Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol

  Rubinson Fur Emporium was often confused with Russeks Fifth Avenue, another fur emporium also owned by Russian emigrés. Rubinson Fur Emporium became a major investor of the movie world, under the guidance of its peripatetic heiress, Virginie Brasi, until Virginie was disowned for betraying her forefathers by converting to Roman Catholicism. See Virginie Brasi.

  Diane Arbus, née Nemerov (1923–1971) was a photographer and a granddaughter of furriers, the Nemerovs of Russeks Fifth Avenue. Like Rubinson Fur Emporium, Russeks Fifth Avenue boasted progeny of cultural significance—in Russeks’ case, Diane Arbus and her brother, poet Howard Nemerov.

  Piero della Francesca was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He grew up in the hills of Umbria. One can find his masterpiece, La Madonna del Parto (The Lady of Parturition), in the town of Monterchi, a stone’s throw over from his birthplace Sansepolcro—on the way to the Prada discount store, near Florence.

  Freddo of Gubbio, Italy, for the last few decades has tried making a film, a four-minute homage to Piero della Francesca, arranging abstract pale pigments against the background of the painter’s favored shade of blue, blu oltremare, once obtained by crushing lapis lazuli. The color is not obtainable in CGI.

  Cassandra Chase, born in 1872, brought her reflecting, clanking Zeiss glasses to other historic battles, including the war for Montenegrin independence (which bore her one son, Franz-Gyorgy) and the battle for the cooperative movement in America, located in Connecticut in the glorious philosophical years of the movement, the 1920s. Her autobiography, Times I Have Seen, Scenes I Have Captured, 1905, is out of print. A self-published album, Women at War, 1907, and her manifesto, The Collective Hope, 1921, are best printed on demand. Her masterpiece, “The Vespertine Pair,” has yet to be found, or so Professor Estrella Espejo has lamented on FB.

  Virginie Brasi, née Rubinson (1945– ), wished to take the veil after converting to Catholicism in 1981. But she had a change of heart going through Cambodia. In a passing moment in September, Virginie heard a song on the radio as she moved through haunting ruins in Phnom Penh. Beneath the high, nasal wail of the country’s old Khmer opera, she heard an ancient grief, something spoke to her, that faint tinkling of bells, from her childhood. She found herself swerving into the path of a farmer and his cow: she stopped the car. It was the tinkling of the bells at Central Park Zoo, misplaced in the sunlit, dying fall of the sounds of Khmer, but then the song transformed into a disco tune from the seventies, the preferred Western music of all the dead revolutionaries of Cambodia. It was an unnerving confabulation, and for a moment, she wished she were Buddhist.

  Balangiga, Samar, has been the eye of many storms. It was razed to the ground by Americans, following a people’s uprising on September 28, 1901, and by a supertyphoon, on November 8, 2013. The 1901 uprising of Balangiga may have been plotted by President Aguinaldo’s general in Samar, Vicente Lukban, but opinions are divided. Nevertheless, historians admit that the town’s daring action is fit for a costume zarzuela, with cross-dressing revolutionaries, divinely inspired heroine, chess maneuvers, and excellent use of ancient martial arts. The Americans found no women in Balangiga after the people’s successful attack on the US garrison, despite evidence of the women’s presence the night before when the great Chief, Abanador, got people drunk at a fake fiesta. Who knows who those women were, measuring out rice and bibingka to the unsuspecting soldiers? The legend is garbled. In retaliation, Americans burned all the huts in Balangiga, having found no one in them except a lone woman, a foreign photographer; then they also burned the outlying towns, Giporlos, Guiuan, San Roque, Lawaan, Quinapundan. The body count is debated. Numbers of the dead range from 2,500 to 50,000, depending on who is doing the counting, blamer or blamed. American forces in 1901 killed more people in Samar than history’s most powerful supertyphoon, Yolanda, also known as Haiyan.

  The statue of the valiant Valeriano Abanador, the Chief, or the Hero of Balangiga, remains standing in Balangiga despite the ravages of time, oblivion, and Typhoon Yolanda.

  The martial arts of chess and arnis saved the day. The great chronicler of the Balangiga incident, Professor Rolando Borrinaga, credits the intellectual arts of chess and arnis, the twin obsessions of Valeriano Abanador, the Chief, with the shadowy moves of the townspeople’s actions and the martial arts stealth of their plot. An impartial scholar, Borrinaga also notes how some absent-minded person left the door of the kumbento open and allowed some Americans to survive. Kudos and bravo to you, Professor Rolando Borrinaga, for your scholarship! History salutes you!

