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FABC 2022 Book Chat: Schedule/Guidelines

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FABC 2022 Book Chat: Schedule/Guidelines

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Official FABC 2022: Book Chat Schedule/Guidelines

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Welcome to the Filipina Authors Book Club Slides by: Cristina E. Vera

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Plan on attending/participating? Pin a location (click below FABC Intros link) & share a quick bio!

FABC Intros

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Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines' present and America's past by the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealer's Daughter.

Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.

Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40237027-insurrecto

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Gina Apostol won the 2022 Rome Prize in Literature to write her next novel, on womanhood and radicalism in fin-de-siécle Europe. Her last book, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers' Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018, selected as an Editor's Choice of the NYT, and shortlisted for the Dayton Prize. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, now out in the US from Soho Press, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her newest book, La Tercera, will be out in May 2023. She has received fellowships from Civitella Ranieri and Emily Harvey Foundation, among other residencies. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

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“words are all we have to save us, but they are not enough to make us whole” — Gun Dealers’ Daughter

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Essay as found in "Behind the Book" section of Insurrecto

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Book Expo Talk on Insurrecto aka "How Do We Know the Things That Make Us?" Essay

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Book Expo Talk on Insurrecto aka "How Do We Know the Things That Make Us?" Essay

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https://ginaapostol.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/book-expo-talk-on-insurrecto/

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Gina Apostol, author of 'Gun Dealers' Daughter,' talks about her novel in progress, 'William McKinley's World,' and her research on the Filipino-American War, Oct. 27, 2015 as part of the University Lecture series. Apostol combines a discussion of historical documents -- in particular, the stereo cards of the war and online government documents -- with concerns about novel writing and nation construction.

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The Filipino-American War and the Writing of a Novel: Reflections on History and the Art of Fiction - CornellCast

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Gina Apostol, author of 'Gun Dealers' Daughter,' talks about her novel in progress, 'William McKinley's World,' and her research on the Filipino-American War, Oct. 27, 2015 as part of the University Lecture series. Apostol combines a discussion of historical documents -- in particular, the stereo cards of the war and online government documents -- with concerns about novel writing and nation construction.

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Gina Apostol at the Asian American Writers' Workshop

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Gina Apostol at the Asian American Writers' Workshop

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Insurrecto! with Gina Apostol & Sabina Murray

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https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/212969-things-to-know-balangiga-massacre/

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Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said Balangiga Encounter Day was commemorated starting 2008. It also said that the estimated number of civilians killed amounted to 10,000. These have been corrected.
MANILA, Philippines - The Balangiga Massacre was one of the bloodiest events during the Philippine-American War.

To this day, the United States considers this as their "worst single defeat" in the history of the 3-year war from 1899 to 1902. The Philippines has also not forgotten.

Republic Act 6692 enacted on February 10, 1989, declared September 28 of every year as "Balangiga Encounter Day," a special non-working holiday in Eastern Samar to commemorate the uprising of fellow Filipinos and to honor the gallantry of those killed.

In 2008, however, Malacañang issued Proclamation No. 1629 moving the commemoration of Balangiga Encounter Day that year to September 30. The provincial government had requested this, since September 28, 2008, fell on a Sunday. Eastern Samar officials believed the province and its people would be given the "full opportunity" to observe the occasion if it were held on September 30, 2008, a Tuesday.

Here's what you need to know about the Balangiga Massacre:
Why it started
In the beginning, residents of Balangiga town and Company C, the 9th US infantry regiment, had a good relationship. According to historians, relations went downhill after two American soldiers allegedly tried to molest a Filipino woman tending a store.

When locals came to the woman's defense, the soldiers wanted revenge. Since then, people in Balingaga were subjected to forced labor and detention with only little food and water.

The locals also protested the move of the US garrison to cut food and other supplies in the town.

Balangiga police chief Valeriano Abanador, along with guerilla officers Captain Eugenio Daza and Sergeant Pedro Duran Sr, plotted the uprising against the Americans.

According to historian Stuart Miller in his book Benevolent Assimilation, Balangiga men disguised as women hid weapons inside small caskets which were brought to the church under the pretext that a cholera epidemic had killed many children.

Reinforcements from neighboring towns also entered Balangiga several days before the attack under the guise of preparations for a fiesta.
How it happened
The plan was executed on September 28, 1901, during the supposed funeral procession for children killed by cholera. Abanador initiated the first strike by shooting an American sentry after chatting with him.

The church of Balangiga rang its bells, signaling the start of the attack. The men dressed as women pulled out their weapons - mainly machetes - and attacked the US troops. Locals also headed to the barracks to attack unsuspecting American soldiers.

At least 48 out of the 78 American soldiers were killed during the surprise attack.

The following day, American forces decided to retaliate. General Jacob H. Smith vowed that he would turn the town into a "howling wilderness," earning him the nickname "Howling Jake."

"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States," Smith said.

Smith's remark became even more infamous when he instructed his men to "kill everyone over 10." Soldiers also burned and looted the villages in Balangiga.

The killings did not end there, as the US continued to enforce a "scorched-earth policy" until 1902, which meant the total destruction of the town and its people.

There is no exact estimate on the number of Filipinos killed, despite what some resources have previously said that about 2,500 were killed during the duration of the massacre.

Recent study by the Balangiga Research group found that most soldiers "counter-manded" the kill-and-burn order, which meant that some soldiers refused to claim innocent lives and resorted only to destruction of homes and livelihood.

The Americans brought home the church bells of Balangiga as " trophies of war." Two are under the custody of US troops in the "Trophy Park" of the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, while the other is with the US military unit in South Korea.
Moves to return the bells
The Philippines has been asking for the return of the bells as early as 1958, when Jesuit priest Horacio dela Costa wrote a letter to American military historian Chip Wards seeking help for this purpose.

President Fidel Ramos was the first Philippine president to negotiate the return of the bells with a US President, Bill Clinton, who agreed to the request. However, the return was stalled due to an apparent conflict in US military laws.

In his 2017 State of the Nation Address, President Rodrigo Duterte asked the US to return the bells as they are "reminders of the gallantry and heroism of our forebears who resisted the American colonizers and sacrificed their lives in the process."

On August 11, 2018, the US embassy in Manila announced that the US defense department had notified the US Congress of its intention to return the bells to the Philippines, but no date had been set. The return of the bells needs congressional concurrence.

Some US veterans groups and lawmakers are opposed to the move, as the bells are seen as memorials to fallen US soldiers.

After more than a century, will the bells finally return home? - Rappler.com

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Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said Balangiga Encounter Day was commemorated starting 2008. It also said that the estimated number of civilians killed amounted to 10,000. These have been corrected. MANILA, Philippines - The Balangiga Massacre was one of the bloodiest events during the Philippine-American War.

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U.S. Returns Bells Taken as War Booty From Philippines in 1901

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U.S. Returns Bells Taken as War Booty From Philippines in 1901

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Philippine military personnel unload one of the three Balangiga church bells after they arrived at a military air base in Manila on Tuesday. Credit... Ted Aljibe/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

MANILA - Three church bells taken from the central Philippines as war booty by American troops more than a century ago were flown to their original home Tuesday, ending a contentious flash point in relations between the two longtime military allies.

The bells were turned over by Sung Kim, the American ambassador, to the Philippine government, which had stepped up its efforts to recover the war artifacts since President Rodrigo Duterte took office two years ago.

American troops seized the bells in 1901 from the town of Balangiga on Samar Island, where they went to avenge the death of 48 fellow soldiers killed in an attack by Filipino guerrillas on an American garrison. The American troops were under orders to turn the area into a "howling wilderness" by killing every male citizen age 10 or older and capable of bearing arms.

The massacre was the deadliest of American troops since Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops were slaughtered at the Battle of Little Bighorn 25 years earlier.

Mr. Duterte used his annual address to Congress last year to demand the United States return the bells, saying they were "spoils of war" from another period of history.

The United States ambassador to the Philippines, Sung Kim, second from left, and the Philippine defense secretary, Delfin Lorenzana, center, at the handover ceremony for the bells. Credit... Rolex Dela Pena/EPA, via Shutterstock

The day was replete with historical symbolism for both allies. The bells were ferried aboard a United States Air Force plane, the Spirit of MacArthur, named after Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who liberated Manila from the Japanese invaders toward the end of World War II. And the plane, which flew in from Okinawa, Japan, one of the war's bloodiest American battlefields, landed at Manila's Villamor Air Base, named after a Filipino World War II pilot.

"It has been a very long road home," Mr. Kim, the United States ambassador, said shortly after the bells were loaded from a military plane and presented to Delfin Lorenzana, the Philippine defense secretary. "Many Filipinos and Americans worked tirelessly for decades to make today possible."

The ambassador said that virtually all Philippine presidents had pressed for the bells' return since the early 1990s, but that Mr. Duterte's words finally forced the United States to return them.

"Our shared history is enduring and deeply personal," Mr. Kim said in remarks that cast a positive light on ties that have frayed since Mr. Duterte was elected president. "Our relationship has withstood the tests of history and flourishes today."

In demanding the return of the bells, Mr. Duterte had said they reminded Filipinos of how their forebears resisted the American colonizers.

"They are ours," Mr. Duterte said in July 2017. "They belong to the Philippines. They are part of our national heritage."

Residents of Balangiga celebrating next to one of the returned bells on Tuesday. Credit... Ted Aljibe/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Relations between Washington and Manila cooled after Mr. Duterte took office as he forged closer ties with Washington's traditional rivals, China and Russia. But his stand softened with President Trump's election, and local officials said the bells were among the topics briefly discussed when the two leaders met last year on the sidelines of a regional conference in Manila.

American forces also recently played a critical role in helping the Philippine military defeat Islamic State-backed Filipino militants who had occupied the southern city of Marawi.

Rolando Borrinaga, a local historian who worked with descendants of those who survived the Balangiga violence, said the relatives now felt "a great sense of relief and satisfaction" that the bells were being returned.

They will be installed at the town's Roman Catholic Church later this week amid festivities attended by Mr. Duterte.

"The return of the bells will certainly help bring closure to a brutal and bloody episode during the Philippine-American War," Mr. Borrinaga said in an interview.

Representatives Raul Daza, a descendant of Capt. Eugenio Daza, the highest ranking Filipino officer on the island of Samar during the war, said the bells' return represented an important moment in Philippine history.

"The return of the bells recognizes our country as a truly sovereign state, capable and determined under a firm leadership to assert resolutely its rights against other states," he said at the ceremony marking the return of the bells.

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U.S. Returns Bells Taken as War Booty From Philippines in 1901 (Published 2018)

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Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Give this article Give this article Give this article MANILA - Three church bells taken from the central Philippines as war booty by American troops more than a century ago were flown to their original home Tuesday, ending a contentious flash point in relations between the two longtime military allies.

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Gina Apostol's Essays/Excerpts, Forewords & Some Anthologies, and links to other work

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The novel has several female characters whose lives are in the process of "becoming"  - that is, their progress as women artists or wives or lovers or revolutionaries forms part of the novel's layered plot. Discuss a scene where a woman's dilemma is central to the plot of history or art, or storytelling, or other matters in the novel.

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Discussion Question 2: (as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto)

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Discussion Question 2: (as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto)

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Why do you think there is a road trip at the heart of the novel?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Locate a scene or line or detail of humor in the novel. How did you respond to humor in the novel? What is the role of humor in this book?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Texts are layered in the novel: two dueling scripts are framed by a mystery novel, which in turn is framed by the story of a forgotten history. History seems to be an overriding frame for this novel’s plot. What do you think is the novel’s idea of history? How do the layered texts and multiple plotlines relate to this idea? Why choose a layered structure to explore this concept of history?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Consider the figure of Casiana Nacionales. What do you think her role is in the novel? How does she relate to the otehr characters and their dilemmas in the book?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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The novel makes several remarks about reading. Find a few of them. The reader seems to have a role in the novel. What is your role as a reader of the novel? In what way does your experience of reading the novel relate to any of the ideas in it?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Find a chapter where you believe Magsalin is writing the script of the movie. What are the attributes of Magsalin in the novel that make you believe this? Do the same exercise for Chiara. In what ways does the book maintain ambiguity about author figures within it?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Find some objects or matters or lines that repeat. What is the role of repetition in the novel? What is the role of doubling? What are its uses or effects?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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Consider optical technology in the novel: movies, stereo cards, photography, the human eye (the theme of stereopsis). How these relate to other ideas in the novel, e.g., history, colonization, resistance?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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There are a number of mentions of Elvis in the book. Why do you think he is included in this novel about colonization?

**as found in "Behind the Book" section in Insurrecto

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https://www.praxino.org/

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"In the days of dopey dreams-happy peaceful Philippines!-when the bolomen were busy all night long! When ladrones would steal and lie and Americanos die, you heard the soldiers sing this evening song! Damn damn damn the insurrectos. Cross-eyed kakiac ladrones! Underneath the starry flag, Civilize them with a Krag and return us to our own beloved homes!"

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BenCab's Woman with Fan is the image on the cover of Insurrecto

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Benedicto Reyes Cabrera (born April 10, 1942), better known as " BenCab", is a Filipino painter and was awarded National Artist of the Philippines for Visual Arts (Painting) in 2006. He has been noted as "arguably the best-selling painter of his generation of Filipino artists."

