INSURRECTO by GINA APOSTOL (1)

  MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Engages

Insurrecto by Gina Apostol 

(Soho Press, 2018)

BOOK LINK

 

Tentative Notes for a Book Review on the Structure of Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto.

 

1.

 

When I think of non-linear narratives in Filipino-American fiction, I always go back to Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, especially, Dogeaters (1993).  In that novel, each chapter offers a world of its own, a tone, a distinct memory of ghosts, loss, and dilapidations, that when stitched together like a collage, in the reader’s imagination, reveals a distinct impression, an ecology of dimensions cohering into a recognizable and familiar dream-state.  In Hagedorn’s case, of course, that impression is the Philippines as an archipelago of desire, a dream-jungle of religions and melodramas, among other things.  The spirit of Hagedorn’s narrative form is quite alive in Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto (2018), though Apostol may have accelerated that form to another dimension of frenzy, full of jump cuts, close-ups, and other cinematic techniques, made explicit by the way her novel arranges and numbers its chapters. 

 

Here, Apostol starts with the twentieth chapter, on the third page, then bounces back to the second chapter on the fifth page.  The first-chapter sits deep in the belly of the novel, and is now part of Part Two, sandwiched between the twenty-second and the twenty-eighth chapter, one-hundred-seven pages later.  On the other hand, Part Two is titled “Duel Scripts,” where there are nine first-chapters, or ‘dueling’ first-chapters, first-chapters trying to be the first-chapter in the mind of the novel; these chapters contain information for a movie-script.  To curious readers, arranging the chapters this way doesn’t necessarily invite confusion, but more like a challenge to connect the dots in the imagination, made more challenging by the sheer number of characters involved in the story, which is listed in a “Cast of Characters” section, after the epigraph.

 

2.

 

So why bother arranging the chapters this way?  First, let’s look closely at the novel’s two leading ladies who make the story happen: Magsalin and Chiara Brasi.  Based in the U.S., Magsalin divides her time between New York City and Manila.  She is a novelist; her genre is mystery.  And she has been fishing for a subject for her next novel while on vacation with relatives in Manila, when she meets Chiara Brasi, a filmmaker, who is scouting locations for a movie in the Philippines, and needs a translator.  This is not Chiara’s first visit in the islands.  In fact, she has lived in Manila before, in 1976, when she was only five, and her father, Ludo Brasi, was making a war film about Vietnam called The Unintended, which Magsalin has seen a few times in her teens.  Critics praised Ludo Brasi’s film as a viable contender to the creative genius of Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now, though less commercial.  Then Ludo Brasi disappeared, after his film premiered, perhaps a victim of “the existential weariness in his film,” according to one critic.

 

Ludo is now dead.  But when Chiara was going through information about her father’s work, she read a paper written by a Filipino scholar linking The Unintended to a gruesome event that happened in 1901, when American soldiers massacred close to thirty thousand Filipinos in Balangiga, in the island of Samar, and only a few Americans were tried.  Chiara tells Magsalin that her visit to Samar “is necessary for her spiritual journey.”  And more so, Chiara “had a conversion into the world of the Filipino insurrectos in 1901,” as though “[Chiara] had entered a portal and becomes the body of a Filipino farmer disguised as a devout Catholic woman carrying a machete inside his voluminous peasant skirt and hoping to kill a G.I.”  On the other hand, Magsalin dismisses the confession as mere hallucination, that the filmmaker is suffering “an unearned case of white guilt.”  But in many ways, Chiara’s ‘conversion’ only deepens the mystery of Chiara’s oedipal intentions in Balangiga, and thus heightens Magsalin’s interest in Chiara as the new protagonist of her next novel.

 

3.

