Re-Read: Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol, read with Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture by Caroline Hau
“I am a coward. I do not have the imagination to possess affection. To be honest, I have never been able to envision society as a creature with genuine warmth or pumping heart.”
On the romanticism of the colonization of the Philippines, brought forth by Magellan’s arrival:
“A charming romance. Fancy dress-up for the evils that occurred in the colonizer’s name.”
Reeling, still, from the return of another Marcos to Malacañang, I decided to re-read Apostol. I read it once before, in a fugue state, too caught up in the language and the imagery of a pretty patient boarded up in New York (like the wife in the conjugal dictatorship) to really linger. I first read it as a sophomore in the same university as Sol and Jed and Soli, too like the narrator to surface something genuine. It didn’t take.
Now, though. With Hau in the margins and my own pencil marks, I am gutted. The amnesiac telling the same story, over and over, is told to forget it to make room for new memories. Is told to tell stories in the present tense. Everyone else, her doctor says, has already forgotten. How cruel. “It’s horrible,” the artist says, “how we forget the past, just like that—we forget how war has killed the best of us.”
Apostol is a master story-teller, that rare Twitter invention: someone who can write write. Her language repeats because it’s what the tongue remembers. It cuts like an accusation. It is accented with the inflections of this burgis girl who cannot pay attention during EDs in huts for all the roaches there, who retches at the funeral of those killed in protests. Apostol writes pointedly, “You are who survived.” Caroline Hau, academic-historian, herself a writer, rephrases it more plainly: the non-elite is the victim of the elite, killed off by two rich kids hatching an assassination plot. So what now?
It’s terrifying and comforting both that this is a story familiar in the now. Apostol tells it with grace.
