Noli Me Tangere

By Jose P. Rizal

A cleverly indicting portrayal of the injustices that Filipinos suffered at the hands of Spanish priests and statesmen in 19th century Philippines.

Fresh from a European education, the young intellectual Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the town of San Diego to start a school for young boys and marry his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful Maria Clara. However, he is opposed at every turn by the priests Damaso and Salvi for his subversive ideas. When Ibarra becomes implicated in a fake insurrection and is forced to leave town, he begins to question whether or not his dream of a more progressive Philippines can be achieved through peaceful reforms or bloody revolution.

Through Ibarra's struggle to uplift his countrymen, Jose Rizal reveals the sufferings of Filipinos against the oppressive hand of the Spanish regime—which ultimately led to Rizal's execution and the birth of the Philippine nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9789712736698

Book preview

Dedication

To My Country

In the catalog of human ills there is to be found a cancer so malignant that the least touch inflames it and causes agonizing pains; afflicted with such a cancer, a social cancer, has your dear image appeared to me, when, for my own heart’s ease or to compare you with others, I have sought, in the centers of modern civilization, to call you to mind.

Now, desirous of your welfare, which is also ours, and seeking the best cure for your ills, I shall do with you what was done in ages past with the sick, who were exposed on the steps of the temple so that the worshippers, having invoked the god, should each propose a remedy.

To this end, I shall endeavor to show your condition, faithfully and ruthlessly. I shall lift a corner of the veil which shrouds the disease sacrificing to the truth everything even self-love—for, as your son, your defects and weaknesses are also mine.

The Author,

Europe, 1886

Introduction

Two Novels That Made A Revolution

Few novels, except perhaps the now much disparaged Uncle Tom’s Cabin, have made a more shattering impact on the society in which they were conceived and read than the Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo of the Filipino national hero, Jose Rizal. And surely no writer paid a higher penalty for self-expression; Rizal was executed by a firing squad mainly because of these two books, now revered by his country as the gospels of its nationalism and lately made by law required reading in its colleges.

It is usually not much fun to read gospels, but the Noli was meant to be enjoyed; at its best it is a delightful comedy of manners, an irreverent satire on the last years of the Spanish colonial regime in the Philippines. It has the melodramatic excitement of the elder Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, by which Rizal was influenced in his early years. The characters come to life with surprising ease and linger in the memory: the absurd Doña Victorina, the elegant Dominican hairsplitter, the peasants worriedly classifying Spanish insults into various degrees of danger, the bell-ringer Crispín, even the ham-fisted, oddly sympathetic Father Dámaso. Rizal was perhaps less fortunate with his plot and his protagonists, who tend to be plastercast in sorrowful Wertherian attitudes when they are not earnestly debating the desirability of reforms from above and revolution from below, an issue, however, which has not yet entirely lost its topicality.

The Noli can be thus enjoyed as a novel even without its aura of historical significance. But, like its sequel, it was nothing if not political. When it was written (in Spanish) and published (in Berlin in 1887), the Filipinos were only beginning to think of themselves as Filipinos rather than as members of various tribes scattered among 7,000 islands between Borneo and Taiwan. Their segregation from their fellow Malays after the colonial wars of the East Indies were settled, and the consciousness that the Spanish oppression was suffered by all in common, had given rise to a feeling of separate nationhood, brought to a point by a dispute on the rights of the native clergy and the execution of three Filipino secular priests in 1872.

Rizal was eleven at the time; his elder and only brother, a protegé of one of the executed priests, feared he would be implicated in the alleged conspiracy and prudently went home to the provinces.

Indeed Rizal did not have to go far from his family circle and home town to find his material. His father had become relatively affluent by leasing and working lands from the great estates of the Dominican Order: troubles over taxes, tithes, and rentals hounded the family throughout Rizal’s life, and find their echo in both the Noli and the Fili. When he was still a schoolboy under the Jesuits, his own mother was the victim of a false charge of attempted poisoning, and, like Sisa in his story, was marched to gaol along the highway in public degradation, only, like Ibarra’s father, to be acquitted after long suffering and humiliation. When, upon the publication of the Noli, Rizal was accused by his critics of exaggeration, he could retort that he was ready to match every incident in his novel with one from life.

An extremely talented and versatile scholar with a gift for language, more sensitive than most of his contemporaries to racial discriminations, and aflame with impotent anger at the misgovernment of the Philippines, Rizal left for Spain at the age of twenty-one to continue his studies in Madrid. Like many another nationalist after him, he hoped to find in the metropolis a freer atmosphere and a readier audience than in the colony. By and large, he was disappointed. He found sufficient freedom of thought, speech, and the press in a Spain that scarcely a decade before, although only briefly, had been a constitutional republic.

