In a recent article in the December 2018 issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, Jocelyn Martin argues that Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law can be “labelled scientifically as traumatic” by underscoring the “unequivocal link” between experiences of martial law and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by victims of the regime. In the September 2018 issue of the same journal, Mary Grace Concepcion published an article that similarly links trauma and martial law, but she focuses on the writing of autobiography as a way by which victims—or survivors, as she termed them,—have coped with the trauma of martial law: writing, in this case, is cathartic. Martin, for her part, dwells on the manifestation of PTSD, the “canonical form” of trauma, among victims of martial law. In her study, Martin analyzes the narratives of three activists who were either incarcerated or tortured during martial law: Cristina Montiel, Karl Gaspar, and the Quimpo siblings.
Following the original meaning of the Greek τραυμα, which “refers to a wound,” Martin uses Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma as “a wound of the mind.” Martin contends that the effects of trauma can be felt even years after the traumatic event, “impeding the linearity of one’s life, thus interrupting the subjective fluidity of one’s chronological sense of time.” Sigmund Freud in his 1941 essay “Remembering, Forgetting, Working-through” proposed the idea of Nachträglichkeit, roughly translatable as “afterwardness” or “belatedness,” which Martin says “explains why effects of torture and trauma can still manifest years later.”
Roger Luckhurst describes the characteristics of trauma as including intrusive flashbacks, recurring dreams, situations that repeat or echo the original, emotional numbing, total absence of recall of the significant event, loss of temper control, and hypervigilance or exaggerated startle response. To this list, Irene Visser adds depression and cynicism (otherwise, if you retain “include” the sentence will have to be rephrased to “Included in this list, for Irene Visser, are depression and cynicism”. Echoing Judith Herman, Martin argues that “prolonged and repeated trauma” can be caused by the individual’s subjection to “totalitarian control” as experienced by hostages, prisoners of war, concentration camp survivors, and survivors of religious cults. More common examples include victims of domestic battering, childhood physical or sexual abuse, and organized sexual exploitation. In other words, trauma is induced by the deprivation of personal volition through the violent intrusion of an Other.
Martin focuses mainly on Montiel’s autoethnographic article, “Multilayered Trauma during Democratic Transition: A Woman’s First-Person Narrative,” which she says has “a clear relation to PTSD.” Unlike Karl Gaspar’s book, How Long? Prison Reflections of Karl Gaspar, and Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years, authored by the Quimpo siblings, Montiel’s article analyzes her own experience of martial law and its repercussions to her mental health. She was neither incarcerated unlike Gaspar nor tortured physically unlike Jun and Jan Quimpo; it was actually her husband who was imprisoned after the latter joined the underground resistance movement against the Marcos regime. She and her son escaped to Mindanao in the 1980s, but were pursued by intelligence agents who traced their whereabouts. Montiel felt guilty that she was unable to join the underground movement.
Martin argues that Montiel “lived years of psychological torment that would later bear nachträglich consequences.” As she narrates in her autoethnography, Montiel lived the next fourteen years after martial law afflicted with “hypervigilance, guilt owing to her intellectual status, repressed emotions, even after the 1986 revolution, and stress because of internal rifts in her organization.” In the 1990s Montiel also experienced “‘bouts of uncontrollable weeping and vomiting”; difficulty in breathing, high-[blood] pressure, rapid-heart palpitations, nightmares, exaggerated startle response, cumulating to the end of her marriage.”
The content of Montiel’s dreams in 1999, 2001, 2008, and 2009, according to Martin, “clearly established the link between trauma and martial law”: waking her up sweating with heart palpitations, Montiel’s dreams revolved around “her abandonment of comrades, whose traces of torture are evident; the constant worry for children; the presence of intruders and military men; bomb threats; and guilt over her status as an intellectual.” Moreover, after obtaining her PhD in psychology in 1995 and her “intellectual life [beginning] to take more vitality,” Montiel “became very angry and fought with almost all of [her] colleagues.” These were obvious symptoms of PTSD.
In her analysis of the manifestations of PTSD in the narratives of Montiel and Gaspar (although in Gaspar’s account, PTSD was not explicitly and prominently described), Martin peruses Cathy Caruth’s assertion that “literary language allows for the unnarratable to be narrated. The same is true for the hefty narrative volume of the Quimpo siblings. When we listen to a trauma narrative, we listen to a voice that cannot fully know itself, but which, nonetheless, bears witness.” Martin points out that, with the suppression of free speech during martial law, writers like Montiel and Gaspar took advantage of poetry’s allegorical and metaphorical language “in order to express themselves,” at the time proximate to their respective traumatic events.