BenCab was born to Democrito Cabrera and Isabel Reyes in Malabon, Philippines on April 10, 1942. He was the youngest of nine children. BenCab's first exposure and discovery of the arts happened through his elder Brother Salvador, who was already an established artist during Bencab's childhood.

He went on to study at the University of the Philippines Diliman He received his bachelor's degree in Fine Arts in 1963.

BenCab met British journalist Caroline Kennedy (author of An Affair of State, 1987, and How the English Establishment Framed Stephen Ward, 2013) in Manila in 1968, and married her in London in 1969. The couple decided to stay in London. They have three children. The eldest, Elisar, was born in 1971 and is now a film and web series producer, married to award-winning playwright and web series writer, Lisa Gifford, based in London; Their middle child, Mayumi, was born in Manila in 1973 and became a successful model both in London and Los Angeles. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her partner, John A. Fries, and their two children, Ronan (2011) and Ione (2013). Their youngest, Jasmine was born in 1977, the mother of Sienna Daphne (b.2016), and lives in Quezon City.

When BenCab returned to the Philippines in 1972, he was hailed as a Filipino pioneer of the arts and a significant influence among his peers. However, he returned to London once more in 1974, partly to get away from the tightening grip of Martial Law, which Ferdinand Marcos had declared in 1972. That event is said to have "marked the beginning of [BenCab]'s passionate involvement with social commentary and the topics of repression and freedom," turning him into a key figure in the development of protest art against the Marcos dictatorship.

His Larawan series was developed out of his nostalgia for the Philippines. He and Caroline used to scour local flea markets all over Europe looking for early maps and prints of the Philippines. This collection became the basis for his Larawan series.

In 1985, however, BenCab's 16-year marriage with Kennedy ended in divorce, and he eventually decided to come home to the Philippines.

BenCab eventually returned to the Philippines, and settled in the City of Baguio in Northern Luzon, eventually putting up a studio and a secluded little farm on Asin road, in the nearby town of Tuba, Benguet. He and a small group of fellow artists - visual artist Santiago Bose, filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, and sculptor Ben Hur Villanueva, among others, established the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG). It was during this period in his career that BenCab began to more deeply explore the use handmade paper as a medium on which to work.

When the 1990 Luzon earthquake struck, BenCab and the BAG helped out by instituting programs such as the ArtAid workshop for traumatized children, and a fund-raising art auction they titled "Artquake." Bencab was elected president of the guild the following year.

Later in the 1990s, BenCab's input was a critical element in the creation of Tam-awan Village, "a refuge for local artists who desire a nurturing environment in which to develop their talents, and a community for all those who wish to take part in the harmonious fusion of art, culture, environment, and history."

BenCab also exhibited considerably during the last decade of the Millennium, also reaping many accolades. Among the most prominent of the many awards received by BenCab during this period was the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining (Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Arts) in 1992.

In 2006, the Philippine Government conferred upon him the Order of National Artist for Visual Arts. In 2009, the University of the Philippines conferred upon him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. He was also conferred Doctor of Humanities, honoris causa by the University of the Cordilleras in 2018. His other notable recognitions and awards are enumerated below:

1962

Second Prize, Painting, Shell National Student Art Competition

1963

First Prize, Painting, University of the Philippines Student Council Art Competition

1967

First Prize, Photography, 20th Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Annual Exhibition & Competition

Second Prize, Photography, 20th AAP Annual Exhibition & Competition

Third Honorable Mention, Photography, 20th AAP Annual Exhibition & Competition

1969

Philippine Representative, VI Paris Biennale

1970

Thirteen Artists Award, Cultural Center of the Philippines

1988

Kalinangan (Cultural) Award For Painting, City of Manila

1991

President, Baguio Arts Guild

1992

Gawad CCP Para Sa Sining (CCP Awards For The Arts) for Visual Arts, Cultural Center of the Philippines

1993

Chairman, 4th Baguio Arts Festival

1994

Most Outstanding Kapampangan For Arts & Culture (Painting) Award, given by President Ramos on Pampanga Day

1997

ASEAN Achievement Award, for Visual & Performing Arts, 5th ASEAN Achievement Awards, ASEAN Business Forum, Jakarta

Outstanding Citizen of Baguio Award for Arts, given by the mayor of Baguio on the city's 88th Foundation Day

2005

Invited by the Singapore Tyler Print Institute to join their Visiting Artists Programme as artist-in residence for one month working on large-scale prints & paperpulp painting.

2006

Conferred the Order of National Artist for Visual Arts by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Malacanan Palace.

2011

Holy Angel University Juan D. Nepomuceno Cultural Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts

Five books covering BenCab's works have been released:

Ben Cabrera: Etchings (1970-1980) by Cid Reyes;

Bencab's Rock Sessions by Eric Caruncho;

BENCAB by Alfred Yuson and Cid Reyes; and

BenCab: Nude Drawings by Alfred Yuson;

BenCab Portraits by Ambeth R. Ocampo.

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Benedicto Reyes Cabrera (born April 10, 1942), better known as " BenCab", is a Filipino painter and was awarded National Artist of the Philippines for Visual Arts (Painting) in 2006. He has been noted as "arguably the best-selling painter of his generation of Filipino artists."

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https://www.bencabmuseum.org/

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It’s no coincidence that National Book Store invited both Gina Apostol, PEN awardee and author of Insurrecto and Gun Dealer’s Daughter, to sit beside Pulitzer-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen (for 2016’s The Sympathizer) in the Salon Room of Raffles Makati — just as it’s no coincidence that the co…

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A few movies can capture the banality of evil and violence in the way that ‘Apocalypse Now’ does – for a generation reared under the looming threat of the Vietnam War, this is perhaps the most palpable depiction of the biblical apocalypse. Although Francis Ford Coppola has a repository of titles und…

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How Apocalypse Now inspired Filipino surfers

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How Apocalypse Now inspired Filipino surfers

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When a scene from Apocalypse Now was shot on an obscure beach in the Philippines in the late 70s, little did the film-makers know they were giving birth to the country's surfing culture.

"Charlie don't surf," says the reckless and irrepressible Colonel Kilgore, in one of the most memorable lines of the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.

Charlie is the American soldiers' derogatory nickname for their enemy, the Viet Cong, and the surf-mad colonel is trying to persuade his troops to ride the waves, despite the bombs falling all around them.

Apocalypse Now, released in 1979, depicts the madness and mayhem of conflict, and is widely regarded as one of the most powerful war films ever made.

But it also has another legacy - something that the director, Francis Ford Coppola, could not possibly have intended.

Apocalypse Now was not actually filmed in Vietnam, but in the little fishing town of Baler in the northern Philippines.

As the cameras rolled, local Filipinos like Edwin Nomoro watched from the sidelines.

Nomoro was 10 at the time, and he came down to the beach every day to see it transformed into a battle scene, complete with an entirely fake Vietnamese village and helicopters swooping overhead.

But what excited him most was the sight of the actors surfing - something he'd never seen before.

"When the filming finished, some of the crew left their surfboards behind, and my friend and I picked up the boards and taught ourselves how to surf," he says. "We've been surfing ever since."

At first, Nomoro and his friends found it difficult because there was no-one around to teach them.

"But we studied it, and learned, and now - no-one can explain what it feels like. Only a surfer knows the feeling," he says, smiling.

Once they got the hang of it, the boys started teaching others, and as word spread, tourists began coming to the little town to learn to ride the waves at Charlie's Point, as it became known.

Nomoro was able to turn his passion into a way of making a living, and more than 30 years on, he still earns money from the industry he helped to create.

"I have several rooms to rent. I also have some surfboards for hire," he says. "It's really improved my life. It helps me feed my family."

Baler is now very different from the sleepy fishing town where Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando stayed decades ago.

Several big hotels line the seafront, and more are being constructed. According to the local tourism office, at least 50,000 people came here in 2012.

Most visitors are Filipinos - Manila residents who just want a weekend of surfing - but an increasing number are foreigners.

One of the earliest arrivals was Donny Cope, who turned up in Baler in 1997 with "a surfboard, a backpack and a sense of adventure".

He has stayed at the beach on and off ever since, and now runs a small guesthouse.

"Last year we had surfers from the Czech Republic, Switzerland and a bunch from France," he says.

Baler's success as a surfing centre has rippled out to other parts of the Philippines, such as Surigao, La Union and Pagudpud.

"Baler is the birthplace of Philippine surfing," says Mac Ritual, a local tour guide.

"Other places saw a lot of good things here in Baler, and they also wanted to be popular because of surfing."

Ritual often takes his tour groups to see the main sites featured in Apocalypse Now.

The most famous is a headland where a major attack on the Viet Cong was staged. It was nicknamed Charlie's Point in the film, and now even local Filipinos use this name.

Going there now, it's quite difficult to recognise anything from the film.

The fake Vietnamese village was blown up at the time, and the trees which were burnt down as part of a simulated napalm attack have all regrown.

But there's no chance of the beach nearby going back to the way it once was.

All the way along it, people are surfing - beginners screaming excitedly as the waves crash over them, and seasoned professionals perfecting their technique on the breakers.

This town has come a long way since the days of Apocalypse Now.

Perhaps the best way to sum up its changing fortunes is a little shop on the seafront.

Its name? Charlie Does.

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How Apocalypse Now inspired Filipino surfers

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When a scene from Apocalypse Now was shot on an obscure beach in the Philippines in the late 70s, little did the film-makers know they were giving birth to the country's surfing culture. "Charlie don't surf," says the reckless and irrepressible Colonel Kilgore, in one of the most memorable lines of the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.

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Lone woman in historic Balangiga uprising gets recognition

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Lone woman in historic Balangiga uprising gets recognition

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BALANGIGA, EASTERN SAMAR - Hers was the voice that sounded loud as the bells that the American invaders took away. But the role of Casiana Nacionales, the only woman to join that daring surprise attack against American soldiers on Sept. 28, 1901, has been largely overlooked, until fairly recently.

With her story absent in official history texts, a youthful generation of her descendants from this coastal town composed mostly of women is leading efforts to give recognition and preserve her legacy of uncommon courage and patriotism.

"She was always praying and singing in church. We learned that from our elders," said Fe Campanero, the town's tourism and cultural officer who is also a great-great-grandniece of Nacionales.

According to local lore, Nacionales, while holding up her rosary, shouted, "Attack, my fellow Filipinos," as she rallied the guerrillas in the assault against the Americans who were preparing for breakfast on that Saturday morning 117 years ago today.

The guerrillas killed 44 soldiers from Company C of the 9th Infantry Regiment. In retaliation, the US military waged a "kill and burn" policy, leaving thousands of Filipinos dead.
Annual dance drama
The atrocities resulted in the court-martial of two US officers, and the Americans decided to end their war in the Philippines.

"If the Ilocanos have Gabriela Silang and the Tagalogs have Tandang Sora (Melchora Aquino), we Warays have our Casiana Nacionales," said Danny Ablay, 37, a town councilor who has been playing the role of Balangiga hero Capt. Valeriano Abanador-the town's police chief who planned and led the Balangiga uprising-in the annual dance drama reenactment for 10 years now.

Most historians now claim that the arrest of Eugenio "Guno" Nacionales, Casiana's younger brother who was imprisoned without food and water, may have motivated her to join the attack against the 74 American soldiers garrisoned near the town plaza.

"Why would a church-going woman join in this attack? The arrest of Guno may have been the last straw," said 85-year-old Oriculo Amano, Nacionales' grandnephew who received motherly care from her.

Nacionales' role in that uprising that resulted in the worst debacle for the Americans during the 1899-1902 Philippine-American War has been overshadowed by the male narrative in books and oral history.

The woman who hid bolos under her skirt for the guerrillas is not even depicted in Napoleon Abueva's life-size Balangiga Memorial sculpture in the center of town.
Role of heroine
But her rallying call on that bloody battleground, brandishing her rosary like a weapon, will be reenacted today at the town auditorium with 20-year-old Emily Montallana playing the role of Balangiga's famous heroine.

"I am so thrilled to play her since I learned about her legendary life when I was 11," said Montallana, a Balangiga native who is a famous disc jockey at MOR Love Radio in Tacloban City.

Separate scripts that were written by Butch Dalisay and Pete Lacaba but have not yet been made into film had an American sergeant named Frank Betron flirting with then 23-year-old Nacionales.
Tease from cousin
The latest movie about that historic episode, "Balangiga: Howling Wilderness" by Khavn de la Cruz, does not mention Nacionales at all.

The second daughter of Ruben Nacionales and Ana Salazar, and known as Apoy Sana to her relatives and Doday Sana to the townsfolk, Nacionales was also called Geronima, her nom de guerre in the Katipunan.

Geronima is a variation of Geronimo, the name of the Apache warrior who gained fame for his raids on US soldiers who tried to subjugate the American Indians from the 1850s to the 1880s.

"That nickname was a tease from her cousin, Captain Abanador, while she joined the secret meetings as the only woman plotter of the attack," said Rolando Borrinaga, an acknowledged authority on Balangiga whose 2003 book, "The Balangiga Conflict Revisited," tries to sift fact from fiction about the uprising.

"We did not learn that from history books. We learned that from the rich oral tradition in our community," added Kenneth Gales, 34, Balangiga's unofficial historian who lives in a house along Geronima Street, named after its famous Balangiga native.

