The Fractured Politics of Naming

Such twins and shadows abound in Insurrecto. Bodies, as well as names, seem to shift and sub in: American tourist and Filipino translator, photographer and revolutionary, wife and mistress, writer and filmmaker, actor and character. The book, like the films within it, takes place on “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; and the problem of lapsed time—in which simultaneous acts of writing are the illusions that sustain a story.”

This isn’t mere metafictional play. In an essay about the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Apostol writes: “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 both enacts and reacts to this fictionalization: Casiana Nacionales is written (or rewritten) by the American outsider Chiara, while Magsalin inserts her own characters into the more recent history surrounding Chiara’s father. The doubled strands of the novel read like an exaggeration, a satire of postcolonial literary theory, of our multicultural studies: we know the story we learned as children was wrong, but what is the right one?

The tidier narrative, in our postcolonial reckoning—that there is a single right story buried under decades of telling the wrong one—is teased apart in Apostol’s work

The problem lies in the question: one. The tidier narrative, in our postcolonial reckoning—that there is a single right story buried under decades of telling the wrong one—is teased apart in Apostol’s work. “Anti-colonial critics at one point suggested that one must isolate ‘Filipino-ness’ or ‘Argentine-ness’ and find some pure, untrammeled state beyond history, when the ‘native’ was pristine and untouched by the foreign,” Apostol writes in that essay. “But the Filipino or Argentine or Kenyan or Indian is necessarily hybrid, condemned to deal with the past: history makes our identities irreducibly multiple.”

Our identities, all of them: Chiara is no simple villain, and Magsalin no forthright hero. The relationship between filmmaker and translator—as, perhaps, between colonizer and colonized—is a mutually influential one, its borders shifting and yet sustained. Who gets to define the other? Who gets to realize her script? In Insurrecto these questions thrive, unanswered. “Her protagonist, what do you know, is female,” we are told, upon meeting Magsalin in the novel’s opening pages. “The woman’s name has an arbitrary Italian flavor—Chiara or Lucia… Magsalin has yet to decide.” The tidier narrative—white outsider, appropriated culture—is upended at this moment, the balance of power flipped. Are we meant to believe or to doubt this particular meta-moment? Who is telling this story? And who is being told?

“An identity is questioned only when it is menaced,” says Baldwin, “when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.” We happily admit the influence of others when it suits us: the genetic traits and learned habits inherited from our parents, the acclimations we make to live with lovers or friends. Less easily acknowledged, perhaps, is how we are molded by Baldwin’s menacing strangers—how, as Apostol says of Borges’s stories, “through our enemies we conceive ourselves.”

Chiara and Magsalin are not enemies—not exactly. But Apostol plumbs the ways in which they see themselves reflected or refracted by each other’s lenses: personal, political, artistic. Both characters are familiar with such shaping. The translator Magsalin, living in America as an adult, finds her personal signifiers indicate differently in this distant country—“‘Sweet Caroline’ was the Boston Red Sox song, not Tio Exequiel’s signature karaoke anthem”—and the traits she would claim make her appear other than she knows herself to be: a mistranslation, or a misunderstanding. As a child visiting her father’s distant film set, Chiara plays with the Filipino orphans brought on as extras for a filmed massacre: “They let Chiara play the villain, while they play dead.” Daughter of the director, daughter of colonizers, Chiara knows her role.

They are not exactly enemies, these descendants of the occupiers and the occupied, but neither are they friends. Apostol offers no sugary solution to centuries-old enmity, even as Chiara and Magsalin discover overlapping motives behind their ostensibly professional missions: the men they have loved—a father, a husband—are dead, each (probably) by his own hand. Each woman travels to Samar because it is the last place he was seen or the place he was known or the place from which she will, finally, be able to move forward. “For the survivor of suicide, everything is possible and nothing is true,” writes Apostol. “A locked-room puzzle.” What Chiara and Magsalin find in each other is an intellectual equal, a sparring partner, someone holding another possible key to that locked room. “To encounter oneself is to encounter the other,” writes Baldwin, and vice-versa, perhaps. No treacly sisterhood is required, no burying of hatchets, just the other’s knowledge, the other’s otherness. “Difference produces perspective,” Apostol writes.

The endpapers of Insurrecto are covered with the doubled photographs of a stereoscope, a neat metaphor for the twinned visions competing and collaborating in these pages. “Is it wishful thinking that the enemy might be a reliable witness?” Apostol asks, of the white photographer documenting the Balangiga massacre. “The troubling, doubling quality of her Tru-Vision prints goes out of fashion, and the world moves on to other fare—praxinoscopes, Brownie cameras, moving pictures—in her world’s search for a way to view itself whole, given the limits of human stereopsis.” The question of wholeness is an impossible one, for persons and nations alike; we are made of innumerable parts. “She does not quite know how to put it, this fragmenting sense of herself,” Magsalin thinks, “except that it is the only way she can get at who she is.”

To deny that fragmentation, to insist on a clear, singular, and irrefutable self or purpose or story or country, is not merely false but reeking of bad faith. Throughout her work, Apostol lays out the sinister underpinnings of such an insistence; she asks, in her essay on Borges, “What is it about the writer in the First World that wants the Third World writer to be nakedly political, a blunt instrument bludgeoning his world’s ills?” Insurrecto is a potent rebuttal to such bluntness, parsing the intersections of politics and art with the finer tools of humor, skepticism, and playful misdirection—the camera sees what you want it to see, after all. “[It is] an act that must occur without the reader’s noticing,” Apostol writes of Magsalin naming Chiara—and so we think we notice everything, while the good stuff gets the drop on us. Apostol’s novel is so whip-smart and winking that when the great pain came, it grabbed me by the throat.

And there is great pain here, beneath the play of language. “The story Magsalin wishes to tell is about loss,” Apostol writes. “Any emblem will do: a French-Tunisian with an unfinished manuscript, an American obsessed with a Filipino war, a filmmaker’s possible murder, a wife’s sadness.” The possibilities splay like translations, each with its merits and difficulties. There is no single right answer here, either, where the question is how to give grief a form that might be grasped and carried, able to be endured.

“[D]on’t worry about it,” Magsalin tells Chiara, when the American tries to sing a tune she learned in Tagalog as a child. “No one ever gets that song right.” We might say the same of any attempt to translate or assimilate, to speak another’s language: the fissures remain visible, the choices endless and fraught. Set on those very fault lines, Insurrecto makes a powerful argument for the value of the attempt, nonetheless. It is easier, yes, to tell a single story, to stick to one language or country or culture, to elide the many people you are into a unified and definable self. It is easier, but it is a lie, and great fiction tells the multiplicitous truth. “I did not revise the manuscript,” Magsalin tells Chiara, having read and added to the American’s screenplay. “I presented the possibilities of translation. A version, one might say.”

“How do you know that your perspective does not distort the story?” asks Chiara, and Magsalin replies: “How do you know that yours has not?” We should demand such distortion of our stories, not merely tolerate it: how else to show the camera along with what it wants us to see? Magsalin is a translator; she knows that the act of translation is never unbiased, never impartial, never a clear and unblemished screen through which we might glimpse some untarnished fact. Neither is the act of writing. This is its motive—its traitorous center—and its strength.