 

Now I’d like to think that the novel uses the imagination and temper of Chiara’s conversion, though unconsciously, as a kind of template on how Apostol structures her novel.  Indeed, the conversion contains a host of elements, or rather competing signs and significations that offer clues into the sensibilities of that conversion, its tendencies, and, too, its proclivity for chaos, revisionism, and, certainly, revolution and change.  Here, an American filmmaker’s imagination in the age of information enters the imagination of Filipino resistance in the early part of the twentieth century, when the United States was still a young empire, obsessed in claiming the teleologies of manifest destiny.  Here, the camera meets the machete.  Or perhaps the camera as story-teller in the digital age enters the spirit of the machete attuned for insurrections.  In a sense, the conversion hints at the idea of storytelling in cinema struggling to abide with new forms of presenting what we see on the screen, when it comes to history and the ethics of representation.  In Chiara’s case, she feels stuck in someone else’s movie, where the director is “still laying out his scraps of the script, trying to figure out his ending,” and tells Magsalin what she plans to achieve in Samar, in the end:

 

I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else’s construction, and yet as she watches, she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists.  It seems as if The Unintended were constructed out of the story of Samar, but reverse is also true.  The Unintended also produces, for us, the horror of Balangiga.  We enter others’ lives through two mediums, words and time, both faulty.  And still, one story told may unbry another, and the dead, who knows, may be resurrected.  At least, this is the hope.  Recurrence is only an issue of not knowing how the film should end.

 

There is a hint of responsibility on Chiara’s future film project set in Samar.  Maybe she wants to redeem what her father had stolen or appropriated from Balangiga for a film set in another country, and thus “unbury” the massacre in Balangiga itself, resurrect it from history as mere footnote, and give it a life on-screen.  In a sense, Chiara’s project hopes to not so much challenge her father’s film set in Vietnam, but perhaps offset and blur its vision, to recalibrate the ‘wrongful use’ of a massacre in the Philippines for the sake of an artistic vision.  A moral imperative, indeed, though I’m not convinced Chiara’s project is about white guilt, but rather a family project of sorts to submerge the temper of her unconscious on the idea of Balangiga in her father’s conception of Balangiga, where the hurdles of creating her project in the islands are most likely minimal, such as translation issues in moving around Samar, in the Philippines of President Rodrigo Duterte.

 

*****

Michael Caylo-Baradi is an alumnus of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center (CUNY). His work has appeared in Hobart, Kenyon Review Online, Across The Margin, The Common (Online), Eunoia Review, The Galway Review, Galatea Resurrects, MiGoZine, Our Own Voice, Otoliths, PopMatters, New Pages, Ink Sweat & Tears, and elsewhere. He blogs HERE.

INSURRECTO by GINA APOSTOL (2)

 JOANNA ANABO Reviews

Insurrecto by Gina Apostol 

(Soho Press, 2018)

BOOK LINK

If history is written by the victor and said victor is usually a straight, white male from an imperialist Western country, such as the United States, then Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto is a bold response and reclamation of those buried histories of the Philippines purposefully forgotten by the West. In other words, the novel is an exemplification of what happens if the imperialized Filipina/x/o subjects can, in fact, speak for themselves. With this stated, the novel propels the widely overlooked conflict of the Balangiga Massacre out of the margins into the light of day, examining its lasting complications for the Philippines, beyond the context of the Philippine-American War. As such, the novel occupies a space that is part fiction, historical narrative, and contains moments that appear to break the fourth wall when it comes to commenting on the practice of writing and documentation.

Spanning decades and detailed through multiple protagonists, the dissecting of Philippine and American relations, an imbalanced and complex dynamic of resisting colonized Filipinos versus the brutal and barbaric American colonizer, is exposed. Via Magsalin and Chiara’s strained relationship as Filipina translator and American movie director, the act of uncovering the events of Balangiga becomes a toiling feat of revivification and self discovery for both women. Through layers and layers of references, jumping from Chiara’s script to Magsalin’s plot for a mystery novel, and juxtaposing point of views from both women and other characters, the horrors experienced during the 1901 conflict are laid bare. Yet despite how laden with information and pop culture references that emphasize the globalization of American ideology and its permanent effects in the Philippines (and other colonized nations), Apostol refrains from providing concrete verdicts on whether this century long entanglement is a positive or negative thing. Instead, she allows those jarring and vivid details to speak for themselves, leaving the audience to come to their own conclusions about the matter. Though it is worth noting that the Library of Congress images of the Balangiga Massacre that are described at great length lines the inner cover of the book, which is gut wrenching to examine for too long. (Trust me!)

