A Thousand Little Deaths: Growing Up Under Martial Law in the Philippines

This is an incredible story that is very well told, though difficult to read in some places - not because it is not well written, which it is, but because the anguish and terror and fear that she describes is so heartrending. It could not have been easy for the author to write about the mental and physical pain that has marked her life as a result of her traumatic experience as a teenager under President Marcos' martial law regime. It is a great gift to the reader that she is able to write about her life with so much feeling - and objectivity. Reading this short book significantly reduced my level of ignorance about the Marcos regime and how much death and destruction it caused. The author's assessment of the character of her countrymen and the influences that made it what it is was also fascinating. I highly recommend this book.

Although the book is titled “A Thousand Little Deaths” what emanates from each page is a multitude of shimmering strands of hope. The author imbues her story of her unjust incarceration as an adolescent with resilience and honesty. As much as she describes the fear, anguish, and shame she felt when incarcerated as a political prisoner as a teenager, (with no charges ever being brought against her), what stays in the reader’s mind is her love of family, of learning and literature, of her grandmother’s cooking and the enjoyment of local feast days. Most of all, one senses her deep and abiding love of her homeland, her empathy with its poorest people, and her outrage at what harm is being perpetrated on the country by those who are meant to protect it.The author is skilled in drawing the reader in to taste the local delicacies, to feel the texture of the dress her mother makes for St Joseph’s Day, smell the radiant flowers and lush green vegetation of her native land. She is also adept in making the reader shiver at the darker side of her homeland --- the corpses dumped by the road, the stone-faced soldiers who regularly monitor her weekly “sign-in” at the prison camp, the brazen duplicitousness of the government of the day.In addition to these evocative descriptions, she is fearless in exposing her own psyche. She frets over being so traumatized when she was not physically tortured, until finally allowing herself to understand that the psychological terror and social condemnation she endured cut as deep as any rope or blade, which permits the road to healing to begin in earnest.One is brought to mind of Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the Butterflies”, although happily this young idealist lived to tell the tale. And what a tale it is. Highly recommended.

Such a courageous writing, but for the reader, a true glimpse of Philippine history from a personal perspective. Thank you Vicky Pin-Pin.

This book is riveting. It's only $6.99 as a Kindle download. Imagine being a convent schoolgirl of 15, and being taken away by military and being made a political prisoner. We cannot forget these stories. This was the dark horrible side of martial law that is too ugly to look at so people tell themselves stories about how it wasn't so bad and so forth.

A 15-year old highschool girl is in the 1973 arrested by soldiers at her catholic school in the Philippines and transported to a prison camp. We are in the time of the repressive Marco regime and arrests were common to quell a combination of a Muslim insurgency in the South, a Maoist-inspired insurgency in the North and student protests.In this book, the author recalls her ordeals as a political prisoner during a few months, the weekly reporting at the camp she had to perform during a five-year period, her paranoia of feeling watched and followed in the streets and how 30 years later, another event - being hit by cancer – enable her to overcome the previous trauma.During most of the book we are inside the mind of the 15-year old. In the beginning, as a reader, one is irritated because one is not informed why the young girl was arrested. The point is: she does not know! She is guessing and comes to the conclusion that her participation in a couple of rather banal events must have let to somebody reporting her. She is concerned about her situation but even more about her family is affected and what her father and mother think about her. Therefore her disappointment is huge when she is released from the camp and returns home that nobody in the family talks about how they feel about the situation.Although never stated in the book, the “thousand little deaths” refer to the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms used in political repression to install fear. Yet, the book is about more than that: we are also transferred back in time. While in the prison camp the 15-year old has a lot of time to think about her life in the Philippines and to observe what is going on around her. From her reflections we learn a lot about social life and etiquette in middle-class Philippines - I was surprised by how conservative a society the country was in the 1970s – and how people reacted to the non-stop political propaganda of the Marcos regime.The book is a pleasure to read: meticulously, very intelligently written, one senses how the author has carefully reflected about every single sentence.I was enthralled by being inside the mind of the 15-year old watching Philippino society and almost smelling the food being prepared for Christmas from the description. For that reason I was annoyed by the break in the middle of the book, where the author, who has a Ph.D. in political science, interrupted with a chapter analyzing the political situation in the Philippines. I would have preferred to read that section as a post-scrip at the end of the book. It took me several pages of reading afterwards before I was once more back into the mind of the 15-year old, and not an outsider looking at her.In short, I highly recommend the book: there are many layers in it!Wolfgang Mostert