Gina Apostol wants to uncover the truth. A Philippine-born novelist and teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City, Apostol seeks to get at not just psychological truths, but also at those underpinning how power operates; it is this search that comprises her leftist activism. As she explained in an email exchange with The Prog, for her, “to be left-wing attempts to unveil, to figure out what the juggernaut of power must cover up to keep us in its thrall, and in this way one might uncover truth.” She clarified, however, that such unveiling “does not mean writing characters from an ideological perspective—but figuring out complexity, being aware of the fascist, or the misogynist, or the classist, even in ourselves.” Her first two novels—Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata—evidently struck a chord with a post-colonial readership: each one was a winner of the Philippine National Book Award (Bibliolepsy was even well-received by N.V.M. Gonzalez, a towering figure in Filipino literature). It is her American novels, however—2013’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter and her most recent book, published in November of 2018, Insurrecto—that bring these issues in the context of Apostol’s Philippines to an American readership.
The history of American involvement in the Philippines has long been marginalized by mainstream academia; few in this country know about the Philippine-American War and, if they do, they are likely unaware of the extent of its brutality. Having seized the islands from Spain in 1898, the United States retained control over them until their independence in 1946. However, this was not until after a bloody war of revolution and occupation that lasted from 1899 to 1902. It was in this period that the American military toppled the independent Emilio Aguinaldo government, installed concentration camps on the islands, and battled the guerilla resistance in a series of assaults that resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 200,000 to 1,000,000 Filipino civilians and around 20,000 Filipino combatants (compare this to the 4,300 American deaths, of which around 3,000 were due to disease). In the town of Balangiga, in reprisal for the killing of approximately 48 American soldiers on the part of the Filipino resistance, the US Army tortured, burned, and murdered. Ultimately, it is unclear how many Filipinos died as a result, but the true number of casualties probably resides somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000. This would not, however, be the last time Americans interfered with the islands, nor the last time the history of the Philippines would be obscured in the United States.
From 1965 to 1986, Ferdinand Marcos was President of the Philippines, having declared martial law in 1972, which he upheld through 1981, at which point the period of martial law ended, but not the dictatorship. His government is suspected to have murdered 3,247 people, tortured some 35,000, and arrested around 70,000 (all figures originating in the work of historian Alfred McCoy). The brutality swelled just before the People Power movement ousted Marcos.
The Marcos regime was backed by the US from the beginning to its end, since it was perceived to be an ally in the Cold War; at the height of Marcos’s authoritarian rule, in 1981, then Vice President George H. W. Bush said of the dictator, “We love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process, and we will not leave you in isolation.” Indeed, just after his fall from power in 1986, Marcos was welcomed by the American government in Hawaii, where he died in 1989 at the age of 72.
He was survived by his wife, Imelda, whose extravagant lifestyle, funded by the estimated billions embezzled from the Philippines, was an embarrassment to the regime. In 1990, an American court acquitted Imelda of racketeering, and in 1998, a Filipino court overturned a 1993 conviction on corruption. She is still alive, and the Marcos children are successful politicians under the current presidency of Rodrigo Duterte—a time of still more murder and corruption. Now, as under Marcos, the government has undertaken a massive campaign of “salvaging”—arresting, torturing, and murdering—suspected Communists. Of Apostol’s two most recent books, Gun Dealers’ Daughter deals with the Communist resistance to the Marcoses, and Insurrecto, with the Philippine-American War and its scars that are still visible today. The act of uncovering power, however, cannot just be to bear witness to power’s abuses; what Apostol provides are complex psychological portraits of the subaltern, their oppressors, and the oppressors’ collaborators. It is that duality that is particular to Apostol’s work: a deep understanding of oppressor and oppressed. Apostol explained,
As a writer, I need to have empathy for all my characters—I need to find a way to get into their minds; I need to be open to their contradictions. It’s one of the ways that writing makes me more human (which is a good thing!). Compassion is important in order for me to write with some grace about any of my characters. But that does not mean I don’t take sides. I do make ethical choices in Insurrecto, in my view: I’m on the side of Casiana [the leader of the uprising in Balangiga]. I’m on the side of the Filipinos who killed the Americans, despite my empathy also for the American soldiers—in order to understand them, I viewed soldiers as workers. I think being able to practice both, examine with empathy and yet also figure out the proper ethical choice despite the breadth of empathy always required of us, is important.