But he also found his compatriots, with a few honorable exceptions, dissipating their time on women and cards; Rizal was not a prig but he sought his pleasures on other levels. A small Filipino review intended to promote Philippine interests died after a few issues. The Spanish ministers, some of them liberals, were unapproachable, indifferent, or wary of challenging the religious orders. Rizal tried to enlist the collaboration of his countrymen in writing a symposium on conditions in the archipelago, but found no response. It was then that he decided to write the book himself, choosing the form of a satirical novel that would open the eyes of his countrymen to their true condition, and of the Spaniards to the errors and injustices committed in their name. It was about two years in the writing; one-half was drafted in Spain, a quarter in France, the remainder, together with the final revision, in Germany, in the hours he could spare from his studies.

The Noli is unabashedly anti-clerical, or, more precisely, it is aimed at the Spanish friars in the Philippines at that time. It had to be. In Rizal’s view and that of most Filipino intellectuals, the excesses of authority and the denials of individual freedom in the Philippines could be traced to the mendicant and preaching friars (Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans, and Recollects) who controlled the Philippine Church, because the hierarchy and most of the strategically located parish priests were drawn from their ranks. The Church in turn was the only element of stability and continuity in a colonial administration whose lay heads came and went with every change of government in unstable Madrid. Believing themselves secure in the loyalty and affection of a Catholic Filipino people, whose ancestors the first virtuous missionaries had protected from the abuses of the colonizers, these religious orders were the true rulers of the Philippines, representing to the administration that only they could avert a popular rising, and to the people that only they could give protection as of old from official excesses.

Was the Noli also anti-Catholic or anti-religious? Rizal frankly explained his purpose to a friend: I am aiming at the friars, but since they were shielding themselves behind the rites and superstitions of a certain religion, I had to free myself from it in order to strike at the enemy hiding behind it . . . Those who abused its name must bear the responsibility. The issue, let us fondly hope, has lost its original passion and importance. Rizal’s ribald laughter should be heard as an echo, still amusing but no longer wounding, of a battle fought much too long ago. The contemporary reader of Honor Tracy’s The Straight and Narrow or Bruce Marshall’s A Thread of Scarlet will not be shocked by the Noli, and indeed Rizal anticipated many of the most effective gibes at superstition in the latter and in Peyreffite’s The Keys of St. Peter.

Only 2,000 copies of the Noli were printed; Rizal had to borrow money from a friend to publish the novel at his own expense, and never made a penny out of it. At first the book was sold openly in Manila but, when Rizal’s homecoming in the year of its publication brought matters to a head, it was unanimously condemned as heretical and subversive by a special jury of the Royal and Pontifical (Dominican) University of Santo Tomás, and subsequently the government board of censorship recommended the absolute prohibition of its importation, reproduction, and circulation in the Philippines. It came to be considered proof of disloyalty to possess a copy, and Rizal confided to his agent the fear that copies of the book were being bought in order that they might be destroyed.

For all that, the impact of the Noli was phenomenal among an illiterate population where public opinion, such as it was, was moulded by a handful of Spanish-speaking intellectuals. The best evidence of its success was the immediate recognition given to Rizal by both his own countrymen and the Spaniards, in the Philippines as well as in Spain, as the leader of the growing nationalist movement for the expulsion of the Spanish friars and other reforms. The official hostility towards and his family now assumed such proportions that, after a few months, he was compelled to leave the country again in the hope, quickly defrauded, of sparing his family from persecution. Indeed, already abroad, he learned that one of his brothers-in-law, like Ibarra’s father, had been denied burial in consecrated ground because of their relationship.

For a year Rizal worked in the British Museum on annotations to a history of the Philippines that, he hoped, would establish the ancient dignity and culture of the pre-Spanish Filipinos, denigrated in the monkish chronicles as savages just down from the trees. A man of great and many talents, he won the esteem of the European scientists with whom he corresponded and conferred, and planned to organize an international association and congress of scholars on the Philippines. In the meantime a Filipino review had once again been issued in Spain by the small colony of expatriates there, and, a master of polemics, he assiduously contributed political articles of remarkable depth and prescience (in one of them he foresaw that within a century the Philippines would fall either to the North American Republic or to Japan, a prophecy which was fulfilled in both respects in less than half the time).

But the control of editorial policy became an issue of émigré politics, and Rizal withdrew once again to write the sequel of the Noli. After he had completed El Filibusterismo, the feeling grew on him that his place was in the Philippines, but his family opposed his return, which would place him within reach of his enemies. For a time he practiced his profession in Hong Kong, and negotiated with the British North Borneo Company for the establishment of a free Filipino colony there. But he lacked the necessary funds and finally returned to Manila, ostensibly in order to raise them by the liquidation of his family interests. He had a higher purpose. Before embarking he left two sealed letters with a friend in Macao to be opened and published after his death.

