First Filipino
Benedict Anderson
- Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal, translated by Soledad Lacson-Locsin
Hawaii, 451 pp, $47.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 8248 1917 9
Few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines. Seen from Asia, the armed uprising against Spanish rule of 1896, which triumphed temporarily with the establishment of an independent republic in 1898, makes it the visionary forerunner of all the other anti-colonial movements in the region. Seen from Latin America, it is, with Cuba, the last of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest. Profoundly marked, after three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, by Counter-Reformation Catholicism, it was the only colony in the Empire where the Spanish language never became widely understood. But it was also the only colony in Asia to have had a university in the 19th century. In the 1890s barely 3 per cent of the population knew ‘Castilian’, but it was Spanish-readers and writers who managed to turn movements of resistance to colonial rule from hopeless peasant uprisings into a revolution. Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines’ new self-identification as ‘Asian’, almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world – to say nothing of the written archive of pre-20th-century Philippine history. A virtual lobotomy has taken place.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997
From Ruben Mendez
It was gratifying to see Benedict Anderson write a political as well as a literary analysis of the latest translation of José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (LRB, 16 October). Although Rizal is not that well known internationally, he has not really been ‘unavailable’ in the Philippines. When the Americans took the country over they found him an ideal hero to promote since he had not – unlike Bonifacio, Mabini, Aguinaldo and others – advocated revolution or independence. The national literature has long been replete with writings by and on Rizal. Like Martin Luther King (but not, say, Jesse Jackson), he was a safe figure for the establishment to celebrate.
As Anderson notes, Rizal wrote mainly in Spanish, for he wished to address his ‘enemies’ as well as his ‘friends’. In the Philippines, unlike Latin America, Spanish never became a language of the people. One reason is that when the Spaniards settled the Philippines, there were already populations with well developed languages and alphabets, and the Spaniards were never more than a small minority. Nor did they establish a public school system (although they did establish universities, and much earlier than the 19th century cited by Anderson – Santo Tomás, founded in 1616, is 25 years older than Harvard), and pedagogically inclined parish priests and native Filipinos taught the catón in the local languages. Spanish, too, was overwhelmingly the language of the (print) media and government, so that the educated and those wishing to read had to know it, much as the Arab intelligentsia in Algeria had to know French. But the real tragedy was the low level of literacy in any language, which the Americans raised when they established a public school system, albeit in English.
Anderson (like Rizal) perhaps makes too much of ethno-racial parallels with Latin America. True, there were ‘peninsulares’ and ‘filipinos’ – people of ‘pure’ Spanish descent born in the Philippines – but the latter were few compared with their Latin American counterparts. There was never a movement of ‘white filipinos’ to secede from Spain. Also unlike most of Latin America, the Philippines was ruled during much of its colonial history through the viceroy in Mexico rather than directly by Spain. Such esoteric distinctions, in any case, were lost on the vaster native population. This is shown by the fact that, as Anderson has noted, by the time Mabini was writing, a mere two years after Rizal’s execution, the ‘old meaning [of “filipino”] had vanished’.
It is interesting to note that although the term ‘mestizo’ has practically the same meaning in the Philippines and Latin America, it denotes someone with part Indian ‘blood’ in the latter, and someone with part Spanish (or Chinese) blood in the former. The definitions are identical but the perspectives are not. The culture of the Philippines is a blend, whereas the Latin American establishment remains Spanish with its native population marginalised.
Ruben Mendez
UN Development Programme
Vol. 19 No. 24 · 11 December 1997
From V.K. Mina
For weeks now, I have been puzzling over a curious line in Benedict Anderson’s review of José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (LRB, 16 October). Since Rizal wrote in Spanish, Anderson claims, ‘he wrote as much for the enemy as the friend, something that did not happen with the Raj until the work, a century later, of Salman Rushdie.’ I surmise that the colonists are the enemies and those with the same mother tongue are friends, but I am still left with questions. Since (as Anderson notes) far more of his enemies than his friends knew Spanish, wasn’t Rizal writing more for his enemies than his friends? Whatever the merits of post-colonial theory, surely Rushdie’s work appeared after the Raj? Innumerable Indians before Rushdie wrote for their enemies, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to A. Madaviah, who wrote four novels in English for the express purpose of enlightening the British. I believe Tagore won the Nobel Prize for his English-language writings. Many of these writers also wrote in their own languages – and their bilingualism much better suits the phrase ‘as much for the enemy as the friend’. Nor is Bengali an ‘ancient’ language any more than, say, French, and there’s something odd about the remark that Tagore wrote for the ‘huge Bengali population of the Raj’. Surely Tagore wrote for the huge Bengali population of the world?
V.K. Mina
New York
Vol. 20 No. 3 · 5 February 1998
From Miguel Orio
V.K. Mina is wrong in stating that Rabindranath Tagore ‘won the Nobel Prize for his English-language writings’ (Letters, 11 December 1997). He was awarded the prize for work written in Bengali.
Miguel Orio
Nederland, Colorado