Overshadowed by the giant personas of Abanador, Capt. Eugenio Daza of the revolutionary government and Balangiga Mayor Pedro Abayan, three of the leaders of the attack, the proud legacy of Nacionales was largely relegated to the sidelines.
Oral histories
This legacy was almost forgotten until scholarly journals and college theses that mined the oral histories of Nacionales' descendants came out in the 1990s across Leyte and Samar that told the story of the heroine of Balangiga.

"Geronima became the model of strength not only to the women but also to the men as well," UP professor Glenda Lynne Anne Tibe-Bonifacio said in a historical paper she presented on Oct. 21, 1998, before the Philippine National Historical Society.

What could be a likeness of Nacionales is on the cover of "Insurrecto," the latest book by New York-based novelist Gina Apostol who was born in Leyte province.

Apostol was given permission by National Artist Ben Cabrera to use his painting, "Woman with Fan," to represent Nacionales. The book will be released by Penguin Books in November.

"Hers is the face of Casiana Nacionales, the Geronima of Balangiga," Apostol said on her Facebook fan page.

Nacionales, the pious heroine and freedom fighter of Balangiga, remained unmarried and died on May 11, 1953, according to the town registry. -CONTRIBUTED

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Lone woman in historic Balangiga uprising gets recognition

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Hers was the voice that sounded loud as the bells that the American invaders took away. But the role of Casiana Nacionales, the only woman to join that daring surprise attack against American soldiers on Sept. 28, 1901, has been largely overlooked, until fairly recently.

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Surviving the menace of Balangiga: Two stories about community leadership

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Surviving the menace of Balangiga: Two stories about community leadership

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I visited the coastal town of Balangiga in Eastern Samar to attend the turn-over ceremony of the first set of motorized fishing boats for 150 poor fishermen who lost their boats during the onslaught of super typhoon 'Haiyan' (local name Yolanda). Funded by Metrobank Foundation Inc., the project was implemented by TOPSOLDIERS and the Army's 801st Brigade. Behind me is the historic St. Anthony's Church and the tower where the renown Balangiga bells were once installed. (Photo by Mikhail Harvey Cabunoc)

Unlike the other communities in Samar and Leyte where thousands died during the onslaught of super-typhoon Haiyan, Balangiga suffered only 13 dead out of its 13,000 population. I would say that it was an extraordinary feat that could be accomplished by strong and respected leaders. I was impressed and began asking questions. Ooops, the people of Balangiga did it again!
How come? What made the difference?
What can be learned from them?

I consider this as a repeat of a historical event that occurred in Samar island 112 years ago. Owing to the excellent leadership provided by the likes of Abanador, most of the Balangigan-ons (local term for residents of Balangiga) survived the gruesome massacre carried out by American forces. Sorry to General Jacob 'Howling' Smith, his real targets, the Balangigan-ons were nowhere to be found!
Narrative accounts tell us that u nder the instructions of General Smith, an expedition of American soldiers scoured the different communities and killed everyone above 10 yrs old. It was a punitive expedition aimed to avenge the deaths of at least 46 U.S. Army soldiers at the hands of bolo-wielding Filipino warriors led by Valeriano Abanador in the public plaza of Balangiga.
American writers put the tally of massacre victims at around 2,500; but, Filipino historians had a higher casualty count based on 'realistic' research. Well, only God knows which is true. What I am quite sure is that the Americans have kept three Balangiga Bells as war trophies up to this day.

I had the chance to visit this town during the turnover of motorized fishing boats donated by Metrobank Foundation Inc. on May 22, 2014.

I stopped for a souvenir photo at the San Juanico Bridge that links the provinces of Samar and Leyte. I was accompanied by Major Lemuel Baduya, the Project Coordinator of the boat project funded by Metrobank Foundation Inc. (Photo by Mikhail Harvey Cabunoc)There were discrepancies in the "Please find me direct relatives of Police Capt Valeriano Abanador, the local hero of Balangiga. I want to have a chat with them about their great grandpa," I told Major Lemuel Baduya, the Coordinator of the
I had read many stories about the Bells of Balangiga and the tales about the extraordinary courage displayed by our ancestors against the American colonizers.
historical r ecords, depending on who the author (Filipino or American) of the publication is. I decided to find out more untold stories by talking directly to the descendants themselves.
'Bangka ng Buhay, Bunga ng Bayanihan' boat project that I facilitated in Eastern Samar.
Thanks to Lemuel's resourcefulness, he was able to find two surviving relatives of Abanador named Rufina Abanador Nacionales, 74, and Milagros Abanador Cabales, 71. They were the daughters of Juan Abanador, the nephew of Kapitan Bale (the popular name of Valeriano Abanador).
They gladly met me upon my arrival in Balangiga town on May 21. Both of them have sharp memories about their uncle despite their old age.

"My father was the favorite nephew of Kapitan Bale. He was running errands for him as a child and was told about the exploits and adventures of his uncle," revealed Cabales.

I met two of the grand nieces of Capt Valeriano Abanador, the leader of the Balangiga incident. Mrs Rufina Nacionales (left) was accompanied by her younger sister Milagros Cabales. (Photo by Mikhail Harvey Cabunoc)

This is the narrative account about the attack on the American forces as told by Abanador's grand nieces:

She said that only a few people from Balangiga fell victim to the punitive actions carried out by American forces a few days after their humiliating defeat at the hands of Capt Abanador and his men.

They survived the ordeals experienced by countless other Samarenos during the military operations that followed. Practically, the whole Samar island was turned into a 'howling wilderness' when American troops began killing people including children over 10 years old, pillaging and burning houses along the way.
"The residents of the town were already evacuated hours before the planned attack on the American unit. Kapitan Bale ordered all women and young children to leave the town and stay in the designated areas in the forests," said Nacionales who has no idea if her husband is directly related to the lone female planner of the attack, Casiana "Geronima" Nacionales.

This photo was taken from the 2nd floor of the town municipal hall. Behind me is the public plaza where most of the American troops were billeted. Farther behind is St. Lawrence the Martyr Church where some American officers stayed since their arrival in August 1901. (Photo by Mikhail Harvey Cabunoc)
Balangiga Town Council Secretary Marciano Deladia Jr. said that only a few residents around the peripheries of the town were killed by the responding elements of Golf Company, 9th US Infantry led by Cpt Edwin Bookmiller, who came by boats from their base in Basey town about 40 kilometers away.
"On September 29, 1901, American troops burned all houses here and stole all three bells from St. Lawrence the Martyr Church in retaliation for the worst defeat that they experienced in their conquests during that time,"said Deladia.

Surviving Yolanda
Deladia said that the recent actions of the Balangigan-ons during the onslaught of Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) was comparable to their great escape in September 1901.
"We received warnings from the national government about the coming of a super typhoon in Samar island. Mayor Viscuso 'Viscoy' De Lira directed the Municipal Disaster Management Office to plan and coordinate the evacuation of people to designated areas where they can take shelter," he said.

"As early as November 6, Wednesday, we had a 'bandillo' (mobile public announcements) using several vehicles including our ambulance. We roamed around town to remind people to pack their essential things and head towards safer places in the interior, away from the coastal communities."
Deladia said that the spirit of Bayanihan was alive in his town in the same manner that almost all families took part in attacking the American soldiers who committed abuses in their peaceful community over a century had passed.
"The people who hosted the evacuees actively helped in preparing food provisions for those who came to take shelter in their community. We are very proud about this practice during emergencies in our town," he said.
Ernesto Delantar, 43, was among the fishermen who followed the orders from the local authorities. He tied his boat on a tree at the back of his house and took the engine with him as he brought all 7 of his children towards an evacuation center a day before the typhoon arrived.
"We brought only a few clothes and kitchen utensils with us. I carried the boat engine because it might be stolen while I am away," said Delantar, a widower, whose main income source is fishing.
Arthur Sabadlab, 36, is also one of the fishermen who deserted their coastal community in Bgy Singko in order to escape from the howling winds and high waters. Like Delantar, he also carried his boat engine with him as he led his wife Precy, 25, and 4 young daughters towards an evacuation area.
"I heard from our leaders that the wind brought by the typhoon was too strong and that our kubo (nipa hut) might be torn to pieces. Though we only had enough food to eat that day, I decided to leave with my whole family," said Sabadlab who left his boat that was bought out of his 2-year savings as a fisherman.
No one among the family members of both Delantar and Sabadlab were harmed when the typhoon struck in the morning on November 8, 2013.

I met the survivors of super typhoon Haiyan, some of whom are relatives of the Balangigan-ons who survived the punitive expeditions carried out by American forces after their 'terrible defeat' at the hands of Filipinos. (Photo by Mikhail Harvey Cabunoc)Nacionales said that Gamlin was knocked unconscious by
Thirteen people who refused to leave their homes in danger areas along the coast lines, did not survive the strong winds that brought flying debris and surging waters.
Returning to their sea side community the following day, Delantar and Sabadlab found out that they had no houses to return to. Both of them also lost their boats which were carried by raging floodwater.
"I felt like it was the end of the world for me. I had no idea how to feed my big family during that day,"said Delantar, one of the 50 beneficiaries of the boat project implemented by the TOPSOLDIERS and the Army's 801st Brigade.

Nacionales said that despite the clamor by Balangigan-ons for the return of the church bells, they had welcomed some descendants of the American soldiers who came to make friends with them. Healing session
"It was in September 2001 when I received a visitor named Jean Wall, the daughter of Pvt Adolf Gamlin, a survivor of the Balangiga encounter," said Nacionales.
"Ms. Wall said that Adolf Gamlin, her father, was having nightmares for many years. Her father revealed later his harrowing experience during the attack on his unit by the people of Balangiga during the Filipino-American war," said Nacionales.

Kapitan Bale himself before the latter raised his ' baston' (cane) to signal the multi-pronged attack by hundreds of his followers.

"Ms Wall was told that the hack wound suffered by his father was inflicted by a Filipino. She decided to visit Balangiga despite the negative remarks made by her friends and relatives," said Nacionales.
"She was told that the people in Balangiga are fearsome individuals who could not be trusted at all. She insisted to come and found out that even we, Kapitan Bale's descendants, were very warm and hospitable towards her," added Cabales.
Both Cabales and Nacionales said that the visit was like a healing session for all of them. They said that Ms Wall returned a year later with his brother.
"They were always excited to see Balangiga, the place where their grandfather once served. We don't have any bitter feelings towards the each other because of this event in the past," said Nacionales.
For the survivors of supertyphoon Yolanda, we had our own 'healing session' when I facilitated an exchange of experiences among them.
All of them are ready to rise and face the upcoming challenges in life because they are the proud children of Balangiga. However, they have a simple wish that is still unfulfilled after more than a century of waiting:
"Return the Bells of Balangiga!"

Photo collage of the 'Bells of Balangiga' that are put in display in two military camps in Wyoming, USA and South Korea. This framed photo is now hanging at the little museum in Balangiga town that is dedicated for the local heroes like Abanador. (Photo by Mikhail Harvey Cabunoc)

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Surviving the menace of Balangiga: Two stories about community leadership

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I visited the coastal town of Balangiga in Eastern Samar to attend the turn-over ceremony of the first set of motorized fishing boats for 150 poor fishermen who lost their boats during the onslaught of super typhoon 'Haiyan' (local name Yolanda). Funded by Metrobank Foundation Inc., the project was implemented by TOPSOLDIERS and the Army's 801st Brigade.

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Waray-Waray is a member of the Visayan branch of the Central Philippine language family spoken by 3 million people in the Philippines in the provinces of Samar, Northern Samar, Eastern Samar, Leyte and Biliran.

Waray-Waray is also known as Waray, Samar-Leyte, Winaray, Binisaya nga Winaray, Samarenyo and Lineyte-Samarnon.

Waray-Waray alphabet and pronunciation

Sample text in Waray-Waray (Samar version)

Nga an ngatanan nga mga tawo, nahimugso talwas ug katpong ha ira dignidad ug katdungan. Hira natawo dinhi ha tuna mayda konsensya ug isip ug kaangayan gud la nga an ira pagtagad ha tagsatagsa sugad hin magburugto.

Sample text in Waray-Waray (Leyte version)

Ngatanan nga tawo gin anak na libre ngan paragtas ha dignidad ngan mga katungod. Gintagan hira hin rason ngan konsensiya ngan dapat tratohon nira it kada usa ha espirito hit kamagburugto

Translation

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Sample videos in Waray-Waray

Information about Waray-Waray | Numbers | Tower of Babel

Links

Information about the Waray-Waray language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waray-Waray_language
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=war
http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/waray-info.php
http://www.angelfire.com/indie/warayglimpses/FAQ.htm
http://e-waray.blogspot.com

Online Waray lessons
http://waraylessons.netfirms.com/

Online Waray-Waray dictionaries
http://www.bansa.org/?q=dictionaries/cmd&dict_lang=Waray

Philippine languages

Languages written with the Latin alphabet

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Waray-Waray is a member of the Visayan branch of the Central Philippine language family spoken by 3 million people in the Philippines in the provinces of Samar, Northern Samar, Eastern Samar, Leyte and Biliran. Waray-Waray is also known as Waray, Samar-Leyte, Winaray, Binisaya nga Winaray, Samarenyo and Lineyte-Samarnon.

