Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol

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? What is our wait for? I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else’s construction, and yet as she watches, she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists.

Inversions provide a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, do not require logical coherence. This is the case of the Bahasa-Indonesian prayer in Peter Weir’s movie. The Indonesian prays the “Our Father” in Tagalog, not Bahasa—that is, he need not be coherent. It’s the concept that counts. Inversions are opposed to obversions, that is, providing a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, are generally insulting. The Ewok dialogue in the Star Wars prequel, a few choice Tagalog epigrams, is a basic Filipino fuck-you to the universe. Diversions, like the irate Filipino farm workers in Stockton, California, in Anderson’s The Master, are plausible, though irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. What Magsalin expects is that Chiara’s script will require reversions: a set of matching signifiers that, if reversed, will portray the privileged language as in fact the other, and vice versa. Perversions, of course, produce scant good. Lastly, conversions, in which one exists like a vestigial body, a desiring corpus, occupied by the words of others, is the most difficult of these types of translations: Magsalin simply refuses to attempt them.

The script, as Magsalin sees it, creates that vexing sense of vertigo in stories within stories within stories that begin too abruptly, in medias res.

Her brain was a ball of hair in a bath drain, as miserably dense as it was inert.

She calls these reader moments the quibbles—when she gets stuck in the faulty notion that everything in a book must be grasped. Why should readers be spooked about not knowing all the details in a book about the Philippines yet surge forward with resolve in stories about France?

her passion confirming she had too hastily subscribed to them—It

When he was a boy, the gales released him from summer’s suffocations and the boredoms of Lent (a deathless monotony that turned the weak-willed against God)—he’d lie in wait for the cool winds, oddly welcoming, unlike the June monsoons.

The unstable nature of the filmmaker’s art paradoxically gave her a sense of fulfillment—as if, similarly unfinished, she had license to make of her own life whatever she wished.

Hagiographical décor, windows of truth without a ledge, hopes grounded on partial knowledge. For the survivor of suicide, everything is possible and nothing is true. A locked-room puzzle.

Memory was her focus. Knowing is beside the point. But that is a thought she articulates only years later, with the benefit of distraction.

She will bury the facts of his life’s script the way he has stuck in details of the biography of Gus the Polar Bear, his unmade movie, into his colossal, subsequent films—curious details of desolation with resonance only to him. The secrets of her life with him she will also carry to her grave, with perhaps some details peeking through in rough spots, she can’t help it, but her choice is to be that life’s only reader, because what does anyone else have to do with it? It is nobody’s business. Not even the creator can know her part, that mystery writer Magsalin who draws her thin characterization—a rich widow in the South of France with unstable vision whose vagrancy is the mark of her sorrow, though such lingering unease, she thinks, is surely a weave, a sinuous braid of Manila hemp that sneaks through human lives. It must weave through all of us, this sense of horror, this solitude, the secret within the secret, and it is no one’s business to know.

His most eloquent screed was “To a Person Sitting in Darkness.” Everyone should read it, especially before reading Huckleberry Finn—his overt stance against imperialism during the Philippine-American War sheds light on all his work.

And for the people of the Philippines, for whom this book tries to keep memory, a history of revolution vital for our surviving: to tell the story of our resistance when our leaders pervert our past and to speak so that the world will know it, too—this book is also for you.

But the history of independence that Filipinos learn is really our revolution against Spain—we barely talk about the war that followed it, when our allies the Americans decided to occupy us when we mistakenly believed we would be given freedom after having helped to wage war against America’s enemy, also our enemy, Spain. Instead, America bought the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars in the Treaty of Paris, and the rest, as they say, was occupation.

It is only when the world of the colonizer includes the world of the colonized as part of his reality that such a world can heal itself.

On the other hand, I must inevitably read that world of the colonizer, in which I live, with at least two gazes. It’s simply a daily part of how I exist: the colonizer’s world is in fact also my reality—it is part of me—but I must simultaneously see this world awry, in an inverse gaze, in order to see myself whole. This is why libraries have been such a refuge for me, from the time I was a child. A library is a place of multiple worlds. It offers multiple identities. And because it is so, in a library paradoxically one can always be oneself.

we called it the US-Marcos dictatorship because the man Ferdinand Marcos’s murderous rule was propped up by the United States during the Cold War as hedge against communism in Asia.

John Barth’s book called Chimera and The Sot-Weed Factor—The Sot-Weed Factor is an extremely beautifully crafted book about early American history that’s so rich in detail it seems practically footnoted.