Ang mga bukol sa katawan ay hindi pirming bahagi nito. Samakatuwid, tuwing makakakita tayo ng bukol, inaasahan natin na ito’y maglalaho, o di kaya’y hahanap ng paraan upang ito ay mawala. Dahil ang pagkakaroon ng bukol ay laging isang babala na may mas malalim at peligrosong proseso na nagaganap sa ating katawan.

Kung gayon, ano ang ibig sabihin ng pagsulpot muli ng pormang dagli sa akademya sa panahong ito sa pamamagitan ng isa sa mga batikang manunulat at akademiko? Isa rin kaya itong sintomas o babala ng mas malalim na suliraning pampanitikan, o panlipunan?

Ayon kay Rolando Tolentino, ika-100 anibersaryo ng pormang dagli noong taon na nailimbag din ang kanyang aklat (2005). Dagdag pa niya, “[m]atapos ang unang dekda ng panahon ng Amerikanong pananakop, naglaho ang pormang ito” (xi).

Hindi na bago ang ganitong pangyayari—ang paglitaw at paglubog ng mga popular na pormang pampanitikan. Talamak ang mga “revivals” sa larangan ng popular na musika at gayundin sa mga tema ng teleserye. Ang revival ng mga imahe at iba pang artifact ng kulturang popular ay minsan nang pinroblema ng Marxistang si Fredric Jameson. Ayon sa kanya, ang panahon ng postmodernismo bilang kultural na lohika ng “late capitalism” ay yugto ng repitisyon ng mga dating nang pormang kultural. At ang “revivalism” na ito ay senyales ng papasulpot o “emergent” na kaganapan sa lipunan.

Samakatuwid, ang pagpapasulpot nang muli ni Tolentino ng pormang dagli sa “mainstream”ng akademya (nilimbag ito ng University Press) ay nararapat na basahin bilang isang senyales at sintomas. Sintomas at senyales ng ano?Upang masagot ang tanong na ito, tunghayan natin ang nilalaman ng “Sakit ng Kalingkingan”

Sa titulo pa lamang ng aklat ay matutunghayan na ang pagkakahawig ng metapora na gamit ni Eagleton at Tolentino na kapwa tumutukoy sa isang porma ng distabilisasyon ng katawan (sakit ng kalingkingan kay Tolentino at bukol sa leeg naman kay Eagleton). Ngunit magkaiba ng behikulo: teorya kay Eagleton, isang porma naman ng panitikan para kay Tolentino. Subalit ang pormal na pinagkaiba ng panitikan at ng teorya ay natutunaw sa akda ni Tolentino. Ang paggamit niya ng kabalintunaan (irony), datos istatistikal, mga “media events”, at iba pang halimbawa ng pangyayari sa araw-araw ay patunay na wala namang bagong gustong sabihin si Tolentino. Sa halip ay nais niyang ituon ang ating atensyon sa isa pang dako:ang mga nakababagabag na katotohanan hinggil sa mga bagay na matagal na nating nalalaman. Kung gayon ay imbitasyon itong maging bata muli. Sabi nga ni Eagleton “[c]hildren make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accpeting our routine soial practices as ‘natural,’ and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten (1990:34).” Ang ganitong pagdidistansya sa ordinaryong realidad upang kilalanin ang realidad ay matutunghayan sa unang dagli ni Tolentino:

“Ang taong nagigipit

Baon sa utang at kasalanan

Ang pasaherong nagigipit

Pinagsisiksikan gn driver

Ang sexy na babaeng nagigipit

Kumakapit sa DOM

Ang guwapong lalakeng nagigipit

Kumakapit sa Master Showman

Ang estudyanteng nagigipit

Nakatimba ng mga 5.0

Ang manunulat na nagigipit

Lalong nakakasulat

Ang langgam na nagigipit

Papalitan ng ibang langgam

Ang beauty contestant na nagigipit

Nauubusan ng Inggles <...>

Ang walang pag-asa na nagigipit

Napapataya as lotto

Ang aktibistang nagigipit

Nakibaka (3-4)”