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La Tercera by Gina Apostol: 9781641293907 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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In her first novel since Insurrecto, Gina Apostol assembles a vision of Philippine history from the 19th century to present day in the fragmented story of the Delgados, a family surviving across generations…

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May 2022 - Gina Apostol currently writing another book: "The Treatment of Paz" -- About Juan Luna's wife Paz Pardo de Tavera

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Filipina writer wins Rome prize in Literature

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Filipina writer wins Rome prize in Literature

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Filipina writer wins Rome prize in Literature | The Final Word

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Laurel Flores Fantauzzo - Los Angeles Review of Books LARB

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In Multiplicity Is Truth: An Interview with Gina Apostol

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In Multiplicity Is Truth: An Interview with Gina Apostol

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GINA APOSTOL IS a Philippine-American author whose novels confront, and radically reorient, the histories of both countries. Her latest novel, Insurrecto, follows a filmmaker and a Filipina translator on a kinetic road trip to the site of a Philippine uprising and an American massacre. Insurrecto 's jump-cut chapters transport readers into tragicomic scenes of the Spanish-American War, and introduce us to one of its central, forgotten heroines, Casiana Nacionales. The book also excavates women's private sorrows and ethical quandaries in the face of political violence.

Apostol and I corresponded between Honolulu and New York City by email and Facebook messenger, like members of the diaspora usually do.

¤

LAUREL FLORES FANTAUZZO: Insurrecto is a complex book. There is a film within the novel; countries and eras clash repeatedly; characters merge and double. Can you discuss the restlessness of your storytelling?

GINA APOSTOL: Well, I am a writer and I am always occupying other people's minds. And this book is also about art-making. Plus, I grew up speaking three languages, but my primal one, Waray, was oddly repressed in the classroom. I'd be fined if I did not speak English.

Literally fined? How did the school enforce this rule?

You put five centavos in a coconut shell, of course! Ha ha. I remember it was so weird to be fined for speaking my own language. So this sense of splitness, rooted in language, was part of my growing up. But this doubleness, for me, is existential - it's a human thing. But it is hard for us to express that simultaneity, or to think about it too much, for basic reasons, such as sanity!

Virginia Woolf did it, and so many of Borges's stories are about doubleness. Some of Vladimir Nabokov's work, like Laughter in the Dark. Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual works on this concept of multiple planes. So does Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, or Invisible Cities. So I like that kind of work a lot. But to put these existential themes alongside issues of current politics is something else. I mean, Nabokov did not speak Waray.

For the Filipino in America, our immigrant self is a kind of hyper-humanity. You visibly - or vocally - bear that aspect of the human, that splitness. And then there's material history. Even now, in the US or the Philippines, constantly the news will tell us, Trump is Watergate all over again, or Duterte is Marcosian - simultaneity and repetition in our political worlds. But then our own past, too, is always part of us, a second self in us - it's called memory.

I was writing a novel about the onset of colonial occupation - America's step toward imperialism in 1898 - in the Philippines, and it was very hard not to see that American atrocities then were visibly and historically linked to atrocities now. What is the consequence to our sense of being that comes with conquest? It was hard to tell the story of the colonizer and the colonized with just one voice. For one thing, those voices are intertwined, in my view. It's hard to read myself without the world of the colonizer in me: the world that history has subjected me to.

Obviously, an effect of colonization is a Philippine oligarchic state long propped up by US military funds. Ours was the first anti-imperialist revolution in Asia, in 1898; but then, for Filipinos, rebellion is also endemically internationalist - the revolution against Spain and America was informed by readings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and of course the work of novelist and doctor José Rizal, a polyglot global mind. The katipuneros invoked the American revolution - Washington and Jefferson - in their war against the Americans. And, to me, that's one of the most tragic things about that war.

Wow. Taking on the best ideals of the ones harming them, to liberate themselves.

And Rizal translated The Rights of Man straight into Tagalog - Ang Mga Karapatan ng Tao. It survives in his papers without attribution or acknowledgment of its source, which was the French Revolution, of course. We don't know what he wanted to do with it since, a few months after the translation, the Spaniards sent him into exile in Dapitan. It was found among his papers when he died. I really love that story of revolutionary translation, the best kind of appropriation.

On one hand, I'm not damaged by having Dante in me, or Chaucer, as well as Iluminado Lucente and Eduardo Makabenta, to name just two Waray writers. A global sense of self - confronting your own scars and trauma, but steadfast in your own multiple identities - is healthy.

I understand the complexity of using English as my language of creation: but this fact is ordinary to me. It's no burden, it's just my history. I have no angst about that which I cannot undo. But it is also correct for others to recognize the trauma it signifies.

And a country like America will be healthier when it recognizes that the voice of the colonized is in it, too: the story of this war is American history. The repression of this war in American consciousness has already done damage: Americans have not learned from it. So that's why a novel like Insurrecto, I think, is useful. It is both a Filipino and an American novel, and that is a good thing.

The book seems to stage an insurrection, if you will, against our expectation of a single narrative, a single answer. The chapters are deliberately out of order, giving us a sense of forever needing to reorient. At what point in your writing process did you feel the structure of this book needed to be slightly insane?

I think the structure is very sane, though.

Yes, it's a planned, crafted structure. I suppose by "insane" I mean that it demands, in that Cortázar/Calvino way, that a reader set aside their expectations for a tonally calm, chronological narrative.

Yes - it is an insurrection against the novel form! It's especially an insurrection against the form of the political novel.

Sometimes I get the sense that if we are interested in radicalism - and my work, in my view, is polemical; layered and multi-tonal as it is, it is nakedly staking political ground - we are expected not to play as much, not to have as much fun with our art. Or as Asian, people of color writers, or whatnot, we're expected to write certain kinds of novels, sad realist family sagas or something, while narrative play is for Donald Barthelme or Don DeLillo or some other don.

Are those of us who write the immigrant family epic somehow less free, held back by the limited gaze of literary capitalism? Do we risk unconsciously playing to industry demands, to make ourselves palatable to a white American audience?

No, of course not. One does not write according to expectations. You write a family saga or you don't. Don't you know my next novel, William McKinley's World, is a family saga?

I did not know that.

It's very difficult to write.

We need to make an effort not to take on the power lens that does not read us right. This is true of a child growing up, or of a writer.

Part of writing is freedom - this immensely satisfying freedom to figure out reality as it suggests itself to you. The demands of any particular novel dictate the work you do - the novel creates its own requirements. I like to have specific, arbitrary constraints that I make up, which help me write. But ultimately, when I am writing, I wait for that point when the novel is simply and deeply a pleasure. I look for that pleasure.

I like Oulipo, for instance, a seemingly apolitical group (though Georges Perec wrote very class-conscious novels). But to turn Oulipo strategies into a political tract - that's fun! The first chapter of Insurrecto - which were the first words of the novel I wrote, and I've never moved them - was triggered by reading 53 Days, the last novel by Perec; he never finished it.

The trope of the unfinished book is a haunting thing, for me. Insurrecto 's voices emerged during the recess time of writing another, very long novel. So it's a playground of a novel that insists that in multiplicity is truth.

There are multiple conflicts within the Philippines and the diaspora - a marking of territory and setting of rules, if you will. For example, arguments that some voices are distinctly Filipino American, not Filipino; that the convention of naming should be Filipinx to avoid gender markers; that Filipino Americans should actually call themselves American Filipinos. What do you think of those ongoing disputes? Your argument in Insurrecto seems to be for an embrace of the multiple, rather than a setting of divisions, or a dogma of naming.

Yeah. I think categories are damaging because they can be exclusionary. I prefer categories that are inclusionary, if one can do that.

I think it is better to acknowledge the spaces from which the voices come, and say, that is one kind of Filipino, or that is one kind of American. When I got to the States and made Fil-Am friends, my experience of being Filipino, I knew, was quite different from theirs. But the Fil-Am experience of being Filipino is just that - different from mine. It does not make one not a kind of Filipino. Or not a kind of American.

Understanding that there are differences, and thinking about what and why those differences are, can be fascinating. For instance, growing up in the Philippines, I was radicalized to analyze class, not race. Basically, I thought everyone was just Filipino. Even Elvis. Ha ha. I had no angst about my Filipino-ness.

And I still don't think identity is a crux for me. I fail to agonize over it. I am not interested in identity as sadness about my doubleness. I am okay with my self as a deconstructing thing, inherently unstable. It's how others view that identity that becomes a problem. I mean, let the Filipinx be Filipinx; it does not kill you and it solves a problem of gender. White supremacy is the problem, not our markers of identity. So it's up to us if we want to be divided so that others conquer.

This novel is saying - let there be many ways of telling stories, of having delight in stories. Viet Thanh Nguyen calls it the need for narrative plenitude in the stories of the diaspora - and that narrative plenitude must also be about style - stylistic plenitude. Insurrecto 's structure rests on trauma, which has a kind of infinity - so the weave, the structure came from its subject - the endlessness of grief, the repeating spiral of it.

The out-of-order chapters, then, summon the reader to return, and return, and return. The way grief and trauma do.

But I think the novel is also funny. I think it is a light, comic novel - meant to be read quickly, not belabored. But then you have to reread it. I do like rereading books. You can't read Borges without rereading him, for instance.

It does strike me that the narrative is cackling and weeping at the same time, which would seem to me a particularly Philippine way of existing. The two protagonists, Magsalin and Chiara, are women in mourning, and yet very comic in their own ways. Can you talk more about the relationship between mourning and laughter, even as the personal and political histories here hold such grave weight?

Maybe it's a notion of realism? Reality is, in a sense, produced by the observer. On one plane, we know who we are only seen through the eyes of others, without being quite conscious about that, of course. (Again, sanity is important!) So there is always the possibility of the absurd - the possibility of a comic lens, of an eye that might see your tragedy differently.

In my experience, that possibility of comedy in tragedy is a healthy tonic, a private one, in times of grief. This basic human reality can be ruinous in a story of colonization, because the power-lens upon the colonized world is the one that misperceives it - the colonizer's eye.

Laughter can also be a fatal avoidance, an incomplete coping mechanism for suffering that must be addressed.

But, for me, the eye of the colonized on the conqueror is the interesting thing. The Filipino's eye is used to absurdity - to turning tables on the powerful, in secret, in the mind, through language, through seeming passivity, and so on.

Chirino, a Jesuit of the 1600s, chronicled my province, Leyte. He talks about the way the women of Barugo, for instance, laughed at him when he told them that women should have only one husband. They said, what, why should we change to your religion when we can marry as many men as we like? And they just ridiculed Chirino. That was his example of Waray women as hopeless devils.

Colonizers call our sense of the absurd sneaky. But it's a form of power. The Filipino's can be a cold eye, in my view - a hugely skeptical, remorseless, even cruel gaze. Wordplay is part of that Filipino gaze - we play word games on strangers and on each other. Because language is at the heart of our entrapment.

I first wished to write about this war because I realized - at one point in our history, suddenly, Filipinos had to begin learning an entirely different language, from Spanish to English, and how multiplied their history became. How odd to imagine that change in power-languages, because language is so elemental.

My husband used to say we laugh at foreigners speaking our own languages because we don't really want them to learn - because language is our secret weapon. And that humor, wordplay, is a weapon of the colonized.

The novel circles a central woman character in the Philippine Revolution: Casiana Nacionales, a real historical figure who participated in the anti-colonial Balangiga uprising. When in your life did you first encounter Nacionales's story? How did your understanding of her role develop over time?

Casiana appears in the basic texts by historian Rolando Borrinaga and others about Balangiga, and I came upon her when I was researching William McKinley's World. That novel was a man's world - I do love those great Filipino revolutionaries against America: Macario Sakay, Apolinario Mabini, Gregorio Aglipay, and the unsung katipunero from my hometown, Barugo, Florentino Peñaranda.

But Insurrecto is a woman's world. Those are the voices I wished to do, not the men's. It was a thrill to see Casiana's name etched on the wall when I visited the Balangiga shrine - the only woman's name. And what a name for a revolutionary! Nacionales. You cannot make it up. It's so beautiful. I was in love with Casiana's name.

So I knew Casiana would be in my novel, but I did not know how she would appear. I have a structure, a kind of geometric frame for my novels. In the case of Insurrecto, it was a weave, a braid.

So I had the frame, but I didn't completely know what would fill it. I kept wondering when Casiana Nacionales would appear. The way she comes in was just as surprising to me as having Elvis - I had no idea he would be part of it either. I just began having this Elvis fix - and I was no fan of Elvis as a kid, though my mom loved him. He was so baduy, but then I got super-obsessed with this one song, "Suspicious Minds," which is super-duper-baduy. But beautiful still.

That apocalyptic movie, Blade Runner 2049, actually uses the exact same video that became a weird muse for me. I almost fell off my chair when the hologram that survives the android apocalypse turns out to be - Elvis singing "Suspicious Minds"! I laughed so hard.

I'm reminded here of the unnamed uncles who sing karaoke constantly throughout Insurrecto. They're like a chorus of titos, a baduy presence, while the women characters quest and journey.

Yeah, I like those uncles a lot. The karaoke uncles. But Casiana for me is the key to the novel. Also a key to the conundrum of multiple perspectives.

People can sometimes mistake empathy for ethics. In our fraught political times, we can get confused. Just because we must see from multiple lenses does not mean we do not take sides. As a novelist, as a human, I empathize with all my characters - the US Army soldier who's a pawn in war games, the white woman socialite staking an identity in this difficult, foreign, masculine world of war, et cetera - but I do not need to be on their side.

To empathize does not mean you cannot figure out, stake out your ethical stance. My students call it "judging." But I come from a Catholic, Dantesque place, and to be neutral in a case of abuse of power is to be the devil.