One was addressed to his family and revealed that he was exposing himself to danger to crown my lifework and bear witness with my example to what I have always preached. The other was addressed to his countrymen and said that he could no longer live abroad knowing that so many suffer unjust persecution because of me, could no longer stand aside seeing my brother and sisters and their numerous families hounded like criminals; I prefer to risk death and willingly give my life to free so many innocent people from such unjust persecution. He added: I also want to show those who deny our patriotism that we know how to die for our duty and our convictions.

At first he was well received. The Governor General himself granted him a personal audience and a full pardon for his father and sisters. But he proved too popular. Friends and admirers carried him in triumph from province to province; he himself, with only rudimentary precautions, started to organize a national league for mutual assistance among all Filipinos. He was promptly arrested on the belated and transparently false charge that subversive pamphlets had been found in his baggage at Customs inspection. In confidential administrative proceedings he was then banished to the town of Dapitan on the distant and only half-explored island of Mindanao.

There is an uncanny foresight in the plot of the Noli, which should silence those who would dismiss it as implausible and contrived. The protagonist Ibarra, an intellectual recently returned to the Philippines from Spain, arouses the enmity of the friars, apparently because of an innocent program for popular education, finds himself implicated in a revolt he never planned, refuses to flee when warned, and is finally seized and condemned to banishment while his fiancée is promised to a Spaniard. I am not of the common opinion that Rizal saw himself in Ibarra and spoke through him; there was always a curious ambivalence in Rizal, and in the end I believe that Elías prevailed over Ibarra in his own mind. But Rizal might have been reliving the vicissitudes of Ibarra when his own fiancée was prevailed upon to marry an English railway engineer, and when he saw his proposals for reform branded as subversive, was himself banished on false charges, refused an offer of rescue, and was eventually accused of inspiring the Philippine Revolution.

This broke out in 1896 when he had been four years in rustication. He had spent the time under surveillance, managing nevertheless to dabble in projects for the improvement of the town and for the rehabilitation of his family’s fortunes in new surroundings. He had turned once again to farming (he was a licensed land appraiser) and trading. He had opened a small school, and practised his profession as a physician; his fame as an ophthalmologist brought him patients from all over the country and even from abroad. One of them came from Hong Kong attended by a pretty Irish girl, who returned to share Rizal’s anti-climactic exile.

The death he had expected, the death to give witness, had not come; and it may be surmised that even unexpected love and domesticity after wandering over half of Europe had been insufficient compensation, and that a brilliant correspondence on religious issue with his old Jesuit mentors in Manila had not stilled his intellectual restlessness. Was he bored? In any case he had taken the strange decision to volunteer to serve as a doctor with the Spanish forces in Cuba.

His offer had been accepted. He was on his way to Barcelona aboard a Spanish warship, having once more turned away an opportunity to escape in Singapore, when he was suddenly arrested in mid-sea and sent back to the Philippines on the next sailboat. The Revolution had started after the premature discovery of the Katipunan, the Association of the Sons of the People, an outgrowth of Rizal’s League, but under proletarian rather than intellectual middle-class leadership.

There was no Elías to rescue Rizal when he was brought to trial. The courtmartial proceedings were a judicial farce, but a political necessity in the times. The charges were absurd on their face, but fundamentally they were a correct identification of the author of the Noli and the Fili as the soul, although not the actual military leader, of the nationalist revolution. Fifty years later, under a more realistic colonial administration of another race, Rizal would have gone on eventually from gaol to the Prime Ministership of his independent country. But the Spaniards are not a people who are given to accommodations. Rizal was condemned to death and executed publicly by a firing squad of Filipino colonial troops on the 30th December 1896.

The Spanish regime in the Philippines lasted less than two years more. Now that Asian nationalism is a force to be reckoned with, it would not be amiss to recall what the western world seldom realizes: that the Filipinos, inspired by Rizal, made the first nationalist revolution in Asia in 1896, established its first democratic republic, which survived until 1901, and in 1946, exactly half a century after Rizal’s execution, became the first Asians to win independence from western colonialism. It is not mere patriotic pride that leads Filipinos to acclaim the author of the Noli and the Fili as the first Asian nationalist and as one who in his way moved the world.

A New Introduction

Corruption in the Convent

Rizal wrote for the Filipinos and to be read by the Filipinos but his writing should now command a much larger audience. Through these sharp, satirical and highly readable novels, Rizal shows us history from a side we don’t normally see. As my father, Leon Ma. Guerrero, the translator of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, puts it: Rizal’s comments on the abuses of the European conquerors were nothing new to the historian; what made them unique was that they gave the point of view of the descendants of the victims of colonialism.

