The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata [Excerpt] by Gina Apostol

From The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

“[1]  Enough, Estrella, enough. All readers of history are prey to this revolutionary postscript—dueling memoirs that rose from the ashes of war. Magdiwang writers jumped the Magdalo to the gun: Artemio Ricarte and Santiago Alvarez, both Magdiwang, penned the first memoirs. Then that elegant stylist, Apolinario Mabini, damned Aguinaldo in sublime dudgeon. “Miong” Aguinaldo never recovered from Mabini’s prose style. It took him six decades before he published the Magdalo version of events (though before that the historian Agoncillo did function as ventriloquist). He was too late: by that time he was a villain, a schemer, and a murderer in the eyes of many. The point is: he became so not necessarily because of established fact but because he did not frame the narrative. The question of why Aguinaldo took so long to publish—the Mystery of The Tardy Memoir—is thought-provoking. On one hand, his image as villain was convenient to Americans, the actual combat enemy. The Magdiwang case, the vilifying of Aguinaldo, suited the eventual occupiers (which does not mean that Magdiwang statements wereuntrue). Aguinaldo’s memoirs show he was perhaps an insecure egoist who lent his instability to others’ schemes. At worst, he killed not only Bonifacio but also Luna. So the Interesting Case of the Dueling Revolutionary Memoirs may be no postmodern mystery; the first president is, as we suspect, less than a hero, and his tardy recollections may be tacit acknowledgment of his sins. This does not lessen the following fact: Estrella’s agony is symptomatic, a fantasist’s angst. The Supremo’s death inscribed trauma—it is the emblematic wound of all Filipinos betrayed by fellow Filipinos. (One notes that Aguinaldo, in turn, was betrayed, though unfortunately  for him not killed, by a Filipino turncoat in America’s pay.) This duplicitous sense of self, the Judas wound, marks the country’s notion of its humanity, so potent in its history. Only in the story of Rizal is there no Judas kiss, which may explain why, given the country’s complex aversion to the past, it clings to the hero with implacable ardor. Rizal’s death is simple: Spain killed him. Filipinos are not complicit in his blood. Emilio Aguinaldo, on the other hand, is troubling—he is the man in us whom we prefer not to see: the sinner in our midst who is ourselves. Just as we will never see Rizal as a man because we idolize him, we cannot see Aguinaldo as a man because we vilify him. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New York, New York, U.S.A.)

” [2]  Whoa, Aramis de Michigan. Calm down. (Trans. Note)

” [3]  Dr. Diwata, let me explain the physical nature of my ‘implacable ardor,’ as you call it—though you do not deserve my patience! I recall distinctly when my illness began. It was late in June in the year martial law was lifted by the tyrant, and yet the country was no more changed than I was by the proclamation. I was a freshman in college taking Philippine History and Institutions 101. I’d always been a bookworm, an idealist—yes, as you say, a fantasist. As a kid, I used to collect the posters of the heroes and labeled them with their corresponding epithets, because I was a nerd with weird compulsions. When I learned about the political assassination of the Plebeian Martyr by the men of the First President of the Republic, I was not only surprised that I had never heard about it before in my high school textbooks: I went into septic shock. My breathing froze in that room at Palma Hall Annex, and my asphyxiated shriek before I slumped sideways from the graffitied desk onto the lap of my blockmate, a pale, kind of palsied kid from Panay, made the entire classroom go still (or so I was told, as I had gone into abasic atrophy, a kind of failure of the nerves). I remember (or fancy I do) the ambulance, the brief blur of flame trees in my rolling vision, the concerned face of my professor (the bifocaled, unwitting perpetrator of my nervous wreckage), as I was strapped onto a trundle, given emergency respiratory help, a blood pump, and whatnot. My classmates waved at me as if calculating already whether or not they could take time off to go to my funeral. It was a minor seizure whose source the doctors could not fathom—whether I was epileptic, schistempsychotic, or just plain pathetic, it was a mystery to them. I returned home for the rest of the term, and in those months all history books, even komiks versions, were banned; but surreptitiously I read. By the end of the year I was back at college, but this time armed with the weight of history—not to mention all the kilos I had gained from provincial puto. In this way I became a vessel of the country’s pain, a small price to pay for truth. If this is a symptom, then what is a country? A tumor of ideology?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)”

Reference:“If this is a symptom, then what is a country? A tumor of ideology?!”. (2015). Retrieved August 05, 2016, from https://ginaapostol.wordpress.com/2015/09/26/from-the-revolution-according-to-raymundo-mata/