REVIEW | Gouge These Eyes Out: The Violence of Seeing in ‘Salamisim’

Zine: Salamisim 
Author: Frejae Gamboa
Publisher: Tridax Zines, 2025

DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 20 April) — There is a moment in Salamisim where the speaker asks, almost desperately, for their eyes to be taken from them: “Ibuta gud ning mga mata ko” — Gouge these eyes out.

To see, in Salamisim, is to be caught within a system where bodies are made legible, exposed, and, eventually, reduced.

Across its poems, Salamisim returns obsessively to this problem: what happens to the body when it is seen too much, too closely, and by the wrong eyes.

As author Frejae Gamboa of Magpet, North Cotabato describes it, Salamisim is a collection shaped by grief carried over time, tracing loss across generations, from a young girl to a grandfather to a father, each piece attempting to hold together fragments of memory and identity.

The zine unfolds through fragmentation. In “SANTIENT,” the body appears in dismembered  parts — eyes, mouth, lips, hands, flesh, voice, eyelids — never fully assembled into a stable whole. The speaker offers up their eyes, instructing an imagined other to scatter them:

Ilagay mo gud sa kamay ng mga
manika
Ihalo mo gud sa mga paang naga
tumbang preso
Ilunod mo sana sa rumaragasang
ilog

For someone, the body, has taken its own subjecthood: “Kay gitapon niya na ang boses para / magmasid.” The corpse is a non-body with eyes; the speaker desires to be a body with no eyes.

As Sartre tells us, it is in and through the looks of others, that we are made aware of ourselves as subjects, and the consciousness of being looked at, that we, subjects, are transformed into objects (258).

Salamisim stages this transformation repeatedly. The dismemberment of the body renders it both illegible and hyper-legible to the pulang mata at the same time, at once nullifying and intensifying the quiet competition between objectifying looks.

Illegible, because it isolates the dismembered part from its subject, allowing the latter to escape the gaze.

Legible, because it isolates the dismembered part from its subject, reducing the latter to a set of apertures and tissues: Foucault’s medical gaze.

The body becomes too exposed to ignore, but too fractured to fully capture.

This tension extends beyond the body and into space itself. In “MINDANAO STAR,” we move between locations.

We are on the bus with the speaker; we are sitting close, breathing together — “Dumadaloy na ang gasolina sa bawat / hininga” — then we look up and find ourselves at the edge (The edge of where?), away from tireless eyes — “pulang / mata” — and then we are reading these words off of pages — these pages — “Nakabuka na ang mga pahina para umalala” — then we are in the speaker’s memories, then we are back on the bus — “Gitanong ako ng konduktor / ‘Gang, asa ka munaog?’” — and the bus begins to fracture —

Wala na ang drayber sa bus
Wala na ang konduktor
Wala na nagatuyok ang mga gulong
Wala na ang mga tao

The speaker realizes they never left the alat, dungis, baho, the init, sikip, and alikabok of their bedroom.

The poem reminds of what French theorist Guy Debord describes as the homogenization of space under capitalism, where distinct places are flattened into uniform, interchangeable spaces: maalat, madungis, mabaho, mainit, masikip. Movement does not lead elsewhere; it loops back.

The bus stops. The driver disappears. The passengers vanish. But the speaker remains.

If the one who gazes, in Salamisim, is the one who exercises control, then sound appears as its counter-register.

In “ANCESTRAL DOMAIN,” meaning does not reside in the lexical units on the page, but in the voice that activates them: “Buhay … sa aking / bunganga.” Writing records the words, but voice renders them vibrational and physical, specific, embodied.

This echoes what sound theorists have long argued: that sound resists the distance and fixity of vision. Where the gaze isolates, sound circulates. Where sight captures, sound leaks.

Across the zine, voice becomes a way of reclaiming the body, not by restoring its wholeness, but by allowing it to move, to resonate, to exceed what can be seen.

This refusal of fixity extends even to language itself.

As I was going through its pages, I kept noting how Salamisim does not consistently follow the rules of capitalization. Proper nouns shift — Neng, neng, Papa, mama — destabilizing the hierarchies embedded in the written form. 

This small rebellion against written language destabilizes meaning, such that, when in “CANCER,” as we greet death face to face —

Giihaw mo ang mga pangarap
ko
Giihaw mo. Ang. Pangarap ko
Pa.

— unmet dreams are one key shift away from the father.

If writing has historically functioned as a tool of order — classification, standardization, control — then Salamisim attempts to unsettle that order from within. It privileges the unstable sentence over the polished one; the lived form that erupts in the bunganga over the correct one.

Death, in this text, is merely a transformation of perception. In “TINOLA,” the speaker asks their father to try the dish, noting that it tastes different.

“Matabang lagi, tignan mo gud
Pa”
Nakangiti pa rin niyang
gitingnan ang platong nilagay
Sa gilid ng kaniyang lapida

We see the father’s smile and quiet presence, but this image is refracted entirely through the speaker’s gaze. The dead, it seems, acquires a different kind of sight — one that is both everywhere and nowhere.

This motif recurs across the zine: the idea that death produces an all-seeing presence, even as the living struggle to escape being seen.

The desire, then, is to be seen and not seen simultaneously. To exist, but not be fixed.

Perhaps this is why the text turns, at moments, to nature.

In “ARCEDO PARK,” the speaker mourns the loss of nature’s purity alongside the engkanto.

In “INSOMNIA,” the speaker finds relief only in the absence of others, suggesting that freedom lies, however briefly, in being unwitnessed.

To read Salamisim is to be made aware of one’s own position as reader — as one who looks, who pieces together, who risks repeating the very act the text resists. 

The speaker, too, cannot escape this cycle. Even as they attempt to evade the gaze, they find themselves looking: at memory, at the remnants of loss, at the body — its subjecthood refracted through their own. They tell us:

Nagasalita man din siya…
Sa isang pader na puno ng mga
medalya
Sa mga librong noon pa’y
Nakahelera

They tell Neng: “Hawakan mo gud siya…” They attempt to restore agency, sight:

Nagabuka pa rin ang mga
talukap niya
Nagatingin
Nagtataka

But in doing so, they perpetuate the same cycle they seek to escape

And so they return to the beginning: “Ibuta gud ning mga mata ko.”

The request is for release from the violence of being seen, from the burden of seeing, and from the endless negotiation between the two.

Salamisim does not resolve this tension, and in doing so, proposes a way of thinking through the body as something that cannot be fully captured, even when it is laid bare. (Bea Gatmaytan / MindaNews)

(Works cited: Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, 1967; Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1974; Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being And Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Éditions Gallimard, 1943.)