This perspective is becoming all the more valuable. As Balachandra Rajan writes, The (literary) canon, largely imperial, must change as readers from territories, until recently subjected, take their place in future reading communities. Even James A. Michener, introducing this translation for an American audience in 1961 said, If any nation can be said to have a single source for its nationalism, the Philippine Republic is such a land, and this novel is the source(vi). While Harold Augenbraum, in his 2011 introduction to El Filibusterismo says of Rizal, There is no other literary figure in world history quite like him, and that the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo are two of the most influential works of colonial or postcolonial fiction in the history of Spanish-language literature (El Filibusterismo, x).

The caveat of Spanish-language might be instructive. As my father wrote in his biography of Rizal, The First Filipino, a novel in Spanish, not the most popular or appreciated language in Europe, would scarcely be read in the great centres of the world. Rizal was influenced by the great books of his era. His aim was to capture the "realities of my native country—what Hugo had done for Les Miserables, what Zola, Daudet and Dickens had done for the wretched of France and England, he would do for his countrymen. Indeed, as his biographer speculates, that the Noli in French would have had a much better chance of publication and success. Part of the problem with writing in Spanish was that Spanish publishers could hardly be expected to denigrate their own regime."

What then is the Noli all about? It is, on the surface, a story about a young Filipino, Ibarra, who returns to the country having spent time in Europe getting an education. In this it mirrors Rizal’s own experience in going to study in Madrid in 1882. Like other writers who leave their home countries (Lu Xun who goes to Japan, or Soyinka going to England for example), the more time Rizal spends abroad the more conscious he becomes of the need for change at home. Indeed he returns to Europe for the years between the publication of the two novels and perhaps as a consequence, El Filibusterismo is the more radical of the two in a political sense. (See Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags for an erudite discussion on this topic.)

In the Noli, when Rizal’s lead character Ibarra returns to Manila, his plans for reform quickly unravel and his longed-for marriage is thwarted. Having started with high hopes, the hero’s journey ends in despair. However, it is in the telling of his journey, in the depiction of provincial life and especially in the satirical description of the supporting characters, that the magic of the novel is found. As my father puts it in The First Filipino, It is not only a tribute to his skill as a writer but also a proof that Filipino society has not changed much since his day that we recognize in ourselves and our contemporaries the self-made and self-seeking Capitán Tiago, always careful to be on the winning side . . . or Doña Victorina and Doña Consolacíon, haunted by class and color complexes, typical wives of politicians and army officers . . . or any number of other brilliantly observed characters: the vice mayor who cannot bear to think of resigning . . . the lieutenant eager to slaughter dissidents to win promotion, even perhaps the pious spinsters wondering if it will be lewd to mix male Our Fathers and female Hail Marys.

It seems, however, that while the priests who effectively ruled the country may have overlooked the slights that some of these characters conveyed they could never have forgiven him the sardonic portraits of Father Sybila, the elegant Dominican quibbler, Father Damaso, the blustering gluttonous peasant Franciscan with a daughter doubly illegitimate, sacrilegious and adulterous, or Father Salvi, the scheming and frustrated lecher, a cassocked ‘Peeping Tom.’ Rizal seems to reserve a specially sharp pen for these portraits and for this the books were branded heretical, impious and scandalous by a special committee set up by the Archbishop of the Philippines and later it was recommended that the books be prohibited in all forms.

However, in a speech given on the occasion of Rizal’s centenary, my father makes a convincing case that Rizal was not primarily anti-clerical. "If the (Noli and Fili) have one theme, it is power, the power that, as we have so often been told, tends to corrupt, and, when absolute, corrupts absolutely. Corrupts we may add both the powerful and their victims, for as Rizal pointed out, ‘There are not tyrants where there are no slaves.’ He goes on to say that, What Rizal hated was the absolute power of the Damasos and Salvis . . . . these men of power could with impunity, seduce and rape, conspire, torture and exploit . . . intolerable that with their sense of mission they should set themselves up as keepers of public conscience" (We Filipinos, 73).

Nevertheless if this is a chronicle of power and corruption, those wielding the power are those to whom the church entrusted in its mission in the Islands. As Rizal makes clear, there was little resistance to the friarocracy from the Spanish civilian authority. He uses the following conversation between Tasio and Ibarra to explain the problem:

If a high official comes with great and generous ideas, he soon hears such advice as this, while behind his back he is taken for a fool. ‘Your Excellency does not know the country, and the character of the natives; Your Excellency will spoil them; Your Excellency will do well to trust so and so, and so on.’ . . . His Excellency keeps in mind that he has worked hard and endured even more to obtain his office, that he will hold it only for three years, and that he is getting old and must think of his future rather than quixotic enterprises—a modest house in Madrid, a little country lodge, a good income on which to make a show at Court. These are the things he must work for in the Philippines . . . let us not expect the foreigner who comes only to make his fortune and then go home to take an interest in the welfare of the country" (130).