The person whose story counts here is Casiana. In this novel, for me, we must be on the side of her revolutionary rage. The reason why such a war is horrendous, or why atrocity happens, is because the soldier, the white woman, the United States, the invader, failed to imagine her. We must imagine Casiana into our history to see it and ourselves more whole. Not that there is only one way of viewing Casiana: she couldn't be just a heroine in a lace balintawak in some postcard. It was important that I gave her a sense of humor, for instance: irony, as well as rage.

One grim, funny scene toward the end of Insurrecto haunts me: a police officer claims that a box containing human ashes actually contains narcotics. It reminded me how the pressures of authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte have complicated the duties of storytelling. How else did the recent horrors of the country's murders and political developments affect your writing this novel, if at all?

I love that word - duties. Yes, you feel some kind of obligation. Not in a trite or moralistic way - but in an urgent way. You feel urgency under the realm of this criminal, this atrocious wart on the Filipino psyche that is Duterte. That section is the newest part of the novel. And the fact is - it was easy to put in, though I had begun the novel years before Duterte. It was a seamless insertion. Which is terrible. That this new, obscene violence easily fits into that history of violence.

He remains a popular wart, unfortunately.

I realized, when Duterte was elected and I was writing this book on the revolution, that I could make a triptych of history - the war against the Americans, Marcos and Imelda's US-funded martial law, and Duterte's so-called war on drugs - and my novel essentially would not change. The policing structures are the same, you know - the policing structures that make Duterte's goons possible were created under American occupation, way back in 1899. It's a single thread, in that sense - it's one story.

That's what trauma exposes. Things reverberate.

One needs to understand that imperialism is really quite a material thing: it's in the policing structures of the everyday, it's in America's current totalitarian surveillance protocols that were first made patent in the Philippine-American War, it's in the misogyny, racism, xenophobia, fascism of our Trump world - which is no surprise to any of us who read American history as a layered text. It's in the deaths of boys in Tondo or Talisay funded by the taxes we pay here in the States - the United States has pledged extra money for Duterte's police.

What do you think of the ethical stance the Philippine diaspora has taken, or not taken, on the Duterte government's narrative of the continuing epidemic of homicide? How should we respond, if at all, to it and to each other?

I think we should keep trying to find ways to resist. I like to join with others because I know I cannot do much alone. I joined this group called MALAYA here in New York City simply because they were clear in their goals and were very organized. We had a die-in on Fifth Avenue during the city's Philippine Independence Day parade. It got a lot of press, but most of all we showed the Filipinos watching the parade that resistance is part of the history of that remembrance day. And I'm a writer, so in this novel I inserted a scene about the blood on the hands of Duterte's government.

I'm not interested in fighting people who are not on my side. I like trying to figure out how to tell the story so that maybe we can see our traumatic reality more clearly.

The traumatic reality of the Balangiga massacre is also a marathon comedy, in your novel, with mistranslations and subterfuge.

I actually saw that whole Balangiga affair as one huge play in which the actors, the people of Balangiga, used forms of Shakespearean comedy (transvestism, fiesta-gambit, fake-romance, false identity, coded script, et cetera) to lure Americans successfully to their deaths. Which of course leads to the massacre of thousands of Filipinos. Tit for imperial tat. The American-led massacre was a really dramatic, epically violent event that kind of changed the way Americans prosecuted the 1899 war. It was that war's My Lai massacre.

The initial Filipino action in Balangiga was an amazing piece of stagecraft. At least, that's how I thought of it in my novel. Everyone seems to be on a kind of stage, with interchangeable roles and names.

I did want to emphasize Filipino agency in this story. But in the novel, I also think the humor lies in the fact that every act and character is consciously mediated, so the earnestness is deflected - the filmmaker's gaze, the photographer's gaze, the mystery writer's gaze, and so on.

The material reality and the methods of film have a huge presence in the book. Why is that?

To read the novel, you have to locate the gaze - which can shift without much warning. It seems to be the soldier's voice at first, for instance, then it's really the gaze of the socialite photographer upon him, but actually there is that hint of everything being seen really through the eye of some script-maker, et cetera, et cetera.

My constraint was that I knew every gaze was mediated, usually by an actual piece of media. But I knew my reader would not be fully aware. It was fun to write! That was part of the novel's structure - a kind of game with free indirect discourse (a technical matter I was working on), to which I added the destabilizing spin of moviemaking.

Another trigger for the novel was a form of media - those stereo cards of the Fil-Am War that I kept buying on eBay. I saw the war through a media-maker's gaze.

Tell us more about those horrifying stereo cards. When and why did you start collecting them? Did they precede your idea for the novel and its form?

I first saw the stereo cards - copies of them - in the Library of Congress when I was helping a friend with the biography of President Corazon Aquino's dad, during the 1990s. Photocopies of the cards are in folders labeled "Philippine Insurrection."

I did tell the librarian the term was archaic and offensive. For a Filipino. Also hugely historically inaccurate.

What did the librarian say in response?

What do you expect of the Library of Congress? Which I love, by the way, but it's the repository of the imperial. It's my fate to love these imperial libraries, where I find traumatic images of myself.

Years later, I went back, and the folders still had the same title. I mean, white supremacy is a thing. The Library can still change those labels. It should. Historians should really figure that out. To call my novel Insurrecto is one of those Filipino jokes on the master, but given its historiographic point, it also makes complete sense.

And when I found the actual cards on eBay, I got obsessed. I kept buying them, including the Holmes viewers (I have three of them), as I was doing a book on the Philippine war against Spain, Raymundo Mata. I thought their doubleness was so evocative. And of course their subjects - the posed dead, Mathew Brady-like bodies of Filipinos in the trenches - the gruesome dead.

I kept thinking - who the hell were buying these commercial 3D cards? And who goddamned took those pictures? But at the time, in the late '90s, I had no idea what to do with them. For one thing, I stopped writing for quite some time.

Why did you stop writing?

I know I included my own story in the novel, which really surprised me.

Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah. It is a bit surprising to me. Also weird, in the sense that I realized that I had dragged in the personal only later.

I was so focused on what my book needed, and I used whatever I had to make it work. I don't think I knew exactly what I was doing because I have theories about narration even as I write. Uppermost in my mind was the issue of free indirect discourse and my so-called constraints, not my own feelings. Or so I imagined. To imagine one is not in one's books is a writer's fantasy, and a necessary one.

Someone at a lecture in Manila once asked me - why do you not write anything about your own personal life? And I kind of wanted to say, well, you would not want to know.

John Barth used to say - never confuse a novel with biography. That is good advice to all readers and writers. And that is important in this novel, too.

My husband is not in this novel: that goes without saying. I don't think I could have written it if I thought I was portraying him. That would be paralyzing. It's the feeling of mourning that's in the novel, that's personal to me.

And I am still trying to figure out why I included it, what the connection might be between historical trauma and personal grief, my mourning for a beautiful person, my late husband, who died in the middle of writing a novel.

It hurts my body right now talking about it. One feels it in the bone.

The problem with suicide is that to talk about it is to recognize the futility of it. The futility of talking about it. The eternity of it. This mourning that just goes on forever.

For me, it's been 20 years exactly. Which may not be a coincidence. Freud says we mourn because we hate the dead. But the reason could just as easily be love.

There is one character in Insurrecto that many people might not like - the widow Virginie. A seemingly aimless, clueless person who is also just herself. I made her the most annoying character in the book, maybe. She's a mess. Also, very selfish. And stupidly rich. But her secret struggle is to keep her sense of self, amid the mess. I empathize with that, a lot. Your self is a shred, but it's still a self.

I wanted to express in her this mystery of mourning - to mourn does not mean you give up who you are, though I know how much grief runs underneath the life I lead, always. I mean, you can also love someone else, you can be happy with your friendships. And I am, and I can. But grief is always just there. Too many of us live with constant grief: I know I am not alone.

But I also wish to say here - and I am talking about my empirical self here, me, the writer - I wish also to say to those who suffer: look, I am writing novels, I brought up a child, and it's kind of miraculous to keep making this effort to have a meaningful life, of a sort, perhaps, who knows.

I do think it is because love lasts, too.

I miss my husband. Every day.

I had to make a huge effort to get back to writing because we're both writers - we met at the Hopkins writing program, which is why I came here to the United States, for grad school. And when he died, it was a horror to even imagine myself writing again because, well, he could not.

Instead, after he died, I edited his novel. Because his novel was accepted for publication two weeks after he died. I spent two years getting his novel, , into print. It's a seminal novel about virtual reality that's now out of print, of course.

That's just the way it is - I miss him.

But I did make this vow to get back to my novels somehow: to return to this pleasure. Whenever anyone asked me, at the time, how they could help me, I just said - send me a book about Philippine history. Because I had just finished a draft of my novel Gun Dealers' Daughter and had begun Raymundo Mata, when my husband died. I thought - if I cannot write, maybe I can read.

The history books kept piling up, and I never read them. They were just on my shelves, like tokens of a self that I promised to get back to. And I did, years later. And so I finished Raymundo Mata. And then that much earlier book, Gun Dealers' Daughter, got published. And now here is this novel, Insurrecto.

To be writing at all is a personal triumph, a private triumph, for me. To write out of love, though memory hurts: that is an alright place, too.

¤

Laurel Flores Fantauzzo is the author of The First Impulse (2017). She teaches in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

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In Multiplicity Is Truth: An Interview with Gina Apostol

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GINA APOSTOL IS a Philippine-American author whose novels confront, and radically reorient, the histories of both countries. Her latest novel, Insurrecto, follows a filmmaker and a Filipina translator on a kinetic road trip to the site of a Philippine uprising and an American massacre.

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Gina Apostol on her new book 'Insurrecto,' the Balangiga massacre, and American imperialism

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Gina Apostol on her new book 'Insurrecto,' the Balangiga massacre, and American imperialism

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Adelaide, South Australia (CNN Philippines Life) - Right before we get to the two competing film scripts at the heart of Gina Apostol's latest novel "Insurrecto" (Soho Press, 2018), their plucky creators spar over the implications of what Filipino translator Magsalin had done to the original, written by American filmmaker Chiara Brasi. "You are replacing the story," Chiara accuses Magsalin. "It's not a version. It's an invasion." To which the translator replies: "A mirror, perhaps?" Chiara remains unconvinced: "A double-crossing agent! An occupation!"

The repartee is packed with meaning, of course, especially when we recall that the rival scripts both attempt to reconstruct the events surrounding the Balangiga massacre in some way: Chiara's follows American photographer Cassandra Chase as she takes stereographs of the American troops stationed in Balangiga at the time of the massacre in 1901, while Magsalin's focuses on local school teacher Caz's dalliance with an Italian director on the set of a 1970s film about the massacre.

The dialogue also offers a way of navigating the intricate, funny, hyper-literate puzzles that Apostol's novels reliably weave (the book's cast of characters is immediately followed by chapter twenty -"The Insoluble Puzzle at the Heart of the Labyrinth"). Elsewhere lie more hints: "Difference produces perspective." "There is nothing outside the lens." Americans "have manufactured how to see the world."

True enough, the two scripts would soon pleasurably invade and mirror each other, entwine and tangle with other threads, foremost one on the titular insurrecto Casiana Nacionales, the real-life Geronima of Balangiga and the only woman who participated in the surprise attack on the American soldiers. Mercifully, this vertiginous profusion of stories within stories within stories, of names that recur and images that spiral (Cassandra, Caz, Casiana; the people of Balangiga looking "like medieval martyrs" in Italian museums and churches) is propelled by an absorbing road trip that Chiara and Magsalin take to Samar in present-day Philippines.

It's also the road trip that allows the novel to powerfully engage the horrors of contemporary Philippine experience in the context of such a harrowing history. And as the two women get closer to Balangiga and the events advance toward that September morning more than a century ago, the novel achieves a kind of transcendence symptomatic of the fiery, vehement indignation behind and side by side its formal audacity. How opportune then for "Insurrecto" to hit the shelves of Philippine bookstores just as Balangiga prepares to welcome the return of its historic bells, 117 years after they tolled to signal a town's righteous revolution.

The book has garnered acclaim from outlets such as Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly Top 10), BuzzFeed (Best Fiction Book of 2018), NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times.

Here, Apostol discusses why writing novels are fun, history as experienced through media, and the lessons we can take away from the harrowing events in Balangiga. Below are edited excerpts from the interview.
Readers who are familiar with your work, especially "The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata," will probably recognize the complex, funhouse-like, hyper-reflexive universe that you have built in your fiction in "Insurrecto." Can you talk about your enduring interest in the ideas that seem to animate this world?
That's true. "Raymundo Mata" and "Insurrecto" are twins. Whereas "Bibliolepsy" and "Gun Dealers' Daughter" are first person, singular narrators, there's this adamant multiplicity in the other two books. "Raymundo Mata" and "Insurrecto" even have both Magsalin and Estrella Espejo, too (wonder what happened to Dr. Diwata - where are you, Diwata! Maybe she'll appear in my next one, "The Treatment of Paz" - about Filipinos in Paris in the 1880s - love in the time of Freud -Freud and Juan Luna and his soon-to-be-murdered wife Paz are characters [!], Paz will get treated by Freud's mentor Dr. Charcot, maybe, so the Lacanian Dr. Diwata can be in that).