  Casiana Nacionales continued trading root crops and braided baskets of sinuous Manila hemp after the war. She died a pious old woman, with secrets. No one can find her tomb.

  Geronima of Balangiga is the historic term of praise for Casiana Nacionales, whose life is chronicled by the Leyte-Samar Historical Society, most pertinently in Glenda Lynne Tibe-Bonifacio’s “Deconstructing Maria in Geronima: The Balangiga Story,” which is hard to find. On the plaque of the plaza in Balangiga registering revolutionary names, Casiana’s feminine struggle stands alone. However, the ghosts of the washing women, cooks, gihay sweepers, water carriers, bolo women, female warriors, and so on who were part of the Philippine revolution also lie behind her august name. Women of war salute you with tears in their eyes, Geronimas of Balangiga! And kudos and bravo to you, Leyte-Samar Historical Society! Keep it up!

  Miss Spain, Amparo Muñoz, was crowned Miss Universe of 1974 at the brand-new Folk Arts Theater in Manila. Beauty pageants, boxing matches, the backdrop of films—The Year of Living Dangerously, The Unintended, Platoon, Apocalypse Now. The country in the seventies is a theater, a spectacle, a screen for global enterprises of war, fantasy, and sex. Curated by capitalism and dictatorship, the spectacle is watched over by another theatrical couple, the dictator and his wife, the Marcoses. Eleanor Coppola in her documentary Hearts of Darkness captures the times. She films her husband’s helicopters for his Vietnam film, rented from the dictator’s army, as they are recalled without excuse in the middle of filming. These dictator stunts ruin her husband’s budget, not to mention her wifely peace of mind. However, the length of the filming gave her an excuse to do her own thing, her documentary.

  Communists in real life in 1974 were being killed by Marcos’s machines, paid for by the American military machine, in turn framed and also parodied in Coppola’s cinematic machine, which in turn is an art spectacle we subsequently pay for and watch, et cetera. The Unintended, Professor Estrella Espejo points out, pushes the envelope: within the spiral of war and loops of art is an unknown war wrapped in another, a ghost in its machine.

  The bells of Balangiga, stolen by US soldiers as spoils of war, have still not been returned to Samar by the United States Army. Shame on you, men of Fort Warren in Cheyenne!

  Burning rice is not a good thing. The sacredness of rice can be seen in the numerous terms one may use to denote it. Just as there are a hundred names for God, the terms for rice include the following: sapaw (budding of rice grains on the stalk), tukol (overripe rice grains not harvested), ipa (chaff of rice grains), kumag (fine powder sticking to polished rice), tahip (the shaking of grains to remove husks or chaff), palay (unhusked, freshly harvested rice), bugas (uncooked but husked and polished rice), kan-on (cooked and boiled rice), am (broth made from boiled rice), goto (rice porridge with meat), suam (rice porridge with fish), bahog (generic broth mixed with rice), apa (wafer made of rice), busa (popped rice), ampaw (sweet puffed rice), malagkit (sticky rice), kata (rice bubbling as it starts to boil), saing (boiling rice), bahaw (leftover rice), tukag (burnt rice left at the bottom of a pot). There is no word for deliberately burned rice.

  General Jacob “Howling Wilderness” Smith was court-martialed in 1902. Theodore Roosevelt despised General Jacob Smith as a cursing, rabble-rousing drunk who ruined the army’s name. The general was also a financial speculator, a gambler, and a future convicted swindler. Roosevelt gave him a slap on the
wrist: Smith was retired but not jailed. No Americans were harmed in the making of their colony, the Philippines.

  Balangiga has been called “the worst massacre of Army soldiers in the decades after Custer’s defeat” at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Sites of trauma for Native Americans are linked to Balangiga: General Jacob “Howling Wilderness” Smith served at Wounded Knee, and many American soldiers were battle-tested in the Indian Wars, of which the Philippines was treated as an extension. However, many Civil War soldiers, Union and Confederate alike, were also happily reunited to exclude genocide in the Philippines. General John Pershing, chief of the US Expeditionary Forces of World War I, began his shining career in Mindanao. He was a Veteran Carabao. See Military Order of the Carabao. Balangiga contains analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward) of the US military history of which it is part.

  Demonio nga yawa nga iya iroy is a phrase in Waray, the language of Leyte and Samar. Never say the phrase before your mom. Demonio means devil, and so does yawa. Iroy means mother. It means, “you devil who are a devil who is your mother.” Mothers get the brunt of it, no matter what language you speak.

  Hermès bags can cost up to one hundred thousand dollars.

