Disconnect: The Filipino Comfort Women

by Cristina Lope Yl. Rosello

The Filipino Comfort Women portrays the inner worlds of elderly women survivors of the Pacific War as they grapple with their psychological and historical disconnection, following the fifty-year postwar silence of sexual enslavement and captivity.

Victimized at puberty, ego formation was nipped in the bud. When the war ended, they did not have any sense of who they were. They went through the motions of living, stuck in the time bubble where fragments of what had happened to them kept creeping up in their minds and hearts. To stop the unstoppable whirl of events in their psyche, these survivors explored suffering as the punctum saliens of their “existence.” A number was surprised to discover that the inability to form a sense of self inadvertently spared them of the egoic malaise inherent in humanity. It is in the exploration of suffering that the book profoundly reaches out to the reader. After all, one need not be a war victim or a woman to have had experienced suffering in their lives.

Genres: History

174 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 20, 2011