Lola Atanacia Cortez and Lola Philomena also witnessed torture right before being raped: fingernails pulled out from fingers, and fathers skinned alive before them.
“Then they take that baby and they toss him high to the sky and make a game of skewering newborn infants on the tips of their swords.” “They had no mercy, Evelina,” says Urduja Francisco Samonte, as she describes how babies were sliced out of pregnant women. And these testimonies, especially those of atrocities committed upon loved ones, are told in great detail. Someone once told me that details in a story are an indicator of veracity. And in providing relief for themselves, they provide relief to the reader so that we can push on through their testimonies. Despite their pain, there is still joy in the lolas’ world. She dances with her dalagas and with the lolas, and tells us so. Galang dances, literally dances, around the main narrative of testimony.
Even if your only weapons are words, are testimonies, are stories.” To make a promise to see that justice done in the face of the impossible. Galang writes: “I know what it means to be born an American of immigrant parents, and to return to that homeland to hear the stories of wartime rape and torture on your elders, to feel the drive to right that wrong. Galang, too, is protecting herself from the horrors of the testimonies, aware of the writer Iris Chang, who suffered from depression and succumbed to suicide while researching the Bataan Death March. The narrative is written in present tense, broken up by the interjections of the narrator, summoning the reader back. Over the course of the next decade Galang transcribes the lolas’ words and writes Lolas’ House. One by one, the lolas-or grannies in Tagalog-sit down with Galang, whose Fulbright grant facilitates her journey to the Phillippines and research. On both the part of the lolas and Galang, this book is the accumulation of a life’s work. Lolas’ House changes the landscape by documenting first-person accounts by Filipina comfort women in hopes that these stories never die. These are a handful of many testimonies history has yet to record with any depth, and which the Japanese government has repeatedly denied. Evelina Galang’s Lolas’ House, sixteen Filipino comfort women recount their experiences of kidnapping, torture, and sexual slavery during World War II by the Imperial Japanese Army. LOLA’S HOUSE: FILIPINO WOMEN LIVING WITH WAR, M.
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