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Since I was young, I love the stories that unfold in the confines of many Western empires – from the British E.M. Forster's Raj. A passage to India in surrealist Vietnam Apocalypse Now. And I still love them, even though I realize now that they generally consider other cultures from the point of view of strangers, even intruders.
That's why, these days, I'm looking for books and movies that show how the world appears on the other side of the colonial mirror. One of the most original I've found is Insurrecto, an amazing new novel by Gina Apostol, born in the Philippines but living in the United States.
Beginning in a current mansion supervised by President Thuggand Duterte, this spiritual and slightly revealing book plunges into something that most Americans hardly know about: the tortuous relationship between the United States and the Philippines, which America colonized for 50 years after claiming to release him. of Spain at the end of the 19th century.
The story begins when our heroine – Magsalin, a translator and mysterious Filipina – goes to the Muhammad Ali mall in Manila (yes, it's a real place) to meet Chiara Brasi. This is a fashionable American filmmaker, whose father photographed in the Philippines a fun picture of the Vietnam War (Shades of Sofia Coppola).
Although Magsalin does not particularly like Chiara – who, we are told, has "a celebrity face at rest" – she agrees to help her with her new screenplay. She accompanies him even on a journey through the countryside to the city of Balangiga, place of the dark episode of the US-Philippine war that led to colonization.
Until here, so simple. But after Magsalin read Chiara's screenplay, she started to write hers. Soon, we read two versions of rival scripts: one on an American war photographer, Daisy Buchanan-ish, in the Philippines, the other on a Filipino teacher who had an affair with Chiara's father.
Before we know it, reality and fiction pollinate each other – there are stories to tell, and each character seems to have a double. And we begin to wonder why chapter numbers appear in the wrong order.
Now, I have to admit that Insurrecto requires readers to deal with a few moments of disorientation. But let me assure you that the novel falls easily and becomes clearer in the end.
For Apostol is not a hoaxer or an arid vanguard. On the contrary, she is cheerful like Italo Calvino or Kurt Vonnegut. She tells funny riffs about everything from "Thrilla to Manila" to Elvis Presley's love for her compatriots to what the book calls the Filipino Chekhov rule: if you mention karaoke in the first chapter, someone must sing it in the last chapter.
For all his sparkling style, Insurrecto is steeped in the pain of lived history. The road trip of Magsalin and Chiara is a way to explore an episode I had never heard of – an episode that, like the US-Philippine war, did not have so much forgotten that repressed. This happened in Balangiga in 1901 where, with the help of a woman Insurrecto, or revolutionary – Filipino inhabitants attacked US occupying soldiers.
In retaliation, US Colonel Jacob Smith, who served with General George Custer and was equally enlightened, ordered his soldiers to kill all people over the age of 10 years. And they did it. Death estimates range from 2,000 to 50,000.
Insurrecto gives us this barbaric slice of our national history, not through guilty American eyes, but through furiously kind Filipino eyes, who hope we will seize two things. First, we will never understand the modern Philippines in all their warmth, humor and violence, without knowing the history of places like Balangiga. And secondly, we can not understand modern America without knowing the stories of what we have done in the past.
His InsurrectoIt is a great accomplishment to confront us with terrible things without ever becoming an accusatory and anti-American screech. See, Apostol is after more than recrimination. Anchored in the love-hate relationship with the American culture she shares with most Filipinos, she is actually looking to transcend the gap that separates the two countries.
Towards the end of the novel, Magsalin's tumultuous uncles chant a famous Elvis song about the romantic agony that she calls the soundtrack of her life. "We can not continue together," sing the uncles, "with suspicious minds."
And what is it Insurrecto seems to say about America and the Philippines. We are bound by history, says Apostol, but our relationship can never be really happy until everyone is honest about what it is and what it is did.
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