Duterte’s rule reminds me of Marcos’ regime

History is making a bad pun in the Philippines under strongman president

Iwas a child when the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos decreed martial law in 1972, casting a long spell over the Philippines. Martial-law baby became the phrase for people like me, Filipinos who grew up under authoritarianism, blind to its buildup. We martial-law babies are living an eerie moment today. With Rodrigo Duterte now president, it’s like history is making a bad pun.

When norms shift, one of the first things to change is language. In a fascist world, shocking neologisms become everyday speech. Stockade was a special verb I learned as a little girl.

Na-stockade hiya, or he was put in the stockade, was the explanation for someone jailed for staying out after curfew during martial law. You’d say ‘na-curfew’ when a playmate got stuck in your home after hours and to avoid becoming ‘na-stockade’ would stay for a sleepover.

Language normalised our new unfreedoms. The most mysterious phrase for me as a child was habeas corpus; it wasn’t a recent invention, but it was newly common. I would hear it often on public service announcements on TV, not understanding it even after my friend’s sister, a university student in Manila, disappeared. Leticia was an activist, and the Philippine Constabulary, first set up in 1901, during the US colonial period, took her.

We learned later that Leticia had been salvaged, or tortured and killed in unknown circumstances — another term of art under martial law. It was a cross of two words: to savage and to be salvaje, which means wild in Spanish, but naughty or abusive in Tagalog. Add to that obscene joke, the play on its meaning in English is to redeem, to extract from a wreck. This new word alone captured the long history of oppression in the Philippines — Spanish, American and self-made. Leticia’s body was never found.

It was the Vietnam War during my childhood, and the Philippines was in the hands of a military state propped up by shipments of US arms. The citizens who had no rights then were student radicals, peasant activists, and phantom communists. Marcos’s government arrested 70,000 people, tortured 35,000 and killed 3,257 between 1975 and 1985. Today, the government’s targets are drug addicts and drug dealers, and a slew of bystanders, including children. The death toll in the nearly 11 months that Duterte has been in power already is more than twice the official tally of political murders during one decade of the Marcos regime. I watch in real time how fascism changes our tongues.

The Duterte administration calls its antidrug campaign Project Tokhang. Tokhang is a linguistic invention and an existential dread. It combines toktok (to knock) and hangyo (to plead), two words from Cebuano, Duterte’s mother tongue and a sister language to my own, Waray. In Project Tokhang, the police knock on your door and plead for you to come out. If you don’t, you could then be na-tokhang, meaning arrested without recourse and killed.

On social media, na-tokhang has become a sliding signifier with infinite possibilities. Your fingernail broke; it’s

natokhang. Your salary is low and you want to avoid having a wallet that’s natokhang, or empty. After you were photographed drunk, you tweet that you were looking #natokhang. Or when your car breaks down, you say you’re ‘natokhang’.

“EJK” — extrajudicial killings — has become a verb, as in ‘na-EJK siya’: He was killed by the police. To be ‘kaDDS’ literally translates as fellowDDS, and for the people who use the phrase, that’s a positive thing. DDS refers to the Davao Death Squad, a statesanctioned vigilante group said to be active in Davao City, where Duterte served as mayor; organisations like Human Rights Watch accuse the group of having killed petty thieves, drug pushers and other minor criminals. So ka-DDS stands for being one with Duterte. It’s a rallying cry for his supporters — a bit like those Donald Trump voters who proudly took ownership of deplorable after Hillary Clinton called them that.

According to polls last month, 76 per cent of Filipinos said they trusted Duterte. Some accept as a new normal that drug users deserve to die, their corpses thrown duct-taped onto streets. Others are outraged. But for everyone, the bizarre is mundane, and humour is a weapon against the unspeakable.

Tokhang Sizzlers, a new eatery at Navotas Agora Market, north of Manila, has an inspired menu that includes salvaged milkfish (fish stuffed with tomatoes), picked-up corned beef and sausage dumped in a bag. It’s a list worthy of a Novena to the Wounds of the Long-Suffering-YetStill-Laughing Filipino.

Posted on Facebook, the menu drew comments. “There were a lot of eateries during martial law with that menu,” someone noted. A political prisoner during the Marcos years said: “When I was detained in Fort Santiago in 1973-74, some of our meals were ‘sinibak na gulay’ (knifed vegetables), ‘tinortyur na galunggong’ (tortured scad), ‘binartolinang bangus’ (caged milkfish).” It’s not clear whether it was the guards or the prisoners who came up with those terms.

I dug up my research for a novel I’m writing about the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. It turns out that the 1900 birthday menu of President Emilio Aguinaldo, whose revolutionaries were holed up in remote Palanan, northeast of Manila, while fighting the Americans, included Stew a la Mauser (chicken caught with confiscated Spanish guns), Roast Beef a la Bayonet and Thunder Gulaman (a custard that, the diarist joked, smelled of gunfire). Then, as now, people reached for wordplay to reclaim a semblance of control over lives that seemed to have none.

Perhaps the most pitiful, and most gruesomely amusing, of the dishes at the Navotas diner is nanlabang ham, the ham that fought back. In my view,

nanlaban, to resist, should be seen as a heroic thing. But Duterte has said that the police have a right to kill any drug suspect, guilty or not, who resists arrest, and reports abound of police officers planting guns on victims, sometimes the same gun.

Napagkamalang hot dog is a close second for the Saddest Dish Award. It means mistaken hot dog. That made me laugh out loud at first. But the words play on a real fear — the fear of being mistaken for someone else, of becoming the enemy, of being one more person wrongfully arrested or killed. Everything has shifted so quickly in the short year since Duterte’s election that our tongues, and our thoughts, are still twisting in surprise. Gina Apostol is the author of “Gun Dealers’ Daughter” and “The Unintended”

According to polls last month, 76 per cent of Filipinos said they trusted Duterte. Some accept as a new normal that drug users deserve to die, their corpses thrown onto streets.