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Raymundo Mata Analysis

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The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

Gina Apostol
Soho Press | January 12, 2021

Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, which won the Philippine National Book Award, is a
story about a story. The book is the fictional memoir of Raymundo Mata, a half-blind, self-professed bookworm who
comes from a family of dramatists and publishes political pamphlets. Mata’s memoir explores the transition between
the Spanish and American colonial wars in the Philippines, but there’s more. The memoir’s Filipino editor,
anonymous translator, and American critic debate the historical accuracy and quality of Mata’s work in the preface,
footnotes, and postscript. These complex, interrupting layers produce a hyper metafiction that is playful and ironic
like Cervantes’s Don Quixote and satirize social critiques and political violence like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.  

Apostol’s narrative fracturing, perpetuated by external voices that edit, erase, and opine, parallels the violence forced
upon the Philippines by foreign powers, the hostile Spanish and American takeovers exasperating its ever-shifting
identity. As a result, Mata’s memoir is a pastiche of his life and of national history. It seems no coincidence that Mata
writes in Spanish, Tagalog, and English, native tongue celled between colonial linguistic prowess, his authorial voice
pushed and pulled by external forces.

While Mata organizes his memoir into a kind of origin story that moves from his birthplace and family to his
participation in the resistance, the influence of the historical figure and revolutionary author José Rizal drives the
narrative. Once the protagonist reads Rizal’s illicit novel Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) gifted to him by a priest
named Pío Valenzuela, he begins his quest to find the national hero. Here, fact and fiction intersect, both Mata and
Rizal eventually collide on the page. As Mata’s translator writes in her introduction to the manuscript, “Our notion
of freedom began with fiction, which may explain why it remains an illusion.” Even the translator’s name seems to
play with the idea of fiction reflecting a collective imagination and a nation’s disillusion, her
surname espejo meaning mirror in Spanish. Apostol writes in her precursory Author’s Note, “two things shape the
Filipino: puns and José Rizal,” less a wink to readers and more an invitation to a challenging jigsaw puzzle from the
outset.

The manuscript’s three critics reveal that Mata meets with Rizal early on, as they debate the veracity of the meeting.
Rizal resides exiled on an island under Spanish watch, and the three resurface this detail in footnotes so many times
that when the event does take place, the anticipation has been built up—we want to see for ourselves just what
happens between these two revolutionary writers. It’s quite possibly the best sequence of scenes in the novel, history
and fiction—represented in Rizal and Mata—threaded so tightly together that they, for a moment, defragment and
coalesce as one.

This interweaving recalls the Spanish word historia, which can mean either history or story depending on the
context; Apostol writes the Philippines’ nineteenth-century historia by exploiting history in frontmatter, footnotes,
and postscripts, and tethering fictionalized historical figures with fictional characters on a single plane. But this
game of metafiction comes at a price, the illusion the translator speaks of. When Mata comes face to face with Rizal
and, observing how he and others engage the living legend, says, “It’s true. His bones did not matter. We wanted of
him what was air and nothing, such as his name, a ghost louse-scratch.” The promise of revolution is fleeting. We
know the Philippines won’t win their revolution, but Mata doesn’t know, his memoir is a revisited national memory
that almost reaches its goal of winning the war, and its independence, but never does.

There’s a Sisyphean struggle between this hope and disappointment in the book, and in this struggle, there are no
easy answers. Instead, there’s missing fragments, alleged mistranslations and misinterpretations. As we volley
between footnotes and source text, opinions and first-hand experience, fact and fiction, it becomes clear that
Apostol’s novel requires us to sit up, lean in, and study. It demands our active participation. In the end, The
Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is intended for a Filipino audience first— with inside jokes, play on
words, and regional references—and American audiences second. And that’s a definitive reason to pick it up. Apostol
holds a mirror to American exceptionalism and forces us to look.

The Revolution is a work intended for a Filipino audience first, with inside jokes, plays on words, and regional
references, and American audiences second. Apostol holds a mirror to American exceptionalism. It’s a penance
academics realize through postcolonial studies like the American critic analyzing Mata’s memoir. The Revolution
According to Raymundo Mata, like the effects of the wars, is never really finished—there are missing fragments,
alleged mistranslations, and misinterpretations—and readers may not connect all the puzzle pieces, which just might
be the point.
Carroll, M. A. (2021, January 8). The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol. Ploughshares.
Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://blog.pshares.org/

THE REVOLUTION ACCORDING TO RAYMUNDO MATA


By Gina Apostol
By Randy Boyagoda
 Jan. 12, 2021

Virgil should offer libations to the gods in thanksgiving that Gina Apostol writes
about the Philippines’ founding stories instead of Rome’s. Her latest novel to
appear in the United States, “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,”
wreaks playful and learned havoc on the life and work of the 19th-century
writer José Rizal. Apostol seizes on the catalytic relationship between his fiction
and the contemporaneous Filipino independence movement, whose success in
ending Spanish imperial rule was qualified by five subsequent decades of U.S.
involvement.

“Raymundo Mata” was first published in the Philippines in 2009 and won the country’s National
Book Award. Since then, Apostol has published two well-received novels — “Insurrecto” and “Gun
Dealers’ Daughter” — in the United States, where she now lives. She writes historical fiction like
Hilary Mantel on acid. The result is demanding, confusing, exhausting and impressive, and justified,
at base, by the origin story of her native archipelagic nation, as one of the several voices of this novel
explains:

“The American Revolution had farmers and dentists. The French Revolution had a mob of lawyers.

“Our prime mover was a poet.

Boyagoda, R. (2021, January 12). A Filipino Freedom Fighter’s Life, Relentlessly Annotated. Retrieved August
22, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/

Winner of 2010 Philippine National Book Award

Winner of 2010 Gintong Aklat (Golden Book) Award

"Gina Apostol's The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata weaves the complex tangle of Philippine history,
literature, and languages (along with contemporary academic scholarship) into a brilliant tour de force of a
novel. Brava!" --John Barth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap8_DOiNUtM

About the book: Gina Apostol's riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one Raymundo Mata, a half-
blind bookworm and revolutionary, tracing his childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his
discovery of writer and fellow revolutionary, Jose Rizal. Mata's 19th-century story is complicated by a present-
day foreword(s), afterword(s), and footnotes from three fiercely quarrelsome and comic voices: a nationalist
editor, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic, and a translator, Mimi C. Magsalin. In telling the contested and
fragmentary story of Mata, Apostol finds new ways to depict the violence of the Spanish colonial era and to
reimagine the nation's great writer, Jose Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish for his revolutionary
activities and is considered by many to be the father of Philippine independence. The Revolution According to
Raymundo Mata offers an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction, uncovering lost histories while building
dazzling, anarchic modes of narrative.

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