Patricia Evangelista on “Some People Need Killing”: ‘I think it is important to put a face to the story’

Patricia Evangelista is home and, in her own words, ready “to tell a story about a war that happened where we lived. It’s a story we all know, but it needs to be told again and again.”

Evangelista is the author of Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, described as a “meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war.”

Since its release in  2023, it has been hailed as one of the New York Times‘ Top 10 Best Books of the Year, a New Yorker and The Economist Best Book of the Year, and was TIME’s #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year. Some People Need Killing was longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction and shortlisted for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award. Former US president Barack Obama also included the book in his list of favorite books in 2023.

Evangelista is back in Manila for a book tour, which began at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, on April 11, 2024. This will continue until April 30, 2024, also at the national university.

The following day, she visited the Ateneo de Manila University for a book talk and a conversation with noted historian Ambeth Ocampo.

At the talk, Ocampo described Evangelista, who conducted interviews for the book,  as someone who “gave us a human face to the person who was killed.”

Evangelista said, “I wouldn’t compare myself to reporters who have to do the statistics because it’s also part of the story. It’s just not part of the story I was telling. I think it is important to put a face to the story because they shouldn’t just be statistics.”

She cited the first death she encountered during the drug war, saying, “You should remember that Jerome Roa liked to hang out with his grandmother and that he was shy sometimes, that he missed his mother, and had great hopes for the future. That’s important, too.”

Given the gruesome nature of the drug war, it’s interesting to see how Evangelista handles it.

“I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have feelings, but the drug war was hard on a lot of people. I only told stories, people had to live through it. But as reporters, we all had to concede we’re not cameras. We don’t shoot and then report and then delete. You keep the image in your head. You keep the story and carry it with you for the rest of your life. That is a voice that will speak to you until the day you die. But that’s what you do to honor the story. It’s part of the job,” she said.

Evangelista noted the importance of having a community, “people who understand what you do, who don’t ask you why you do it, because the next day they’re on the field with you, standing over the next corpse, lending you their lighter, shooting the picture of the dead body on the ground, and going with you to drink after because the next day, you’re going to do it again.”

Later, she said, “When you’re a journalist, and you write about terrible things, and the terrible things keep happening, you cannot hope for better because if you do, you will stop doing your job. Hope is a dangerous thing when you do what I do. So, you learn to negotiate expectations. You learn to say, ‘My only job is to tell the story.’ To honor it, to do justice to it, to bring it home to the people you wrote about and say, ‘This is what I did. I hope I did it well.’”

Evangelista is not as pessimistic as she sounds. According to her, “That’s not a small thing. Keeping a record matters. That’s what I do. And if someday, the arc of history bends over towards less f*****ry, then I’m grateful. Is that hopeful? I am glad I wrote a record.”

She shared that a few days before her book tour, she visited Payatas to meet the mothers who told her their stories.

“They asked me to sign their books in the name of their dead husbands and sons. Because they may be dead, but they had filed cases. They still fought back. ‘Yung nanlaban pwede pa ring lumaban. That book was not possible without their willingness to say, ‘Tell our story.’ And that is my expectation of hope, that the story would be told.”

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