Gina Apostol's 2018 novel emphatically does NOT make a good audiobook... Having become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of plots and time-shifts, I was reduced to buying the e-book.

But that's actually a recommendation. Despite my confusion, I could hear that this was a really good book, worth grappling with.

From my first pass -- the purely auditory one, that is -- I came away with the impression that I knew a lot of things, about a lot of people, but I had little (really very little) idea of how all those pieces fitted together.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty good representation of the activity of recording history...

I could hear that Insurrecto was about representation. There's a  film-maker, who's the daughter of another film-maker. There's a  translator. There's a photographer. These are all people who make choices about what to include, what to transfer, what story to tell. They are all rendering something, according to their individual lights and experience. And I could hear that it was blazingly self-aware in its treatment of representation. The "countless meta moments" that I later read about in this review, stand out, even to a listener.

I could hear -- without being able to keep track of them -- details that kept recurring in different contexts. Names, objects, lists -- they'd suddenly pop up again in the narrative like echoes from a dream you had the other night.

And I could hear an awful lot of very canny descriptions of the Philippines in all its many-hued complexity. The diaspora, the war on drugs, the delight (to me paradoxical) in American culture, the New People's Army, the beach resorts, the food... And of course, the central tragedy, to which we keep spiralling back: the horrific events of 1901, when a group of Filipinos -- horrified at crazy orders from the American colonizers to starve out opposition to their rule by felling coconut trees and burning the rice crops, and sickened by American punishments such as the "water cure" -- rose up against these occupiers, only to meet with a brutally disproportionate response. 


All the photos in this post were taken during our first trip to the Philippines in 2012



And I could hear, by the end, that the book is like a lament. Not in a lugubrious way -- it doesn't set out to be lachrymose; it doesn't even take itself that seriously; it's playful; it's laugh-out-loud funny in places. Yet, at its kernel is "the secret within the secret, the untold grief".

So next I read some reviews. Courtesy of Gabrielle Flores I learned that there were puns (which you don't get when you listen, of course); there were pseudo-academic endnotes (not included, wisely, in the audiobook...); and the titles of all the Chapter 1s (yes, there are multiple Chapter 1s...) come together to form a kind of sentence (they do?).

Reassuringly, I also learned that the author "isn't in the business of setting anything straight; she wants to show just how fractured and messy the history of the Philippines is". Good, so I hadn't completely missed the point then.

And Tash Aw (I always appreciate reviews by authors I like) confirms: "None of it is designed to be easy for the reader, and the organisation of the novel constantly gives the impression of being in search of something that lies just beyond the grasp of total comprehension." Yep, totally...

Of course, not everyone is a fan of this approach. For Boyd Tonkin, Insurrecto is "a sophisticated, self-reflexive tragi-comedy, adorned with a glittering array of metafictional games and postmodern conceits", but ultimately, its "laborious avant-garde scaffolding of films within films, scripts within scripts, yarns boxed inside one another, exhausts more than it enlightens".

But there were also plenty of reviews along the lines of "demanding, baffling, and ultimately exhilarating".

Armed with these views, and with information from the website set up by Apostol (which, characteristically, she misrepresents and sends up in the book), I set out to read the text. Just for the sake of it, I read the chapters in numerical order, as listed on that website (you need to know that the original chapter numbering is all over the shop, which is particularly confusing when you listen to the audiobook). Having done that (and having, I might add, made notes on all the bits, and pasted them, thematically colour-coded, into a master-document that reconstitutes the chapters in the order presented to us), I have to confess to a suspicion that the author is again joshing us with this numerical order thing...





A film is to be made, you see, and there are two scripts... One by Chiara, the film-maker's film-making daughter (who's American); and one by Magsalin, the translator and mystery-writer (who's Filipina). Both scripts focus on that 1901 massacre, in Balangiga in eastern Samar, but they gaze at it through the eyes of different protagonists. In one script, we're following Cassandra, a turn-of-the-century photographer who not only gets to know and respect Casiana Nacionales (a historical figure who played a role in planning the attack on the Americans), but also documents the horrific results of the American reprisals first-hand, in the sort of pictures that can be seen here. In the other script, we're following Caz (yes, yes, all these names are maddeningly similar). She is the Filipina love interest of Ludo Brasi, Chiara's father, who is making (in the early 1970s) a film about the Balangiga massacre.

Now you'd think two such different perspectives would be really easy to disentangle. But all the way through you get the impression that the women are messing not only with each other's scripts but with each other's lived experiences. Because threaded through these script fragments we have the back-stories of Chiara (who spent some of her childhood in the Philippines) and Magsalin (who has spent a lot of her life in America), their meeting (when Chiara recruits Magsalin to take her to Samar), and their road-trip -- and what actually happens and how it plays out in their minds run together and across each other like a hundred little rivulets.

At one point, Chiara says: "I think we are stuck in someone's movie... That is what we are: hundreds of thousands of feet of unedited film, doing things over and over, in a recursive spool, and we are waiting for the cut. But who is the director?" Who indeed?

Some of the funniest and also most poignant moments are those when one of the characters suddenly takes a step backward, and analyses the reality around her with the gaze of the film-maker. An example (in the midst of the tragic yet farcical scene where two motorbike passengers have just been killed, and Chiara's and Magsalin's bags have been accidentally switched, and the police are accusing Chiara of carrying drugs):  "Chiara mentally notes problems of film, even of costume design: how did a pedicab get here so quickly? Why is she, Chiara, wearing short shorts? Who gave her platform shoes? Why will justice never happen? Who in their right mind would mistake cremains for crack? And will Magsalin ever just mourn, without plots and stories and gestures that distance sorrow?"

This is a loopy but fascinating paragraph. All the muddle is right there. The real. The imaginary. The distance. The unknowability of everything.







