GREAT book to read in the midst of the second Marcos presidency, one that was won by denying, distorting, and mythologizing Philippine history. Here is a book that bares the mechanisms of how to use narrative to sieze power, and just how much power can be accrued through legend.

But beyond this meta examination of history as fiction and fiction as history, there is the representation of the plural postcolonial nation, with all its unresolved traumas, with all its contradictions, with all its people and all their dreams. How can you describe the Philippines? Only in this postmodern way where many voices, past and present, are talking at the same time, and the truth is elusive, but not unknowable. 

What I love about this book is that despite its incessant cynicism, in the end it has hope anyway. There is no other choice; because what can you do when nothing can be done? When the family of thieves we kicked out from Malacañang has come back through the front door with a key we just handed back to them, when the country is run by buffoons, when we know what they're doing with our money?

All there's left to do is hope and to act upon that hope. I never could pin down what being a Filipino means but I think that's the closest I could get. Nobody does hope like us, fuck, 333 years of Spain, and then America, and then Japan, and then America again - for a pretty permanent time, and then a fucking dictator, and then a parade of trapos and balimbings, and then a murderer, and then a murderer's son; by god, we are still here. Not only that, but we are still able to imagine a better world. I hope that one day we will come to live in it.