Comradeship, Remolding, and Rectification in Norman Wilwayco's Gerilya

• Main Author: Castillo, Laurence Marvin S.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: NatDem fiction; novel; rectification; remolding; revolution
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss43/3; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2074/viewcontent/KK_2043_2C_202024_203_20Regular_20section_20__20Castillo.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

In this article, I examine the representation of the long-running Maoist national democratic (NatDem) revolution in Norman Wilwayco’s award-winning novel Gerilya (2008), which centers on the uneasy, often violent encounters between petty bourgeois revolutionaries from the city and revolutionary peasants in the countryside. By engaging with the issues of revolutionary errors, remolding, and rectification, I explore how the novel’s predominantly unflattering depiction of revolutionary guerrillas track the difficulties that underpin the process of revolutionary remolding and the formation of comradely relations. Such portrayal conceives of the revolution as a complex social process marked by the tension between, on the one hand, emergent revolutionary lifeways, Party-led discipline, and comradely relations, and on the other, deeply entrenched relations and values that pose both enabling and disabling conditions for the advance of the revolution. This chronicle of the various subjective crises and contradictions among revolutionaries foregrounds the imperative toward remolding and constant rectification as integral to the waging of the struggle, while simultaneously edifying an oppositional imagination that challenges state-deployed anti-communist propaganda.