TODAY, I RECEIVED a message from my publisher here in the UK about an email from someone back home accusing me of ‘anti-workerism’ and ‘misogyny’. The email also asked my publisher to contact the sender ‘as soon as possible’.

Based on my experiences with this kind of harassment I have received since 2016, this is not the usual professional jealousy that you could encounter as a working-class writer writing in a country where access to literary and theatrical opportunities is limited to the middle class (from the middle-class Left to the matapobre Right of the political spectrum in the Philippines) gatekeeping the literary and theatre establishments. This kind of harassment is to extract more information on my activities from the people who are close to and working with me. This is dangerous for Filipino writers writing and publishing outside the literary establishments in this period in the country, where the elite ruling class is ‘correcting’ itself and transitioning to a normalisation with a fascist regime.

As a writer and a playwright, I’ve been accused of so many things in the Philippines – from being an ‘iskwater’ and ‘psychotic’ to a bad influence on younger writers, a communist terrorist, a Muslim terrorist, anti-Filipino, a ‘bougie fuckwit’, and publicly mocked online from my gender, religious, and class orientations and my physical appearance. I have been subjected to online bullying since 2016, coming from writers from the Philippine literary establishments and paid trolls from the State. All of these were documented by writers and colleagues who have been protecting me since 2016.

In 2017, in desperation, probably from professional jealousy or clout from some centrist and right-wing liberal writers, my name was included in the list of writers that should be haunted, shamed, and banned from the literary establishment since I was allegedly supporting the Duterte regime. This happened at the same time that my name was also on the list of the fascist regime’s supporters of anti-Duterte writers and critics that they needed to target online!

I welcomed them all.

This is nothing new to me. Last 25th of May, in an attempt to use me to whitewash the image of the country that there is ‘freedom of expression’ in Duterte’s Philippines, a bookshop owned by the known fascist writer, a National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, one of the most influential liberal, anti-communist patriarchs of the Philippine Literary Establishment, wrote me an email asking if I would like to display my books in their shop. I made my response to the ‘invitation’ to the public to protect myself and my writing: I refused, as an exiled author, to be used as a tool by this fascist regime for propaganda. The supporters of the government and the coteries of the elitist liberal literary establishment were quick to spin this as my attack on the workers of the bookshop.

My apologies to people, institutions, my publisher, and communities here in the UK who may have received harassment from the Philippines due to their association with me. My apologies, too, to my translator, Kristine Ong Muslim, who is being dragged into this mess and targeted because of her association with me.

I am still writing. They are not winning.