Author’s Note on the American Edition

In 1998, a fellowship granted by Phillips Exeter Academy allowed me to finish the first draft of what became my third published novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, and begin the first chapter of my next work, based vaguely on a detail in Katipunan and the Revolution, the engaging memoirs of Santiago Alvarez, a general in the Philippine war against Spain. I remember the solitude and satisfaction of beginning the text that became The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata: the stillness of that spring midnight in New Hampshire, when I began a farcical reconstruction of an anecdote in Alvarez’s book—the evening when Emilio Aguinaldo (who will later wage war against the Americans after winning his war against Spain) rides the kalesa with the blind future katipunero Raymundo Mata. I was laughing as I wrote what I thought would be the comic novel’s first chapter (it is Entry #25 in the finished draft). There is nothing like the first pages of a new work—when one has finally discarded the trepidation and the horror of beginning—and just begins. The horror of beginning a new work lies in the immensity of its blankness. Any new novel leaves you on your own, worse than on a desert island because it is a desertion and bereftness of your own making. You build toward the angst of those first words, and so the frank release of that first chapter, when you begin, is an unspeakable pleasure, because to be honest: before you begin, it always seems impossible.

For a long time, I had only those first pages. I finished the book nine years later. I published it in the Philippines ten years ago. Revising the book for this American edition was like that first page: it was simply a pleasure.

This book was planned as a puzzle: traps for the reader, dead-end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of tongue. But at the same time, I wished to be true to the past I was plundering. My concept of Raymundo, an actual but unknown historical figure, is cut out of imagined cloth, but I decided to follow his times as much as I could. For me, a powerful reason to write novels like these is that their construction matches my sense of reality. A colonized country is the overt result of various others shaping its sense of self. The novel’s multiple voice, which refracts, realigns, repositions texts and viewpoints from awry angles, ruptured plots, confused tongues, and an almost heedless anachronistic sense of the past, is for me a potent way to fathom and portray the unfinished “reality” of such a nation. (And I’m not so sure if this hypertextuality is not true of all nations.)

Here is an example: the notion of the Philippines, in a sense, was produced by a novel. Harold Augenbraum, the scholar on the history of translation who translated Rizal for Penguin Classics, tells me the Philippines seems unique in its enduring yet insolubly mediated relation to its seminal book. The national hero Jose Rizal’s first work, called Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), inspired the mass movement that launched revolution against Spain. That novel was written in Spanish. At this point in history, Filipinos do not read that language. Because we were occupied by America by 1898 and officially ruled by it until 1946, we learn to read in English (at least I have) and speak at least 50 different other languages. I grew up with four languages: Waray, Tagalog, English, and Cebuano; at this point, I consider the first three of those native tongues (my spoken Cebuano is still funny). I was required to study a fifth, Spanish: but my learning of it was much removed from actual practice. Thus, Filipinos must read in translation the novel that begot us. It’s no wonder that, in my view, two things shape the Filipino: puns and Jose Rizal. The Rizal Law of 1956 required the reading of Rizal in schools—but it did not require reading him in the original. In a further spin, many of us study his novels in another colonizer’s tongue, English (as for me, I first read the Noli in Tagalog: one more colonizer, so the joke goes, for those not from Manila).

The essence of a country like the Philippines is that it seems to exist in translation—a series of textual mediations must be unraveled in order to reveal who or what it is. More precisely: it exists in the suspension of its myriad translations—it is alive in the void of its ghost-speeches. In this way, for me, Filipinos embody a definition of the human: a translated being. It seems to me we are all always only on the cusp of being understood, or understanding ourselves.

This novel in many ways is about recovery. The recovery of a text, a body; the recovery of a hero, a history; the recovery of a country, a past. It was miraculous to me how writing this novel was such a joy: when I began writing it in earnest, I looked forward to writing it every day. The power of Rizal, and the power of this history, is that these genii are inexhaustible: we must be glad for the patently unfinished and infuriating history that Filipinos have—in this way, it seems Filipinos must represent the complexity of everyone’s incomplete and indeterminate selves, and our endless, surprising resurrections.

 

Gina Apostol

New York, New York