The Lakatan Defiance

The retreat house sat quietly where a river's brackish mouth spilled into a Visayan sea, cradled beneath a dense, rustling canopy of native trees. At night, once the heavy humidity settled over the coast, the damp earth outside came alive with the soft, rhythmic chorus of frogs hopping through the dark shadows. But inside the hall, beneath humming fluorescent lights, a starker reality unfolded. For three days, I sat among social action workers guiding them through the mechanics of digital safety and solidarity—teaching encrypted messaging, threat modeling, and how to harden smartphones against state surveillance. Yet a haunting, persistent irony emerged: I taught digital defense to people whose most immediate existential threats were not made of code, but forged from iron, soil, and gun barrels.

Throughout those sessions, my eyes kept returning to three women sitting near the back corner. For sixty hours, they sat hunched over their plastic chairs, shrinking into themselves as if trying to occupy as little of the physical world as possible. Their hands were rough, lined with the dark calluses of field labor. They said nothing during the group discussions on password hygiene or VPNs.

Then came the final day, and lunch.

The retreat center administrator walked around the long wooden tables, setting down platters of rice and fish. With a gentle, apologetic sigh, she announced that there were no lakatan bananas for dessert today—in fact, lakatan had become remarkably scarce across the entire province.

The casual announcement hung in the humid air, and in that instant, the lakatan became the pivot on which the region's entire history turned.

Lakatan—the humble, golden banana that should grow effortlessly in any backyard in these islands—was scarce. How could a fruit so native, so fundamental to the daily bread of the Visayan landscape, become a rarity on a table surrounded by agricultural workers?

The missing lakatan was not a supply chain hiccup. It was an icon. It was tangible proof of ongoing historical inequality.

In a province dominated by a hand-counted elite of land barons, the soil is not a living entity for the people; it is a ledger for the powerful. Indigenous Peoples wait decades for their Certificates of Ancestral Domain Title (CADTs) to crawl through intentionally lethargic bureaucracies, while informal, lucrative arrangements for natural resource extraction are quietly granted overnight to those allied with power. The land cannot be tilled for food, for local sustenance, for a simple patch of native bananas, unless the lords decree it so. Vast swathes of earth are chained to commercial monopolies, leaving the very people who nurse the soil unable to harvest a single lakatan for their own lunch.

The missing banana explained everything. It explained why peasant leaders were being snatched from their homes at night and slapped with fabricated charges for demanding tenure, fair wages, and social security. It explained the quiet terror that had kept the three women slouched in the corner for three days. To demand land to grow food—to demand lakatan on your own terms—was to threaten the absolute authority of the lords.

Yet, as if answering the silent revelation of that missing fruit, the three women finally spoke.

Standing up before the entire room, their voices trembling before settling into a quiet, unwavering frequency, they began to tell their stories. They spoke of arrest warrants issued like harvest notices. They spoke of living on land they cultivated but could never own. They spoke of the quiet, suffocating grief of watching their loved ones dragged away.

It was heartbreaking to hear, but as their words echoed through the room, the space transformed. The lakatan was missing from the table, but its spirit—the raw, native, stubborn right of the soil to yield life—was alive in their voices. To watch human beings, rendered invisible by decades of feudal, patriarchal violence, claim their narrative in a public room was an act of quiet resurrection. They had broken their silence and, in doing so, reclaimed the earth stolen from them.

The road ahead for these communities is long, perilous, and paved with unsparing resistance. The structural violence that starves the land of its own lakatan will not crumble overnight. But as I watched those three women share a meal, no longer shrinking, no longer silent, I understood why we gather, why we build networks of solidarity, and why we fight to keep each other safe.

In a world engineered to control the soil and silence the soul, choosing to speak, choosing to stand, and choosing to reclaim what is native to you is an act of war against hopelessness.

To hope is to defy.

By Chadwick Go Llanos

Illustration generated from Gemini AI