For several decades now, Gina Apostol has been writing revolutionary fiction, fiction that fuses the postcolonial and the postmodern in intricate, surprising, witty, and politically potent ways. Only in 2018, though, with the publication of her fourth novel, Insurrecto, did the world seem poised to fully embrace the complex wisdom of Philippine-born Apostol’s dazzlingly refractive lens. In this intoxicatingly metafictional book, the chapters are out of order, the puns are polyglot, and the two main characters—white American filmmaker Chiara Brasi and her Filipina translator Magsalin—write and re-write a film script that addresses the most basic and crucial questions that bind American colonizer and Philippine colonized: What actually happened in the Philippine-American War, and who gets to tell the story? The result is a profound meditation on history’s reverberant consequences, a breathtaking series of prose magic tricks, and a hilarious elucidation of The Philippine Chekhov’s Rule.
Apostol and I conducted this interview via email.
Micah H. Stack: Your latest novel, Insurrecto, is compared to Cortázar’s Hopscotch in the jacket copy—an apt comparison, especially regarding the question of how to read your book, whose numbered chapters are out of order. Unlike Hopscotch, though, which offers readers two approaches to navigating its non-linear structure, you provide no didactic instructions. What is the ideal way to read Insurrecto? And what’s the ideal way to re-read it?
Gina Apostol: A lovely question. The ideal way is to read with pleasure. I wrote it with pleasure; my hope is that it can be read with pleasure. I’d say read the book also with acceptance of not-knowing. The book is meant to be a puzzle. Sadly, destabilization is part of the journey. But so are one’s own wits, modesty, and instincts. Anyone with generosity can read this book. If you re-read, do it according to your desire. Of course, despite this caveat, I do have a cheat sheet website! For those interested, I’d suggest reading it afterward, though. I mention this website in the novel, in the Cast of Characters: praxino.org.
MHS: The Cast of Characters is so detailed that, several pages in, I began to howl with laughter. It seemed funny because no one could possibly grasp (before reading the novel) who all these people are, why certain names recur or seem like variations of previous names, or what Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson have to do with anything. Was the list meant as a comic device? Part of a larger narrative strategy?
GA: The idea was to give the feel of a movie—but with a perverse list that included even footnote-like characters, such as Gus the Polar Bear, who’s one of my favorite characters, actually. I had fun doing it: I love randomness as meaning. Apart from comedy, I’d say it functions in at least two ways. It begins an echo chamber—for the reader who will be grappling with many threads, maybe echoes can jog the mind. And this idea that history in the book is also an echoing chamber, of a sort.
MHS: I hesitate to describe Insurrecto as “fun” or “funny” because the subject of the Balangiga atrocities committed by Americans is so serious. But the novel does inspire laughter, and its games delight. How do you view the role of humor and entertainment in this book?
GA: I think humor in this novel, as with most comedy, lies in subversion. But I link its subversions to my very early awareness of language, a theme that obsesses me. Growing up, I was alienated and made self-aware by language. When I was a kid, I’d be fined for speaking my primal language (Waray), while English was privileged, the language of learning. I was only dimly aware of the power issues, but I was very aware of the doubled meanings and the fun—my classmates were always making punny jokes—kids are natural neologists. This punning humor pervades Filipino speech. My theory is that this word-subversion, however unconsciously, has always been a way to poke at power. E.g., the colonizer, contrarily, is hyper-un-aware. The colonized, by her multiplicity, is always a step ahead—like a writer. But this advantage is not recognized, funnily enough. The Filipino chief of police in Insurrecto is more aware than Captain Connell because he has multiple languages at his disposal, including English, learned from war. So this humor comes at a historical, violent cost. And this costly sense of the absurd just happens to be my fate. I have no angst over it. I play with it. It’s very clear to me that language is a power game—but which is to be master, as Humpty Dumpty says, and whom I quote at least twice in the book. Obviously, I also like Alice, which is about language, power, and games.
MHS: The jacket copy also compares Insurrecto to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, though your second novel, 2009’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, strikes me as even more clearly in conversation with Pale Fire. It’s as if, to stress the dizzying multiplicity of interpretations of history, you invented a trio of competing Kinbotes in Mimi C. Magsalin, Estrella Espejo, and Dr. Diwata Drake, leaving it to readers to decide just how unreliable each woman is as a commentator on Mata’s papers (which are themselves far from the orderly iambs of John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire”). Your psychoanalyst, Claro Mürk, seems like a polyglot riff on Nabokov’s own Freudian figure, “Blanche Schwartzmann.” There’s even a joke about Nabokov—or “Nabukoff,” as he’s called—in a footnote, aptly. To what extent do you consider Nabokov an influence?