Pansinin na pamilyar sa atin ang lahat ng mga imahe at pangyayaring nabanggit. Walang rebelasyon! Pero saan nanggagaling ang kurot ng dagling ito? Sa pamamagitan ng pagtalakay ni Tolentino sa mga talamak na kaganapan sa lipunan, hinihimok niya tayong maging bata muli. Pag-isipan na muli ang mga kaganapang tila natural na sa atin upang sa huli ay makita na hindi pala hiwa-hiwalay na natural na katotohanan ang mga nabanggit kundi mga pangyayari na umaayon sa iisang lohika ng pag-iral: ang disposisyon ng pagkakakulong sa bilangguan ng namamayaning sistema sa panahon ng krisis. Iba-ibang tao man, pare-pareho ang moda ng pagniniig sa daigdig at pare-pareho rin ng kinahahantungan. Liban sa pigura ng aktibista na imbis na pumaloob sa bilangguan ay pilit na kumakawala rito (nasa loob pa rin kagaya ng iba pero tahasang bumabangga sa lohika ng sistema ang sariling lohika ng “survival” dahil imbis na pag-angkop sa sitwasyon ay pagtutol mismo rito ang tunguhin ng aktibistang paraktika.

Ang Manunulat Hinggil sa Gitnang-Uri

Popular ang pag-atake ni Tolentino sa mga temang kanyang tinatalakay . Mula sa mga pilosopikal na pagtalakay ng mga popular na salita kagaya toxic, “verdey; ” mga kaganapan katulad ng pamamanata, kidnap-for-ransom, representasyon sa kababaihan bilang “sawsawan” ng kalalakihan, komersalisasyon ng edukasyon, paggamit at kolonisasyon ng wikang Ingles; mga istratehiya ng kapital kagaya ng mga ads ng Jollibee (“Ang Jollibee na nagigipit/Bini-bee happy tao p. 95), ng MaDonald’s (“Ang McDonald’s na nagigipit/Pati ulyanin ginagamit, p. 95) , feminisasyon ng labor migration, danas ng kabaklaan, hanggang sa mga usapin at tunguhin ng rebolusyon, soyalismo at komunismo bilang usapin ng katarungan. Paano napagtatagni-tagni ng manunulat ang kalat-kalat na paksang ito?

Nauna nang ipahayag ni Tolentino ang kanyang pagtataya bilang isang manunulat sa aklat na Sarilaysay: Danas at Dalumat ng Lalaking Manunulat Sa Filipino (2004):

“Una, yung tema ko ay mas overtly political—mga teacher na nagha-hunger strike, mga apathy sa poverty, etc. Pero habang nagtatagal, mas nagiging middle class yung perspective ko. Dahil yun naman talaga ang pinanggagalingan ko as a writer, at wala na akong grand vision na masu-sway ko ‘yung paniniwala ng maraming bilang ng tao. A masu-sway ko na lamang ng paniniwala ay yung mga taong nakakabasa ng akda ko. At sa maraming pagkakataon ito yung mga taong nakakabili ng mga libro at magasin na nilalabas ko. Mas middle class yung pursuit para sa akin, mas gusto ko yun. Pag middle class meron kang certain freedom, me certain tolerance sa klase ng experimentation, sa isang klase ng kakatwang take sa isang narrative ng isang kwento—dahil ito yung uri na mas maraming nagbabasa. Me access sa libro, me access sa knowledge, at active participant sa knowledge production (2004:368).”

Malay si Tolentino na mamamayan ng gitnang-uri ang kanyang kausap. Masasabing nagmula rin siya rito batay sa kanyang credentials: Nagtapos sa De La Salle University, sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas at sa University of South California; at kasalukuyang permanenteng propesor sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas. Ang kanyang uring pinagmulan ay siya na mismong batayan ni Tolentino sa kanyang pagpupusisyon bilang manunulat. Malinaw na naisisiwalat ang kaugnayan ng uri sa panulat nang sinabi ni Eagleton na “all theory is a real social practice (1990:24).” Walang espesyal na kapangyarihan si Tolentino bilang manunulat. Ngunit mayroon siyang kultural na kapital na nagbibigay sa kanya ng kakayahan na maging mahusay na artikulador ng mga karansan ng gitnang uri. Ang pag-gamit niya halimbawa ng kabalintunaan at tablahang pangungutya (witty sarcasm) ay palatandaan ng disposiyon ng pang-gitnang uri. Ang uring aral sa klasikal na literatura at may pangkonsumo rin naman ng popular na kultura ng malls, coffee shops, Hollwood films; at mga teoryang akademiko. Dito matutunghayan ang kapangyarihan ng Marxismong kritismo sa litieratura na hindi pinaghihiwalay ang texto sa manunulat; sa larangang kinapapalooban nito (academic o literary field) at sa mas malawak na konteksto ng lipunan.

Malaki ang hamon sa gitnang uri ni Amado Guerrero sa kanyang akdang Lipunan at Rebolusyong Pilipino. Ayon sa kanya ang peti-burgesya ay positibong pwersa ng rebolusyon na bagamat “vascillating” ay may kakayahang pumanig at manindigan; at magbuo ng opinyong publiko na pabor sa pagwawagi ng rebolusyong Pilipino. Ganito rin ang hamon sa sarili ni Tolentino.

