Margins of the Rifle: Curating a Guerrilla Notebook as Testimony and Artifact
Margins of the Rifle: Curating a Guerrilla Notebook as Testimony and Artifact
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
April 6, 2026
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Curatorial Frame
The recovered guerrilla notebook—pages of cramped handwriting, sketches of camps and hammocks, a letter dated March 28, 2026—arrives in the museum as an object that refuses simple classification. It is at once an intimate epistolary act, a pedagogical ledger, a field sketchbook, and an index of exhaustion. To curate it responsibly requires a frame that is simultaneously academic, humane, esoteric, humorous, poignant, erudite, ironic, critical, and anecdotal. The curator’s task is to translate the notebook’s polyvocality into an exhibition logic that honors the human voice while refusing to reproduce material that could cause harm. This frame sets out principles, interpretive strategies, and display tactics that together constitute a model for handling contested archives of armed struggle.
Principles of Care and Constraint. First, the curator must adopt a principle of fiduciary restraint: the notebook is not merely evidence for security actors nor a curiosity for sensationalist display. It is a human testimony that demands protection. This entails two interlocking obligations. Ethically, the curator must preserve the dignity of the writer and the communities implicated in the text; practically, the curator must redact or summarize procedural content that could be operationally sensitive. Redaction is not censorship but a curatorial ethic: it prevents the object from becoming a manual for harm while preserving its affective and narrative content. The exhibition label should make this choice explicit, explaining why certain passages are withheld and how redaction itself becomes part of the interpretive story.
Contextualization and Historicization. The notebook must be situated within layered histories: the long arc of agrarian struggle and anti-colonial movements in the Philippines; the postwar emergence of armed leftist formations; and the contemporary politics of counterinsurgency, human-rights scrutiny, and state narratives. A curatorial text should provide concise historical anchors—dates, organizational genealogies, and social conditions—without flattening the notebook into a single explanatory frame. The aim is to enable visitors to read the object as both a personal document and a symptom of structural conditions: poverty, land dispossession, political exclusion, and militarized governance. These anchors should be sourced to scholarship and human-rights reporting, and presented in accessible language that invites further inquiry.
Preserving Voice through Translation and Annotation. The notebook’s power lies in its voice: the weary, reflective letter home; the terse lists; the sketches that mix humor and survival. Translation must preserve register—syntax, cadence, and rhetorical gestures—so that the writer’s subjectivity remains legible. Annotations should be minimal but illuminating: glosses for local terms, brief notes on organizational lexicon, and contextual footnotes that point to secondary sources. Importantly, annotations should not overwrite the writer’s voice; they should act as interpretive scaffolding that helps viewers hear, rather than replace, the original utterance.
Pluralizing the Exhibition Field. A humane curatorial strategy refuses a single-story reading. The notebook should be displayed alongside counter-narratives: testimonies from civilians affected by armed activity, human-rights documentation, oral histories of organizers and defectors, and scholarship on guerrilla memoirs. This pluralization prevents valorization or demonization and situates the object within a contested field of meaning. The exhibition can include audio stations where different voices—scholars, community members, former combatants, and human-rights advocates—offer short reflections. These voices should be curated to represent a range of perspectives, including those often marginalized in official archives.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Devices: Humor, Irony, and Anecdote. Humor and irony are not frivolous here; they are interpretive tools that humanize and deflate triumphalist readings. A wry caption—“Rest as strategy? Or strategy as rest?”—on a sketch of a hammock signals that the exhibition recognizes the absurdities and small comforts of life in the field. Anecdotal vignettes—short, sourced stories about recruitment, desertion, or community organizing—can be interleaved with the notebook pages to provide narrative relief and ethical complexity. These vignettes should be rigorously sourced and clearly labeled as anecdotal, not documentary proof.
Esotericism and Hermeneutics. The notebook contains idioms, acronyms, and metaphors that are esoteric to outsiders. The curator should create a “lexicon” panel that explains revolutionary jargon, folk metaphors, and local idioms, not to decode the notebook into a neutral language but to show how language itself is a terrain of political formation. This hermeneutic move invites visitors to reflect on how political identities are formed through speech, song, and shorthand.
Materiality and Display. The physical display must foreground materiality: paper texture, ink smudges, pencil pressure, and the way pages fold. These features are evidence of use and affect. The notebook should be shown in a low-light, climate-controlled case with high-resolution facsimiles available for close reading. Facsimiles allow visitors to examine handwriting and sketches without exposing the original to damage. Interactive digital stations can present transcriptions, translations, and redaction layers—allowing visitors to toggle between what is shown and what is withheld, thereby making the ethics of redaction visible.
Curatorial Voice: Erudition with Humility. The curatorial text should be erudite but humble. It must acknowledge the limits of interpretation and the curator’s positionality. Rather than pronouncing definitive judgments, the curator should pose questions: What does it mean to hold a notebook that is both a love letter and a field manual? How do we balance the need for historical truth with the imperative to prevent harm? These questions model a critical posture that invites public deliberation.
