Forest Thought, Narrativity, and Counterinsurgency in Yñiga

In this paper, I investigate the ways in which the tropical forest can assume the position of discourse, formal design, and textual form in fiction. I think about how, beyond its usual role as space, its vitality and various logics can facilitate a different way of storytelling, one that seeks to embody the historical resistance that the forest has long incubated. I demonstrate this by looking at the forest as a critical element in the spatio-poetics of my novel Yñiga (2022), and how its literal and conceptual manifestations--or "forest thought"--can help illuminate the ways in which history is imagined in the novel. These manifestations, I argue, allow the novel to contest state power and narrative in the context of the historical phenomena at its core: counterinsurgency and notions of "terrorism," urban development and global capitalism, and popular resistance and social movements in early twenty-first-century Philippines.