Frankly, Apostol’s novel leaves the audience little room to breathe as its multitude of threads spill out across each chapter, constructing a web so multifaceted and detailed, it’s easy to dive in and become disorientated. However, if one considers how frequently the past and ongoing conflicts are an inseparable cause-and-effect relationship, the relentless jumping through time to note various aspects of Philippine-American history makes sense. Furthermore, the act of revealing this moment in history and its continuous reverberations is a strenuous feat that’s only accomplishable by Apostol’s overwhelming achievement that is this timeless novel. Though all of the answers concerning the overall plot and its parallel subplots aren’t provided by the conclusion of this text, it is up to you, the reader, to read between the lines and be the interpreter. So, be prepared to explore or reconnect with the horrors lurking in these pages, waiting to be held in your gaze and consciousness!

*****

Joanna Anabo is an educator by day and an MFA Candidate in Poetry by night who still believes her poetry is just okay. Born in the Bay Area, she is a first generation Filipina-mestiza whose work celebrates her heritage and functions as catharsis for her lifelong identity crisis as a mixed individual. She has read at a quite a few places and plans to actually use Submittable in 2021.

OF COLOR: POETS' WAYS OF MAKING edited by AMANDA GALAN HUYNH and LUISA A. IGLORIA (1)

 KAREN LLAGAS Reviews

Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making, An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics edited by Amanda Galvan Huynh and Luisa A. Igloria 

(The Operating System, 2019)

 

BOOK LINK

Other words for transformative—life-changing, cathartic, reframing—can be used to describe this anthology of essays from poets of color on writing process and craft. Issues that BIPOC poets persistently grapple with are deeply and thoroughly explored: How do we think about literary lineage and mentorship? How do we write rooted in the struggles of our families and communities? How do we heal our individual and collective traumas even as we are asked to either perform or justify them on the page? How do our oral traditions relate to the written word? And what of the other languages that still permeate our dreams?

 

As a practicing BIPOC poet, I appreciate how editors Amanda Galvan Huynh and Luisa Igloria have created a space from which we can hear our literary aspirations and considerations reflected back to us. It is a task that is both immense and practical. Igloria writes, “For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they learned to others?” In her foreword, Mai Der Vang sums up this endeavor beautifully: “I am moved by these poets who give of themselves in these essays as a way of honoring each other, their communities, and their shared labor with language.”

 

As BIPOC poets, it is often up to us to summon and even fight for the mentors and teachers whose guidance and acceptance will allow us access to as many parts of ourselves on the page, and not just what a mainstream, white-dominated readership can easily digest. Addie Tsai articulates how much an MFA cuts both ways, how though it has “transformed my relationship to craft in a profound way, I was also transformed by the way in which I felt my body as a poet of color erased, made invisible… explicitly directed to change course as to not make the white bodies—both students and faculty—uncomfortable with my foreignness.”  Tony Robles reminds us that though we often have to explain our desires to study poetry formally to our immigrant and working-class families, we also find in them our first lessons on artistic craft and care, and thus our first teachers: “Thorough and fluid, his mop strokes were lines, were art—communicating an intention that lived in his core that would not accept anything less than the truth. … it could easily mean do not lie, do not deceive, do not take for granted the time or attention of your reader.”

 

And yet, this turning towards our families and communities also comes with a reckoning, a realization that a BIPOC poet’s literary self-education is often complicated by trauma that runs through the wellsprings we seek. Abigail Licad’s piece on being a Filipina American poet who has started writing publicly of her disability pulses with courage and clarity: “Should my parents confront me about breaking the silence they themselves have practiced, I already have a response prepared. It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault, either. But it is your fault that I’m not a coward.” Sasha Pimentel’s essay confronts the effort it took to be open to other APIA writers, because “…I sighted too quickly my own vague face, so wanted to reject them because I’d confused their art with my own shuddering, my family.” Pimentel’s included (and inclusive) reading list, “Sasha’s Incomplete List of Writers to Turn to, For Other Lonely Children,” is poignant and hopeful, a rich starting point for readers and students of poetry to immerse in. 