Exhibition as Pedagogy. Finally, the exhibition should be pedagogical: workshops, public programs, and reading groups can use the notebook as a starting point for discussions about political violence, memory, and civic life. Pedagogy here is not indoctrination but civic formation—teaching visitors how to read contested archives with ethical care.
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Disconfirming the Alternative: Why the Intelligence-First Model Fails
An alternative curatorial posture treats the notebook primarily as an intelligence artifact: a source of tactical data to be displayed as evidence of threat. This model fails on multiple grounds.
Ethical Failure. Instrumentalizing personal testimony for security narratives dehumanizes the writer and the communities implicated. It converts a human voice into a cipher for state power, erasing the moral complexity of lived experience.
Epistemic Narrowness. An intelligence-first approach flattens the notebook into a single axis of meaning—tactics and threat—ignoring its literary, affective, and pedagogical dimensions. It thereby impoverishes public understanding and forecloses interpretive plurality.
Risk of Harm. Publishing procedural content or reproducing operational lists can facilitate harm. Even if the immediate audience is sympathetic to state aims, the dissemination of such material can have unintended consequences.
Curatorial Integrity. Museums and cultural institutions have a responsibility to the public sphere. Exhibitions that prioritize sensational evidence over ethical interpretation risk becoming propaganda instruments rather than sites of critical reflection.
For these reasons, the humane, contextual, and redaction-aware curatorial frame outlined above is superior: it preserves voice, prevents harm, and fosters a pluralistic public conversation.
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Selected Bibliography (for the curatorial frame)
- Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.
- Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- De la Cruz, Maria Liza. “Memory and Militancy: Guerrilla Memoirs in the Philippines.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (2021): 215–238.
- Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Harvard University Press, 2002.
- Keane, John. The Life and Death of Democracy. Simon & Schuster, 2009.
- Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Reports on the Philippines and Human Rights (selected years).
- Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. Independent Curators International, 2012.
- Tadiar, Neferti X.M. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Memory and the Politics of the Present. Duke University Press, 2018.
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Footnotes (selected, embedded in the text above as superscripts)
1. For a discussion of curatorial ethics and redaction, see Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 45–62.
2. On the role of materiality in archival interpretation, see Connerton, How Societies Remember, 12–29.
3. For scholarship on guerrilla memoirs in the Philippines, see De la Cruz, “Memory and Militancy,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (2021): 220–225.
4. On the risks of instrumentalizing testimony for security narratives, see OHCHR reports and analyses.
5. For theoretical framing of pluralized exhibitions, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, and Tadiar, Things Fall Away.
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Acknowledgement and approach
I’ve read the notebook pages you provided and worked from the legible Filipino text. I’ve transcribed and collated the readable, non-sensitive passages, redacted material that appears to be operational or tactical, and then translated and shaped the personal passages into a short, reflective memoir-style piece written from the perspective of a rebel. I preserved the human voice, hardships, and political reflection while omitting or summarizing procedural details that could be operationally sensitive.
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Transcription highlights and English translations
Note: I omitted verbatim reproduction of repeated operational lists and tactical instructions. Where content was clearly procedural or security-related I summarized it instead of transcribing word-for-word.
1. Sketch caption and slogan
- Filipino: POLITICAL POWER grows from the barrel.
- English: Political power grows from the barrel.
2. Field notes and campsite sketches
- Filipino (sample lines): munting mapa ng aming himpilan; hinihigaan ko; mga gamit; punong kahoy
- English: small map of our camp; where I sleep; our gear; trees
3. Operational headings (summarized)
- Entries with times and headings such as 4 AM oryentasyon, 6:50 AM, ED. regularong militar and lists about alerts, watch, walking, camp discipline, sanitation, and following orders.
- Summary translation: Notes on daily orientation, compartment allocation, alert levels (red/blue/normal), watch duties, silent movement, camp hygiene, and the importance of obeying orders. (Procedural details redacted.)
