DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 25 February) —  Hilda Billano Narciso is a Martial Law survivor. Arrested in 1983 on charges of conspiracy to commit rebellion, later dropped for lack of evidence, she was detained as a political prisoner, tortured, and raped in military custody. “I’m a victim,” she says, “but a survivor.” She refuses to let that chapter define her only as wounded. “I’m a survivor and I live a life in balance.”

In the decades that followed, Hilda has become a public speaker, healer, organizer, and advocate for other victims of violence. She testified against Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in court, founded initiatives supporting women survivors of rape, and continues — now in her 80s — to speak about justice and the long work of healing.

Now, four decades after the People Power Revolution along EDSA, Hilda reflects on what it has meant to survive: to experience cruelty, suffer its consequences, and still insist that life is beautiful.

Extremes, but the same

“I have seen the weighing scale,” she tells us — the balance — how it has shifted over the past years up to the present. “I saw how the people move. I saw how the people struggle. I saw how the people give their lives for others and for the country, and how the people, because of loyalty and power, they become slaves of their own weakness.”

Weakness, for Hilda, is not a lack of physical strength, but an inability — or unwillingnesss — to see two parts as belonging to the same whole; a refusal to see ourselves as part of something larger — whether that is communal, ancestral, or divine.

“They thought it’s a strength, but it’s actually a weakness,” says the 80-year-old survivor.

“Ngayon ay maraming weak, maraming nanloloko ng tao, magnanakaw, maraming [ang] hinahangad ay kapangyarihan para sa sarili hindi para sa bayan, samantalang sila ay bayad ng taong bayan.” (Today there are many who are weak, many who deceive people, thieves; many who seek power for themselves and not for the nation, even though it is the nation that lines their pockets.)

This is a pattern Hilda has observed over the years that power has exchanged hands: “Martial Law, Cory, Ramos, Erap, Gloria, P-Noy, Duterte,” she recounts. “The end-to-end of this, Duterte and Marcos, are extremes,” she says. “Extremes, but the same.”

“The same Martial Law,” she continues. “Declared by Marcos, undeclared by Duterte … It’s the same … It’s the same.”

(Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao on Day 1 of the Marawi Siege on 23 May 2017 and had it extended thrice until December 31, 2019. Hilda uses “undeclared” to describe what she sees as a broader pattern of state violence beyond official proclamations.)

Cruelty is constant, unchanging. It survives transitions of regimes. For Hilda, it takes strength — a questioning mind, an analytical eye, some measure of light — to recognize the same darkness across administrations, wearing different names. To see that both obey the same logic, where killing without due process is called order; to see the same drawing of lines around who counts as criminal, who counts as expendable, who doesn’t count at all.

“Tapos, ‘yong dalawa,” Hilda adds — our two end-to-ends, Marcos and Duterte — “pinag-aaway, nag-aaway. Tapos isasali nila ang tao: ‘Kanino ka, kay Marcos o kay Duterte?’ Bakit mo isasama ang taong bayan? Kayo lang ‘yong nag-aaway. Sa pag-aaway niyo lumabas ang inyong mga baho. Bakit isasali niyo ang tao diyan? Away niyo lang ‘yon, dahil sa inyong interests.” (Then the two of them, they fight, they quarrel. Then they drag the people into it: “Whose side are you on, Marcos’ or Duterte’s?” Why involve the people? It’s only you who are fighting. In your fighting, your own dirt comes out. Why drag the people into that? That’s your fight, fueled by your interests.)

That, too, she calls weakness. 

To fight over personal interests while holding the fate of a nation in their hands is, in her view, to forget that they are part — and a powerful part — of something larger than their quarrel. From where they stand, their decisions shape the conditions under which everyone else must live — hardening into laws, into budgets, into prisons, into graves.

To hold power yet fail to recognize oneself as embedded within the larger body politic is its own form of blindness. They are part of the body they govern; they do not stand outside the shared structure they are actively reshaping and rebuilding. And in rebuilding it, they bind us all to the same systems of injustice—and we do not suffer the consequences equally.

Leave the dark

“Find the balance. Find the light,” Hilda urges. “We are in the dark,” she says, have been for 40 years.

“But, still I can say, life is beautiful,” she adds. “Life is beautiful because we are given a chance to understand the human aspect and the human interest. Extremes in both sides.” Indeed, life’s beauty, for Hilda Narciso, does not lie in the absence of cruelty but in the chance to see it clearly, in understanding the full range of human motives and contradictions, our capacity for harm as well as for care, and the extremes that define what it means to be human.

But clarity requires labor. “Hindi mo makita ang tama at hindi tama kung nasa dilim ka.” You cannot tell right from wrong if you remain in the dark. Justice, for Hilda, demands that we become open — “umalis ka sa dilim, hanapin mo ang liwanag” — leave the dark, look for the light. It requires that we examine our leaders isa-isa, one by one, and ask what truly drives them: whether fear, self-interest, or greed. Injustice is “hindi lang sa korte”(not just in the courts); it exceeds the courtroom. “Ang mga leaders ang may kasalanan … tayong lahat ay makasalanan.” The leaders are guilty, and we are implicated as well. The task, then, is to face the pasikot-sikot — the twists and entanglements — so that something broken might be set right.

For Hilda, to find balance is to find restitution: “balikan mo ‘yong taong pinagkasalaan mo … ibalik mo ‘yong nakaw mo” — return to the person you wronged … return what you have stolen — and“tanggapin mo na makulong ka,” accept imprisonment if it comes. Some things cannot be restored — “hindi mababalik ang buhay na pinatay mo (you won’t be able to return the life you took)”— but accountability remains. Darkness may make light visible, but in dark times we are called to step out of it.

Healing the whole, restoring balance

Hilda finds that today, that darkness persists when stories like hers are obscured, edited, rewritten, erased, or lost in virtual spaces that can just as easily distort truth as illuminate it. She worries that the content we consume in these spaces, too, can begin to normalize and justify violence, to frame cruelty as order and punishment as justice — quietly reinforcing the very structures that depend on such thinking.

But while darkness may circulate, so does care. For Hilda, healing begins close to the body and moves outward. We are never separate from the whole we shape. What we restore in one another restores the nation we share. 

“When you heal yourself, you heal others,” she says. “When you heal others, you heal the country. When you heal the country, you heal the land.”  (Bea Gatmaytan / MindaNews)