Empathy with ethics are what allow for Apostol’s political writing—for the creation of characters who are not ideological puppets but rather full human beings whose choices can and should be understood in the realm of ethics. In order to produce this effect for Insurrecto, Apostol looked at the works of Jane Austen and Henry James, studying how “they manipulated the third person.” She clarified,
I needed third person free indirect discourse because I needed to weave in and out from one voice to the next but needed some kind of intimacy, as well, that an omniscient third just would not do. And first person is very unwieldy for historical storytelling—I have no idea how a goddamned woman photographer in the Victorian age would actually speak, so to use the mediated third, the free indirect, released me into a ventriloquism that suited my purposes. The means, the choice of perspective, must suit the ends, in this case, the need for multiple storytellers in different historical times.
In the case of Insurrecto, there are multiple storytellers and perspectives that clash and combine in various ways to form a web of stories surrounding the Balangiga massacre. With each perspective, there is a new perspective. Practically, Apostol explained, “this kind of ultra-awareness” of one’s own “subject-position” ends up being “very hard to practice moment by moment.” However, this kind of awareness is vital to the process of truth-telling, particularly when that truth is in such flux. In Insurrecto, Apostol said,
the choice of overlapping voices, doubled chapters, and so on, came from a need to tell this history of colonization and the trauma and grief attached to it in a way that fit how I read this history: it seems to me there is always a paratext when one considers a colonized country’s history. You must read the colonized view (a paratext) within the power-text that is the colonizer’s frame.
The primary material on Balangiga—and, indeed, on the entire war—is usually from the perspective of the colonizer, or, from within the “power text.” Apostol found that “it was really exhausting to read the very persistent racism in all the voices I read from the American occupation of the Philippines, McKinley and Taft and Roosevelt on down.” Not even Filipino texts were safe from susceptibility to the colonizer’s point of view. Therefore, she needed “multiplying voices” to uncover “a sense of truth in the novel’s view of story, or history, or this war… The soldier’s eye overlaps with the white woman photographer’s eye which overlaps with Casiana’s eye with overlaps with Magsalin [another protagonist]’s and so on—the overlay of voices allows me to get at a difficult thing I was trying to discover, perhaps: what is truth in a highly contested story? Which is why in my view the structure of the novel is—a puzzle.” This puzzle—its recognition and its unraveling—epitomizes the critical core of the Maoist ideology Apostol grew up with.
“The class critique,” she said, “and interrogation of history and constant strategizing to gain our ends, the focus on action, not just words or thought, that I grew up with as a kid at my university have been vital for me. It gave me a critical lens from a very early age [she was sixteen at the time]. In a practical sense, it also made me very aware of the need for strategy—that one needed to plan things out, be agile and inventive. And in fact, we actually did end up throwing out a dictator.” The protagonist of Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Sol, also participates in the People Power revolution; however, unlike Apostol, Sol ends up a UF—a ”Useful Fool,” Lenin’s designation for non-members who could be used by the Party for their resources, etc.—for a group of Maoist students at the end of the Marcos era. That means that Sol collects coins to be melted into bullets; she provides information, resources, and ultimately, the key to an assassination plot.With a relatively straightforward plot (compared to Insurrecto), Gun Dealers’ Daughter is a mystery that looks into the heart of Sol’s breakdown. Granted, the timeline is not totally linear and the information is not revealed in absolute order; however, the multiplication of identities and meaning ends at a certain point. That is not to say that the plot or its message are not complex; in the words of the judges of the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award, which Gun Dealers’ Daughter won, “You will read Gun Dealers’ Daughter wondering where Gina Apostol novels have been all these years (in the Philippines, it turns out). You will feel sure (and you will be correct) that you have discovered a great fiction writer in the midst of making literary history.” The plot is fast-moving and the literary references deeply layered, the twists by turns shocking and thrilling. Insurrecto, meanwhile, is slower paced and more intricately enigmatic. Both however, echo the words of the PEN judges: “Through this novel we see how fiction can scrape out a future, demand a re-look at the past—it is a reckoning kind of book.” It is fitting; Apostol, in her relentless search for the truth, is a reckoning kind of writer.
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