To open Kape Blak’s Elyen Ka is to witness the drafting of a spiritual death certificate. The text does not dramatize a conflict between the human and the industrial; it stages the eerie stillness that comes after the battle is lost. There is no nostalgic resistance in these pages, no flicker of the old romanticism that once insisted the human spirit might still negotiate with the machine. Instead, Blak imagines a world in which the human and the mechanical have fused into a single organism, a creature whose bloodstream carries metal filings and whose breath is the exhaust of factories. If earlier literatures of the industrial age mourned the widening distance between man and machine, Elyen Ka rejects the premise entirely. It presents a consciousness that has already been metabolized by the system: digested, processed, repurposed, and returned to its own body as fuel.
This gives the zine its peculiar texture: it functions less as an anthology and more as debris. It does not present itself as a curated collection of poems but as the fallout of thinking under duress, as the textual residue of a mind that has synchronized its rhythm with the hum of fluorescent light. Blak, a Philosophy student at USM-Kabacan, does not compose hymns against the gods of capital, because he writes from the altar itself, as the sacrifice. The work reads like a liturgy authored from inside the machinery, a devotional chant whispered through a mouth full of wires. It is a hymnbook for those who have already surrendered.
The first encounter with the zine reinforces this position not through argument but through assault. Before the reader can understand its content, the zine forces them to confront its formal hostility. The second page erupts into visual noise: the phrase “elyen ka” is repeated, fragmented, scattered like shrapnel across an open expanse of white. The page resembles a screen frozen mid-glitch, the static burst of a failing transmission, the stutter of an overheating chip, the muttering breakdown of a corrupted file. This chaos is not an accident of design or a corruption of form, but it is an entry protocol. The text establishes immediately that coherence is a luxury the world of Elyen Ka cannot afford, and that language, in this cosmos, must be scavenged rather than received. Reading becomes a form of waste-picking, an excavation of meaning from the rubble of communication.
This metaphor of salvage gains additional depth when one reaches the zine’s end and finds Blak’s biography: a creator of burloloy assembled from ukay and Japan surplus. That artisanal labor, the piecing together of trinkets from what others discard, is repeated on the page itself. The reader becomes a co-scavenger, forced to comb through typographic debris and reassemble a narrative from scattered fragments. The experience is tactile; one feels the resistance of the page, the sharp edges of its ruptures.
The world this text constructs is visually austere, refusing color in favor of a strict black-and-white palette. As the reader moves deeper into the zine, they enter a gothic industrial noir that eliminates any softening gradient. The chosen palette is not merely stylistic; it enforces the logic of labor that governs the zine. The world of Elyen Ka operates on binary terms: clocked in or clocked out, functional or obsolete, light or dark. Even the illustrations participate in this discipline. They depict a weeping eye dripping ink like oil, an anatomical heart that resembles a piece of coal or a dried root dredged from toxic soil, and electric wires knotted into silhouettes that choke the sky rather than illuminate it. These images are not expressive metaphors but anatomical diagrams of dehumanization.
Yet the monochrome’s rigidity introduces a tension of its own, and here the work invites necessary criticism. Its bleakness is so absolute that at times it risks folding inward, not into profundity but into a stylized claustrophobia. There are moments when the aesthetic becomes so totalizing that it nearly aestheticizes the suffering it wishes to indict. The visual world offers no apertures, no small ruptures of color or softness to suggest that escape is imaginable. And perhaps that is precisely the trap: the absence of a door is what makes the room a cage. However, by denying the reader even a glint of resistance or difference, the text occasionally mirrors the very totalitarianism of the factory it despises, risking a monotony that mimics the drone of the machines it critiques.
The zine’s textual architecture tightens this enclosure by turning grammar itself into a mechanism of oppression. The poems rely heavily on the Bisaya prefix gina-, which carries the sense of a continuous action inflicted upon a subject. Ginabenta. Ginakaw. Gisakop. Ginasira. These words accumulate like blows. They create a rhythm that mimics machinery in the forms of pistons, hammers, and presses by reiterating the position of the speaker as an object perpetually acted upon, never a self-determined actor. Here, grammar becomes a conveyor belt. Language does not describe reality but performs it. The speaker is processed as raw material, and the reader feels the steady compression of the prefix with each line.
This mechanical rhythm, however, does not produce monotony. The poems become chants, liturgical repetitions that enact the violence they describe. The constancy of the prefix creates an atmosphere of ongoing harm, a hum in the background that one only notices when the silence fractures. In this linguistic economy, the scream is not an interruption, but it acts as the base note that sustains the system.
