Author interview: Gina Apostol

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure to meet US-based Filipino author Gina Apostol, whose work I first encountered in the anthology “Manila Noir,” so I quickly agreed to interview her when I received the invitation some months back.

I read her two books, “The Gun Dealers’ Daughter” and “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,” which proved to be quite an interesting experience. I enjoy non-linear narratives (because they mess with your mind, haha constantly make you think), and while these were not easy reads (the vocabulary is intimidating!), these two books showcase some darn fine storytelling, not to mention a historiographic wonderland for both postcolonials and postmodernists.

I read “The Gun Dealers’ Daughter” first and was surprised to find it was a coming of age novel. Soledad “Sol” Soliman is a young woman trying to come to terms with a traumatic past, struggling to emerge from her dreamy haze to piece together her memories and discover what her psyche is blocking out. And while there are entirely too many novels set in Martial Law Philippines, I enjoyed the deeply personal way the novel tackles this period in history, making it Sol’s own story and telling it in a different way.

“The Revolution According to  Raymundo Mata” is a metafictional delight set in my favorite period of Philippine history, the Philippine Revolution. Raymundo Mata is a fictionalized historical character, whose journals are being translated and annotated by scholars. As Raymundo tells his story, another story is being told in the footnotes, as the translator Mimi C. Magsalin and two rival scholars Diwata Drake and Estrella Espejo begin to create meaning out of the text (and then some!). I loved the way Raymundo Mata was neatly slotted into history (as a childhood friend of Aguinaldo and a patient of Rizal), but I enjoyed the comedy happening in the footnotes even more: the petty catfight brewing between Diwata and Estrella, and the ongoing commentary on the text, reflecting the way history is never fully objective. As they get deeper into the text, more questions arise, leaving the reader to form their own opinions on this historical mystery.

 Here’s the transcript of my interview with Gina Apostol:

Q: How did you “fall into” writing?

A: I was at UP, I was in Diliman. I was taking writing classes and eventually became a writing major. But I knew I wanted to do fiction, and the writing program at Diliman — and I think it’s still the same — you do all the genres: two workshops in poetry, two workshops in drama, and two workshops in fiction. But I always knew I wanted to do fiction.

Q: When did you first get published?

A: In the Philippines, UP Press took “Bibliolepsy,” but before that Anvil published “Catfish Arriving in Little Schools,” so there were three writers and I think they published about four or five of my [short] stories. So that was actually the first one, they had an imprint of contemporary fiction. “Bibliolepsy” was my first novel published by UP Press; it won the National Book Award and then after that, Anvil also published “Raymundo Mata” and “Gun Dealers’ Daughter.” I got an agent in the States, and W.W. Norton took the book [“The Gun Dealers’ Daughter”] the first week that it was being sold.

Q: Tell me more about the structure for “Raymundo Mata.” What inspired you to tell the story this way?

A: I wanted to do a comic novel on the Revolution because I thought it’s always so serious. Palaging patriotic, ganyan ganyan. At the same time, I was studying Rizal. I was kind of obsessed with Rizal (and I always say, if you don’t want to fall into a wormhole, don’t study Rizal! It keeps going on and on and on). The structure of “Raymundo Mata” happened, because in order to do a reading of our history, it’s very clear that you need multiple voices. And when people talk about history, there’s always this very personal and opinionated view of history. When you look at our historical texts, it’s all provisional, and you can see different historical incidents in so many different ways. In fact many of the texts have been found to be frauds, hoaxes, and I thought that was very interesting in terms of the novel. Because I needed multiple voices, I ended up having footnotes as a major part of the story, because it’s really people taking personal offense at historic events.

Q: What sources did you consult in writing this novel?

A: Most of my sources, if not all, but many, are at the back of the text. I practically read all of Rizal that I could. I read the two novels, I read “Makamisa.” “Makamisa” was very important to this novel; at the end I wanted to go back to “Makamisa.” I was very interested in the fact that it was unfinished, so what do you do with that text? And then I read tons of memoirs of the Revolution. My favorite was Santiago Alvarez’ “The Katipunan and the Revolution,” but I’ve [also] read two memoirs of Aguinaldo, and the most beautiful one is that of Mabini, “La Revolucion Filipina” — very well written. I’ve read Ricarte, minor people like the musician Julio Nakpil, who became the husband of Gregoria Bonifacio. I read a lot of memoirs.

You read these memoirs in what language?

Different languages. The memoirs of Rizal on his days in Ateneo, I found that at the New York Public Library, there was a version in Tagalog and one in Spanish. There was no version English. So what I did was I translated sections of the memoir — very interesting memoir because he’s very young, cute, emo, sensitive — and I used sections of my translations of the Spanish (using the Tagalog as my crib so I could compare my Spanish) of “Memorias” for “Raymundo Mata,” and that’s where the voice for Raymundo Mata came from. But the Aguinaldo memoirs, “Saloobin” is in Tagalog but there’s an English translation. The Ricarte I read in English. “Katipunan and the Revolution” was in Tagalog but it was also translated into English so I read both versions.

Q: In “Gun Dealers’ Daughter” your narrative was non-linear as well — you really like experimenting with structure?

