A Thousand Revolutions
A Review for Eric Gamalinda’s novel, ‘My Sad Republic’
My Sad Republic is a novel in hindsight. To any student of history, or to anyone who paid attention to the badly taught Philippine History classes in high school, the novel can only end in the absolute defeat of the revolutionary forces that upheaved the country in the last decade of the 19th century. Every reader knows it and there is no doubt that any effort done by the characters end in abject defeat. Unless the book makes itself explicitly known that it is an alternate history to the one that Filipinos know, the ending is sure to be part of the long list of defeats in a continuing line of defeats that Filipinos are all too familiar with at this point.
Despite this, the book does not lend itself to melancholy nor does it give itself to anachronistic ramblings of a story told and written in hindsight. It is not defeatist in defeat nor is it filled with nationalist ramblings of a nation not yet born. It is sober and it is sobering. I once wrote a story a few years ago surrounding a character on his way to what is now known as the Cry of Balintawak. In it, I filled the story with the inner monologue of a would-be revolutionary, neglecting the fact that the revolution would not have probably been fought with those ideas in mind. As a result, the character became a bulletin board for the beliefs I believed a Katipunero foot soldier would hold — not the beliefs one would have actually had. I wanted to believe that the burgeoning consciousness of a nation existed in those nameless heroes who are still buried nameless and without dignity throughout the archipelago. Gamalinda does not do this. What he does is write about a people through the eyes of Isio who dreamt he saw the end of the world.
In my reading of the novel, Isio serves as the continuation of a flow of belief and consciousness throughout time. The book itself is conscious of this too. The narrator gives out a history of the islands as it was seen. From colonization to revolution, the mystical serves and fulfills a role that leads certain individuals to believing that the end of the world was coming, that a messianic figure would come and save the common tao from the suffering of this world and usher in the next. It is not nationalist in that the nation was not expressed in terms of a nation but rather of a church of the people moving from an exile to a promised land. There was an Eden, an exile likened to the exile of Jews in Babylon, and the promised paradise. By every definition and explanation of the details, the revolution in Negros was a millenarian movement.
While the whole 1896 Revolution can be expressed as a kind of millenarian movement mixed in with Enlightenment ideals, the revolution in Negros, as figured in the book, was waged on religious terms and terminologies. Following a tradition of belief that a kind of messianic figure would arise from the islands during a time of great turmoil, Isio would move to become a larger than life figure for a following that looked for miracles and an explanation for their suffering as well as the purpose of it. Yet, past this, Gamalinda does not neglect to portray these characters as human — frail, given to obsession, fallible, and given to deception, to love, to betrayal, to sin, to forgiveness. Isio does not become the messianic figure yet he fulfills the role. The people are not ushered into a new and promised land but participate in the creation of a new world. The masses are not an uncharacteristic blob in the background subject to the whims of the characters but actively affect how the characters move between themselves, how they act, believe, love, and launch revolt to revolution.
Given this, it would be an understatement to say that the novel is rich, complex, and contains a depth that would require more than one reading to fully embrace the complexities contained therein. Yet, as a student of history and with an odd obsession surrounding the Katipunan and the 1896 Revolution, I seemed to have fixated on one scene. There is an instance in the book where — I am paraphrasing as I do not have my copy with me as of the writing of this review — the American officer presides over the reorganization of Negros under the revolutionary forces, comparing the revolt with that of Cuba. He remarks that the revolution in the archipelago is different with that of Cuba. Cuba is but one island, how do the revolutionaries plan to consolidate an archipelago made of thousands of islands? Isio casually replies that a thousand revolutions will have to be launched. It is as simple and as complex as that.
I suppose that that is exactly what happened during those pivotal years. As the book demonstrates, there is not one Philippine Revolution, not one singular or monolithic event that ushered in a new age for the Philippines. While it is fiction, the book nudges to the truth of the matter that multiple if not multitudes of revolutions happened around the archipelago as Spanish power waned and American imperialism began to intrude. A thousand revolutions each waged on different beliefs, different nuances, each unique to the region, the island, and peoples that comprised the thousands of islands in the archipelago. Would it be better to call it Philippine Revolutions rather than the insinuated grandness of one revolution? Or would it be a blow to the decades of nation-building that the Philippines has gone through since its inception and eventual independence? A thousand revolutions to create one nation, each revolution trying to consume the others to gain primacy only to be stopped by American imperial ambition. A multitude of unfinished revolutions plagued by what-ifs and if-onlys. We can never know, but through fiction we can look into the lives of those people who fought to usher in a new world even if it was to bring the end of it.
My Sad Republic is a novel about people just as much as it is about revolution. In writing about revolution, one can get caught in the semantics of it, in its meaning, its relevance, its anatomy, its aims, its goals, its methods, its cause and causations. This is not one of those novels, it is a story about those that comprise a revolution in the first place: people and ideas. The novel in itself questions the modality of a nation forged from revolution, it questions traditional narratives of the Revolution, and it gives life to characters who were dismissed with a line or so in the historical records. It tows the line between history and fiction by giving humanity to humans that are often ignored in the grand narratives that have been crafted and taught to generations. More importantly, it tells the stories of people caught in interesting times. More than just revolution, it tells a story of hope, love, faith, defeat, promise, all of which are contained within people as ordinary as the readers of the novel. While steeped in mysticism, what one finds are regular people — differing beliefs, of course, but just as regular as any one person.
As such, the novel ends in the defeat of the revolution but it is not defeatist — it does not give in to the melancholy of failure. What Isio saw was the end of the world and it was the end of a world that he helped create. Negros still continues to produce sugar, it is still lorded over by corporations in place of sugar barons, the tao still suffers while those in high places flourish. One could probably extract a sugar worker from those final years of Spanish hegemony and place them in any sugar plantation in the province to find that little has changed in the course of a century. The machines have changed, the clothes have changed, the roads have changed, but the relationships of the people, the material and power relations, the injustices, those have remained the same. In those years of revolution, in the colorful lives that Gamalinda half-created, what change did they affect? Is the defeat simply that? Defeat?
Isio saw the end of a world as the historical Isio must have seen as well. The Pope saw the transition from one colonial master to the next. Should his spirit still remain in Kanlaon he must have also seen Filipinos lord over, slaughter, starve, and oppress one another in a continuation of power relations as the Filipino took the role of the oppressor of fellow Filipinos. What would his spirit say? Yet past this, what Isio and his followers must have seen is hope. I am not inclined to believe that the spirits give up hope as they wander around the jungles and foothills of Kanlaon. I think they are still there hoping that the paradise they saw can still be created among a community of peoples.
Even in defeat there is hope. And so, as inheritors of the millions of stories forged in those turbulent times, we must continue to fight for the realization of these revolutions, to learn, to forge forward, and to create the world that is made possible with hope.
The novel is a masterpiece. I am usually wary of stories written in hindsight but I suppose all stories written about this period are written in hindsight. I am wary for the fact that they can only ever end in failure, in death, in disappointment of the hopes that the Filipinos held in those years of promise. We want happy endings, after all. But My Sad Republic is a novel of hope. It is not written in appeal for hope of a victory, it is fully conscious of the eventual defeat that all characters in the novel must face, but it does so hopefully. Despite defeat there is hope and even in defeat we must hope that tomorrow burns brighter with all the candles lit in the dark.
Even past the defeat of the revolution, the capture, and eventual execution of Isio, I imagine his spirit wandering the mountains of Negros, still hoping for the paradise he had promised to his followers.