GA: I love Nabokov, and also Borges—I think those two are art-twins. (They were actually born in the same year, 1899—which was, coincidentally, or maybe not, the year the Fil-Am war began.) But my aims are different. As a kid in college, I read every single Nabokov novel at the British Council in Manila, plastic-wrapped hardcovers, and to this day, if I find an old Nabokov hardcover, I feel like buying it, as if I were buying my past. But reading both Borges and Nabokov so deeply, I end up with aims that are anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchy—three terms that would make Nabokov vomit because politically he was nutty, like the karaoke uncles in Insurrecto. I mean, the guy liked Joseph McCarthy. He was a political troglodyte. But Borgesian and Nabokovian narrative schemes—this destabilizing of reality through mediated stories—are very rich for postcolonial work. What I find very funny is to weaponize their fiction games: to use iconic, art-fetish structures for practically didactic themes. I think the result is a constant recognition of fissures and splits in ways of thinking that we must recognize as normal: yes, massacre and pop culture coexist, and literary theory is part of life, like breathing, but you just don’t think about it, etc. These junctions are unexpected, but also politically coherent—and fun. Insurrecto is non-binary political art—my aim is to make it hard to extricate the art from the politics and vice versa. Because as I said, the world I grew up in—the hyper-hybrid, mixed world of the Filipino—is unseen, but in my view a step ahead. I hold the advantage of multiple worlds—the Western art-worlds of Nabokov, the unbearably multiple world of the Warays, which demands an ethical account. I make that multiplicity central in Mata and Insurrecto: so that the novels’ form is in itself also political and historical commentary. Insurrecto was actually triggered by Georges Perec’s last novel, 53 Days—an unfinished novel about the death of a mystery writer in a colonized country (seemingly Tunisia). Unlike Perec, whose novels are overtly game-like, lipograms and such, Nabokov and Borges seem on the surface to be very interested in meaning—structure and form are entwined with suggestive philosophical things—usually a concept of illusion. My novels transpose those philosophies of illusion (in which they meditate on art, or existence, but not explicitly on politics, though arguably all their books are about identity) into my postcolonial concerns with power—this interrogation of beings dreamed up by others. Actually, Perec’s personal politics are maybe more simpatico. Some of his books read as downright Marxist. But the reason I’m attached to all three is that play drives their work. For me, art is very serious play. But I’m completely uninterested in the troglodytic Manichean fallacy that art and politics—and psychology and literary theory—don’t mix. Not to mention Elvis. I think we need to have an art-world that deeply understands why those obsolete dichotomies are harmful.
MHS: An abiding concern in both Mata and Insurrecto is Philippine history, particularly the Spanish and U.S. colonial involvement in it. Are you ever concerned about portraying the nation’s real history within a fabric that not only contains fictional elements but deliberately tricky, postmodern structures and unreliable narrators? Do you worry that readers might mistake it all for a fiction?
GA: No—those readers need to get smarter. A powerful thing for me is that reality and history are constructed—they are things perceived, above all. This is how I understand the world, which may be why I write novels. Which is not to say that “truth” is arbitrary and not “real”—at least in the sense that the truths we make have consequences, many of them dire, some marvelous. For instance, a nation is a constructed thing—produced by our imagination of it. But the fact that it is imagined, that the United States or the Philippines are imagined communities, as the scholar Ben Anderson called nation-making, does not mean that such constructs do not have material effects—passports, or a Constitution that one can pledge allegiance to, including the banality of the acceptance of genocide in that Constitution, or a concept of heroism that sustains a group. I’m interested in the material effects of the illusive nation. A novel that points out this constructedness is producing a healthy—because conscious—way to perceive this reality of a world or self made up by others’ perceptions. Being taken in by fake news, for instance, shows we lack exercise in this mindfulness. This kind of novel brings awareness of how illusion makes us. It’s a kind of mindfulness that can send one to a nuthouse. But a novel can provide that awareness, in a safe way. I think mindfulness of the illusions we necessarily construct, or which might ruinously construct us, is a useful practice. This is true of nations; this is true of the self.
MHS: It is a strange thing that so many of us depend on fiction for our sense of history—novels engage readers who might not pick up history books as readily. But occasionally this turns dangerous when authors alter or erase aspects of history. I’m thinking of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which portrays the (white, male) character Thomas Sutpen “putting down” a slave revolt in Haiti during the 1820s, when in fact by 1804 the Haitian Revolution had been successful. As scholar Wanda Raiford notes, this aspect of the novel “operates to deny the Haitian revolutionary war of independence, writing out of existence the Western Hemisphere’s first black national state.” Clearly problematic, whatever Faulkner’s intentions may have been, right? What duties do you think fiction writers assume (or ought to) when they incorporate historical incidents?