 

In a conference, I once heard a Pulitzer-prize poet say “your audience is your politics.” I love how Wendy Gaudin’s essay complicates the notions of poetry’s audience and readership and deftly entangles it with the healing she must generate for the women in her family: “In history, men like my great-grandfather are culprits… In poetry, they are listeners—a captive audience—receiving criticism, receiving forgiveness, receiving a focused, dynamic attention from those they never acknowledged. In poetry I can say, Whether you saw her or not, she was there. Whether you hear me or not, I will speak.” The fire and compassion in this essay is in conversation with Melissa Coss Aquino’s piece that recognizes the difficulty of aiming for “the tiny space where we manage to tell the truth without enacting stereotypes long used against us, but sometimes our truth feels like a long list of stereotypes no matter which way we turn.” 

 

While weaving in and out of other languages and often in varying fluencies, is something BIPOC poets have always intuited as enzymatic—i.e. bringing new energy and nuances to their own poetry, the implications of having to translate our experiences and tongues are also constantly wrestled with. Ernesto Abeytia’s essay reclaims the self by welcoming this collision of languages, “I want my poetry to work with and against Spanish and English to offer the parts of myself that can’t be shared monolingually.” Huynh in her editor’s introduction offers an impassioned argument, “But why should we even italicize our bilingual and multilingual experiences? Is it too difficult for readers to imagine our double consciousness?” José Angel Araguz recognizes the work it takes to live with this double consciousness, how “…the weather of being a poet raised in the United States, informed by literary traditions in both English and Spanish has been one filled with movement. Over time, I have learned to accept of the state being unsettled.” For Ching-in Chen, this very dynamism carries possibilities, “Because to never feel whole/grow the landscape in front of us…”

 

Giving BIPOC writers the permission to be unsettled must be coupled with the call to actively resist oppressive systems that permeate much of contemporary American society, including its poetry. Luisa Igloria, in her editor’s introduction, articulates the collective wish expressed in this collection—“that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility without replicating the systems that play the game of divide and conquer and turn us against each other for narrow or self-serving profit.”  Ocean Vuong amplifies this wish when he intones that “I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Kenji Liu puts forth a new creature that can counter the monstrosity of “capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy;” a creature that is a “monster of compassion and ferocity,” and birthed from it, a “frankenpo,” which is a “feral, generous poetry arriving from the future we are always being blown into.”

 

The passionate BIPOC poet-guides in Of Color invite its readers to engage with their own work in ways that are life-giving and soul-affirming, and thus nudge contemporary American poetics towards what Khadijah Queen calls a “radical poetics of love,” one that “pushes the difficult and problematic thoughts out into the open, where they can be honestly examined, and hopefully, an evolution toward loving and true solutions can occur.” This complex and difficult work is worth our energies, what Tim Seibles describes as “subversive to the exact extent that the surrounding culture denies the primacy and abiding complexity of our emotions.” When Remica L. Bingham-Risher narrates the devastation of losing a childhood friend shot by the police, one of the countless victims of systemic violence against Black bodies in this country, she articulates the freedom and hope that we are all struggling towards, “…how important it is to be free to say what I’m afraid of out loud, to dispel it; to show my children, that even in unimaginable times, we can create our way out of fear.” Into this circle of creation and solidarity, BIPOC poets are invited to add their voices, and into the page that Craig Santos Perez affirms, “is never truly blank. The page consists of submerged volcanoes of story and unfathomable depths of meaning.”  Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making is a necessary and urgent read for all poets who want to imagine a kinder and bolder world into being.

 

*****

 

Karen Llagas is a recipient of a Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize, a Hedgebrook residency and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry prize. Her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010.  Her poems have appeared in Rhino Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, the anthologies Troubling Borders, An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2014), The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010), Field of Mirrors, (PAWA, 2010), among others. Based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, she lectures at UC Berkeley and works as a freelance translator.