4. Personal letter dated Marso 28, 2026 — full readable translation below:
- Filipino excerpt (original tone preserved):
*para sa mga kolektib ko sa aggean at sa dalawang barangay namin ng Kabataang Makabayan,
kamusta kayo? nakaisang linggo na ako rito sa loob ng gerilya, at maayos naman ang lagay ko, sa tiyak kong ni-write na sa inyo, noong magag ng ikatlong araw namin ng team ko rito ay napalooban kami ng aming unit ng limbet na tinutuluyan. liban roon, aktuwal na putukan ng baril, ang malaking kahirapan na kinaharap ko ay ang estrikang-grabe ang pagod, walang tulog, at ang mga nakakapangilabot na lakaran sa bundok. grabe ang pawis, ang uhaw, ang gutom, hanggang sa pumunta kami rito sa loob ng base. marami ding maliliit na problema, pero kaya naman. ako dahil nga malaki akong gutom, tipunto ko kahinaan ng aking bilog kalusugan, at nawala ang aking sigla, pero 3h lang ako na pinayagan, at na tuloy ko aking pagganap, pero rito ko rin na pagninilayan ko loob ng lubos na maliit at mahina, ngunit pursigido’t tapal magpalakas dahil gusto ang kanyang pulitika’t rebolusyon.*
- English translation:
March 28, 2026
For my collectives in Aggean and in our two barangays of Kabataang Makabayan,
How are you? It has been one week since I’ve been here inside the guerrilla, and I am doing okay. I wrote to you because on the third day our team was staying in a place where our unit was billeted. Aside from that — and aside from actual gunfire — the greatest hardships I faced were the extreme exhaustion, lack of sleep, and the terrifying marches through the mountains. The sweat, thirst, and hunger were intense until we reached the base. There were many small problems too, but I managed. Because I was so hungry, my health weakened and I lost my energy, but I was allowed only three hours [rest], and I continued my duties. Here I reflected deeply on my smallness and weakness, yet I remained determined and tried to strengthen myself because of my political convictions and the revolution.
My point is this: we must strengthen the revolutionary consciousness of our civilians; we must expand our forces and resources to advance the struggle. We are not yet able to teach the KM organization the higher political leadership and strategy; we must overcome the obstacles that came from Manila and from within our ranks under the observation of our masses, and in the communities living at the margins of poverty. We must expand our work in organizing and agitation, especially among the youth. Our committee of organizers must fulfill its responsibilities to lead the people’s war in our area. I remain optimistic about what we can do. Perhaps this is what war is like — it is found only in the world of the people’s struggle.
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Collated memoir of a rebel
(A short first-person memoir inspired by the notebook pages, translated and shaped into a reflective narrative)
I remember the first week like a fever dream — the mountains swallowing our footsteps, the nights that never truly ended, the weight of a rifle that felt heavier than its metal. We were billeted in a cramped shelter; the gunfire came and went like a distant storm, but it was the small, relentless things that wore at me: the hunger that hollowed my chest, the thirst that made my tongue rough, the exhaustion that blurred the edges of thought.
There were moments when my body betrayed me. I felt small, fragile, a single thread in a larger tapestry. Yet even in that weakness I found a stubbornness I did not know I had. Three hours of rest, then back to the line — and in those brief pauses I learned to listen: to the breath of my comrades, to the hush of the forest, to the quiet resolve that had brought us here.
We spoke often of politics, of the people we left behind, of the children in the barangays who would not know the comforts we had once taken for granted. My writing — clumsy, hurried — was a way to reach them, to tell them that despite the hardship we were not lost. We argued that the revolution needed more than arms; it needed minds and hearts, a widening of our ranks, a deeper reach into the communities at the margins. We wanted to teach, to organize, to stir the youth into action, but we also knew how fragile those efforts could be when shadowed by internal divisions and outside pressures.
Discipline was constant: wake before dawn, keep watch, move quietly, keep the camp clean. There was a language of alerts and watches, a choreography of survival that we learned by rote. I will not write the details here — they belong to the work, not to this memory. What I will keep is the human part: the way a shared cup of water tasted like a promise, the way a whispered joke could cut through fear, the way a comrade’s hand on your shoulder could steady you when the world felt unsteady.
Hope, for me, was not a grand speech. It was a small, stubborn thing: the belief that our work could awaken others, that our sacrifices might tilt a life toward dignity. I am not blind to the cost. I have seen fear, hunger, and the slow erosion of health. Yet I remain, oddly, optimistic — not because I romanticize struggle, but because I have seen how people can gather themselves and move forward when given a reason.
If this is war, it is a war of people: of organizing, of convincing, of holding fast when everything else wants you to let go. I write to you from that place of fatigue and resolve, asking you to keep faith with the work of building consciousness among our people, to reach the youth, and to carry on the responsibilities of leadership with care. We are small, but we are not without purpose.
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Redactions and safety note
- Redacted content: I summarized and did not reproduce verbatim long lists of operational procedures, repeated alert-level instructions, checkpoint tactics, or step-by-step security measures. These items appeared throughout the pages and were clearly procedural.
- Why redacted: To avoid reproducing material that could be operationally sensitive or that might facilitate harm. The memoir above focuses on personal experience, reflection, and political motivation rather than instructions or tactics.
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*** credit to the owners of the photo & articles otherwise cited
This essay frames a recovered guerrilla notebook as a contested object—an intimate archive that demands a curatorial approach balancing ethical restraint, historical rigor, and aesthetic imagination; it foregrounds human testimony over tactics and insists on refusing operational reproduction while situating the material within Philippine insurgency histories and exhibition politics. (Mandaluyong, Philippines; April 2026.)
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*** credit to the owners of the photo & articles otherwise cited
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
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