Gina Apostol is giving a talk this Saturday, April 5, 2014, 2 pm at the University of the Philippines Cebu campus in Lahug. She will be speaking of her novels and “Historiographic Metafiction”. The talk is open to everyone free of charge.
Gina Apostol is a novelist born in Manila and currently residing in New York. She was awarded the 2013 PEN Open Book Award for her book “The Gun Dealer’s Daughter”, a story set in the martial law years in the Philippines about a woman who “transforms from a bookish rich girl to a communist rebel” caught somewhat between love and her allegiance to Mao.
Excerpt: At first, we never had encounters. You had to find the trick to it—deserted leafy places, usually after midnight. You had to be ready to run. We had near-brushes. Silly, delirious moments, with my heart thumping so hard that I heard it in my hand, my brow, a loud, regular drill, my body like a drum. A rush in my cunt, a delicate throbbing. We were never caught.
We became quick, minimalists.
We stuck to one phrase, monotonous but efficient.
Apostol’s works raises in us issues related to veracity and the tension between history and alternative accounts of it set in fiction. The arguments orbit around questions of the completeness of historical accounts. Are there facts and sections of the narrative left out or erased in the historical accounts?
As for instance, the fact that in Western art history, there are no women artists mentioned until the late 1800s when Berthe Morisot came to be mentioned with other Impressionists. Does this erasure mean there were no women painters before her? Or were they simply deemed by history writers to be unimportant or not important enough to be mentioned? Which question leads us immediately to the question of value.
Who decides how important an artist is? What measures are applied to decide this? What purposes does the historical account serve? Which question raises another: Who is history written for? Who is the intended audience? Who “buys” the text? Why?
Which is why there is and there should be a blurring of the border which divides history from fiction. We think of fiction as fantasy. But is it? The fiction writer does not exist in a creative vacuum. The fact of language encapsulates him or her inside a specific reality with its own brand of truthfulness and veracity, its own “laws of physics”. And inevitably, the writer can only describe himself or herself no matter the layers of persona he or she may hide under.
No matter how fantastic a world the writer conjures it will still be haunted by peculiar truths governing text and how it is written and read. And what if it is not the purpose of the writer to conjure a fantastic world?
What if his or her purpose was to write of the “real” world described by personal unverifiable realities? What if the purpose were to reinsert into the text what has been erased? What if we presumed that every “remembered” story is fiction? Or what if we said, there are some “truths” that can only be truthfully described that way?
Gina Apostol studied at UP and earned her M.A. in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University. Her first novel, “Bibliolepsy” won the 1998 Philippine Book Award for fiction. “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata” is a “comic-historical novel-in-footnotes about the Philippine war for independence against Spain and America in 1896.
She is currently working on a novel about the Philippine-American war, William Mackinley’s World.” “Conversations with Gina Apostol” is facilitated by UP Cebu’s Creative Writing Workshop Committee.
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