Maaaring hatiin, kung gayon, sa dalawang kategorya ang mga inilalarawang pangyayari ni Tolentino sa kanyang mga dagli. Ang lohika ng pag-angkop at ang lohika ng pagtutol. At sa dalawang binarismong ito ay pinapaboran ng manunulat ang huli. Sa kaparehong panayam na nabanggit sa itaas, mas malalim na tinalakay ni Tolentino ang kanyang pananagutan at pagtataya bilang manunulat:

“Ang masasabi ko, dahil pumasok ako sa iba-ibang avenue, may conscious na decision on my part na maging bahagi ng teacher’s movement, halimbawa, tulad ng people’s movement…may certain preferecnes ako so direksyon na gustong i-take para sa sarili ko at sa pag-evolve ng sarili kong convictions at theory…

Sa isang panahon ay may mga available talaga—quite readily—may access ka sa ilang grand theories na nagpapaliwanag ng iyong panahon. At sa panahon na iyon, at sa tingin ko hanggang sa kasalukuyan, ay may validity pa rin tiong Marxist theory, bilang ideolohiya na dinadala ng National Democratic Movement…Sa akin, ang ganitong partisipasyon at continuous na pag-aaral ay mahalaga dahil kini-keep ka in resonance with the oppressed people—hindi ka isang writer na nasa tore, ikaw ay isang writer na kabahagi ng lipunan na ginagawa mo rin namang paksa sa iyong panitikan.Sa ganitong ugnayan, ikaw din naman ay guro, mas marami kang nakitang options sa klase ng gusto mong tunguhin para as sarili mo. Sa klase ng gusto mong panigan, bilang isang indibidwal sa isang mas malaking lipunan at kasaysayan (2004:371).”

Sa mga pagtatayang nabanggit, matutunghayan kung paano ang mga paksa sa Sakit ng Kalingkingan ay pinag-uugnay ng isang porma ng radikal na pulitikang makabayan. Kung kaya’t may pagtatangkang maglagom ng mga kaganapan sa pang-araw-araw na buhay si Tolentino sa kanyang akda. Sapagkat para sa isang Marxista, mahalagang magkaroon ng materyalistang lapit sa realidad upagn makita, masuri at baguhin ito batay sa mga kongkretong kundisyon. Taliwas ito sa idealismo at metapisikal na lapit na tinatanaw ang realidad bilang hiwahiwalay na mga kaganapan na sumusunod lamang sa isang lohikang hindi lapat sa relasyong ng tao sa tao (kapalararan, gulong ng buhay, swerte, kagustuhan ng Maykapal, karma, at iba pa)

Bagamat malawak ang kanyang paksa at iba-ibang buhay ang kanyang tinatalakay, hindi siya nahuhulog sa bitag ng kultural na lohika ng neo-liberal na globalisasyon sa larangan ng pagteteorya ng kasalukuyan. Ayon kay Eagleton, may kakambal na pulitika ang pluralismo sa teorya: “seeking to understand everybody’s point of view quite often suggests that you yourself are disinterestedly up on high or in the middle, and trying to resolve conflicting viewpoints into a consensus implies a refusal of the truth that some conflicts can be resolved on one side alone (1983, 1996:173).” Malawak ang tinitingnang mundo ni Tolentino ngunit malinaw ang kanyang pagtataya rito. Ang pagpusisyon na ito ay ang nagiging lunsaran ng manunulat sa paglahok sa tunggalian sa mga pwersa ng kasaysayan.

