Killing the Poor: How to Read ‘Some People Need Killing’
/Review of Patricia Evangelista's Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country. New York. Random House. 2023. xvi, 428 pp.
After Love Love's fierce defense of her soon-to-be-executed father, you can pick a name of a victim (Djustin, the epileptic kid alternately slapped, kicked, and shot by Police Sergeant Gerry Geñalope who would then claim in his official report that Djustin tried to shoot him first. His mother fought back, and Geñalope was prosecuted and detained. Police and local officials, however, dogged the family with money offers. Normita Lopez resisted for as long as she could, but once her husband wavered and accepted the bribe, she gave up. Even people experiencing poverty have their limits. You can then jump to another story, this time of Jimmy Gongon and Bartolome Marin, who were killed after they “sensed the presence of operatives” and tried to draw their guns first. Theirs was an “instantaneous death.” And you hop to another one.
This segmented reading may be the antidote to what the book can do to you if you pore through it the usual way -- from pages 1 to 429. I suggest this because if you leaf through the book the normal way, the book can drain you. The relentless succession of stories of death and survivor’s trauma can wear you down. Reading the book can cause anger and sadness, but the blood and gore -- especially in Part II (Carnage) - could be exhausting and numbing. Once these sink in, the power of these stories could diminish as you try to control your sorrow and anger.
And this, in turn, could very well lead you into the dark world Evangelista had been living in since she decided to join the night shift and cover the killings. This deadening of one's senses grows as you go through one story and after another, where the only difference is the Orwellian newspeak of then-churlish National Police Director General Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa and the creepy Police Lt. Col. Robert Domingo.
Patricia Evangelista (Source: Rappler)
This was what happened to me when I first read the book, and I was only able to snap out of it when, thumbing my Kindle, I ended up on page 332. I read the stories much closer after that while not letting my anger and hopelessness fade away. Do this, and I assure you the book's powerful message will reach you.
**
Some People Need Killing is also a book about life stories and disappointments. To an eight-year-old Evangelista, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) was a "battlefield" where the forces of democracy prevailed over the dictator Marcos. Her grandfather, the journalist Mario Chanco, remained loyal to Marcos, but what stood out for her was the recollection that "[o]nce upon a time we were heroes."
She excelled at the University of the Philippines' Department of English and Comparative Literature, a student who according to her former professor Jose Dalisay, "think[s] on her feet and speak to the issues of international importance, the poster child of Filipino intelligence and audacity." This "ingénue," Dalisay adds, "would return to the global stage as a hard-bitten, chain-smoking investigative reporter... very possibly one of the world's best yet again" (https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2023/11/06/2309343/beyond-reportage).
“Systematic brutality is what defines the lives of the majority. They are not only used to it; they live it -- from hunger, the lack of a decent home and education, an insalubrious life.”
It was the Ampatuan massacre that made Evangelista become cynical. The warlord who "delivered" the one million votes Gloria Arroyo needed to win the 2004 presidential elections against the late action star, Fernando Poe, Jr., ended whatever democratic fiction People Power I conjured. Strongman power had welded itself to presidential politics. After ten years of Arroyo and a brief semi-democratic surge under Benigno Aquino III, that fusion blossomed under the thug-mayor Rodrigo Duterte.
In a sense, Evangelista's slide into this dark world mirrors our overall political degeneration. She is not alone. Many of us appear to accept that this is the hand we have been dealt with by the times. We just have to learn how to live with it. All hope is lost. I did not even elicit any incensed response from my progressive friends when, on one of those inebriated nights, I asked them, "Why has the NPA not assassinated Imelda Marcos? This would make great propaganda and be politically damaging to the family?" My friends dithered. No one gave a direct answer, and the best one I remembered was one comrade who murmured an anodyne answer, "Her security is too tight."
The dictator's son is now president, and we cannot do anything about it. Even Leni Robredo preferred the Bellagio Residency Program to spending People Power One's 38th anniversary. So why do people not act in the face of these violent deaths? Or, to put it another way, why is it that the most passionately anti-tokhang (extrajudicial killing) are those not directly afflicted by it? The answer may be pretty simple: systematic brutality is what defines the lives of the majority. They are not only used to it; they live it -- from hunger, the lack of a decent home and education, an insalubrious life. Death is just around the corner, and as you lose one family member after another, you get used to the visits to the morgue, the wake, the burial, and a return to an (ab)normalized life. Not the rich and the middle class whose life-cycles are the antitheses to that of the poor, where the breaks from the daily grind, the ascetic life of academia, and leisure enable them to reflect on life's injustice and scream against it.
But this impression of dark times and the silenced poor may not be entirely fair. In fact, Evangelista saw courage in those to whom she dedicated her book: the "survivors of the drug war, named and unnamed, who have chosen to bear witness." She writes in English, though, and so she has a specific audience in mind (it did make me wonder, how Normita et. al., would respond to a Filipino translation of Some People Need Killing). So there is hope. Now what are we -- her readers -- going to do about it?
Patricio N. Abinales teaches at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Hawaii-Manoa.
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