I see "Insurrecto" as continuing the themes of "Raymundo Mata," but the Oulipo constraint on this Raymundo-Mata-text was - walang footnotes! So I wanted the braided multiple voices but I had to encode them in the actual narrative. The (arbitrary, of course - I just decided it would be so) constraint in "Insurrecto" is actually that every scene has media or some mediated matter in it.

I'm interested in these structural issues of a novel because it seems deeply entwined maybe in my view of reality - I am hyper-conscious of our multiplicities - how we are quite fragmented, fractured selves, but that is not a burden to carry but a means for imagining others more deeply. It's healthy to recognize we are fragmented, we're unstable, desiring beings, not singular unities. I'd say the two people requiring therapy in my novels are Primi in "Bibliolepsy" and Sol in "Gun Dealer" - the single-narrators who kind of have tunnel vision. Whereas when a character is released through multiple voices, she gets to have some grip on her sanity, a kind of therapeutic power, as far as I can tell.

The value of recognizing the brutality of that war is to see ourselves more clearly in the light of it.
You've written so-called realist fiction in the past, as in the short story "Cunanan's Wake" or "A Tall Woman from Leyte." In many ways your novels are also about individuals and constructions of history but your way of engaging these ideas via fiction has radically changed. What changed?
I'm not sure if I've changed my notion of fiction. I've always loved Laurence Sterne or Barth or the Melville of "Moby-Dick" - I love "Moby-Dick." I love Franz Arcellana but I only admire NVM Gonzales, for instance. I like the unraveling novels, that seem unfinished but are actually quite replete. Of course, I also enjoy Austen very much, Henry James: actually I love them! And I love Butch Dalisay's short stories - I grew up on those.

But basically, I just really did not enjoy writing short stories. Short stories demanded a realist mode from me, true - though this realism was just my view of what the short story form was, maybe. Some of them I liked, like "Cunanan's Wake"- but I did not profoundly enjoy writing them. Whereas I very much enjoy writing novels. It's huge, huge fun. The only thing I liked about short stories was the discipline of figuring out the ending - that's been useful to me as a novelist. But workshops were better for short stories than for novels. So I'd do stories.

What I really wanted to do when I was writing those stories was to finish "Bibliolepsy." I did not finish that novel while I was at Hopkins. It was supposed to be my thesis. I ended up writing five stories - "Tall Woman" was one of my Hopkins thesis stories, I think. I don't remember. I kind of needed to be back home to work on "Bibliolepsy" - and I went back home and finished it there. I wrote about this issue of nationhood and the novel, and why I chose that as my mode when I began thinking about history, in an essay for an anthology called "Thirdest World." I think people can read about that in that essay.
In the book, we are constantly reminded that our ways of apprehending and imagining history seem to be mediated by various technologies, like photography and cinema and even the internet, which reflect but also refract and even distort our notions of history and reality and even the act of reading itself. Do you think Philippine reality and history lend themselves to these ways of experiencing or reading?
Well, the Philippines is the premier Facebook nation - Duterte won through Facebook and trolls. And one year the most selfies in the world were taken in Cebu City - or so I understand. Uy, mga taga-Cebu: very vain! As I mentioned to [writer] Laurel Fantauzzo once, just wait, before you can count one, two, three, we'll soon see a lot of Pinoy babies named Selfie.

It's a country where you can't look at someone's mustache or hairdo and say - why do you look like Rizal? - even one's hairstyle is mediated - there's uber-referentiality in the ways we relate to the world, beginning with our excellent ways with puns. It's an aspect of colonization, maybe, about being seen awry, from someone else's lens - but that's true of just humans too.

What I don't think is true is that all this is necessarily damaging or distorting. It's phenomenologically what reality is, in a way. Referentiality is not necessarily distorting. It can be quite illuminating and reflective, too - which is what art is. As Aristotle says, mimesis is a human instinct - it's an adaptation to the world. We gain empathy and knowledge through imitative acts or refracted guises, through mimesis. Or through art, through a novel. I mean, we gained a sense of nationhood through a novel, Rizal's "Noli." I still believe in it, the uses of that technology - writing.

True, the internet trolling that helped create Duterte is a vicious horror. And true, the onset of cinema - William McKinley was the first leader of the world captured on cinema, you know, by acolytes of Thomas Edison - he mainly looks like Humpty Dumpty walking jerkily, or like a jerk, Pinoy pun, toward the camera - and that globalizing interest in photography, the 3D-vision stereo cards, etc., occurred at the time the Philippines was becoming a nation. We became a nation as the world was also becoming a technologically much more mediated place.

We were ground zero of Tru-Vision World - amplifying the perils of stereopsis. Come to think of it, we were also ground zero in the internet-troll world we have now - that created first Duterte, then Trump, and now they're just proliferating: Bolsonaro, etc. I guess Mark Zuckerberg had good instincts when he chose to do his FB experiment on the Philippines (fuck him, too). So we are the emblematic Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - but really, why are we so ineluctably Borgesian - why?? And yes, America in 1899 became imperialist at the onset of a technological revolution - so I guess, yes, that does tie in with the colonizer/colonized theme: the image of the colonized is mediated by the colonizer's gaze, captured, so to speak, in that dominating lens.

One important difference between art and internet trolling (and obviously there are others!) is that with art, one is conscious of the construction. And with referential, reflexive, meta-fictive art, the construction even gives away its hand - it intentionally makes you aware. To combat being manipulated by the internet, we need to be more conscious, more educated about the ways we are being constructed, perhaps. Interestingly, reflexive texts, the types people call "meta," at least offer that kind of useful cognitive experience: of being aware of a world in which you are being constructed by someone else.

The massacre in Balangiga is an important part of Philippine, and Waray, history but its sheer brutality seems to be deliberately downplayed in official narratives. Do you remember how your interest in Balangiga as a novelistic subject began? What do you think is the value of resurrecting the spectre of the massacre in the Philippines and the U.S.?
General Jacob Smith was court-martialed, and so was Captain Edward Glenn, an infamous user of the water cure who worked first, I think, in Negros. But their punishments were slaps on the wrist. The brutality of the U.S. in the Philippine-American war is downplayed in history, period. Both in U.S. history and in our Philippine history classes. It's not just the violence in Samar. What General Franklin Bell did in Batangas was heinous, the burning of Northern Luzon by the men of Arthur MacArthur, etc. It's not just Balangiga. In fact, there were raids on other Samar garrisons before Balangiga - Balangiga was not the first in the Philippines, not even in Samar, to rise up against a garrison of U.S. Army soldiers.

True, the Katipuneros in the grip of the counterinsurgency strategies of people like Franklin Bell or Jacob Smith also responded with viciousness against their comrades - Katipuneros killing Filipino spies, and so on, plus there were the regionalism issues of the Katipuneros, and the elitism of the leaders. But the perverse inhumanity of an enemy that was racist, technologically superior, therefore callously efficient, historically experienced in bigoted cruelty - since many of these U.S. soldiers had just come from subjugating Native Americans in their Indian wars etc. And on top of that, of course, America's history of slavery, which in reality is America's "exceptionalism." Its very long slavery history is quite exceptional among modern nations - this military force willing to win at all cost since it did not quite see its enemies as people like them - a war like this can only be a horrendous episode in history.

Of course, many Americans also protested this war. It's a tragedy for America, but especially for the Filipinos - and even more so because we have not really had a chance to reflect on this war. It's so buried - the witnesses of course being long dead, and their stories untold in their lifetimes. It's a fascinatingly unstoried war.

I got interested in it when I was doing research on the U.S. military in the Philippines for "Gun Dealers' Daughter." One book I read was this very dramatic and sensationalizing book, "The Ordeal of Samar." Turns out most of its facts are wrong, plus the book is unbearably racist, as many of those texts are. But it got me to do more research. I could not use that info for "Gun Dealer." I thought I could put it in "Raymundo Mata," because he actually was imprisoned by the U.S. in Bilibid. But I never got to the Phil-Am war in "Mata."

Clearly, the history of the Phil-Am war, which I knew nothing about by the way - it's barely taught in school, even in U.P. - was this void in my understanding of both the Philippines and America. Turns out, what we call the revolution is mainly our war against Spain. Most heroes we know about are from that war: Bonifacio, del Pilar, Juan Luna, Rizal, etc. We know only vaguely of the heroes of the American war - Gregorio Aglipay, Manuel Tinio, Vicente Lukban, and my favorite, Macario Sakay - we know Sakay only because his hair was so long. Hippie hero lang siya. He had this plan to kidnap Alice Roosevelt Longworth, T.R's daughter - wow! He got executed instead. Ricarte and Mabini are the straddlers of the two wars, and of course Aguinaldo. Though now we know a lot about Antonio Luna. And the hero of Tirad Pass.

For Filipinos, the point is to remember that we were victims of that barbarity and we had to survive it. It's a country produced from the needs of surviving.

The value of recognizing the brutality of that war is to see ourselves more clearly in the light of it. The movie "Heneral Luna" for instance - the Americans occur like jokers with handlebar mustaches, on the sidelines. Hello - they were ruthless military machines going after Aguinaldo! The enemy was the Americanos - not Aguinaldo, no matter how fucked up Aguinaldo is.

We forget it was a brutal anti-imperialist war because we see it through the eyes, in some ways, of the colonizer, who naturally wishes this forgetting. Like the colonizer, we judge ourselves by the effects of colonization, instead of by the actual violence of its presence. In this way, we erase the colonizer's actions - this erasure of course being very helpful for him. We retain the imperialist's structuring imagination. So we judge ourselves by this weak, oligarchic state greased by corruption - the state produced by history, symptom of imperialism's effects.

Wondrously, this state is confounded every so often by the people's idealisms - citizens who rise up, such as the Hukbalahap, or the student activists, or the peasant resisters, or the Lumads who are still fighting their oppressors even now - and of course, the Muslims who, if we could only make them more central to our notion of the nation, might allow us to see ourselves better - a people who've been wanting autonomy and dignity for a long time. So instead of seeing that weak, oligarchic, corrupt state as linked to imperial history, the kind of state wrought from a country produced by vicious military power, "Heneral Luna" instead blames personalan among the Katipuneros. It's a shallow, really frustrating ahistorical argument.

We still like to essentialize ourselves as tribalistic or whatnot - essentializing the victim being quite an imperial mode of thought. Not to say we're not tribal in some contexts: it's just that we need to look at things not ahistorically. Of course, we do this also because we see most immediately our long line of bad governments. So I get that. But we were given a bad hand from the start, you know: the game of nation was rigged. I won't get into all the ways that American occupation fed the beast of local corruption, perverting relationships among townspeople, even among families - even as of course, Filipino agency and choices are part of this story.

It's not just that the Americans were barbaric in their cruelty - who cares really at this point how barbaric they were - that's for an American to think about - and yes, it would be useful for Americans to grapple with that history, to know it. But the point of this novel is not to hate others, or blaming. We can't go on together - with suspicious minds.

For Filipinos, the point is to remember that we were victims of that barbarity and we had to survive it. It's a country produced from the needs of surviving.

That's what this historical void has done for us - we fail to see that actually, we were heroic resisters against an implacable force, and that in fact our history of resistance rises up in forms of activism that we should honor as central to us - except most Filipinos misrecognize activists as marginal to our sense of self, outsiders - "communists," "Lumad," "Moros"-when this activism is directly related to someone like Casiana Nacionales, for me. It is what we should be.

We should be resisters. We should look to that history and think about why we did it: we had a deep sense of injustice and a vital sense of our own dignity. We should think about the ways we are perverting that history under Duterte: when we weaken our sense of justice because we allow an imperial, fascist mindset to take over us, the perverse, authoritarian, Kano-like mind of Duterte - and his Congress - in the sense that he is as brutally fascist and inhumane as an antiquated imperialist. He says he's anti-Kano, but in this iteration of history, he's the Kano. He's the brutalizer of his people.
The book is about a dark, violent episode in Philippine history and issues fair warning about the "morbid multiplication" and "repetitive spirals" of our history (Randles the Sergeant turns into Duterte supporter Sergeant Randols), and yet it pulsates with karaoke and Elvis and laugh-out-loud humor about Pricks and mistranslations and such. How does that work out, you think?
Is that not a question for the reader - how does that work out, for you? We are made up of many selves - for Filipinos that's most obvious in our many tongues - and I think the humorous self, the good humor with which Filipinos have risen to be a vital and, in my view, fascinating nation, I could write about the Philippines forever, a nation that is excruciatingly postmodern, even post-post-modern, just really makes me want to write. It's a fun thing to do - to come from that complex, insane, frustrating, but very warm and generous and also crazily word-happy, word-triggered world, a very oral world, hence the music that ends this novel, orality being a symptom of our very relational, personal sense of others - and try to give voice to it. I just have immense love for the way the country is so insanely absurd in many ways: so beautifully human as it is.

In a sense, I write out of love - in spite even of its current horror, our complicity with violence. I claim my love for the Philippines. Notice that I made Magsalin's uncles Duterte supporters - they love her but they voted for Duterte. That's our reality. I recognize how complex our family ties are. I'm hoping that writing and reflecting on our history might change something, who knows. We're a country of survivors - a Gloria Gaynor disco country - I Will Survive! - but a country of resisters, too. So this humor, I think, is just my recognition of that complexity - the many ways we claim our agency, despite trauma. But the novel's message to Filipinos is unambiguous - resist. Do not allow our fellow Filipinos to die unmourned, with justice not done. Sulong, insurrecto - that's a call for Filipinos then and now.

