To be clear, I was not at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But in the past few months, I’ve been holding a book fair of sorts on my own after coming to terms with my being a polygamous reader. I seem to think that just because I am unable to read one book at a time, I need to hoard books from my favorite online sellers and second-hand bookstores so that somehow, over an unsure period, I’d be able to eventually finish reading all of them. I inadvertently end up with a “book fair” in my head, where all these authors and conversations exist in a fictional space-time. I didn’t need to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair, nor did I want an invitation.

So, in the past few months, the writers in residence in my head have been Jose Rizal, Edward Said, Adania Shibli, John Berger (a permanent resident), Brian Dillon, Floro Quibuyen, Caroline Hau, Benjamín Labatut, and Frédéric Gros. The texts I read for my classes keep me sane because I have to finish them in one go, re-read, discuss them with my students, and forget about them entirely until the next semester. But these books I let simmer for quite some time, and I end up in a strange stew. 

Acutely aware as I am of how I will be engaged with a book for months, each time I pick one up nowadays I wonder how their authors would respond to being invited to a book fair that’s supporting an ongoing genocide. Even before buying their books, I investigate on my phone their questionable choices in life, and I check if they were ever supportive of Zionists. Often, there’d be something of concern, but don’t we all go through these things?

Writers are a curious breed. I read and write out of a nosiness for what people can and can’t do with words; how writers can bridge the immensity of our thoughts, desires, and experiences with squiggly lines and spaces on the page. I immediately and simultaneously admire and distrust writers. I cheer and hope for moments when they so vividly and so painfully put being alive into words. But I also often find myself asking the writer on the page: “Are you so proud to try wording this one out?” There’s a level of insanity in committing to words when words often don’t quite get it. There’s a bit of delusion in believing how the act of wording things out can address our problems, big and small, and yet it is the closest thing we can get to constructing a different reality.

The LiBeraturpreis was to have been given to the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair for her novel “Minor Detail,” but the awarding was put off with the book fair organizers citing “the war started by Hamas.” This cancellation caused writers to withdraw their support for the Frankfurt Book Fair and challenge its reasons for being, but it only grew more stubborn with its support of Israel and continued to fund the arming of the genocide. 

Immediately after the cancellation of Adania Shibli’s award—partly attributed to the objections of some jury members who felt that the novel is “anti-Semitic”—the book fair added more stages for the promotion of Israeli voices. In October 2023, its director Jürgen Boos said it is in “complete solidarity on the side of Israel.” 

“Minor Detail” is a short novel in two parts. My copy is the English translation by Elisabeth Jaquette. The first 45 pages follow, in excruciating detail, an Israeli military commander in 1949 establishing occupation of a part of the Negev Desert in Palestine, near its Egyptian border. The remaining 52 pages are set in more recent times, told in the “I” by a Palestinian woman who was born 25 years to the day since the final events of the book’s first part—the rape and murder of a Bedouin woman by the Israeli commander and his men. While short, the novel is a difficult read. I crawled my way out of some of its parts and the whiplash I suffered from it stayed with me for weeks.

John Berger introduced me to Palestine through his book “Hold Everything Dear,” published in 2007. While fireworks were going off on New Year’s Eve of 2019, I was in bed reading about his time in Palestine, navigating through the rubble, the checkpoints, and the walls which the occupying Israeli forces forced into Palestine. 

In the essay “Undefeated Despair” (2005), Berger talks about the immeasurable and inordinate amount of suffering Palestinians face on a day-to-day basis, compounded by the contradictory impulses that they wrestle with, the situation which the empires of the United States and Israel threw them in. I didn’t know much about Palestine prior to reading this book, but I would join Berger (who died on Jan. 2, 2017) over the next years in his many essays about his friends in small corners of the world and the art they created. I owe Berger—and, accordingly, Palestine—much of the ways I understand art.

In the past few months, I also committed to what I think was my sixth re-reading of Rizal’s “Noli Me Tángere” and “El Filibusterismo.” This time, I read the Penguin edition translated by Harold Augenbraum. There is always something new to be gained from reading Rizal’s novels. A lot of joy, laughter, and a lot of pain, yes, but what fascinated me with this round of re-reading is how Rizal wrote with an urgency and a sharpness that put all these Facebook columnists, old and new, to shame. 

