Also by Gina Apostol
Bibliolepsy
Gun Dealers’ Daughter
Insurrecto
Copyright © 2009 by Gina Apostol
All rights reserved.
This edition first published in 2021 by
Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Apostol, Gina, author.
Title: The revolution according to Raymundo Mata / Gina Apostol.
Description: New York, NY : Soho Press, Inc., 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019059158
ISBN 978-1-64129-183-5
eISBN 978-1-64129-184-2
International Paperback ISBN 978-1-64129-277-1
Classification: LCC PR9550.9.A66 R48 2021 | DDC 823’.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059158
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Arne
Dicit ei Iesus, “Noli me tangere: nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem; meum vade autem ad fratres meos et dic eis ascendo ad Patrem meum et Patrem vestrum et Deum meum et Deum vestrum.”
Venit Maria Magdalene adnuntians discipulis quia
vidi Dominum et haec dixit mihi.
Jesus said unto her, Touch me
not: for I am not yet ascended to my
Father; but go to my brethren, and say
unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and
your Father, and to my God, and your God.
Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples:
I have seen the Lord and he told these things unto me.
John 20:17-18
Noamla berlemla, mi ra puada vimgoes am at.
Jose Rizal, “Profiles,” Miscellaneous Writings
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;