As for the local elite, we only need to look at Capitan Tiago, who will not go against the priests even if he must deny his daughter’s happiness and immediately repay his debts to Ibarra. The rest say their indulgences and play along. The only voices of reason are persecuted like Ibarra and Elias, or marginalized like Tasio, who starkly predicts that in this country you either bow your head or lose it.

Perhaps, this kind of corruption was peculiar to the Philippines in the way Tolstoy, writing before the publication of the Noli, put it that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Filipinos endured corruption in the convent for over 300 years. (The famous sequitur of fifty years in Hollywood, was coined by the translator’s sister Carmen Guerrero Nakpil.) But, wherever you are from, examples of power and corruption are, unfortunately, all too familiar. In learning that one man’s response was to expose its ridiculousness—and that he paid the ultimate price in doing so—we have, in Rizal, an example of a Filipino who can inspire the world.

David Guerrero

2019

References:

Guerrero, Leon Maria. The First Filipino: a Biography of Jose Rizal. Manila: Guerrero Publishing, 2010. (Kindle Edition)

Guerrero, Leon Maria. We Filipinos. Manila: Daily Star Publ. Co., 1986.

Rajan, Balachandra. Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Rizal, José. El Filibusterismo. Trans. by Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

Rizal, José. The Lost Eden (Noli Me Tangere). New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.

Note On The Translation

Filipino National Artist Nick Joaquin, writing in A Question of Heroes, says that: Guerrero, a descendent of Illustrados, was bred by the Ateneo and a home steeped in the old Filipino-Spanish traditions, and is thus perfectly at home in the mind of Rizal. While the Jesuit scholar Miguel Bernad, writing contemporaneously in Philippine Studies, says Guerrero’s translations are different. In his pages it is possible to recapture some of that excitement which Rizal’s first readers must have felt when the novels were first issued in Ghent or Berlin. He goes on to say that In many respects he is the ideal translator both from the linguistic and from the historical point of view. And that He has that peculiar feel for language which only the best writers possess. He is alert to the nuances of meaning, and he has an ear for the sound of words and the cadence of good phrasing. Similarly Leonard Casper reviewing the US edition in the Saturday Review praised the vitality of Guerrero’s translation, which armors the old authenticity within contemporary presence. Now for the first time action, humor, the passions are audible again, as they must have been for Rizal.

This translation certainly has an ear for Filipino diction. Such that, as Bernad points out, Even the bad Spanish of social-climbing Doña Victorina is rendered into equally bad English: How nasty also! She says in her Tagalicized English. What she had said in her Tagalicized Spanish was: Uy, que saco! Another example is the way the same character says: Oh what a pity Clarita did not becoming sick more earlier!(Guerrero, 222). This compares to a more recent translation which while literally correct, seems to lose the uniquely Filipino-English syntax, which renders the same phrase as: Oh, what a shame Clarita did not fall ill two days before."

Certainly some of the word choices in the Guerrero translation should be more familiar to Filipino readers than some in Augenbraum’s more recent work. The use of Sacristans vs Sextons for example. Guerrero consistently refers to carabao rather than buffalo or water buffalo. We also read of a balete tree rather than a baliti while tinola is described as a stew of chicken and squash rather than the confusing description of the dish as "a gulai of chicken and pumpkin."

Finally, on culinary matters, the anecdote of Father Salvi’s instructions on preparing a cup of cocoa (a version of which can be ordered in Manila’s Café Adriatico) is a product of this translation. The Guerrero version reads: "If he calls the servant and tells him ‘So-and-so make a pot of chocolate, hey’ then you can rest easy;" but if he says ‘So-and-so go and make a pot of chocolate, ha’ then you’d better pick up your hat and make a run for it . . . Chocolate hey means really good chocolate, chocolate ha means it will be very watery."(47)

This compares to the Augenbraum which reads: If he calls the attendant and says ‘Fulanito, make a bowl of Hot Chocolate, okay?’ then don’t worry. But if he says ‘Fulanito, make a bowl of Hot Chocolate, all right’ then grab your hat and hightail it out of there . . . . ‘Hot Chocolate, okay’ means thick and ‘Hot Chocolate, all right’ means watery.(68)

Another example of the difference in style can be found in Chapter 32, The Sermon. In the Guerrero translation it reads: Father Damaso spoke Tagalog with a heavy Spanish accent, and began by addressing the natives with what might be roughly rendered as: my ’diar bradders in Hesoos Christ.’ This was followed by an avalanche of untranslatable phrases; he spoke of the soul, of Hell of the ‘belobbed pahtron sent’ of the sinful natives, and of the virtuous Franciscan fathers." (160)

Whereas in the Augenbraum translation the same paragraph is rendered as: "He began with Mana capatir con cristiano, after which he followed with an avalanche of untranslatable phrases. He spoke of the soul, of hell, of the mahal na santo pintacasi, of the sinning indios and the virtuous Franciscan fathers. (In footnotes the translator helpfully explains that The correct Tagalog would be mga kapatid or my brothers (in Christ).)

