To even begin trying to understand Gina Apostol’s perplexing, historically- and politically-interweaving spectrum of a novel about the Philippines during its pre-turn of the century revolutionary era, “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,” a reader has to get out from under the tried and true empirical norms of the classical literary universe and take a leap into the murky zone that lies between fact and fiction, culture and politics, method and disorientation, history and mythmaking, subjective memory and objective past.
“Raymundo Mata” is not the first time that Apostol has revealed herself as a profanely creative postmodern novelist. “Raymundo Mata” is her third-work of fiction and it is standard Gina Apostol, even more so. It is usually a good idea to prepare oneself mentally before starting an Apostol novel. It won’t be easy to avoid getting tired, frustrated, or dazed outright by the challenging structure, direction, and content of her stories.
She writes in the author’s note that “This book [Raymundo Mata] was planned as a puzzle: traps for the reader, dead-end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of tongue.” However, despite taking the notion of poetic license to an entirely different level, Apostol remains loyal to the anchor that is Philippine history: “at the same time, I wished to be true to the past I was plundering.”
There have been a plethora of works, both fiction and non-fiction, about the Philippine revolutionary period that saw the end of 400 years of Spanish colonial rule. But while “Raymundo Mata” is put together from the heterogeneous material of the Philippine revolutionary generation, the novel is no ordinary literary memorial or historical document of that time. As stated explicitly in a description of the book, Apostol the novelist is the proprietor of “anarchic modes of narrative” in this fictitious chronicle of an invented Filipino revolutionary.
Who is Raymundo Mata supposed to be? To answer that question, we must keep in mind that Apostol uses her artistic abilities to construct a multifaceted, multivocal, and multiperspective journal of this character’s life. Difficult as it may be to come to terms with, the further one reads into the novel, the more labyrinthian it becomes to pin Mata down.
In what must have been a labor-intensive endeavor on the part of Apostol, we discover that Raymundo Mata is man of several parts: at once a man of science and verse, of sentimentality and politics, he is a purblind revolutionary and bibliophile who fittingly “From birth...was immersed in the world of make-believe.”
In that vein, Apostol’s contrived translator Mimi C. Magsalin forewarns that “The man you will find in the manuscript has no approximate precursor in the annals of the [Philippine] revolution, perhaps even of humankind.” Magsalin is also one of the memoir’s footnote contributors. There are two others, Estrella Espejo and Diwata Drake. Their collective input paves the way for towering skepticism, disagreement, and hermeneutical contention. As each woman takes turns trying to talk over the other, their hodgepodge volleys of historical assertions are untethered at times to calm deliberation or expression.
While Mata’s life chronicle is evidently tilted towards being a keenly disjointed, centrifugal text that is, as Magsalin notes, “linguistically deranged” and potholed with “spastic code, squiggles and symbols” that were “halting” and “hallucinatory”, the novel does converge around the context of the Philippine Revolution which started in 1896.
Whenever the topic of the Philippine Revolution is broached, the historical figure of Jose Rizal is inevitably found at the center of any such study or discussion. Internalized and romanticized by Filipinos as a national hero, Rizal is paid the proper respect by Mata (“Ah, Rizal. I met him you know.”) by having affectedly perused through the latter’s iconic Filipino postcolonial novel “Noli Me Tangere.” This in turn inspired Mata to seek out the future national martyr for himself.
Rizal’s presence reverberates and intervenes throughout much of “Raymundo Mata.” This is a reflection of the man’s lofty and ubiquitous stature in Philippine history. Combining witticism and nationalistic prestige, Apostol writes to that effect: “two things shape the Filipino; puns and Jose Rizal.”
“Raymundo Mata” directs our gaze towards the post-Spanish Filipino struggle for nationhood which was thwarted by America’s expansionist ambitions. Filipinos were able to expel the Spanish colonizers only to have their indigenous polity subverted by another colonizer, the United States:
“We drove off a Spanish empire that had already given up the ghost then the Americans beat us to a pulp...They had guns. We wore slippers. Who are we kidding?”
In the novel, America’s colonial encounter in the Philippines comes flooding back into the social, cultural, historical, and psychological spaces that surround and engage with Filipinos and their identities as a people and as a bodypolitik.
Apostol compels both her Filipino and American audiences to reexamine their joined history without past preconceptions or misrepresentations. She tacitly interrogates, through Mata’s remembrances and her trio of commentators, America’s openly-altruistic but controversially-opportunistic and violent crusade to “civilize” the Filipinos after the Spanish were expelled from the Philippines.
It was Nietzsche who said that there are no facts, only interpretations. Like-mindedly, Apostol seems to look quite favorably on his doctrine as her own literary-political article of faith, to be found in the novel, would suggest: “Like a novel revolution is never finished.”
Manifestly worthy of being called an erudite confluence of writing skill, organization, and compilation, “Raymundo Mata” is deserving of being raised as a dynamic living history of the Philippines—-as far as a work of fiction can go—-specifically its revolutionary phase.
ALLEN GABORRO
Comments
Post a Comment