Gina Apostol
New York, New York
Editor’s Preface
I had not read General Mata’s journals when I spoke last year to a Mürkian psychoanalyst about the possibility of hysterical abreactions occurring on a national scale. This was during a lull at a conference at a floating restaurant on Manila Bay (or was it a fish market in Kowloon?—I can’t keep those junkets straight). There was a full moon, and we could see the marble columns of a colonial building nearby—a monstrous wreck that gave the shantytown around it a nasty glamor. The scholar was an unshaved blonde, the kind one often meets at academic conferences. She was expounding on independence movements as “macroscopic examples of aggressivity in the analysand” while she fondled some frangipani and picked through the pectorals of a Peking duck.
It struck me as she manhandled vertebrae and munched on the fronds, or vice versa, that academic blondes are aggressive bores.
To compare our revolution—the crux of our history—to some hysterical patient on a hypothetical couch was just icing on her slanderous cake.
But what did I have to offer her as evidence of the irreducible reality of our history? I knew no scholar, no text, not even a comic book that spoke of the Philippine War of Independence without disturbing solipsism or deeply divided angst. It’s a history that invites neurotics to speak up.
It’s no great surprise that it ends up a vulgar patient in obscure neo-Freudian journals.
When the publisher Trina Trono described to me the Raymundo Mata manuscript—an excessive term, perhaps, for the mess she held up in her hands—I have to say I was skeptical. She held up an assortment of unpaginated notes and mismatched sheaves packed in a ratty biscuit tin and stuffed in a tattered medical bag, the edges of the papers curled up in permanent rust.
Then she thrust into my hands another stack, a neatly typed translation, with notes.
But even then.
I was not persuaded.
In my experience, the voice of the revolutionist is clouded by conflicting purposes.
He is vulnerable to the cynicism of a world that by the time he is done has sadly changed.
Our revolution failed.
Let’s face it.
We drove off a Spanish empire that had already given up the ghost then the Americans beat us to a pulp.
They had guns.
We wore slippers.
Who are we kidding?
Everyone acknowledges we got it worse than Vietnam, and the Battle of Manila Bay was way back in 1898.
We lost big time.
Why else do we have postcolonial conferences except to invite everyone to pick at our scabs?
Typically the revolutionist’s memoir emerges when the hero is beyond innocence—when the dream is dead. The gap between the irreducible (the mad flipflop fever, the trauma that cannot be spoken) and the speech that cradles it (unnaturally chronological, with suspicious clarity, and keloids of rancor garnished by footnotes) is only natural.
After all, as the blonde scholar said, and I quote with disgust: “the gap between language and reality is the bane of the human condition.”
Unquote.
However, in the histories of our revolution, this is magnified by the speaker’s own acceptance of his Fall. We’re left with the pathos of which he cannot speak, a rotten trick, if you ask me.
This is the tragic underlying note of all our histories. And so I felt this familiar troubling pain, below the diaphragm, near the liver, when I picked up the tin-can journals of Raymundo Mata, now conveniently stashed into this fine translated state.
My surprise was great as I read on. That the storyteller is, I must admit, flawed, maybe mad, does not diminish my faith in his story.
In fact, his madness amplifies its truth.
Estrella Espejo
Quezon Institute and Sanatorium
Tacloban, Leyte
December 17, 2004
Translator’s Note
It was difficult to approach this text with calm as a translator. It is linguistically deranged. One notebook was in spastic code, squiggles and symbols that I think were Japanese characters, hiragana or katakana—I don’t know anything about Japanese. The halting, hallucinatory rendition of those moments arises from the fact that I could barely understand what he was saying.
Interspersed throughout his papers are sheaves that seem to be his private diary, written in the throes of his insomnia (he was well-known for his nocturnalism; there is that sordid legend in his hometown about certain bestial acts he performed in private, in bat caves; I won’t get into that here). These intermittent outpourings are mostly in General Mata’s first language, a curious variant of Tagalog. They portray an admirable grasp of vulgarisms, licentious metaphors, off-color puns. Throughout the diary his prose is remarkably “quotidian,” some call it “rakishly colloquial,” not to mention “peevishly colonial.” As has been said at that last conference in Kauai (or Kowloon, who cares): “he favors loose speech when he writes on loose leaf . . .”
Neat antanaclasis there, Professor Estrella!
But the challenge was to translate the richness of Raymundo’s tongues into singular, common English. I tried my best.
In this way he can sound shockingly modern, with an almost lurid Byronic passion. The lapses in civility that bedevil the text may include my own frugal powers of speech. Trust me, I found faint comfort in the vulgate of our times.
Dr. Diwata Drake refers to some of these passages in her justly celebrated [criminal] monograph on the [purloined] Mata papers (but I believe she has since returned those translations). She discusses the suggestive instances of “frustration, aggressivity, regression—the triad of resistances that mark revolutionary pathology,” but really, if you think about it, he was probably drunk.
The original papers are not pristine. Some sections have been lost forever. A few