It may be clear from these examples that my father was sometimes willing to depart from a literal rendition of the text in order to appeal to what he described as a new generation of readers. This approach has been the subject of a fair amount of study, not least by the American political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson. Anderson looms large over the contemporary academic appraisal of these translations. He is, perhaps, the most prominent Southeast Asia scholar of his generation and few if any have ventured a critique of his opinions.

But while he questioned the thinking behind these translations, I’m not sure that the more literal renditions ever met with his wholehearted praise either. In correspondence with me regarding my father’s work in 2014 he said that he was in some ways a fan of his. Indeed he references my father’s biography of Rizal The First Filipino extensively in Under Three Flags for example and even, rather cheekily in my view, uses the title for one of his chapter headings in Specter of Comparisons. In any case I am grateful, as are many others, to Anderson for his eloquent discourses on Rizal. All of the debates around the work should give us plenty to talk about in future and only make all the available versions worth reading and comparing.

David Guerrero

2019

References:

Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. Verso, 1998.

Anderson, Benedict. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. Verso, 2006.

Bernad, Miguel A. Rizal: El Filibusterismo (Subversion), Translated by Leon Ma. Guerrero. Philippine Studies 15, no. 1 (1967): 204–5.

Casper, Leonard. The Lost Eden by Jose Rizal, Leon Ma. Guerrero; The Bamboo Dancers. by N. V. M. Gonzalez. The Journal of Asian Studies 21, no. 2 (February 1962): 246–47.

Guerrero, Leon Maria. The First Filipino: a Biography of Jose Rizal. Guerrero Publishing, 2010. (Kindle Edition)

Joaquin, Nick. A Question of Heroes. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Published and exclusively distributed by Anvil Publishing, 2018.

Rizal, José. Noli Me Tangere: Touch Me Not. Trans. by Harold Augenbraum. London: Penguin, 2006.

A Noli And Fili Reader

Rizal was a student at the Universidad Central de Madrid when the idea of a novel of the Philippines under Spanish Colonial Rule occurred to him. In early 1884 he proposed a writing collaboration among a group of Filipinos in Madrid which, perhaps unsurprisingly, came to nothing. However, he got underway by himself and by late 1884 was about halfway through. No longer a student, he finished another quarter in Paris in 1885 and the last fourth in Germany; with the final chapters completed in Wilhelmsfeld in mid-1886. Final revisions on the manuscript saw him in Berlin, ill, depressed and impoverished. Dr. Maximo Viola, a friend, financed the printing cost and provided the living expenses of the author. The Noli was finally finished with sixty-three chapters plus an epilogue and ready for printing on February 21, 1887. After a month, 2,000 copies came off the press of the printer Berliner Buchdruckrei-Action-Gesselschaft at a cost of 300 pesos. It had taken the twenty-six-year-old author about two and a half years to complete his masterpiece, with one chapter (originally the 25th) entitled Elias and Salome a casualty of financial constraints.

It was all worth it. As Rizal explains in his dedication To My Country there is to be found a (social) cancer so malignant that the least touch inflames it and causes agonizing pains. He proposed to lift a corner of the veil which shrouds the disease, sacrificing to the truth everything. The novel, he said, serves a purpose: to strike the head of that two-faced Goliath that in the Philippines is called friar-rule and maladministration. Moreover, the novelist asserts that the facts I narrate there are all true and have happened; I can prove them. In other words, as he himself told Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Filipinos would find in the novel the history of the last ten years. Leon Ma. Guerrero; on the other hand, reminds the reader that "the Noli was meant to be enjoyed; at its best it is a delightful comedy of manners, an irreverent satire on the last years of the Spanish colonial regime in the Philippines."

Taken from the Bible, the Latin phrase means touch me not or do not touch me. Although Rizal cites the Gospel of St. Luke as its source, it is actually mentioned in St. John (Chapter 20, verses 13-17). The phrase refers to sensitive matters of state and church or delicate conditions obtaining in society that otherwise could not be touched. In the novel, he observes, discusses and makes fun of the untouchable. And most of all the friars who shield themselves behind the rites and superstitions of a certain religion. As Rizal observes I had to free myself from it in order to strike at the enemy hiding behind it.

