A Thousand Little Deaths

by Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein

  I was so full of shame that I began to see myself as a troublemaker. I blamed myself for having the knack to rock the boat. I considered myself a selfish and angry teenager who thought only of herself and not of others, as I had been instructed by my German-nun teachers. I could already see Sister Celsa, my favorite teacher from second grade, looking at me now with her sad blue eyes and, who passed away by the time I was in high school. I had been her favorite back then. But now I had brought shame not only to my family but also to my school. I wished the nuns at St. Scholastica’s Academy were more understanding, more forgiving. But none of them said anything to me. In their habits, frequently with rosaries in their hands, where is their love now? There was only silence. The reality of my arrest was the one and only thing that stood between them and me. Sure, they wanted to cover their backs too. I understood that. But it also provoked in me resentment about Catholicism that I had not felt before. I knew then that the seeds of doubt about my religion had been planted.

  Those around me did not know that each encounter, verbal or otherwise, felt like death. These encounters felt like a thousand little deaths thrown like darts piercing me bit by bit, hitting some part of my body, but never quite striking the deathblow. Each time an insensitive remark was uttered from their lips, another dart was thrown my way. By the time their sentence was completed, my face would have turned red and hot. I would feel myself getting smaller and smaller until I wished that the earth below would just swallow me.

  Let me be clear about one thing: the word ‘aktibista,’ or activist, was not always derogatory, in the way my aunt or others used it. For many enlightened citizens, the word was applied to those worthy of a badge of honor; meaning that one was courageous enough to stand for principles, or that one was willing to go against the grain for things that truly mattered. Being an activist was closer to being a hero because you had put your life on the line. And so for those who believed in Marcos and thus had faith in his government, being an activist meant being a rabble-rouser, a troublemaker, or worse, a nihilist. For those who were disenchanted with the country’s state of affairs, activists or radicals were necessary in summoning what little opposition Filipinos could muster against the coercive power of Marcos and his men.

  I discovered many years later just who some of these other activists were. It was gratifying to know that one of them was a beloved member of my family. My older sister, C., was then a student at the state university. She disclosed to me in one of our conversations that when she was told by our parents that I had been arrested, her first thought was, why not me too? There she was, a student involved in demonstrations and sit-ins supporting social justice, with other activists and student leaders and yet she was not arrested. She believed that being sent to jail in those days was a step closer to being a hero, because by doing so you indisputably placed yourself on the other side, on the left, on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed. “Besides,” she intoned in her older sister voice, “I could endure it better than you could because, let’s face it, you were only fifteen and much too young.”

  So life went on, with its ups and downs and in-betweens. Sometimes, the pressure got intense. Martial law continued and so did our fears and our anxieties. Despite these pressures, I sometimes found myself giving in to the silliness, the farce, the tragi-comedy of the Marcos years. A particular incident that I can remember even now with a smile was one of those elections that Marcos seemed to always be holding. Marcos was fond of elections. He called for elections even when these were not scheduled. It was as if by doing so, he could tell people he had won and had the mandate, even if his men had stuffed the ballot boxes.

  I was sixteen when Marcos called for another election. We all knew what this meant. As preparations were underway, he thought he would at least give it a semblance of legitimacy by allowing the opposition to participate. But stuffing ballots would again win the day; that was how it has been and the way it would be for this election. Even more important he dropped the voting age to fifteen from twenty-one. He also declared that voting would be mandatory and those who did not vote would go to jail. My siblings and cousins, who were fifteen and over, were incredulous that we could vote in a presidential election. We began talking about who we would vote for since there was really no choice about abstaining.

  I raised my hand immediately amid the clamor at Grandma’s house where we were assembled.

  “I know who I will vote for,” I volunteered.

  “Who,” they asked. “Surely not Marcos?”

  “Are you serious?” I retorted.

  “Knowing you, you would never vote for him,” they agreed.

  “Well, since this is just a mockery of an election, I will vote for Mickey Mouse,” I declared. ‘Mickey Mouse money’ was what we called paper money when we played house as kids.

  “Maybe I can vote for Donald Duck,” someone said.

  “Would you vote for Dolphy?” A cousin inquired.

  “Why not, he is probably more popular than Marcos.” Dolphy was then the country’s most popular comedian.

  And so it went, each one in the group saying whom they would vote for. On Election Day, I promptly walked to the elementary school in front of our house to cast my ballot. After I drew the booth curtain closed, I looked at the ballot and saw that there was a space to write in a candidate. In handwriting that I deliberately made squiggly and child-like, as if I was just learning to write, I wrote Mickey Mouse. Maybe they would think a little child wrote it, I thought. That’s good, that’s good, I said to myself. How about that? Mickey Mouse has just been voted as President of the Philippines. He had at least one vote and I would not have been surprised if my many cousins also wrote down his name. Viva Mickey Mouse!

