A REVIEW OF INSURRECTO (2018) BY GINA APOSTOL
There is a line, I like, in the Moody Blues song Lovely to see you:
Tells us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands
Where empires have turned back to sand
Will the American empire turn back to sand? What about a precursor, like the Spanish one, who colonized The Philippines and then handed them over to the Americans? The linguistic consequences of transitioning from Austronesian to Spanish and finally to (American) English are beginning to play out on the English literary scene, no doubt ending in a Booker Prize or what have you. Is the Filipina writer the next big thing, out-writing the English-English/American-American (the latter is a bit more complex), as done by the likes of Arundhati Roy (her being the ultimate author who writes in English without ever having lived/worked in the core countries where English is the native – excuse the pun - tongue). Gina Apostol looks like to be an example of that one step before: the expatriate making a career in writing, sitting uncomfortably on the fence (or Trump’s wall) that divides the first world from the second (or even third, more likely). Just like the English-speaking expatriates from Africa, the West-Indies and the Indian subcontinent flock to the UK, the English educated Filipinos migrate to the USA, the home of their last colonizer. Moving from the tropical heat of Tacloban to the miserable chills of New York but, anyhow (as Gina Apostol is fond of saying), never mind the weather, who would be as stupid as not wanting to live in the Big Apple (it’s great for shopping)? Americans are crazy people, mostly, but they have the power and the money, mostly. Or as Gina is fond of mimicking Filipino English, “usually”, so let’s substitute my ‘mostly’ with ‘usually’.
Caveat: I commiserate with Gina Apostol in that I, too, am an expatriate who writes in English (but usually I do not mimic German English).
Since many a colonizer subdued the natives by way of military violence followed by missionary forgiveness, it comes as no surprise that in 1901 American occupation forces slaughtered some 30,000 Filipinos (historians disagree about exact numbers, ranging from 2,000 to 50,000) in retaliation for 45 killed of their own.
Having already been missionized by the Spanish conquistadores, the Americans as good Christians slaughtered the good Christians of Samar. Of course one cannot blame the Americans as they were attacked first, or can one? On researching this history, one comes across photographs taken at the time, of the massacre – the photographer having been an American society woman who nevertheless testified – or so the story goes – against the American army. These stereographic photographs fascinate Gina Apostol. How haunting is it to see your ancestors in ditches, mass graves, like the Nazis dug for the Jews? The advent of photography, and later film, is to history what Henry Ford was to the industrial revolution: the facts of the matter, as captured by the camera, they don’t lie. History as a moving documentary has arrived. No need to write about it. Just watch it again and again.
When I was in high school in Germany in the late 60s, our history teacher claimed to know nothing about the Holocaust. Some of us rebellious students wrote to the Wiesenthal Center and they sent us a package with photographs taken at the concentration camps. We showed them to our history teacher. He went to the Principal and complained that we were harassing him. The Principal was as guilty as the history teacher. He too knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing.
Still, you cannot really deny history when it stares you in the eyes. Of course, now in 2019, one can argue that photographs are as fake as any digital snapshot, with an App that inserted your face into/onto the one of a porn star in action, sexted to all and sundry in a post-modern Twitter world that in the USA and The Philippines has given rise to best mates, Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte. Anyhow, (to mimic Gina) let’s turn this whole quagmire, from 1901 to 2018 into a novel entitled Insurrecto. Let us use photography and film as a vehicle to tell the story, and what a story it is!
Let us do the literary Russian Doll thing – perhaps as taught in the Creative Writing class Gina attended in Iowa but mocked in her novel – namely that the two main contemporary characters are connected to a film maker who wanted to make a film about the 1901 massacre, kind of turning the stereographic photographs into moving pictures, connecting all the protagonists to each other through time. It gets a bit convoluted at times, what with cinematic flashbacks and voiceover, and the author thinly disguised as the contemporary Filipina revisiting her homeland.
