El Grito Meaning El Filibusterismo

[Jeremias Resendez]

Manypeople and institutions have given me indispensable help in preparing this book. Among the individuals, my biggest debt has been to my brother Perry for tirelessly hunting up materials to broaden and complicate my thinking and for characteristically meticulous and perspicacious criticisms. Second only to him have been Carol Hau and Ambeth Ocampo. Others whom I would like deeply to thank are Patricio Abinales, Ronald Baytan, Robin Blackburn, Karina Bolasco, Jonathan Culler, Evan Daniel, Neil Garcia, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis, Carl Levy, Fouad Makki, Franco Moretti, Shiraishi Takashi, Megan Thomas, Tsuchiya Kenichiro, Umemori Naoyuki, Wang Chao-hua, Wang Hui, Susan Watkins, Joss Wibisono, and Tony Wood.

The four institutions which have kindly made rare materials available to me are the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam, the National Library of the Philippines, the Library of the University of the Philippines, and the Library of Ateneo de Manila University, especially the staff of the Pardo de Tavera Collection. I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

Such is the general proscenium on which the main actors in this book played their various nomadic parts. One could put this point more vividly, perhaps, by saying that the reader will encounter Italians in Argentina, New Jersey, France, and the Basque homeland; Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Haiti, the United States, France, and the Philippines; Spaniards in Cuba, France, Brazil, and the Philippines; Russians in Paris; Filipinos in Belgium, Austria, Japan, France, Hong Kong, and Britain; Japanese in Mexico, San Francisco, and Manila; Germans in London and Oceania; Chinese in the Philippines and Japan; Frenchmen in Argentina, Spain, and Ethiopia. And so on.

In 1887, at the Exposicin Filipina in Madrid, a 23-year-old indio named Isabelo de los Reyes, living in colonial Manila, won a silver medal for a huge Spanish-language manuscript which he called El folk-lore filipino. He published this text in unwitting tandem with compatriot Jos Rizal (then aged twenty-five), who, after wandering around Northern Europe for some time, published his incendiary first novel, Noli me tangere, in Berlin that self-same year. This book helped earn him martyrdom in 1896 and, later, the permanent status of Father of His Country and First Filipino.

Taking advantage of the folkloric materials gathered by D. Alejandro Guichot and D. Luis Montoto in Andalusia, by D. Eugenio de Olavarŕia y Huarte in Madrid, by D. Jos Prez Ballesteros in Catalonia, by D. Luis Giner Arivau in Asturias, by Consigliere Pedroso with his Tradioes populares portuguezas in Portugal, as well as others, I have drawn up the following list of superstitions which I believe were introduced here by the Spaniards in past centuries. The list should not surprise anyone, given that in the early days of Spanish domination the most ridiculous beliefs [las creencias ms absurdas] were in vogue on the Peninsula.[18]

Literally translated these lines mean: bar-bar (an Ilocano interjection for which there is no equivalent in Spanish), do not get upset, compadre, for we are only cutting because we have been ordered to do so.

Here Isabelo positions himself firmly within the Ilocano world. He knows what the Ilocano words mean, but his readers do not: to them (and by this he intends not only Spaniards, but also other Europeans, as well as non-Ilocano natives of the archipelago) this experience is closed. Isabelo is a kindly and scientific man, who wishes to tell the outsiders something of this world; but he does not proceed by smooth paraphrase. The reader is confronted by an eruption of the incomprehensible original Ilocano, before being tendered a translation. Better yet, something is still withheld, in the words bar-bar, for which Spanish has no equivalent. The untranslatable, no less; and beyond that, perhaps, the incommensurable.

From the end of the eighteenth century down to our haggard own, folklore studies, even if not always selfconsciously defined as such, have proved a fundamental resource to nationalist movements. In Europe, they provided a powerful impulse for the development of vernacular cultures linking especially peasantries, artists and intellectuals, and bourgeoisies in their complicated struggles against the forces of legitimacy. Urban composers foraged for folk songs, urban poets captured and transformed the styles and themes of folk poetry, and novelists turned to the depiction of folk countrysides. As the newly imagined national community headed towards the magnetic future, nothing seemed more valuable than a useful and authentic past.