GA: Yeah, it is very problematic to take on Haitian slave history from a white man’s perspective. The advice: Just. Don’t. That example is about the danger of the white imagination—which has been quite damaging. I think we should be aware of the white imagination in us—the colonizing one—because it occupies us; it has long constructed us, whether we like it or not. Toni Morrison is a very good reader of that. I love her essays on whiteness in American art. It’s funny how, in our standard curricula, teachers say, you need to read Faulkner to read Toni Morrison, when it’s Faulkner who needs Toni Morrison, not the other way around. A good progressive school in America should just teach black writers first—I learned this from a colleague, Alwin Jones, a great Caribbeanist. Of course, the white imagination is interrogated in Insurrecto. I mean, Chiara’s practically taken hostage, in a pedicab. Very deliberately, in Insurrecto, tables, or scripts, are turned, and one’s confusion about which writer is which is important. I’d say a writer has a duty to the imagination above all—but to imagine American acts against the Filipinos, for instance, who were captured by a brutal, inhumane power that could so easily see others as vermin, un-human, that imagination needs to be quite rigorous. My main concern was not to re-traumatize Filipinos or anyone who might feel the oppressive weight of that kind of historic trauma. I still have huge anxiety about that, actually. My concern was to give agency to Filipino acts, not make them just reactors or victims—to give them humor, irony, desire. So the novel’s project maybe was to exhume “truths” hard to see because the victor’s power-lens hid it.
MHS: I love your concept of “weaponizing” postmodern fictional strategies for political purposes. You seem to use allusion as one such strategy of exhuming truths hidden by the colonizers. For example, in Insurrecto, Magsalin, the Filipina translator, is speaking to the filmmaker/consummately-privileged-white-woman, Chiara Brasi, about her father Ludo’s famous Vietnam War film, The Unintended. Magsalin believes the film has transposed characters and events from the Philippine-American War to the Vietnam War. “Read The Ordeal of Samar,” she tells Chiara, “and you have your dad’s movie right there.” Elsewhere, we’re told that Ludo Brasi based his film on “a racist book,” though I don’t think Schott’s text is named there.
I tracked down The Ordeal of Samar, and wow—it’s beyond racist. Only four pages in, we read this: “The insurrectos of our story are those of the island of Samar […] They are an ignorant and undisciplined mob,” etc. I had no desire to read 300 pages of that, but after flipping through it, I wondered if your allusion was designed to signal to readers that Insurrecto is a re-writing of Schott’s book—wresting the history of the Fil-Am War away from Schott’s colonizing, racist gaze. Is that accurate?
GA: Well, no—that would be aggrandizing Schott in a way I do not intend. Schott’s eye was not exceptional. Every white person writing about the Philippines was a kind of Schott: Schott’s racism was banal, ordinary, ubiquitous. Being Schott-sighted was the norm J. The entire congressional hearings of 1902 (a Senate response to Balangiga, called Affairs in the Philippine Islands on Google books) was shot through with Schott-ish racism—and the voices were those of Governor-General William Howard Taft, General Arthur MacArthur (Douglas’s dad), etc. This novel was certainly very aware of that worldview’s racist lens on Filipinos. The allusion to Schott is a gesture toward the larger historical system, the racist ignorance, in colonization.
MHS: Other allusions in Insurrecto seem less straightforward. You compare Ludo Brasi’s The Unintended with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which likewise featured the Philippines as a stand-in location for Vietnam, had a fraught production history, etc. And of course, Coppola’s daughter, Sofia, is a filmmaker, just as Ludo’s daughter Chiara is. (The name Ludo Brasi—so similar to Luca Brasi of Coppola’s The Godfather—seems another hint.) How much should we read into the parallels between your fictional Brasi clan and the real-life Coppolas?