  The anarchist in Buffalo who killed President William McKinley in 1901 was a sad-eyed, unemployed factory worker from Cincinnati, Leon Czolgosz, son of Polish immigrants. He is allied in history with such enigmatic men as Sante Geronimo Caserio, Italian anarchist who killed French President Marie-François Sadi-Carnot in 1894; Michele Angiolillo, Italian anarchist who killed Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas in 1897; and Luigi Lucheni, Italian anarchist who killed Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898. What’s with the Italians?!

  William McKinley was an excellent husband to his wife, Ida.

  Theodore Roosevelt is an American. Progressive and imperialist, conservationist of Western lands, proud hunter of African animals. Charismatic Theodore Roosevelt had complexes. His father paid two servants to join the Union Army in his place, and his doting son, Teddy, never got over the shame. RIP, Theodore Roosevelt! You deserve America’s eternal gratitude for the national parks! For the taking of the Philippines, not so much. History shows that Freudian impulses produce trauma on all sides, on colonizer and colonized. Anyways, water under a bridge.

  Mark Twain told William McKinley to stop it, but McKinley didn’t listen. The Anti-Imperialist League spread Mark Twain’s broadsheets against American expansion in 1898. His most eloquent screed was “To a Person Sitting in Darkness.” Everyone should read it, especially before reading Huckleberry Finn—his overt stance against imperialism during the Philippine-American War sheds light on all his work.

  Elvis Aaron Presley, born gorgeous and brooding in Tupelo, had an identical twin, Jesse Garon, who died stillborn.

  Insurrecto is a misnomer. Revolution is a dream.

  The Philippine-American War is unremembered.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been written without Ken and Nastasia.

  There is no way to thank them, so I put them first.

  I am indebted to Benedicto Cabrera—BenCab—for his generosity in giving us his painting for the cover of Insurrecto. Without knowing him at all, I wrote to tell him Woman with Fan looked so much, to me, like my insurrecto, Casiana Nacionales, the Geronima of Balangiga. The simplicity and grace with which he gave us his Woman with Fan marks also his tremendous, transforming art. The art of BenCab is, simply, a human address to the world. It is an honor to have for the cover of this book a Larawan by the Philippine National Artist for Fine Arts.

  My thanks to early readers of the book: my agent, Kirby Kim; my editor, Mark Doten; Ken Byrne; Nastasia Tangherlini; Lara Stapleton; Sabina Murray; Viet Thanh Nguyen; Paul Nadal; Darren Wood. To Nerissa Balce and Kiko Benitez, scholars who offered key sources for history: salamat!

  Special thanks to Nastasia, expert in readership, whose advice fixed my ending.

  Kirby Kim deserves his own line: the sharpest of readers, he took the book to its correct home.

  Mark Doten sees what the book is and makes it what it should be: he gave me everything one needs in an editor: a writer’s spirit, an artist’s eye. I’m so deeply grateful for his faith, his humor, his friendship—and his Paul.

  To everyone at Soho Press—a miraculous group of empathic people: you have offered me the comfort of your community, my own private patron saints who have taken this complex, not quite describable book (is it a mystery? a history? a dirge? a comedy? why the hell is it all of the above??) into your fold. To Mark Doten, Bronwen Hruska, Juliet Grames, Rachel Kowal, Janine Agro, Amara Hoshijo, Steven Tran, Paul Oliver, Abby Koski, Kevin Murphy, Rudy Martinez, Monica White—I witness your vocation, your compact with books. You are heroes to me. You are revolutionaries in the publishing world.

  As always, this book is for Arne: one more gesture of remembrance.

  Stories are all we have.

  Arne, I steal your stories not because it does not hurt to tell them but because in my body, they endure.

  And for the people of the Philippines, for whom this book tries to keep memory, a history of revolution vital for our surviving: to tell the story of our resistance when our leaders pervert our past and to speak so that the world will know it, too—this book is also for you.

  About the cover artist

  BenCab (Born 1942 in Manila, Philippines)

  BenCab is a National Artist for Visual Arts in the Philippines. His works have been the subject of four books, Ben Cabrera: Etchings 1970-1980; BenCab’s Rock Sessions; BenCab Nude Drawings; and the definitive book on his life’s work, BENCAB. He established the BenCab Museum in 2009, in his mountain home of Baguio, to house his personal collection of tribal art from the Cordillera highlands, as well as contemporary Philippine art. In 2015, a career-spanning retrospective, “BenCab 50 Creative Years,” was hosted by eight museums, each highlighting a different aspect of BenCab’s work.