Facebook, X or Tiktok are among the most potent tools we have. Traditional mass media, especially from the West, have become an apparatus that is complicit in the brutality of the genocide campaign of Israel. Social media allows us to challenge the narratives perpetuated by news networks who have ties, both directly and indirectly, to the what has become a humanitarian catastrophe of the twenty first century.
In this edition of Bangsamoro Literary Review, three works talk about the extraordinary events unfolding today in the Middle East. I hope this encourages Bangsamoro writers to be united in condemning the genocide that is happening in Gaza, unanimous in demanding a ceasefire, firm in making sure that we see a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
The BLR commits to be a safe haven for voices in support of the best of humanity in these dark times. We need to amplify our collective voices by learning from history, sharpening our arguments, so that we can unmask the layers of lies in front of us. Writers only have themselves. And words. Perhaps hope, too. In these dark days, we can seek refuge in the words of the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha:
Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.