Insurrecto

316 pages

English language

Published Jan. 6, 2018

OCLC Number:
1023860197

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4 stars (1 review)

"Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines' present and America's past by the PEN Open Book Award-winning author of Gun Dealer's Daughter. Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte's Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created "a howling wilderness" of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara's film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator--one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher. Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women--artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters--finding their way to their own …

2 editions

Dizzying and keleidoscopic portrait of the Philippines

4 stars

The first part of this book was utterly confusing, with how it shifted perspectives and time periods with each chapter. This book made me feel a lot of things - I felt recognition in all of those peculiarities of being Filipino, the heaviness of that experience, but also the joyful resilience. It's odd reading a book that spoke so frankly of the US genocide against the Filipino people, when that's something I never learned in school as an American, or even from my mother who is from the Philippines. I feel angry and sorrowful - when will we see justice? When will we have our own self determination? The book doesn't answer these questions beyond the simple fact that we must struggle for it ourselves, and expect it from no one, especially anyone posing as our "benevolent" saviors.

Subjects

  • Motion picture producers and directors
  • History
  • Fiction
  • Translators
  • Women