The records of two personal libraries offer some indirect additional indications. The library that Rizal himself brought back from Europe included texts by Chateaubriand, A. Daudet, Dumas pre (5), Hugo, Lesage, Sue (10), Voltaire, and Zola (4) for France; Bulwer-Lytton, Defoe, Dickens, and Thackeray for England; Goethe and Hoffman for Germany; Manzoni for Italy, Douwes Dekker for the Netherlands, and Cervantes for Spain. His correspondence makes it clear that he had also read Andersen, Balzac, Hebel, and Swift.[26] This list is unlikely to represent fully what he had with him in Europe, since he knew his books would be thoroughly inspected by the colonial customs and police on his return home. But it shows unmistakably how central to his novelistic reading was France.

That respectable gentleman, so elegantly dressed, is no doctor but a homeopathist of a unique type; he professes in everything the principle of like-with-like. The young cavalry captain arriving with him is his favorite disciple.

The gossip is catty, but not shocked; moreover, the insinuation of homosexuality flies past the country boy who knows no Latin, and also does not understand the meaning of the word homepata. In other words, Tadeo appears really to be addressing not a country boy but some rather sophisticated readers.

Paulita se pona ms triste cada vez, pensando en como unas muchachas que se llaman cochers podan ocupar la atencin de Isagani. Cochers le recordaba ciertas denominaciones que las colegialas usan entre s para explicar una especie de afectos.

Paulita felt more and more depressed, thinking about how some of these girls, called cochers, might occupy the attention of Isagani. The word cochers reminded her of certain appellations which convent-school girls use among themselves to explain a species of affection.[38]

Next, there is the curious scene where Des Esseintes picks up a teenager off the street, and takes him to a very expensive brothel.[48] There he pays for him to be initiated by Vanda, an experienced and seductive Jewish prostitute. While the boy is busy losing his putative virginity, Des Esseintes chats with the madam whom he knows very well. Says Madame Laure:

Des Esseintes could never think of it again without shuddering; never had he endured a more alluring, and a more imperious captivity; never had he experienced such perils, never too had he been more painfully satisfied.[51]

One should not take these sentences out of context. Des Esseintes, like Huysmans himself, is heterosexual, with a long string of mistresses. The affair with the boy appears to be part of a Flaubertian search for plaisirs inprouvs.

Rizal once said that he had written one quarter of Noli me tangere while in Paris.[56] He later seriously considered writing his second novel in French, to reach a world audience. In a memoir of his time with Rizal in Berlin, Mximo Viola recalled:

Y cuando quise saber la razn de ser de aquel lujo innecesario del francs, me explic diciendo de que su objecto era escribir en adelante en francs, caso de que su Noli me tangere fracasara, y sus paisanos no respondieran a los propsitos de dicha obra.

When I asked him the reason for this needless luxury of French, he explained to me that his purpose was to write from then on French in the event that his Noli me tangere proved to be a failure, and his countrymen did not respond to the objectives of the work.[57]

Rizal ran across Max Havelaar late in 1888 while in London, probably in the quite good English translation. He was reading it shortly after Noli me tangere had come out and Douwes Dekker himself had died. In a December 6th letter Rizal wrote thus to Blumentritt:

Needless to say all the roles in the play, male and female, were played by the teenage boys. Puberty being puberty, Roxas wrote, passionate affairs developed, till one of the various love letters being handed about was intercepted by the prying Fathers. See The World of Felix Roxas, translated by Angel Estrada and Vicente del Carmen (Manila: Filipiniana Book Guild, 1970), p. 330. This book is an English translation of columns Roxas wrote in Spanish for El Debate between 1906 and 1936.

Third was the narrower world of the decaying, residual Spanish empire into which Rizal was born. The metropole itself was wracked by dynastic civil war, fierce competition between ethno-regions, class conflicts, and ideological struggles of many kinds. In the far-flung colonies, stretching from the Caribbean through northern Africa to the rim of the Pacific, anticolonial movements, led by that of Cuba, were steadily increasing in vehemence and social support, while at the same time beginning to have serious contacts with one another.

Yo me paseaba por aquellas calles anchas y limpias adoquinadas como en Manila, llenas de gente, llamando la atencin de todo el mundo, quienes me llamaban chino, japons, americano, etc: ninguno filipino. Pobre pas! Nadie tiene noticia de t!

Wir mssen alle der Politik etwas opfern, wenn auch wir keine Lust daran haben. Dies verstehen meine Freunde welche in Madrid unsere Zeitung herausgeben; diese Freunde sind alle Jnglingen, creolen, mestizen und malaien, wir nennen uns nur Philippiner.

All of us have to make sacrifices for political purposes, even when we have no inclination to do so. This is understood by my friends, who publish our newspaper in Madrid; these friends are all youngsters, creoles, mestizos, and Malays, (but) we call ourselves simply Filipinos.[87]

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