It is in the midst of this system that Blak deploys one of his most striking, yet potentially divisive, formal strategies: the deliberate insertion of gaps and untitled poems. On page 3, the reader is explicitly instructed to supply a title themselves, told that “ang tunay na pamagat ay nasa mata ng mambabasa.” This act directly invokes Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” the idea that meaning is authored not in writing but in reading. Theoretically, this subverts Barthes: instead of interpretive joy (jouissance), Blak offers conscription. The invitation to co-create becomes unpaid labor; the blank space is not an opening for imagination but an outsourced task. However, in practice, this device falters. By explicitly asking the reader to participate, the text flirts dangerously with the triviality of a school workbook or a slam book. For a zine that succeeds so well in establishing a suffocating, closed loop of despair, this sudden pivot to interactivity feels jarring, as if it were a breach of the fourth wall that dissipates the tension rather than heightening it. It asks for agency in a world that has spent the previous pages insisting agency is impossible. Consequently, the gesture hovers on the edge of being a gimmick, threatening to turn a liturgy of exhaustion into a mere writing prompt.
And yet, if we look past the pedagogical feel of the instruction, the burden it places on the reader remains relevant. Interpretation becomes another gig assignment, another piece of the soul handed over for processing. The blank spaces become the quietest request for companionship, a recognition that survival in this industrial cosmos is a collective act. Meaning becomes a shared labor, a gesture of mutual recognition between two exhausted beings.
Out of this shared exhaustion, the zine’s central figure emerges: the alien, the elyen. But Blak’s alien is not extraterrestrial but is entirely earthbound. He is the laborer whose body has been reconfigured by exploitation into something unrecognizable, even to himself. The alien is not an outsider but the inevitable product of a total system. Blak writes, “Hindi ka na gipanganak, ginawa ka lang.” Here, the biological collapses into the industrial, suggesting that birth has been superseded by manufacture. The being produced on this assembly line is a proletarian cyborg (not the liberatory hybrid of Donna Haraway’s mythic cyborg), but a creature soldered by exhaustion and patched together with the scrap metal of its own disintegrated humanity.
And yet this creature moves, confesses, desires. Beneath the wires, beneath the soot, beneath the salvaged parts, something continues to breathe. The alien is grotesque, but he is not grotesquerie. He is the patron saint of what remains.
This creature’s existence necessitates a theology equal to his condition. Blak constructs it through one of the zine’s most devastating passages:
ginaalay mo ang katawan sa diyos ng utos
at gawa.
sa altar ng trabaho,
sa banal na pagod
ng bawat umaga
In these lines, the rituals of labor become indistinguishable from religious devotion. The factory is the new cathedral, its hum the new liturgy, its exhaustion the new sacrament. Work, here, is not merely an economic demand, but is a devotional act. It is a belief system enforced through bodily sacrifice. The alien becomes a devotee of a god who demands fatigue as worship. This is not satire. Blak writes from within the ritual itself, offering confession rather than critique.
The logic of sacrifice extends beyond labor and into the realm of intimacy. In one of the zine’s quietest and most arresting insights, Blak suggests that “pag-ibig ay isa ring uri ng polusyon.” In a world where the atmosphere is poisoned by industry, where the sea is slick with oil, where the body is a processed commodity, even tenderness becomes implicated in contamination. Affection, in this universe, leaves residue. To love is to produce waste, to exhale soot onto the beloved. The metaphor reveals that in this world, no emotion is pure, no connection untainted. And yet the beauty of this admission lies in its honesty: even within a poisoned atmosphere, creatures still seek one another. Even pollutants reach for warmth.
This revelation sets the stage for the zine’s final turn inward, where Blak collapses global decay into personal exhaustion. The confession arrives with painful clarity: “napagod akong maging tao.” Susan Sontag, in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, once described the maintenance of a disintegrating self as an act of coherence long after coherence has failed. Blak transposes this metaphysical fatigue onto the factory floor. Being human becomes a job, and the self becomes a machine maintained through sheer will. The exhaustion here is not bodily but ontological. It is the fatigue of sustaining a humanity that the world refuses to recognize.
In this moment, Elyen Ka’s thesis crystallizes: alienation is not only the outcome of the system, but also the strategy for surviving it. To become alien is to abandon the impossible labor of being human in a world that dismantles humanity at the root. The alien is the one who has stopped pretending.
Yet even after all this, the zine does not end in despair but in a paradoxical clarity. Its final line “Tahimik man talaga ang mundo / kung hindi lang tayo nabuhay dito” — suggests that the world, left to itself, is peaceful, and that our existence is the first disruption. Rather than self-hatred, this confession is a recognition of scale. Humanity is both the wound and the witness.
And still, the existence of Elyen Ka contradicts its own lament. For a consciousness supposedly flattened by machinery, for a soul supposedly metabolized by the system, for an alien supposedly stripped of voice, there remains enough life to write. Enough ache to confess. Enough stubborn spark to articulate the very exhaustion designed to extinguish it. The zine becomes the final, trembling proof that something persists. Not pure, not whole, but insistently alive.
In the end, reading Elyen Ka feels like listening to a voice filtered through static, distorted but unmistakably human. The noise never disappears. The glitch never resolves. And yet, beneath the hum of machinery, beneath the debris of language, beneath the theology of exhaustion, there is still a pulse. Altered, contaminated, alien, but undeniably beating.
This review is part of Mindanews’ literary feature on SOX Zine Fest 2025, focusing on select zines highlighted from the event on November 29, 2025, at Notre Dame of Marbel University, Koronadal City, South Cotabato.
