The Malaya Lolas

IN THE WAKE OF POSTWAR TRAUMA, AND ABSENT ANY FORMAL RESTITUTION, A GROUP OF FILIPINA WOMEN HAVE FORGED THEIR OWN PATH TOWARD HEALING.

Lola Lita and Lola Ceferina are part of the Malaya Lolas, or Grandmothers of Freedom, a group of survivors of mass rape during the Second World War. Seven decades since their assault, the surviving women remain in the same vicinity of the house where they were held for days. Though most of the women who formed the group have died, those who remain continue to seek reparations from the Japanese government.

Lola Lita outside the remains of the Red House, which is what the Malaya Lolas call the house where they were repeatedly assaulted by Japanese soldiers.

Burden bearing [pagdadala] is experienced daily by most Filipinos, namely, those who are poor…. The metaphor or model of burden bearing makes sense only when viewed through the actual experience of burden bearing.

–Edwin T. Decenteceo,
"The Pagdadala Model in Counseling and Theraphy,"
Philippine Journal of Psychology (1999)

"We came home to ashes," Isabelita Vinuya told photographer Hannah Reyes Morales. One wouldn't know it, for all the green.

I am looking at photographs from the several weeks Hannah spent with Isabelita in 2019, documenting the story of the Malaya Lolas, sometimes translated from Tagalog as the Free Grandmothers or Grandmothers of Freedom. We are in her apartment in Makati—the red light, rather than the business, district—which, over the years and across collaborations, has become a second home to me.

Isabelita's village of Mapaniqui was at the heart of the Filipino resistance against the Japanese during World War II. Toward the end of 1944, as Japan's defeat seemed imminent, fleeing Japanese soldiers wreaked havoc throughout the countryside, pillaging and destroying villages as they went. When they arrived at Mapaniqui, they rounded up more than a hundred young women and girls, marched them to a house being used as an outpost, and kept them there for days, raping them repeatedly.

"Lola Lita is the leader," Hannah tells me, referring to Isabelita as "grandmother," following Philippine custom. "They all still live on the same street," she says, in the same town, just a couple of miles from where they were held. "Ang Bahay na Pula," they call it, the Red House.

The Tagalog language refracts the word pagdadala, the act of burden bearing, in different ways; a variation in the way it is said is a variation in nuance. The word struck Filipino psychologist Edwin T. Decenteceo as "a model for viewing the life experiences of the Filipino." Framed by his Pagdadala model, "the Filipino is then revealed as committed to his or her tasks, responsibilities and relationships, taking these to their destinations, crawling on hands and knees if needed."

He avoids calling it the Burden Bearing model because it "sounds so depressing, according to English-speaking Filipinos." This doesn't seem to be a problem for non-English-speaking Filipinos, on the other hand, who "tend to carry their burdens lightheartedly, for the most part."

Ang dinadala

The burden

Lola Lita was fourteen when it happened. Some girls were only eight or nine. For some of them, the ordeal lasted a day. For others, as long as three weeks. By the time the girls spoke up about what had happened, they were old women. In the early 1990s, women from all over Asia, Korea in particular, testified as the former sex slaves of Japanese soldiers, who had made use of at least two hundred thousand "comfort women," a euphemism for what was, in truth, a systematic weapon of war. Those who survived this violence (an estimated 90 percent did not) had to organize themselves—that is, to build a system of their own in order to demand justice.

The women of Mapaniqui were inspired to do the same. In 1997, they started calling themselves the Malaya Lolas, so that their story, too, could be known. They formed their own...