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The following is a formalist reading of poet Alfonso Manalastas’ Country of Nothings (2020), which appears on The Kill List Chronicles, a compilation containing protest literature against former president Duterte’s injustices.

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More and more people are being killed, as if they're just a statistic that keeps on increasing.  Nothing but death encapsulates the news. The persona recounts experiences from watching the non-stop news about the killings to processing their feelings about them. At first it’s the feeling of privilege, then numbness, finally ending on empathic anger, as seen in the image above.

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The persona is an observer of the deaths described in the poem. They are very much aware of the situation due to said observation but have become numb due to the sheer incessantness of the deaths. It has become so commonplace that it has started to seem more like nothing but a rising statistic, which the persona notices but does not agree with.

“In a manner at times more chilling than total silence

Where all the hurt in the world are distilled into a hum”

They describe the situation to the reader. The persona is in conflict with a force much larger than them, which is that of the constant reports of death, so it could be said that it is a man vs. society conflict being portrayed in the poem.

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The persona talks in 2nd person, directly addressing the reader, as if in conversation. The persona talks for the reader, as seen in lines like

"You recount the dead until you fumble over the myth

Recount until you run out of fingers to count them with.”

They also use figures of speech in lines like “From names, you regurgitate numbers and gigabytes” and “More than a punctuation, gunpowder and lush red, Vibrating like a pulse engine right before it conks out”  to describe how you might feel hearing about all these deaths. The persona uses TV flickers, static, and the news as dramatic details to solidify the setting, which appears to me as that of an ordinary citizen observing all these deaths around them from their home, separate from all the chaos. This can be seen in the lines pictured above.

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As thought to have been said by Joseph Stalin, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”  These deaths (the word killings is never used) are normalized to the point of becoming simple statistics. Because it is now the most predominant and common kind of news, it becomes something the reader (despite realizing their own privilege) and world are almost numb to. A related but furthermore bone-chilling message left at the end can be understood from the lines

“And when they try to devour us with a hunger

So infinite, we will surrender to them only nothing.”

We have suffered so much that we have nothing left to surrender but our own lives.

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In the Philippines, specifically under the new administration of Bongbong Marcos, extrajudicial killings (or EJKs) have been losing the public attention they once held during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. However, they still occur. As shown by the UP Third World Studies Center on VERA Files, drug-related killings continue under the current administration. Though perpetrators are not limited to state agents, they still comprise a significant number of killers (“Drug killings under Marcos Jr. surpass those killed in last six months of Duterte”). This can be seen in the infographic above. Moreover, extrajudicial killings were much more common during the tenure of Bongbong's father, with “3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated” (McCoy) under Marcos Sr. according to historian Prof. Alfred McCoy. That gets me up in arms because it reminds me that the apple may not fall far from the tree. We citizens, observers, already successfully fulfilled our civic duty by ousting him, but then just collectively forgot (or chose to forget) why we did so, and soon enough brought his son and whole family back to power.

In a world of state-sponsored killings tied to political power, Country of Nothings is still very much relevant. Two years ago, the government of Myanmar was overthrown by a military junta, plunging the country into civil war and drawing accusations of war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity, against the regime (Kyaw). Another case is that of Russia’s recent and ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which happened almost exactly a year after the coup d’etat in Myanmar. Russia has also been accused of having committed several war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as aerially bombing an evacuation center for children. One war crime has already been proven and prosecuted, which was that of a Russian soldier shooting an unarmed Ukrainian civilian (“Ukraine conflict: What war crimes is Russia accused of?”).

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(my own image, captured May 13, 2022 in the Ateneo during VP Leni Robredo's post-election thanksgiving gathering)

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The killings hit me hard as I am also someone able to observe the situation from a safe, but not entirely safe position of privilege. It resonates with me because I see myself as the “you” the persona is talking to. It’s as if they’ve read my mind and described my feelings to me accurately. Despite the Duterte era being over, I still remember the distanced fear I felt hearing about the almost exponential rise of killings during this time, knowing in the back of my head it could be me, but never entertaining this thought seriously. Luckily, I am still alive and writing this essay right now. Whatever privileges there were that kept me from harm’s way– having money, a lawyer father, a foreigner's complexion, or simply being an unworried subdivision kid– have also kept me at arm’s distance from advocating for these killings to end, or for social justice in general. A few years and irrevocable life experiences later, I can’t and won’t let that continue any longer.

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“Drug killings under Marcos Jr. surpass those killed in last six months of Duterte.” VERA Files, 4 December 2022, https://verafiles.org/articles/drug-killings-under-marcos-surpass-those-killed-in-last-six-months-of-duterte. Accessed 21 March 2023.

Kyaw, Myat Thu. “Myanmar: Abuses Mount Since Military Coup.” Human Rights Watch, 12 January 2023, https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/01/12/myanmar-abuses-mount-military-coup.Accessed 21 March 2023.

McCoy, Alfred. “Dark Legacy: Human rights under the Marcos regime.” Ateneo de Manila University, September 20, 1999, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html. Accessed 22 March 2023.

“Ukraine conflict: What war crimes is Russia accused of?” BBC, 17 March 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60690688. Accessed 21 March 2023.