***
"Insurrecto" is available at National Book Store and Fully Booked

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Gina Apostol on her new book 'Insurrecto,' the Balangiga massacre, and American imperialism

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Adelaide, South Australia (CNN Philippines Life) - Right before we get to the two competing film scripts at the heart of Gina Apostol's latest novel "Insurrecto" (Soho Press, 2018), their plucky creators spar over the implications of what Filipino translator Magsalin had done to the original, written by American filmmaker Chiara Brasi.

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CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Gina Apostol in conversation with Malaka Gharib

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CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Gina Apostol in conversation with Malaka Gharib

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CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Gina Apostol in conversation with Malaka Gharib

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At Home with Literati: Gina Apostol & Elaine Castillo

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At Home with Literati: Gina Apostol & Elaine Castillo

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At Home with Literati: Gina Apostol & Elaine Castillo

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Authors in Conversation: Gina Apostol and Grace Talusan

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Authors in Conversation: Gina Apostol and Grace Talusan

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Lorina Mapa Interview with Gina Apostol (“Insurrecto”) at the Toronto Public Library

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Lorina Mapa Interview with Gina Apostol (“Insurrecto”) at the Toronto Public Library

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The April 15 interview with Gina Apostol, author of "Insurrecto", went well. Our venue was the Toronto Public Library and I was kindly invited by the library, flown in and put up for the night at the Manulife center.

Pablo Picasso said "Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth". "Insurrecto" is a brilliant piece of metaphysical fiction that reminded me of how I felt when I read "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Borges and "Slaughterhouse 5" by Vonnegut. In other words, I felt stimulated, bewildered, disturbed, elated and alive, all at the same time. It is a book about powerful ideas which at first seem new, but upon further introspection, are actually deep in our psyche if we only have the curiosity to allow them to come out.

Gina Apostol was gracious, thoughtful, generous and funny - just like her book. She is a Filipino-American writer now living in New York and has previously won the Philippine National Book award twice. "Insurrecto" is about event that take place in Samar in 1901 during the Philippine-American War as well as Manila in the present. It is a worthy read and I'm so glad I read the book and met its creator.
http://www.ginaapostol.com

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Interview with Gina Apostol ("Insurrecto") at the Toronto Public Library

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The April 15 interview with Gina Apostol, author of "Insurrecto", went well. Our venue was the Toronto Public Library and I was kindly invited by the library, flown in and put up for the night at the Manulife center. Pablo Picasso said "Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth".

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An American And Her Filipina Translator Exhume A Massacre In 'Insurrecto'

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An American And Her Filipina Translator Exhume A Massacre In 'Insurrecto'

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Gina Apostol's new novel, Insurrecto, is about two women on a trip to make a film in the Philippines. Except they wind up seeing different films in the same characters.

Chiara Brasi is an American who wants to make a movie about an event during the Philippine-American War. She hires an interpreter named Magsalin, who takes her to the island of Samar - and specifically to the town of Balangiga, where Philippine rebels were massacred in a retaliation for an attack on U.S. forces in 1901. Magsalin reads Chiara's script and writes a different story.

Apostol uses an array of literary and cinematic techniques - memoirs, jump-cuts, close-ups and reveries - to set a story in the present-day Philippines of Rodrigo Duterte.

"I'm very interested in that concept of multiple ways of looking at things," she says in an interview. "You know, this notion that in all of us there are multiple identities, you know, and we don't recognize the simultaneity of them. I'm a mom, I'm a daughter, I'm a teacher, I'm a writer, I'm a Filipino, I'm a American. And I really like this kind of seeing things from various points of view."

Gina Apostol won the PEN Open Book Award for her last novel, Gun Dealer's Daughter, and has won the Philippine National Book Award. Her newest book shows us that although victors often write the histories, survivors and artists can revise them.

Interview Highlights
On the dueling perspectives
Well, what I wanted was a kind of confusion of their ways of looking at these matters, because as a story - I mean, the story of the Philippine-American War, you know, you have that seeming binary, the colonizer and the colonized. But for instance, myself, as a Filipino, I recognize the colonizer in me, you know. I speak English - I mean, I grew up learning in English. And I thought it was very important also for the colonizer to also have that recognition of the voice of the colonized in it.

I think it's important, for instance, for an American to recognize its multiple histories. You know, this history of wanting to be the liberator in the Spanish-American War period, but also recognizing the inhumanity that came from that war. So there's this tension of the two.
On Casiana Nacionales, the real-life insurrecto of the book's title On the humor in the book
History barely knows. And even say when I went to Samar to ask about her, there was very little known about her. But I think the figure of Casiana Nacionales - I think she resolves that dilemma of multiple seeing. Because just because we need to see in multiple ways does not mean we don't take a side. That there's - that this confusion of empathy with ethics sometimes is problematic, because yes, as a writer I empathize with my character, the U.S. soldier, Army soldier; I empathize with the white woman photographer. But I also recognize that for my novel, Casiana Nacionales is the heart of the story - that we need to, in some ways, side with her revolutionary rage.
On the presence of Elvis in the book
Because I think atrocity happens, this war happened, because of the inability of, let's say, the invaders, the U.S. Army soldier, the white woman photographer - all of whom I empathize with - could not imagine the agency and aspirations of Casiana Nacionales. So the way she's put into that story, which is spiraled through layers and layers of narration, I think is/was, for me, a way to resolve my own dilemma about empathy and ethics.

You know, I'm really so grateful that you bring that up because I think it's not very clear, you know, to people that when you're writing a political novel, that - really, I mean, this novel has very clear political stakes - that you can't be playful with it too, you know? That you're put in this little box of being a political novelist, but the fact is: There's so much you can do as a writer with story. And I'm so glad you mentioned the humor. I'm glad that came through.
On how being a schoolteacher affects her writing
The thing about Elvis is that I - you know, I didn't like him because he was my mom's favorite. But it was only a few years ago that I realized that all these songs that my uncles, when I was a kid, would sing - this is in the '70s - would sing for, like, long long long guitar-strumming fests, were actually all Elvis songs. So I actually thought Elvis was Filipino for a long time. ...

So I really started thinking about: What does that mean that I think Elvis is in me also? You know, what does that mean about this history of colonization? What does that mean about all of us that we're not just one thing? We're so many different things! I have Frank Sinatra; I have Elvis; I have Virginia Woolf; I have Dante; I have also Balangiga; I have, you know, Iluminado Lucente, the Waray [language] writers; I have José Rizal. We're all so many things, and it was that Elvis recognition - I go, "OK." So I put him in.
Sarah Handel and Barrie Hardymon produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
It does fit in very - I mean, I just taught Frederick Douglass' "What to [the] Slave Is the Fourth of July?" I just taught the Constitution to my little 15-year-olds. And I teach the Filipino-American War to my students, because the way I talk about it with my students: You hold these tensions in your country, and it is good for you. It is good for you to recognize the liberatory aspects of the "saving principles," as Frederick Douglass called them, and it is good for you to recognize that there was inhumanity in our original Constitution - that there was a three-fifths clause, that there was a normalizing of genocide against Native Americans. And to hold those together, and to confront that daily - it's really very difficult - but to hold those tensions together is a way to be a healthy American. And I think that's why a book like Insurrecto would be useful, is because you can see all these different sides. And so it's a Filipino book, it's an American book, and to recognize that these are all part of this nation.

And for the students to be able to hold these tensions and from there, think about: OK, what is the ethical move? You what is the ethical move you make when you recognize a more full sense of your country? It's not this exceptional singularity. It's an interesting plural. So I teach these things to my students, and I think that we should use these liberatory aspects of the founding documents to counteract the inhumanity that is also part of this history. So I think as a teacher, it's just - given the difficulty of our times, it's also kind of liberating for me to do the work that I do as a novelist that's not at all separate from the ethical reader that I want, and the ethical citizen that I want in my classroom.

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An American And Her Filipina Translator Exhume A Massacre In 'Insurrecto'

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Gina Apostol's new novel, Insurrecto, is about two women on a trip to make a film in the Philippines. Except they wind up seeing different films in the same characters. Chiara Brasi is an American who wants to make a movie about an event during the Philippine-American War.

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "In the Country" Mia Alvar

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "In the Country" Mia Alvar

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Read 520 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary...

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "A Tiny Upward Shove" Melissa Chadburn

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "A Tiny Upward Shove" Melissa Chadburn

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Marina Salles's life does not end the day she wakes up dead.

Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother's old Filipino stories―an aswang. She spent her life on the margins, knowing very little about her own life, let alone the lives of others; she was shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known―even her killer―as she is able to access their memories and to see anew the meaning of her own. In the course of these pages she traces back through her life, finally able to see what led these lost souls to this crushingly inevitable conclusion.

In A Tiny Upward Shove, the debut novelist Melissa Chadburn charts the heartbreaking journeys of two of society's cast-offs as they find their way to each other and their roles as criminal and victim. What does it mean to be on the brink? When are those moments that change not only our lives but our very selves? And how, in this impossible world, can we rouse ourselves toward mercy?

" A Tiny Upward Shove is gloriously voiced, the kind of addictive and headlong novel that makes reading into a wild bronco ride. Melissa Chadburn has it, the spark; her first novel is strange and tender and not to be missed."
―Lauren Groff, author of Matrix

"In A Tiny Upward Shove, Melissa Chadburn leans into the center of a bad dream. Go with her. Keep going."
―Sia, singer/songwriter

"Melissa Chadburn's writing is more than unflinching―it's steely and brave. Chadburn fearlessly takes her reader down, down into the dark heart and harsh landscapes of sexual violence and drug abuse but she renders these worlds with a painter's eye and a skylark's ascendant song. Her thrilling work brings to mind the lyrical daring of The Lovely Bones and White Oleander. There is much to admire in Chadburn's writing―every line carries music, emotional weight, philosophical insight, and punk rock glory."
―Amber Dermont, author of Damage Control

"In its verve, vibrancy, and sheer reckless energy, Melissa Chadburn's writing recalls a number of wonders from the last several decades: Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, say, or Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River. Chadburn's vision, however, her intelligence and empathy, are entirely her own. A Tiny Upward Shove is a marvel."
―Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

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Marina Salles's life does not end the day she wakes up dead. Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother's old Filipino stories―an aswang.

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "A Carnivore's Inquiry" Sabina Murray

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "A Carnivore's Inquiry" Sabina Murray

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This is a novel of ideas and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose "with echoes of both Poe and Patrick McGrath" (Book Forum), A Carnivore's Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.

"A cracklingly original, brilliantly conceived modern Gothic...Builds like a tropical storm."-Elle

"Elegantly written...every sentence crackles, and the dialogue defines punchy. Murray is a big talent."-Entertainment Weekly

"Stylish, chilling, highly literate psychological thriller."-The Bookseller (UK)

"Mesmerizing...Murray paces her psychological thriller with consummate control, keeping the reader enthralled through subtle suggestion and a scattering of grisly details. But the author has a darker purpose. More than the story of one deranged woman's obsession, the novel and its brilliant subtext hint at the ways American society devours the weak, while building a case for a blood hunger in human nature...Readers will be hooked by Murray's classy treatment of her sexy-sinister subject matter."-Publishers Weekly

"Dark, clever and funny all at once. Brilliant stuff."-Helen Walsh, author of Brass

"Murray not only creates a magnetic, amoral and utterly memorable heroine, she invents a whole new genre: ironic Gothic."-The Washington Post

"Put on your literary seat belts and enjoy the ride."-Jonathan Ames

"Murray is a mesmerizing writer who uses succinct, evocative language with the precision of a pointilist."-Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald

"Though A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY has any number of scary (not to mention stomach-churning) moments, the novel's real appeal lies in Katherine's erudite, mordant humor...Beneath both the humor and horror lies a scathing indictment of American values. Katherine, with her ceaseless hunger, serves as a gorgeous, freaky metaphor for that cliched American dream of having it all."-Joanna Smith Rakoff, Time Out New York

"Compelling, maddening, hilarious...remarkable."-Ron Bernas, Detroit Free Press

"Why is this book, full of murder, loneliness, and insanity, so darn funny? That's the genius of this oddly wonderful and engrossing second novel by Murray...The plot itself is tight and fast, quirky and dangerous."-Anne Rochelle Konigsmark, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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This is a novel of ideas and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose "with echoes of both Poe and Patrick McGrath" (Book Forum), A Carnivore's Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Rolling the R's" R. Zamora Linmark

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Rolling the R's" R. Zamora Linmark

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Read 65 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Fiction. LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In this daring first novel, tour-de-force ex...

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Zero Gravity" Eric Gamalinda

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Zero Gravity" Eric Gamalinda

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Excerpts from a journal entry written 23 January 2007:

...I love this fact, this nearing towards the end. I am grateful, most of all, that there is an end.

***

I realized that I love to look at people reading...I guess I caught the habit. When I'm at cafes, or odd restaurants, bookstores, trains - I noticed that I can't help but look. It's not only the eyes that I notice, but their expressions while they read. They're so naked, their faces.