So what was I left with? Three things, I think:

1. The complexity of rendering any story;
2. The particular -- ultimately insoluble -- complexity of rendering the colonial story; and
3. The truth of grief.

Firstly, Insurrecto, as I've said, is a very self-aware piece of work. Magsalin's reactions to the script she is reading are a good summary of the way the book works:

"As she reads, Magsalin keeps track of her confusions, annotating each mixed-up chapter as she goes... In the notebook, she includes problems of continuity, the ones not explained by hopscotching chapters...; words repeated as if they had been spilled and reconstituted then placed on another page; a stage set of interchangeable performers with identical names, or maybe doubles or understudies as they enter and exit the stage; an unexplained switch of characters' names in one section... At times, she feels discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story... A reader does not need to know everything."

Correct. A reader does not need to know everything. A reader does not need to know whether something is "true", for example. And in a way, a reader should permanently be at least a little disconcerted -- should never feel totally oriented, should always be left distrusting any narrative. Because at the end of the day, there is no "truth".







Secondly, if this is generally a valid assessment of the stories we tell, then how much more so of those stories that feature relationships distorted by colonialism? Apostol wrote in 2013 of the postcolonial experience of a "divided self":  "Anyone who has grown up in a country where history has been created by the words of its occupiers understands this existential condition -- the sense that who you are is a fiction, the result of texts constructed by others."

Insurrecto dissects this condition in several ways.

It sends up, for example, the kind of film that Ludo Brasi made in the Philippines about Viet Nam (shades of The Sympathizer here). Magsalin once saw the film in a "course called Locations/Dislocations, about the phantasmal voids in Vietnam War movies shot in equally blighted areas that are not Vietnam" (there are a lot of enjoyably snide swipes at academia in Insurrecto).

We are told of a frame showing "a fissured bridge in the Philippines, in real life dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 and still unrepaired in 1976, and rebuilt specifically and reexploded spectacularly in the film's faux-napalm scene against a mystic pristine river actually already polluted by local dynamite fishers... There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it, about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a movie's palimpsest, and what was most disturbing, of course, was that, on one level, the professor's point was true, our identities are irremediably mediated."

(The author again:  "The Filipino or Argentine or Kenyan or Indian is necessarily hybrid, condemned to deal with the past: history makes our identities irreducibly multiple... My job as an artist and a citizen is to pursue like a spy, a detective, a doomed translator, a reading and rereading of the double in the text, the elusive Filipino, who must be read awry through others’ words: inverse, anew.")

Magsalin wonders whether Chiara's next project is "to be shot on location in the actual country in which the plot occurs, a film of dizzying unheard-of realism, hence the need for translations into the actual language of the hapless citizens in the process of being killed by the occupation forces". It's embarrassing, right? Because it's so ridiculously accurate.

In the version of the script where a movie is being made about Ludo's making of a movie on the Samar massacre (still following?), we are told: "Caz had watched the villagers watch the scene of the children, the scene of the massacre of the reconcentrated villagers of Samar in 1901, and she thought how strange it was to see it dawning upon them... that this was their history unfolding before their eyes." Told by someone else, of course...

The forerunner of the movie is the collection of stereocards: "Photographs of a captured country shot through the lens of the captor possess layers of ambiguity too confusing to grasp." The captor, the colonizer, has effectively "captured history's lens". This is why, when exhibiting the "Holmes viewer" (the contraption used to perceive the stereoscopic effect of the doubled cards), the American doctor is able to comment: "We have manufactured how to see the world."

Similarly, when Chiara interrogates Magsalin on why she has chosen to interpret Philippines history through the eyes of Cassandra, thereby taking on the point of view of someone she dislikes, and thereby reproducing "the white savior story", Magsalin replies: "I did it for you... It's the only way you could have read the story."







There's something very real and palpable that breaks through this set of constructions, though. Which is my third category. This book is an incredibly moving account of grief unspoken. Chiara is mourning her father, who committed suicide for reasons she has never totally understood. Magsalin is mourning her husband, and literally carries him around with her -- as ashes that she will scatter on this, her first return to the Philippines since his death there.

Before embarking on the rival script, Magsalin has wanted to tell a mystery story about loss. She has experimented with various protagonists. But their identities don't really matter, because they're all simply place-holders for the object of mourning. When the bags are switched, and the ashes are mistaken for drugs, Magsalin is forced to admit her pain: "She feels in her uselessness, that cry, so deep it cannot be excavated, and it is so familiar, the weeping in her body, its slack sick weakening, the way her limbs feel like a hot wind has rushed through them... She is so tired. It is never gone. This untold grief."

Chiara, meanwhile, wanted her script to resurrect her father, but in her story he still dies: "Sometimes I imagine he died from the despair I have, the horror of not knowing him. In the end, I guess, everything is a self-portrait... My discovery is, writing my script -- I should let him rest."

This pain sounds so authentic because Apostol herself lost her husband, Arne Tangherlini, in 1998. She has never stopped mourning him. "Too many of us," she says, "live with constant grief: I know I am not alone."

Mingled with personal grief is historical grief. We just can't fix the things that Insurrecto -- lightly, trippingly, but penetratingly -- depicts. As Magsalin admits: "I wanted to write about this unfinished thing -- this revolution. A story of war and loss so repressed and so untold. But all I did was dwell on trauma that only causes recurrence of pain... The history of that war is beyond my powers to add or detract from the terrible pictures it left behind."

Among all the word games and splintered perspectives and careering plots, is this the only thing that's actually "true"? Is this the only thing, at the end of the day, that's worth trying to record and recall, because it reminds us of our humanity, our commonality, our vulnerability, and our need for solidarity?

So -- an exceptionally powerful book. Just make sure you don't rely on the audio version alone...