GA: First of all, the Coppolas were writing tools—a way to structure and give physical material to some characters. A constraint and theme in this book is media—mediation, allusion, and texts-within-texts suffuse this novel. It was a constraint I made up for myself, and it helped me write. It was also fun. It was amusing to graft stuff from Eleanor Coppola’s diaries of being in Manila onto my novel—the shopping mall scene, for instance. It was funny to imagine Eleanor Coppola at Shoemart during the time of the typhoons, because as I read her diary I realized she was describing a typhoon of my childhood I still vividly remember. So I know both about the typhoons and the crazy-making maze of receipts at Shoemart. Mall management is hugely distrustful of workers, you know, hence all the receipt-stamping. Researching this ’70s part of the novel, I kept laughing at scenes in Eleanor Coppola’s diary. But Virginie is not Eleanor—Virginie is her own self—and Chiara is not Sofia. Second, the pentimento or trace of them in the novel is an aspect of reality I am trying to conjure: that simultaneous doubles exist. The effect is to subordinate the lives of the famous to the life of the quotidian. It makes them very ordinary. I find that funny. Lastly, the allusions are ways I center the Philippines in the larger schemes of the world. Muhammad Ali, Elvis, William McKinley, Coppola, Theodore Roosevelt—ultimately, they’re all seen through the Philippine gaze, and that subverting gaze gets amplified, perhaps, through allusion, which is part of the novel’s humor, I imagine. The Western gaze recognizes itself awry, while the Filipino reader is centered, in on all the jokes, which gives the book a different texture, I hope, for the Filipino reader. Subversion—and perhaps humor, or at least some tickling—lies in the multiple gazes produced by allusion. Again, that technical matter, allusion, creates political effects, but also fun, for me. Not necessarily in a deterministic way: I’m not really conscious of what I do when I write. My aim was to find ways to have fun: to find meaningful, coherent play to keep me writing. Novel writing is both improvised and purposeful—a weird paradox that I experience constantly.
MHS: You’re thought of primarily as a novelist, but you’ve written short stories that are now scattered across two decades’ worth of literary journals and anthologies, many out of print and hard to obtain. Would you ever consider gathering those disparate fictions in a story collection?
GA: No. Not at the moment. Not that I don’t like them. I don’t see them as a cohesive group. Maybe some editor might. But thanks so much for thinking of this.
MHS: I ask the previous question in part because in one of those anthologies—The Thirdest World (2007)—you wrote a brief essay called “Narration and History” in which you express your preference for the novel over the short form. Part of your skepticism about short stories, as you put it, is that you can’t separate the form from the “New Critical-realist mode” of writers like Lahiri and Updike, a mode which “cannot hold that overflowing reflexivity” that you find in Philippine history and “reality.” Do you still feel that way about writing short fiction?
GA: Yes—I have never felt the urge to go back. But that’s just me: the short story is a powerful art form in Philippine writing in English. Nick Joaquin is a case in point. He’s a huge influence on me, along with Estrella Alfon and Franz Arcellana, both short story writers. But I just don’t have as much fun with stories. Which makes me feel guilty because I liked many of the characters, like the crazy mourners in “Cunanan’s Wake.” I just saw The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and I still stand by my characters’, especially the Kapitana’s, wild wisdom about Andrew Cunanan.
MHS: And yet, the first published piece of the Insurrecto puzzle was a short story, “The Unintended: Another Manila Envelope Mystery,” published in The Massachusetts Review in 2011. Did you already know it was the kernel of a novel, or did that realization follow its publication as a stand-alone story?
GA: Those publications were novel excerpts. I found I could easily cut off sections of the novel whenever friends or people I like asked me for stuff during the years I was writing it. I publish short pieces only when friends ask me. I don’t send things out because I’m lazy about business stuff—and also because I’m always working on a novel—it’s novel-making that takes up my imagination. Both Insurrecto and Mata were very easy to cut up into stand-alone pieces, for some reason.
MHS: Just as your novels employ recursive loops, so too does your writing career seem to work in looping fashion. It has been interesting trying to reconstruct the trajectory of it. For example, your bio in the anthology Charlie Chan is Dead 2 (2003) states that you’d “just completed [your] second novel, The Gun Dealer’s Daughter”—which wasn’t published until 2013, and wasn’t ultimately your second novel, since The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata interceded in 2009. Is there a lesson for other writers in all this? Do some projects simply require longer gestation periods?
GA: One issue is timing. I don’t write according to the zeitgeist, and that’s okay. I write what I need to do. I think Insurrecto hits a spot when many are now aware of our harmful blindness in our understanding of history—and we need to self-correct. Mata never got sold to a U.S. publisher, though it’s just as insurrecting as Insurrecto. But in 2009, no one was interested. So one lesson is—just wait. Time lags behind invention—sometimes never catches up—but you at least have your conviction, though you can’t eat that, haha. Day jobs are the life-saver of your integrity. The other lesson is—yes, absolutely, one should be patient and kind to oneself. I revise like hell. My experience is that if the work is difficult to write, the structure or point of view is probably wrong. Pleasure and form are connected. I had to completely restructure Gun Dealers’ Daughter, for instance: the point of view and time design were incorrect—years later, I shifted it from third to first person, and while I kept its initial, straight, chronological line, I enclosed that within an infinite circle. While Insurrecto was rather effortless—I had the same experience with Mata. Maybe because, for both, the form was correct, from the start. In Insurrecto, it was an abaca weave (abaca was an important, commercial reason for taking Samar). But you know, Insurrecto is also about writing, about making art. I loved thinking about it—the surprises and paradoxes of art are a mystery that, every day, sustains me.