The writing of the sequel to the Noli started in Calamba in October 1887 and its completion took three years, a long and difficult birth, in view of his many preoccupations. Come 1888 in London, he made some changes in the plot and corrected some chapters already written. More chapters were written in Paris and Madrid. On March 29, 1891, he finished the manuscript of El Filibusterismo in Biarritz. In Brussels, he revised the manuscript and readied it for printing. Its revision was mostly completed on May 30, 1891. Living anew in abject poverty, he left for Ghent and found a publisher, F. Meyer-Van Loo Press. The installment scheme allowed him to pay the downpayment and the early partial payments through the pawning of his jewels. Just as with the printing of the Noli, money ran out, despair set in, the thirty year old author almost hurled the manuscript into the flames, but compatriot Valentin Ventura this time provided for the necessary funds. Unlike the circulation of the Noli, which had better luck, almost all copies of the Fili were confiscated and lost. Originally intended to be longer than the first, the Fili was drastically shortened to thirty-eight chapters due to monetary considerations.

Rizal may have had problems with funds, but never with regard to memory. His tribute to the martyr-priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora states that the whole of the Philippines in paying homage to your memory and calling you martyrs totally rejects your guilt. Further, I have the right, whether or not you were seeking justice and liberty, to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil I am trying to fight. According to Leon Ma. Guerrero, Rizal saw that the Fili suggested a way out of the impasse in which the intellectuals were finding themselves, asking for reforms that would never be granted.

According to Rizal, "the word Filibusterismo is very little known in the Philippines. The masses do not know it yet. I heard it for the first time in 1872 when the tragic executions took place. I still remember the panic that this word evoked. Our father forbade us to say it . . . It does not have the meaning of pirate; it means rather a dangerous patriot who will soon be on the gallows, or else, a conceited fellow."

Leon Ma. Guerrero translates it as subversion, a nonconformist attitude of mind or an overt attempt to overthrow an established order of society.

As early as 1886, maintains the historian John N. Schumacher, Rizal committed himself to a vision and course of action towards attaining complete separation from Spain as an independent nation. Thus, one has to read the Noli, Fili and his other writings within the context of his personal correspondence at the time he was publishing and the ideas he shared in private with some Filipinos. More importantly, the Noli, Fili and the annotated edition of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas form a unity, a carefully calibrated effort to point the way to the future independence of the Philippines.

With independence on Rizal’s mind, the novels’ impact on Philippine colonial society could be nothing less than controversial. Generally recognized by scholars as a diptych in Spanish composed of the Noli and Fili, the first was published in Berlin on March 21, 1887 and the second in Ghent on September 18, 1891. As was to be expected, the reactions were mixed: the novels were hailed by the friends of Rizal in Europe but condemned by his enemies in Manila. Both sides desired to get hold of the books which said what no one had dared or been allowed to say before in public, according to Schumacher.

Some sixty-nine and sixty-five years after the publication of the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, respectively, the twin novels became a hot political issue again. Dubbed by the Philippine Free Press magazine as the Battle Over the Books, a drama unfolded when the late Senator Claro M. Recto authored a Senate bill regarding the compulsory reading of the novels of Rizal in their unexpurgated versions in all colleges and universities in the country. Made public in April 1956 hearings on the bill were conducted on the Senate floor to allow both sides to express their views. On the proponents’ side were Recto, Sen. Jose P. Laurel and other senators, while the critics were Senators Francisco Rodrigo, Decoroso Rosales, and Mariano Cuenco. Outside the Senate Hall, supporters of the bill were the Spirit of 1896, the Alagad ni Rizal, the Freemasons, and the Book Lovers Society; while its opponents were the Catholic Action of the Philippines, the Congregation of Missions, the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Teachers Guild, and other Catholic groups. The former asserted patriotism, whereas the latter invoked religious freedom. In the heated 469 exchanges, emotions, tensions and even heckling were rife. The deadlock was resolved when it allowed exemptions from reading unexpurgated versions of the novels for reasons of religious belief.

Thus, the Rizal bill came to pass as the Rizal Law or Republic Act No. 1425 (House Bill No. 5561 & Senate Bill No. 438) or "An Act to Include in the Curricula of All Public and Private Schools; Colleges and Universities Courses on the Life, Works and Writings of Jose Rizal, Particularly His Novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Authorizing the Printing and Distribution Thereof and for Other Purposes." Approved on June 12, 1956, the Rizal course is the only mandated subject in the curricula of the various levels of the Philippine educational system signifying the value and importance placed on it by Recto, its principal author. The preamble to Republic Act No. 1425 states that the life, works and writings of Jose Rizal particularly his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, are a constant and inspiring source of patriotism with which the minds of the youth, especially during their formative and decisive years in school, should be suffused. According to the Rules and Regulations to Implement Republic Act No. 1425, these would be accomplished at the high school level through the social studies or languages which include not only a more advanced study of his life but also materials from Rizal’s writings as are suitable to the secondary level; and at the college level, through the social sciences or languages that include, among others, a more intensive study of Rizal’s life, works, and writings."

