A Country Where ‘Some People Need Killing’ Was State Policy

2020 National Fellow Patricia Evangelista's book, Some People Need Killing, was reviewed in the New York Times.

In her book, Evangelista makes us feel the fear and grief that she felt as she chronicled what Duterte was doing to her country. But appealing to our emotions is only part of it; what makes this book so striking is that she wants us to think about what happened, too. She pays close attention to language, and not only because she is a writer. Language can be used to communicate, to deny, to threaten, to cajole. Duterte’s language is coarse and degrading. Evangelista’s is evocative and exacting.

“Journalism,” Evangelista writes, “is an act of faith.” In the Philippines, where a free press has long been a target, it is also an act of courage. She needs to believe that the public ultimately wants what she wants: to have a functional democracy and journalists who are alive to report what they see. Language contains its own contronym — it can propagate lies, but it also allows one to speak the truth.