  I still did not have a name for the dull ache that had now become an inseparable part of me. I was largely unaware of the appropriate vocabulary to apply to someone who had suffered a trauma. For years, even as I suffered its symptoms, I was clueless about its name. But as I learned many years later, indeed, trauma was what it was. During the years following my incarceration, I could only remember the dull ache and the all-too-frequent violent headaches that rocked my body. My body released its terrors physically where my mind could not bring itself to comprehend. The debilitating headaches became all too familiar. I knew its early signs which came just after I tensed up, my body rigid and taut, expecting something bad to happen, like the time I was with my mother at the market or when I was walking back to the dorm from school. It is not as if I have never had a headache before because I did suffer from them as a child. But the ones that I suffered from 1973 on, however, were more intense than anything I’d known previously. These were violent migraines that I battled with for long stretches of time. When it came, it was the kind of pain that would force me to lie down in a darkened room, where any bit of light or noise or movement was like a devil holding its pitchfork and ready to skewer me. If I could not darken the room sufficiently, I would close my eyes and place a pillow over my face to shield me from the light, which was like a dagger, ready to pierce straight through my skull. The throbbing, pulsating pain would intensify minute after excruciating minute. The pain in my head was the only thing I was aware of. I was my head. I had no torso, no arms, no hands, no legs, no feet, or any other body part. My tired, aching head was all that I could be. And then soon I knew an aura would come as the first flickers of tiny black dots danced around my field of vision. I braced myself for what would happen next. I would rush to the toilet in time to throw up. Once that was done, I would experience some relief. I would stumble back to bed because I would feel other parts of my body once again and these would all be tired, fatigued, and in need of rest. I would pop a headache pill into my mouth and let sleep take over. When I would awaken hours later, I would feel like I had just been run over by a truck. These headaches continued for many years and remain a part of my life even now. I slowly learned to handle them over time. But what was harder to unravel and to try to balance was the mental dise
quilibrium.

  I went on with my life as best I could. I completed high school and entered university and armed myself with the degree that my parents expected me to earn. But even as I enjoyed some feeling of accomplishment, I was never far away from the thousand little deaths that I suffered, all of these little wounds refusing to heal. When I finally left the Philippines, and years later read Jacobo Timerman’s account of his incarceration, I began to understand a little of what those little deaths meant. Reading his words from his book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, I thought that it was me he was describing when he spoke about the terrors that struck him. For the first time, I understood the dark sentiments that had nagged at me all those years. Timerman wrote,

  “Every day, since my release, I’ve been waiting for some vital shock to take place, some deep extended nightmare to explode suddenly in the middle of the night, allowing me to relive it all—something that will take me back to the original scene, purify me and then restore me to this place where I am. But nothing has happened and I find this calm terrifying.”

  I have never grasped meaning as readily as I have at reading these words. It was as if I had written them myself. It was almost as if I could hear the first faint timbre of the bells ringing and if I would only listen a little more, the ringing would call me to where I needed to go. His words allowed me to confront my own extended nightmare, a five-year-long nightmare that lasted for even more years, long after I had stopped reporting to the camp.

  Now things started to make a bit of sense. For instance, I used to puzzle over why I fantasized about what I would do in prison, should I be arrested again. Like a sword hanging over my head, I waited anxiously for the next time the soldiers would take me away; snatch me once again from the uneasy comfort of home and family. I was certain that I was going to be arrested again even if I did not do anything. These thoughts became obsessive. I endured a kind of dying by the mere question of when the military would pick me up again. I imagined that they would kidnap me the next time, most likely when I was alone so that they would not have to explain to anyone why they were taking me, and that would be the last anyone would see of me.

  It was these thoughts, the ‘saudade,’ mixed with terrorizing fear that sprang forth from the back of my head when I read Timerman’s words about the “deep extended nightmare that would explode in the middle of the night…” But at least I thought I had begun to assimilate the vocabulary I needed to understand what happened to me.

  It was true that Marcos had done away with much of law and order. It was his law that mattered. So for years, I saw myself as a wounded hound dog and I fantasized about what I would do inside prison were I to be sent there again. I thought about the specific activities I would do to while away the time. I imagined myself sitting on the hard bed of my prison cell, reading the books that I had always wanted to read but never had the time for. I imagined myself writing as I leaned my back against the wall for support, using those lined yellow pads to write stories and articles. Now I would have the time and therefore, I imagined, I could summon the creativity needed to pen them. I also fantasized about composing poems inside the prison walls, poetry being a genre of literature I had never appreciated before. But now, now I thought I could give it a chance. I began believing in and seeing the beauty of poetry and its linguistic brevity, though I was never one to be of few words. In truth, I loved to exercise the muscles of my mouth, jabbering away with friends and family, discussing or arguing points. I simply enjoyed being a chatterbox. And thus, poetry, I naively thought, might dissuade me from that verbal inclination.