A: I’m very interested in structure as meaning. Structure is meaning, and the way the book is stuctured tells you something about what the book is about. And you can see from the openness of the memoir style with the footnotes in “Raymundo Mata,” that says something about the concept of history that I’m trying to talk about. The same  with “Gun Dealer’s Daughter,” the structure is, I think, about a psychological meaning. The circle structure. And that also came from the recognition that this girl, who experienced something so traumatic that makes her feel guilty, she couldn’t tell her story as if she were normal. I actually had to revise the story, because when I ended with the end, which is what the beginning is, I realized either she’s very evil, or she wasn’t hurt, so I realized that it didn’t fit the psychological trauma that I went through in writing her novel — I went through it, too — and it didn’t make sense so I revised it with the circle structure, the doublings because of her inability to see herself.


Q:
This interest in history appears in all your novels. Where does this interest come from?

A: “Bibliolepsy” also had something on the EDSA [Revolution]. I think my interest in history had to do with the fact that I didn’t know it. My late husband, he got very interested in it and kind of ended up knowing more about Rizal than I did, and I just thought I’d get into it as well. I read “Katipunan and the Revolution,” which is a very funny text, and I thought it would be interesting to do a novel on the Revolution from the other side of it, from its comedy. I just wanted to write a comic novel; I wanted to write something funny, and that was what I did.

Q: Describe your writing process.

A: I have an idea basically, and I have a concept of structure. I think structure is really important. Like with “Raymundo Mata,” I wanted it to be multi-vocal; the focus keeps fragmenting, but at the end something is going to be revealed about a lost text and that was going to be “Makamisa.” I did not know how “Makamisa” was going to enter into it [at that point]. The same with”Gun Dealers’ Daughter” — a linear novel, A to B, but it’s supposed to end with her in the mansion and her recollection of her life.

The novel I’m working on [now], there’s two brothers telling the story of the Balangiga incident of 1901, but they tell the stories in different ways. It’s also going to be a double narrative, one is going to be a collaborator, involved with the Americans, and one is going to be revolutionary. Texts are always part of it. Like with ‘Raymundo Mata,” I was doing the other story of Rizal; everything that Raymundo Mata does is following Rizal’s texts; Rizal is always shadowed there. For this one I thought it would be very interesting to do [Jose] Garcia Villa. The collaborator keeps quoting (and the reader isn’t supposed to know) Jose Garcia Villa; it’s in the voices of the Americans, speaking Garcia Villa’s poetry. The other guy also keeps quoting Jose Garcia Villa but in Filipino, and they’re all from the revolutionary side. It’s an experiment with text, like in “Raymundo Mata,” I didn’t know what was going to happen if I kept plagiarizing Rizal in a comic way. I don’t know what’s going to happen if I kept plagiarizing Jose Garcia Villa where he is both the colonizer and the colonized. Basically, I read his father Simeon Villa’s memoir, Col. Villa was Aguinaldo’s memoirist in the last days of the American war. I only learned that when I was doing research for this new novel. It’s called “William McKinley’s World,” and I realized that it was so interesting that there was this guy writing in Spanish, hated the Americans, had to pledge allegiance, and probably had a bad life from having to live under the Americans. And then his son becomes the poet in American English, who is disowned by his father and abandons his country to be in New York City with E.E. Cummings and all. He doesn’t talk about the nation; very little. He does it in his short stories, but not in the poetry.

Q: Do you write in fits and starts, or in one massive effort?

A: When I do the first draft, I do it in the times where I have a long period to write, which is the summer. I have around three months to write in the summer. “Raymundo Mata” for instance, I finished it because I was on Sabbatical, all in one go. “Gun Dealers’ Daughter” was also written in one go as I was doing residency at Phillips Exeter. The revision though, goes on forever, and that takes a long, long time to do. I think writing a novel is all in revision. Pero mahirap talaga ang first draft. I always have a hard time with my first draft.

Q: Is “William McKinley’s World” also going to be released internationally?

A: I’m hoping. I haven’t shown it to my agent yet; I’m just writing it. But I talk about it so my agent will know.

Q: Who are your literary influences?

A: I’ve written about Jorge Luis Borges; I’m very interested in the way he thinks about the story, his notion of doubles and mirrors. I think though that I read him from the point of view of the postcolonial, which is not the way he’s usually read. You’re very aware somehow in Borges of the fictionality of the real world and you’re just constructed and made up of texts, and that reverberates with me in the postcolonial, that we are also constructed usually by the colonizer who usually hates us and take our land and change our identity. We’re these fictions made up by other people and made up by texts, and the texts that make us up are these colonizer texts where we are not seen in a way that allows us to be whole. We’re seen from the point of view of the enemy and we have to read ourselves through layers and layers of texts to uncover who we are, and I think that’s where my novels come from. And that’s why Borges is so interesting to me, because he does it, and people think abou thim in this philosophical way, but I read him as a Filipino working from a postcolonial perspective and his structures work very well.

Q: What is your advice to aspiring writers?

A: I think you just have to sit down and write everyday. It’s not an issue of inspiration. I think it’s good to know where you might be going. So much of a novel is accidental, but to have a sense of where you wish to go is useful. At the same time that when you’re just sitting there, you do discover things by just writing.

Also, to recognize that you will always be rejected. Constant rejection is part of writing, and I don’t think you should take it personally.

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Many thanks to Ms. Gwenn Galvez, Anvil Publishing, and Powerbooks for the interview.

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The Gun Dealers’ Daughter, paperback, 4/5 stars (review copy)The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, paperback, 4.5/5 stars (review copy)

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