Mixing up history and fiction is of course a common literary contrivance. Letting fictional characters discuss famous and not so famous writers, artists, philosophers and their works, adds to the bewilderment of the reader, not knowing who is and who isn’t the real McCoy. If the English reader is not familiar with what happened in 1901 in Samar, it gets quite difficult to figure out who is real and who is not in this novel but maybe that isn’t the point anyhow. Gina Apostol never mentions Duterte by name, only by the moniker ‘the dictator’, maybe as an insurance policy against being hounded by Duterte’s mad dogs when she visits her homeland and gets awarded literary prizes. Nor does she mention Trump by name but there are other American presidents that are named: McKinley and Roosevelt. One could Google all the names of the Americans and Filipinos that pop up, especially as she seems to be an aficionado of the Internet, both inside and outside the novel. She has her own website dedicated to her novel, with links to her other novels, etc., something one has to do as an aspiring writer these online days. So, never mind if all the American soldiers’ names are real or not, or if the Filipinos’ names are in the history books or not: the novelist has license to mix and match as she pleases. She does a very good job of bringing to life those who died and letting the contemporaries wander in and out of the scripts (there are supposed to be two competing ones but they are not really well developed), concocting a rich tapestry of sorts, cinematic in scope, tragic in its subject matter.
Her language – she calls it witchcraft – is very post-modern, very writerly at times, sometimes unnecessarily upfront with sex (fuck, fuck – in literature I prefer Ovid’s clever innuendo), showing off obscure English vocabulary, interspersed with Tagalog (and other indigenous languages) and Filipino-Spanish, creating a rich linguistic tapestry that befits the tropical heat in Manila and Samar. Excursions and allusions to the rest of the world, from New York to Venice to Hong Kong, promote the image of an author who is world-wise and world-weary, nothing like the cliché of the Filipino hospitality workers and nurses that are exploited as cheap labour all around the world. As such I am not sure why she exploits the cliché of The Thrilla in Manilla as much as the purported love for Elvis’ songs amongst her relatives in The Philippines. Sure, Ali was a great boxer and social activist but why Elvis? When in the last chapter Chiara and Magsalin sing and dance to an Elvis tune, it looks like bad taste to me. She mentions that her Elvis-mad uncles voted for the dictator (Duterte): how can the intellectually enlightened if not revolutionary Magsalin stay and dance and sing with them? If any of my German relatives now voted for the reactionary AfD, I would disown them (some of the dead ones may well have voted for Hitler).
The main point of Insurrecto, as I understand it, is to point to the indomitable revolutionary spirit of the many Filipino people who have fought the Spanish and the Americans for their freedom, and are now engaged in a fight against Duterte’s dictatorship, like Marcos’ before. Filipino expatriates like Gina Apostol can play an important role in this fight for a socialist future, as perhaps envisaged by the likes of Casiana Nacionales. It is interesting that in an article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer of September 28, 2018, Nacionales gets treated as a ‘pious heroine and freedom fighter of Balangiga’ and as a woman of ‘uncommon courage and patriotism’ which makes her out as being politically naïve, apolitical – a stance favoured by the mainstream press in the Philippines as much as in the USA when it comes to acknowledging former freedom fighters. At least Apostol raises the stakes by portraying Nacionales’ brother as a ‘communist rebel’ – the likes of whom ‘bedevil’ the current dictator who equates the Filipino communists with Islamist terrorists who lay waste to the Philippines and need to be exterminated by ‘patriots’ like Duterte and Trump.
Having travelled in The Philippines myself a little bit, one cannot help but notice the vast differences between the haves and have-nots, what with luxury resorts dotted along the many beautiful beaches, frequented by old American/European men with very young Filipinas in tow.
The Philippines will soon catch up with Thailand as a retirement haven for Western pensioners and sex tourists who want to live out their last hurrahs as colonial masters of the universe.
When I was an adolescent in Germany, the celebrity magazines were full of the German playboy Gunter Sachs doing his thing with Brigitte Bardot in Manila and environs, alerting the German readers to the fact that high society flourishes best – especially for Paparazzi – in the far-away tropics. Today, as a resident of New Zealand, The Philippines are practically a neighboring country, and indeed there is a big influx of Filipinos in New Zealand, either as temporary workers or as intellectual and political exiles from Duterte’s brutal war on his opponents. New Zealand may not be the first choice for such migrants – presumably the USA is still number one – but at least here they experience a bit less of the anti-migrant terror that currently exists in many other Western countries - notwithstanding the recent Christchurch massacre of mainly Muslim migrants.
Sooner or later a Filipino-New Zealander will hit the literary scene, like Gina Apostol perhaps, and write that novel that will be an instant sensation, and then a Filipina who has never left The Philippines, like ‘Geronima’ Nacionales, will set literature alight, starting a revolution for the readers of English. In the meantime I have come across only one other NZ-Filipino author, namely J.R. Nakao, whose Fire Dragon (2017) is a real political action thriller, set mainly in The Philippines. Compared to Insurrecto it is like chalk to cheese but then again who is to say which genres make the cut and which don’t. Anyhow, Gina Apostolo is the one to watch and read now!
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