Resilient silences: Martial law memory, forgetting, and survival in Tawi-Tawi, Philippines

This study examines how people in Tawi-Tawi, the southernmost province of the Philippines, remember, reinterpret, or selectively forget the trauma of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law (1972–1981), and how these mnemonic renderings shape everyday forms of resilience in the present. Although historically affected by military abuse, displacement, and the legacies of armed conflict, Tawi-Tawi remains largely absent from dominant national histories. The province’s strong electoral support for Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. in 2022 challenges widespread assumptions about memory, trauma, and political judgement. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bongao, Tawi-Tawi, in 2024 and 2025, the study analyses personal narratives of martial law alongside contemporary practices of silence, ambivalence, accommodation, and economic pragmatism. These practices, often dismissed as apathy or miseducation, are interpreted here as forms of everyday resilience: strategies that allow individuals and families to survive precarity, maintain social ties, and navigate state neglect. By treating forgetting not as failure but as a coping mechanism, and by understanding silence as a meaningful social practice rather than an absence of testimony, this research invites a more nuanced account of how people endure political violence and its legacies.