SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING by PATRICIA EVANGELISTA

 GEMA CHARMAINE GONZALES Reviews

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista

(Random House, 2023)

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I’ve been putting off writing about this book because language (my usual weapon of choice) feels embarrassingly underpowered here. Evangelista writes about a country—MY COUNTRY—hemorrhaging under the state-led anti-narcotics campaign and then widens the lens tracing how we got here at all. She maps Philippine history through crime scenes and vignettes of her own personal life. It’s about truth, power and violence. But also about what it means to be a journalist when objectivity feels morally insufficient. 

What undoes me is how self-aware the book is. Evangelista keeps circling the problem of language and how words fail to hold cruelty and senselessness, then proceeds to write with terrifying precision anyway. There’s a voice here that doubts itself and asks whether telling these stories is enough or even allowed. And yet she tells them. With grief, rage and tenderness for the dead and those left behind.

I cried through this book. And layered under the pain I felt reading this (I come to realize this now) is guilt. Even though I read this in the Philippines, I did so from ‘far away’, as an immigrant, fed, safe, and existentially insulated. I was physically present but structurally removed, carrying the privileges of elsewhere into the act of reading. The violence Evangelista records did not threaten my body, did not interrupt my routines, did not demand anything immediate from me except feeling. This padded and unearned distance forced me to confront the uncomfortable truth that I can bear witness WITHOUT bearing risk, that I can mourn without being endangered, that my horror is real but also INCOMPLETE.

This book is devastating and necessary. I don’t know how to recommend it without sounding inadequate. I also don’t want to tell everyone to read it. It carries heavy trigger warnings, and for Filipinos (at home or abroad),it can reopen wounds. But if you are able and if you are ready, this book matters.

 

*****

Gema Charmaine Gonzales is a Filipina PhD graduate based in Paris working in independent publishing and content creation. She shares book reviews on her bookstagram @adelicatereader focused on contemporary, feminist, and world literature.