Rizal was only slightly kinder to his countrymen. It is not only a tribute to his skill as a writer but also a proof that Filipino society has not changed. The Rizal Law lives and thrives on nationalist memory. A rededication to the ideals of Filipino heroes, therefore, rekindles collective memory as a heroic people and subverts national amnesia of a glorious past. Whether it is the Philippine Revolution of 1896, the Cold War circa 1956 or the present time, the preamble to Republic Act No. 1425 reminds Filipinos to always remember with special fondness and devotion the life and works of Dr. Jose P. Rizal, the national hero and patriot, who shaped the national character.

Professor George Fabros

University of the Philippines

A Party

Don santiago de los Santos was giving a dinner party one evening towards the end of October in the 1880’s. Although, contrary to his usual practice, he had let it be known only on the afternoon of the same day, it was soon the topic of conversation in Binondo, where he lived, in other districts of Manila, and even in the Spanish walled city of Intramuros. Don Santiago was better known as Capitán Tiago—the rank was not military but political, and indicated that he had once been the native mayor of a town. In those days he had a reputation for lavishness. It was well-known that his house, like his country, never closed its doors—except, of course, to trade and any idea that was new or daring.

So the news of his dinner party ran like an electric shock through the community of spongers, hangers-on, and gate-crashers whom God, in His infinite wisdom, had created and so fondly multiplied in Manila. Some of these set out to hunt polish for their boots; others, collar-buttons and cravats; but one andall gave the gravest thought to the manner in which they might greet their host with the assumed intimacy of long-standing friendship, or, if the occasion should arise, make a graceful apology for not having arrived earlier where presumably their presence was so eagerly awaited.

The dinner was being given in a house on Anloague Street which may still be recognized unless it has tumbled down in some earthquake. Certainly it will not have been pulled down by its owner; in the Philippines, that is usually left to God and Nature. In fact, one often thinks that they are under contract to the Government for just that purpose. The house was large enough, in a style common to those parts. It was situated in that section of the city which is crossed by a branch of the Pasig River, called by some the creek of Binondo, which, like all rivers of Manila at that time, combined the functions of public bath, sewer, laundry, fishery, waterway, and, should the Chinese water-pedlar find it convenient, even a source of drinking water. For a stretch of almost a kilometer this vital artery, with its bustling traffic and bewildering activity, hardly counted with one wooden bridge, and this one was under repair at one end for six months, and closed to traffic at the other end for the rest of the year. Indeed, in the hot season, carriage horses had been known to avail themselves of the situation and to jump into the water at this point, to the discomfiture of any day-dreamer in their vehicles who had dozed off while pondering the achievements of the century.

On the evening in question a visitor would have judged the house to be rather squat; its lines, not quite correct, although he would have hesitated to say whether this was due to the defective eyesight of its architect or to earthquake and typhoon. A wide staircase, green banistered and partly carpeted, rose from the tiled court at the entrance. It led to the main floor along a double line of potted plants and flower vases set on stands of Chinese porcelain, remarkable for their fantastical colors and designs.

No porter or footman would have asked the visitor for his invitation card; he would have gone up freely, attracted by the strains of orchestra music and the suggestive tinkle of silver and china, and perhaps, if a foreigner, curious about the kind of dinner parties that were given in what was called the Pearl of the Orient.

Men are like turtles; they are classified and valued according to their shells. In this, and indeed in other respects, the inhabitants of the Philippines at that time were turtles, so that a description of Capitán Tiago’s house is of some importance. At the head of the stairs the visitor would have found himself in a spacious entrance hall, serving for the occasion as a combination of music and dining room. The large table in the center, richly and profusely decorated, would have been winking delectable promises to the uninvited guest at the same time that it threatened the timid and naïve young girl with two distressing hours inclose company with strangers whose language and topics of conversation were apt to take the most extraordinary lines. In contrast with these earthly concerns would have been the paintings crowded on the walls, depicting such religious themes as Purgatory, Hell, The Last Judgment, The Death of the Just Man, and The Death of the Sinner, and, in the place of honor, set off by an elegant and splendid frame carved in the Renaissance style by the most renowned woodworker of the day, a strange canvas of formidable dimensions in which were to be seen two old crones, with the inscription: Our Lady of Peace and Happy Voyage, Venerated in Antipolo, Visits in the Guise of a Beggar the Pious and Celebrated Capitána Inés, Who Lies Gravely Ill. This composition made up for its lack of taste and artistry with a realism that some might have considered extreme, the blue and yellow tints of the patient’s face suggested a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition, and the tumblers and other receptacles which were about her, the cortège of long illnesses, were reproduced so painstakingly as to make their contents almost identifiable. The sight of these paintings, so stimulating to the appetite, and so evocative of carefree ease, might have led the visitor to think that his cynical host had formed a very shrewd opinion of the character of his guests; and that indeed it was