  In my more domestic moments of fantasy, I imagined knitting a sweater, looking like a stooped grandmother in her rocking chair; or darning socks or embroidering a piece of fabric that could be turned into a throw pillow. I could not begin to count the times that I imagined doing these activities should I be arrested again. These thoughts became a part of the internal life that I could not share with anyone. It was then that I realized that prison was no longer the camp in which I had been detained. Prison need not be the small square walls found within the highly secure grounds and fences of the camp. It had entered my head. It was there when I was in school learning algebra, science, or whatever class I was in. It was there as I went home from school, always thinking and sensing that someone was following me. It was even there when I went to Sunday mass, seeing a wrathful and vengeful God instead of a loving and compassionate deity. It was definitely there when I reported to those petty military gods every other day. Back then I believed that these people owned me. My body was theirs to do whatever they wanted with. That was what my fifteen-year-old self believed even as I returned to school and went on to complete high school at sixteen. That was what my seventeen-year old self believed, as I went on to university and completed an undergraduate degree by the time I turned twenty. Freedom to say the things that I wanted to say, the independence to do what I wanted to do, and the lack of fear of repercussions should I have said or did something deemed subversive—all these had now become remote possibilities. What was here and now was the endless looking over my shoulder to see if someone was following me; the constant worry that I would soon be sent to jail, tortured, and then disappeared. The realization brought with it a hundred more little deaths raining down on me.

  Leaving

  In early 1979, when my graduation from university was just two months away, I decided I would leave the country at the first opportunity. I did not know how I was going to do this, but I was earnest about giving it a good try. Leaving one’s homeland is difficult for many people. For others, it can be a gut-wrenching decision, particularly when leaving means going overseas, where economic opportunities abound and sooner or later the leave-taker must confront a strong disincentive to return home. Then there are those who will leave, once outside, will never be allowed to return, or should they return, will be sent to prison for being an “enemy of the state.” All of these thoughts and possibilities weighed on me. The more I thought about it, the stronger was the desire to move away. Once the decision was made, my departure could not come soon enough for me. I was tired of all the danger, real or imagined, that I lived through each day I remained in the Philippines. I wanted to be far away from the world I had known since I was born. As much as I would miss my family, I was exhausted from agonizing about what every new day meant, about safeguarding my safety as well as realizing that freedom from fear would never again be in the cards for me. I was tired of having to look over my shoulder every time I left the house. I was exhausted from the constant anxiety that nagged at me to get home as soon as dusk settled. I was tired of visiting the camp, exchanging stilted pleasantries with the guards while I dutifully signed my name in their logbook; its pages getting fuller so that a new logbook appeared with regularity every few weeks. I was still unhappy about the state of affairs of the country. Marcos continued to rule with an iron hand. I was not alone in my desperation to get out of the country. While my reasons were not as economically motivated as these were for many Filipinos, we shared the exhaustion of living the way we did in a repressive society whose government did not give a damn. There were more and more of us who felt disenfranchised and disadvantaged; who were getting poorer by the day, and who, even with their university degrees, were unable to secure jobs. Instead of white-collar jobs, many of them chose to work as domestics in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, or whichever country would take them. The Filipino diaspora has started and there was no going back. Foreign remittances became a regular undertaking for those working overseas to provide for the family members they left behind.

  It was almost at the day’s end on a February afternoon as I wound my way from the hilly slopes of Ateneo’s Loyola Heights Campus to Bellarmine Hall where the Communication Studies department was housed. I had just finished a TV production class at the university TV studios near Gate 2 of the expansive campus. I entered the building and turned towards the stairs, which I took two steps at a time to get to the third floor.
I was hoping that my thesis adviser was still there. Unfortunately, he had already left, the department secretary, C., informed me. She then handed me an envelope.

  “Here’s something for you that came in the mail today,” she said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Open it,” she replied.

  The label on the envelope told me that the letter was from overseas. The return address read Communications Institute, East West Center in Hawaii. Two months earlier, I had applied for a research fellowship with the institute. I whizzed through the contents as fast as I could hoping to find what I was looking for. As soon as I did, I jumped up and down, clutching the paper close to my chest and giving C. a big smile. I hugged her and said, “Oh my god, you won’t believe it. Guess what, I won the research fellowship I applied for. Gee whiz, now I know what I will be doing after graduation, isn’t that neat? And it will be in Hawaii. Oh my gosh!”

  She hugged me back and said, “I am happy for you. It will be an honor for the department that you won the award. I will tell our chairman to make an announcement about it.”

  “Thanks. They want me to be there by April,” I replied.

  The truth is, I did not think I was going to get the fellowship. I was told that I might not get it because I was still an undergrad student when I had applied and most fellowships were awarded to graduate students. I could not have been happier. When I decided months earlier that I was going to leave the country, I had actively looked for ways out. This was one of them. With the letter in my hand, I felt a relief that I had not felt in a long time. The country that had jailed me had no place in my nineteen-year-old heart. I was pleased to go and hopefully take my miseries with me, dropping them, if only psychologically, into the swells of the Pacific Ocean as I made my way on a plane bound for Honolulu. If only for a while, I reasoned, I would not have to think about being picked up again, arrested when I least expected it, or fearful that the next time around I would not be so lucky.