***

I can't believe I'm looking for my life, swept around somewhere, in the corner of my room, maybe hanging like my bra on the bedpost, maybe in the bottom of my waste basket, maybe tucked between Roubaud and the Travel Guide to Switzerland. And there is a poem somewhere that I can't write:

When the Heart Flies from Its Place
Eric Gamalinda

The names are the first to go,
then the dates of births and deaths.
It's as if everything moves on another,
esoteric level, here among the gravestones
where the elements collude so we don't realize
how we succumb to forgetting. The milkweed unfolds
its damascened leaves and monarch caterpillars
devour them scrupulously, and out of this simple act
something marvelous is already happening,
the promise of a massive and silent migration.
Order is natural progression: a century from now
the sugar maples planted by the pioneers
will still be growing, too ancient to remember
everyone who's seen them here. This once
was a church, where now two benches meet
in mute conviviality, and this a pound for stray sheep;
one village will be mowed over by another,
one more road will cut through the forest here.
A tractor roars to say the conquest is complete:
we tame the land until it accepts
our habits, our fear of need. When I hear these sounds,
says Stansik, age five, my heart flies from its place.
Just eight months in the country, he is learning
the landscape of language where there is no
fixed geography, and everything
still evokes another memory: cowdung is
smell of village, a pond is primal, rippling
with translucent newts. The stones
say little of these former lives, just that
they once were valiantly loved;
you can almost hear them calling the roll:
Thompson, Merritt, Thayer, each a perfect
solitude, a stilled comet. Stansik again:
Why are there no blacks in Massachusetts?
And: You are not black but gray. Pretty soon he'll forget
his Russian, the language he is slowly
inventing, the man from whom his mother
had to run away. I wonder if he will remember
this summer, and how the heart feels
when it flies for no reason other than
-what was it? I didn't know, I had never learned
the word for it, and to this day I walk
the unspeakable territories.

I think I need more Brubeck now, and less of Nina Simone.
My heart's too full.

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Excerpts from a journal entry written 23 January 2007: ...I love this fact, this nearing towards the end. I am grateful, most of all, that there is an end. *** I realized that I love to look at people reading...I guess I caught the habit.

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Amigo Warfare" Eric Gamalinda

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Amigo Warfare" Eric Gamalinda

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All told, not absence but memory
takes what it can,
and we pay our debts
by remembering completely.
*
I asked someone
for directions to the end of the world and he said,
Keep going till you can't.
*
If I could sum up
all that I've learned, here it is: Everything
eats everything. There is no escape. Galaxies graze
in endless space and outside of that who knows?
At some junction dappled with the residue
of stars, maybe you'll find yourself as you were
a gigabyte ago. A quasar of desire. Your heart
as mortal as a bird. And when you speak
your voice forms a nest of trebuchets around you.
*
I will endure this stillness,
the smoldering hours that continue
to erase me, as though by my birth
I have broken a pact, that I remain
invisible and small.
So I carry everything with me,
though it's almost over, though I'm tired
of being strong. I leave nothing
for grief to feed on.
[...] Not even love, whose October grows ever more faint
in yours.
*
What's tragic is not that
this journey ends, but that we once walked
through such possibilities.

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All told, not absence but memorytakes what it can,and we pay our debtsby remembering completely.*I asked someonefor directions to the end of the world and he said,Keep going till you can't.*If I could sum upall that I've learned, here it is: Everythingeats everything. There is no escape.

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Planet Waves" Eric Gamalinda

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Planet Waves" Eric Gamalinda

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Read reviews from the world's largest community for readers. undefined

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Also a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: Books by Lysley Tenorio

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: Books by Lysley Tenorio

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Website of writer Lysley Tenorio, author of THE SON OF GOOD FORTUNE and MONSTRESS

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Also a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: Books by Jessica Hagedorn 

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: Books by Jessica Hagedorn 

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JESSICA HAGEDORN | Author of Toxicology, Dogeaters and Other Works

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DOGEATERS

Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines' late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive. A wildly disparate group of characters - from movie stars to waiters, from a young junkie to the richest man in the Philippines - become caught up in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. In the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.

" Dogeaters is a fine achievement on a very serious scale...This is the definitive novel of the encounter between the Philippines and America and their history of mutual illusion, antagonism, and ambiguous affection. It is a rich and satisfying work and certainly among the best novels I have read this year."

- Robert Stone

"A fast, frequently hair-raising first novel, full of images and fantasies reflecting the author's Philippine background, that maps the ruin at the heart of Philippine society in the last four decades."

- The New York Times Book Review

"Tour-de-force debut novel...A kaleidoscopic view of Manila society - high and low -

in which sad and sordid realities are tempered by humor and immense vitality...A spicy stew of a novel."

- Kirkus Reviews

"Hagedorn transcends social strata, gender, culture, and politics in this exuberant, witty, and telling portrait of Philippine society."

- The San Diego Union

DOGEATERS: THE PLAY

Hagedorn has transformed her best-selling novel about the Philippines during the Marcos reign into an equally powerful theatrical piece that is a multi-layered, operatic tour de force.

"It's always a treat when sitting in the theatre feels like travel, when the world onstage reaches out to include you, and suddenly you're transported to another time and place. In Dogeaters, the journey is as titillating as a great vacation that leads you willingly into danger..."

- Bruce Weber, The New York Times

"Fierce, funny and politically uncompromising, Dogeaters is a rarity: a dangerous play which actually achieves its great ambitions...What kind of price does the average person pay while living under a dictatorship? What does naked power look like? How does humor and justice and extravagance and human love survive when the greatest terrorist in your own country is your own government? Dogeaters is a play of important answers and, more importantly, of the right unanswered questions."

- Jose Rivera

"A stunning play of epic proportions...packed with wit, nostalgia, satire, irony, politics, poetry and the humanity of the turbulent and triumphant history of the Philippines..."

- Chay Yew

Toxicology

Jessica Hagedorn's ferociously entertaining new novel, which opens with the tragic death of Romeo Byron, one of Hollywood's hottest young actors, centers on two women who are neighbors in Manhattan's West Village. Mimi Smith, a filmmaker whose only screen credit is a low-budget slasher movie, finds herself in desperate need of resuscitation for both her career and downwardly-spiraling life. Her neighbor, Eleanor Delacroix, is a legendary, scandalous literary figure, now nearing eighty and addicted to cocaine and gin. Their personal and artistic lives begin to converge in unexpected ways as Eleanor grieves over the recent death of her long-time lover, the renowned painter Yvonne Wilder, and as Mimi confronts the challenges presented by the mysterious disappearance of her drug-dealing boyfriend, Bobby; by her newly sober if still somewhat loopy brother, Carmelo; and by her wayward fourteen-year-old daughter, Violet.

Looming over this vast canvas of unforgettable characters is the ghost of Agnes - an "illegal" and cousin of Mimi's who might have been murdered by her New Jersey employers. Toxicology is, often all at the same time, a dark, fearless, playful, savagely funny and ultimately heartbreaking witch's brew of a novel exploring the connection between creativity and self-destruction.

"Hagedorn (Dogeaters) offers a razor-sharp, refreshingly unsentimental portrayal of New York artists-selfish, irresponsible, and brilliant-and the evolution of feminism."
-Publisher's Weekly, Nov 22, 2010
"Hagedorn's brilliant writerly eye sees far beneath surfaces; her voice transmutes what she sees into language so clear and frank and unafraid, it shocks the reader awake. The novel's protagonists are a pair of fascinating, glamorous, formidable women, and their intertwining lives, addictions, and passions make for hypnotic reading. Toxicology is a book for grownups and a thing of beauty."

-Kate Christensen

"In Toxicology, Jessica Hagedorn has assembled a lyrical and haunting chorus of voices crooning from a corner of New York City that most people don't know exists anymore. Real artists, whose work consumes, even as it enlivens them. A welcome respite from the overpaid/under-talented purveyors of what passes for art in contemporary pop culture, Hagedorn's fully-realized, lush characters might be self-destructing in pursuit of their art and loves (and their love of art), but that doesn't mean they're necessarily going anywhere-and once you open this book, neither will you."

-T Cooper

A movie star's overdose provokes three generations of creative women to formally explode. Hagedorn lets the emotional consequences of loss and waste freely expand the parameters of her novel in order to accurately express the wounded heart at play with love, loyalty and making art. When hope is located in the past, and the future not imaginable, her story's telling relies on freedom, risk and innovation. Funny, sad and without phony resolution, Toxicology just tells like it is."

-Sarah Schulman

"As the brilliant chronicler of the Filipino-American experience, Jessica Hagedorn has tackled in the past large themes such as the tragic consequences of colonialism, and the destructive structures of corruption it legates to the colonized. With Toxicology, her best, and most daring, novel so far, she has broken new ground by writing with naked brutality, but also with piercing humor and great wisdom, about what it means to be a New Yorker at the beginning of the 21st century. Toxicology is an indelible portrait of how we live today."

-Jaime Manrique

The Gangster of Love

Rocky Rivera arrives in the U.S. from the Philippines the year that Jimi Hendrix dies. So begins a blazing coming-of-age story suffused with the tension of immigration that finds Rocky moving from the counterculture of 1960s San Francisco to the extravagant 1980s Manhattan music scene.

"Jessica Hagedorn is one of the best of a generation of writers who are making the American language new and who in the process are creating a New American Literature. The Gangster of Love, with edgy humor, verve, and a first-class literary gangster's nerve, brilliantly chronicles that process."

- Russell Banks

"The Gangster of Love is elegant and smart, deftly capturing the pain of leaving a country behind and the struggle to adapt to a new one."

- Time

"Playful, inventive...Asks serious questions about family, exile, identity, about the problems of learning to operate in another language."

- The New York Times Book Review

Dream Jungle

In a Philippines of desperate beauty and rank corruption, two seemingly unrelated events occur: the discovery of an ancient lost tribe living in a remote mountainous area and the arrival of a celebrity-studded, American film crew, there to make an epic Vietnam War movie. But the lost tribe may be a clever hoax and the Hollywood movie seems doomed as the cast and crew continue to self-destruct in a cloud of drugs and egos. As the consequences of these events play out, four unforgettable characters - a wealthy, iconoclastic playboy; a woman ensnared in the sex industry; a Filipino American writer; and a jaded actor - find themselves irrevocably drawn together in this lavish, sensual portrait of a nation in crisis.

"As beautiful as summer, as unforgettable as heartbreak...Another luminous performance by a writer who soars from strength to strength."

- Junot Diaz

"A richly intriguing study of the politics of flamboyant ambition and the politics of corruption."

- The Seattle Times

"Boldly links a Manila millionaire's 'discovery' of a Stone Age tribe on Mindanao with a filmed re-creation of the Vietnam War on that same guerilla-plagued island six years later...Masterly...The result is her best book since Dogeaters."

- The New York Times Book Review

Danger and Beauty A Filipino artist comes of age in America in a dazzling collection of stories, poems, and autobiographical pieces, which includes the satirical novella,
Pet Food. Hagedorn deepens and broadens her vision of the Asian American wanderer, about which Ntozake Shange wrote: "Her language leaps from fiery memories of Hendrix, soft reveries of Billie Holiday, and her own visceral attachments to Tagalog and Spanish in a Filipino way."

Manila Noir
One of the most populous cities in the world, Manila provides the ideal, torrid setting for noir. It's where the rich rub shoulders with the poor, where five-star hotels coexist with informal settlements, where religious zeal coexists with superstition, where "hospitality" might be another word for prostitution, where politics is often synonymous with celebrity and corruption, where violence is nothing out of the ordinary and pretty much anything can be had for a price. Original stories by Lourd De Veyra, Gina Apostol, Budjette Tan & Kajo Baldisimo, F.H. Batacan, Jose Dalisay Jr., Eric Gamalinda, Jessica Hagedorn, Angelo Lacuesta, R. Zamora Linmark, Rosario Cruz-Lucero, Sabina Murray, Jonas Vitman, Marianne Villanueva, and Lysley Tenorio.

Burning Heart:
A Portrait Of The Philippines

Marissa Roth's unflinching photographs cover the importance of religion in the Philippines, as well as the social inequality, dire poverty, overpopulation, and ingrained class system that are all part of daily life. The poetry of Jessica Hagedorn reinforces these realities, but also shows that the simple pleasures we all experience as human beings - dancing, eating, rejoicing, laughing - are not absent from Philippine life. Together, these images and poetry are a deeply affecting vision of a country and its people.

Charlie Chan Is Dead:
An Anthology Of Contemporary Asian American Fiction

From Jose Garcia Villa's minimalist "Untitled Story," first published in 1933, to Meena Alexander's "Manhattan Music," with its razor-sharp look at the hip downtown New York art scene of the troubled 1990s, the selections in this ground-breaking anthology sweep across the twentieth century and across the range of Asian American experience.

Charlie Chan Is Dead 2:
At Home in the World

This updated anthology brings together forty-two fresh, fascinating voices in Asian American writing - from classics by Carlos Bulosan and Wakako Yamauchi to exciting new fiction from Akhil Sharma, Ruth Ozeki, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monique Truong. Sweeping in background and literary style, from pioneering writers to newly emerging voices from the Hmong and Korean communities, these exceptional works celebrate the full spectrum of Asian American experience and identities, transcending stereotypes and revealing the strength and vitality of Asian America today.

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burning heart: a portrait of the philippines

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charlie chan is dead: an anthology of contemporary asian american fiction

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charlie chan is dead 2: at home in the world

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DOGEATERS Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines' late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Noli Me Tangere" & "El Filibusterismo" José Rizal

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Book Recommendation from Gina Apostol: "Noli Me Tangere" & "El Filibusterismo" José Rizal

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Read 2 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. undefined

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Gina Apostol mentions other Filipinos (and historical events) from Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines

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Gina Apostol mentions other Filipinos (and historical events) from Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines