Words by Aidan Bernales
Header by Oshu Allauigan

In my final paper for my Marcosian Fiction class, I wrote about the inherently abstract quality of history. Sure, history is real—documented and verified by those who lived through it. But for future generations, who inherit only its consequences rather than the experience itself, these records become mere abstractions. The curse of history is that it constantly has to make itself relevant or else it will be relegated to become a thing in the past. We see the consequences of this curse daily in those who fight to ensure we remember the lives they lived—war veterans, comfort women, and the families of desaparecidos. Likewise, and as a much larger sector, victims of Martial Law fight daily to keep the memory of their experiences alive. However, they are quickly being disregarded and invalidated by the political machinery currently at work.

As a person born long after the horrors of Martial Law took place, I am always told to be “reminded” of events I have no possibility of remembering. My memory of Martial Law is shaped by the memories of others, and these memories are so abstract that the concepts that underlie them—power, truth, and resistance—mean less and less to me.

Everything changed when I enlisted, on a whim, for ENLIT 129.19, a Literature class on Violence in Marcosian Fiction. I say on a whim because I only took it after I failed to enlist in another elective. My apprehension to take the subject was mainly because I was never really a history buff. In high school, the barrage of names, dates, and places felt more like a memorization battle instead of a memorialization of history.

But the subject proved to be different from the get-go. Instead of analyzing history from the lens of historical writers, our syllabus was filled with creative works from Nick Joaquin, Gregorio Brilliantes, Gina Apostol, Lino Brocka, and more. I was a Communication major dipping his toes in a literary world that I know is more than real—colder, harsher, and bloodier than fiction. I found myself poring over texts late at night, not out of academic obligation but out of a newfound curiosity. What did it mean to tell stories of violence? How did these writers navigate the dangers of speaking out? And, more importantly, why had I, like so many others, never recognized how fiction could serve as a powerful gateway into the world of Martial Law?

In a seminar hosted by the Literary and Cultural Studies Program, and one that my coursemates and I participated in as part of our class requirement, former School of Social Sciences Dean Dr. Filomeno Aguilar mentioned a term that has shaped my understanding of the Marcosian Fiction course I enrolled for. “The past,” he said, “is also an emotional community.”

In the book “Emotional Communities in the Middle Ages” by Barbara Rosenwein, an emotional community is described as a system of feeling based on a social community with common stakes, goals, and interests. Dr. Aguilar used this term to relay the power of literature to take us into the shoes of a person living under Martial Law—something that a historian cannot do. While historians may offer facts and dates, literature transcends those limitations, inviting us to inhabit the emotional reality of those who lived through oppressive regimes.

Fiction, poetry, and memoirs create emotional bridges that help us understand the fear, loss, and courage of the public from those times. By entering these emotional communities through literary works, we move beyond sterile facts and tap into shared human experiences that make history feel present, personal, and urgent.

For example, there is a line which I cannot seem to forget in Butch Dalisay’s short story “The First of our Dead,” a required reading for our class. The story narrates a student activist organization that has to wrestle with the death of one of its members in a rally. Horace, the team leader, relays the news to the fallen member’s parents, yet neither he nor the parents seem to come to an understanding of the death. For this, Dalisay writes, “Grief had simply found three voices—hurt, angry, and confused.”

Martial Law cannot be remembered so easily because it cannot find just one voice. A 2022 study on the perceptions of 2,400 Filipinos revealed a striking ambivalence: while Martial Law is largely remembered in a positive light, the People Power Revolution—the very movement opposing it—is viewed with equal favor. Despite this, Filipinos exhibit a general indifference toward their nation’s history. The story hones in on this further by making the protagonist unsure whether Horace remembered the first protest-related death as he never spoke about it. This reflects the reality that Filipinos would rather reinterpret history to avoid retraumatizing themselves. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to encapsulate the years of grief from that period, and for that grief to be so direct and personal makes relaying it much harder without the risk of trivializing the experience.

But if we revert to the facade of “simpler times”—allowing ourselves to be comforted by authoritarian nostalgia and illusory capitalism—if we let our leaders repeatedly deceive us, taking back their words the moment they become inconvenient, as our Vice President did when she denied the threats she made online just four months ago, then we charge toward a future no different from our past.

Through engaging not just with Dalisay’s text but with research, lectures, and my professor’s and coursemates’ interpretations of the piece, ideas like truth, resistance, and grief became more vivid.  Fiction allowed me to reflect deeply on these concepts by framing them within narratives. By challenging the characters’ helplessness, I found myself not only contemplating power within their stories but also questioning its presence in my own life, thus concretizing it.

For isn’t the most fascinating aspect of fiction its refusal to remain merely fiction? Writers create intricate worlds, yes, but they speak to something profoundly real.

Throughout the semester, our professor encouraged us to problematize the course itself: What is the need to examine the literary world when we have the real one? The answer is simple: This is what my generation has.

These works of fiction represent the past as an emotional encounter— a community that is living and breathing—in ways that the facts are often blurred, misremembered, or too difficult to relay. For someone born years after the Martial Law, feelings of terror, joy, outrage, and peace from that time can only ever be imagined, thus the imagined world of fiction is my reality. Stories like “The First of Our Dead,” “A Tall Woman From Leyte,” “Peripheral Vision,” and even the dystopian, 2069-set science fiction piece “Apollo Centennial” are the closest I can get to understanding what my parents, teachers, and countrymen experienced under Martial Law. Through fiction, I can immerse myself in their pain, grasp the joy they desperately held onto in the darkest times, and confront the looming dread of where our country is headed.

Through fiction, I can remember the unrememberable.

Note: The Literary and Cultural Studies Program offers electives to non Literature majors, including the course Violence in Marcosian Fiction.

Aidan Bernales is a Cebuano poet, fictionist, journalist, and musician studying Communication at the Ateneo de Manila University. His works have been published in Rappler, Inquirer, Climate Tracker Asia, Transit, engendered lit, Sinuman Magazine, The Guidon, and Heights. If you want to listen to his music, it’s on Spotify under his name. His first poetry collection is published by 8Letters.