Montiel wrote her first poem in 1984, entitled “Wine on my Altar”:
I will offer
My wine full of wrath
Bless it drop by drop
In my own cup:
A crimsoned chalice
Painfully carved
By goodness starved
Martin notes the religious tropes through which Montiel expressed her trauma: a pained verse alluding to the Eucharist. Similarly, in the poem “Still Another Detainee Salvaged,” Karl Gaspar “combines the incarceration experience and his allusions to Christianity”:
we heard he was padlocked
all by himself
in the bartolina
on a sunday . . .
sunday and monday passed;
no relatives or lawyer came,
but he was finally surfaced
on the third day
he was brought out in the sun
a figure straight from el greco,
gaunt, thin, with soulful eyes,
half-dead, that tuesday
we embraced him with our eyes,
saw the wound on the forehead;
blood was still oozing out
then, they took him away. . . .
like lazarus he came out of the tomb,
but in the light, there wasn’t
much promise of joy
for us, that tuesday. . . .
friday night, word came in a whisper:
he is no longer in prison
at 2:00 o’clock that afternoon
they had taken him to a place far away.
is he alive? or is he dead?
no one among us knows.
since he disappeared, we can’t
do anything but pray.
In analyzing the experience of trauma in the Philippines, one must analyze the experience of trauma in the Philippines in a way that ethically acknowledges the trauma experiences of every nation “more fully, on their own terms.” Philippine trauma, in other words, is unique and may not easily fit the categories of Western scholarship that have taken the Holocaust or Shoah as the definitive referent of every national traumatic experience.
Not satisfied with the tendency of Western trauma writers in adopting a postmodern framework, Martin “argue[s] for an inclusive corpus that welcomes more genres and modes of literature” like poetry and narrative, which she says are also “valid” genres of trauma writing. Moreover, as explicitly evinced by the poems of Gaspar and Montiel, Christian tropology surfaces as a way by which trauma experiences are pegged in writing and “worked through.” Gaspar notes that “[i]t was very significant that all this happened during Holy Week. I was able to enter into Christ’s own experience of agony, despair, suffering, resignation and hope.” Furthermore, Norman Quimpo would even claim that he was “influenced” by the “liberal,” social justice advocacy of the Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila University. Scholars in the secular West often neglect religious experiences in trauma, most notable in postcolonial nations. The writings by Montiel, Gaspar, and the Quimpos serve as alternatives to the West’s postmodernist texts.
Lastly, Martin incisively sees the uniqueness of Philippine trauma in its recourse to the kapwa (literally, fellow human being) in the healing process. Psychologist Virgilio Enriquez noted that once the “ako [ego] starts thinking of himself as separate from kapwa [fellowmen], the Filipino ‘self’ gets to be individuated . . . and, in effect, denies the status of kapwa to the other. By the same token, the status of kapwa is also denied to the self.” Indeed, as Martin demonstrates, Montiel went to “various healing interventions . . . with the support of [her] siblings, colleagues . . . and psychospiritual encouragement from the Cenacle Sisters.”
Despite the distinctiveness of Philippine trauma, Martin notes that, unlike other countries where the perpetrators of genocide are prosecuted and lustrated, the Philippines has not been very keen in addressing trauma. In other countries, trauma has become part of national canonical discourse; the massacres and genocides in Germany, South Africa, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Armenia have been recognized officially within these nation-states.
In the Philippine case, the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board (HRVCB)—created through Republic Act No. 10368 or the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013—gives compensation to the victims of martial law, which is a form of national recognition. Yet, the healing, denouement, and closure of the martial law narrative and its enduring psychological effects upon thousands of victims remain open and contentious in the post-EDSA Philippines. Until today, the Marcos family and their allegiants deny any responsibility for the atrocities and crimes of martial law and are even allowed to run for public office. In the words of Bongbong Marcos, “What am I to apologize for?”
Compounding the problem is the circulation of fake news and myths regarding the Marcos years, a war waged by Marcos loyalists to facilitate the return of the Marcoses to power, which can only be accomplished by inducing the forgetting of traumatic memory. In this case, as Martin astutely notes, “forgetting is tantamount to allowing injustice.”
To forget the violence of martial law is to efface the trauma of thousands. Anamnesis is the key to healing and justice.
Read the full article of Jocelyn Martin in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints volume 66, number 4, December 2018.
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