I had to re-read Floro T. Quibuyen’s “A Nation Aborted” (revised edition, published by Ateneo Press in 2008) while I was reading Rizal’s novels to see more clearly how Rizal thought of his contemporaries. I felt that understanding his context was important in trying to get into the psyche of a writer who sounds like he would boisterously laugh at the puny thoughts of those who disagreed with him, be they respected ilustrados like himself. In Quibuyen’s chapter “Interrogating the Empire,” I chanced upon these lines from one of Rizal’s letters to Blumentritt in November 1888:

“No one ought to go to the neighbor’s house and subordinate the welfare of the neighbor to his own interests. This would be an outrage; it would be the reign of force. If a colonizing nation cannot make her colonies happy, she ought to abandon them or give them liberty. No one has the right to make others unfortunate!” 

It was funny because right about the time that I was reading this, the Frankfurt Book Fair would make use of Rizal’s line, “imagination peoples the air,” for its promotional materials. The pubmats announced that the Philippines was the book fair’s guest of honor this year. 

“Imagination peoples the air” is a line from American educator Charles Derbyshire’s 1912 translation of the “Noli.” Specifically, it is from the closing paragraphs of Chapter 16, titled “Sisa,” when Sisa prepares a meal and waits for her children, Basilio and Crispin, to come home. The reader would know from the earlier chapter that the boys were detained and tortured in church by the sacristan mayor and Crispin would not make it out alive. The gall of the Frankfurt Book Fair to take this exact line by Rizal out of its context and to use it for the promotion of a book fair that supports the mass murder of children! It was all the more clear that the Frankfurt Book Fair was deliberately playing blind to Israel’s massacre of children, playing blind to all the Sisas the empire is creating by the thousands.

But this shamelessness, this deception, done through the misappropriation of texts to give some semblance of intellectual footing for Israel’s genocide did not just sprout in recent years. My undergrad literature classes introduced me to Edward Said with his book “Orientalism,” but it is only through the recent Fitzcarraldo Editions that I got hold of Said’s “A Question of Palestine” (2024), first published in 1979.

In the “book fair” of my mind, Said makes it clear that although the Zionist Lord Rothschild and the British government were well aware in 1919 of the Arab population in Palestine, numbering around 700,000 at that time, the British colonizers willfully made decisions for them and overrode whatever it is that the Palestinians thought and fought for. Such was, is, the character of empire that I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of writers, Filipino writers, thinking that their involvement in the Frankfurt Book Fair meant nothing for the people Israel is bombing. The book fair was precisely that: an attempt to borrow meaning for an otherwise empty exploit by empire, a masquerade to make it seem they held spaces for the oppressed.

It’s strange to me that writers, some of them I used to admire, could be so naïve. In “Essayism” (2024), another recent Fitzcarraldo purchase and a participant in my mind’s book fair, Brian Dillon so eloquently performs how it is that in essaying there is always an attempting. He talks about the need for coherence in writing as a strange thing, one that cannot be forced because of the nature of our experiences, but also a characteristic that we somehow find beautiful. I understand this as the act of writing being always a path or a way of seeing, always a getting there but not quite. I understand this to mean that writers write to be comfortable with being unsure, and I see this as the exact opposite of the sureness of genocide.

In the fiction that I’m reading now, “Tiempo Muerto” by Caroline Hau, the protagonist Racel still hasn’t found her mother who got lost in a storm. In Benjamín Labatut’s “When We Cease to Understand the World,” a book I first saw classified as nonfiction but later re-classified as fiction, Science is seen as one of life’s grandest delusions. The first three chapters of Frédéric Gros’ “A Philosophy of Walking” turn the reader upside down to reconsider what walking means, what constitutes the indoors and the outdoors, and to ask: What gives weight to time’s passing?

I find it hard to understand how writers, with their mastery of words and in full control of their choices, bow to the logic set by the West and lose all eloquence in the service of attending a fancy book fair in Germany. It’s funny because it is the ending all writers avoid—a predictable one.

“The HeART of Gaza,” an exhibition of works by children enduring Israel’s genocide, is ongoing and on view at ChapterHouse (32 Madasalin Street, Sikatuna Village, Quezon City) until Human Rights Day, December 10. Organized by Gantala Press with the support of chapterhouse.ph, Library Una, Independent Study, Playroom Novelty Shop, Spare Bedroom, and Merienda Jazz.