Ang Historikal na Akda

Ayon kay Eagleton, [t]he object of theory is, in a vastly broad sense, ‘history’…An act of theory takes history as its target, but then finds itself joining the very history it ponders, altering it in the process (1990:27). Sinisipat ni Tolentino ang panahon ng imperyalistang globalisasyon. Sakit ng kalingkingan ang metapora niya para sa krisis ng kasalukuyang panahon. Kung idudugtong ang orihinal na pormulasyon ng kasabihan na iyon ganito ang kalalabasan: Sakit ng kalingkingan, sakit ng buong katawan. Ang kalingkingan ay maaaring basahin bilang metapora para sa akto ng pagteteorya o paglikha ng kaalaman o pagsulat mismo. Ang ehersisyong ito ay nagluluwal ng mapapait na imahe ng mga kontradiksyon. Sa isang lipunan na mayroon na raw liberal na demokrasya, talamak pa rin ang pagkakalulon ng panggitnang-uri—na dapat sana’y mulat na uri dahil sa kanilang edukasyon—sa fetishismo ng mga commodities, kagaya ng pagkakatali sa patriarkal-kapitalistang imahe ng kababaihan sa mga magazines kagaya ng Candy at Cosmopolitan (61-62). Ang “consumer freedom” ng free market ay husto nang pamalit sa mga batayang kalayaang pulitikal. Di bale nang talamak ang pulitikal na pamamaslang basta huwag lang umabot sa credit limit ang credit card (63) para sa susunod na 70%Sale sa SM ay malayang makabili ng anumang nais. Sa “Hello God, Alleluiah” (114-115) halos pagtawanan na na ni Tolentino ang masidhing pagbibigay ng puri sa kaginhawahan na dulot ng cellphone dahil umano’y ang paggamit nito ay umiigpaw sa “communication gap.” Tila nakalilimot na na ang bawat pag-igpaw sa “communiation gap” ay may bayad din naman. Ang pruweba ng mga bagong mekanismong represibo ay ginagawang senyales ng paglaya sa larangan kulturang popular. Ang mga kontradiksyong kagaya nito, para kay Tolentino ay sakit lamang ng kalingkingan. At kung gayon ay sintomas ng mas malalim na krisis ng sistema. Kung ang danas natin ng ginhawa, ligaya, at aliw ay may malalim na ugat sa sistema ng kapitalismo, ang paglaya ay natatawaran at nagiging mistulang pagsunod na lamang.

Kaya nga’t nililinaw ni Eagleton na

[t]he question of the uses of theory, then, is in the first place a political rather than an intellectual one. Literary critics do not in my view divide most importantly between those who are enthusiastic about theory and those who regard it as the fina death rattle of the Free World. They divide, rather, betwen those who understand what Walter Benjamin meant when he declared that there was no document of civilization which was not also a record of barbarism, and those who do not (1990:32).”

Barbarismo ngang maituturing ang mga sumusunod na halimbawa:

1. “May 2.2 milyong Pinoy ang gumagamit ng droga (22).” Subalit dito sa Pilipinas, nakapaghahalal daw ng senador na pinaghihinalaang nasa likod ng pagkalat ng bawal ng gamot. (2) Sa US, kapag nangamkam ka, pupunta ka sa kulungan. Sa Pilipinas kapag nahuli ka o hindi man na nangangamkam, pupunta ka ng Amerika (23). Sa dagling “Young Mom Stangles Three-month-old Baby, isang labingsiyam na taong gulang na dalagang ina ang pinaghihinalaang pumatay sa sariling anak: “Napipi si Dailyn. Kusa na lamang itong tila nagduduyan habang nakaupo. Walang naririnig. Wala ring sinasabi maliban sa angil at pagiyak.Hindi nauubusan ng luha si Dailyn. Ayon sa pulis, “The young woman would be charged with infanticide. She faces the death penalty if found guilty(81).” (3) “Ang babaeng nagigipit napapasayaw ng hubo’t hubad (96). (4) Walang benepisyo at karapatan ang mga kontraktwal na manggawagawa [ng SM] (98):”How can I help you today?” Kami nga ay di matulungan ang sarili, tumutulong pa sa iba!Biglang naiisip ng kaibigan ko, ano ang mas mabuti—ang i-edit ang composition ng mga batang magtatrabaho rin naman sa mga multinational corporationo siyang nagtatrabaho ngayon sa ilalim ng global na dibisyon ng paggawa? Kung hindi siya, sila. Kung hindi ngayon, bukas din. Kung hindi rito, sa ibang lugar doon (102)”

Ang mga bahagi ng ito ng mga dagling nabanggit ay ilan lamang sa mga halimbawa kung paanong nabubusabos ang buhay ng mga tao sa ngalan ng pribadong pag-aari. Ang sibilisasyon ay markado ng pag-usbong ng pribadong pag-aari. Argumento ng Benjamin na nahahati sa dalawa ang mga kritiko o teorista: (1) ang mga nakauunawa na nagpapatuloy ang barbarismo sa sibilisasyong nakabatay sa sistema ng pribadong pag-aari. (2) at ang patuloy na maniniwalang walang kinalaman sa unibersal na pagpatay (universal murder) ang sistema ng pribadong pag-aari.

Sa isang Marxistang lapit, hindi maihihiwalay ang kultural na produksyon sa dominanteng moda ng produksyon ng lipunan. Ang mga tumutunggali sa pormulasyong ito ni Marx ay walang ibang magawa kundi baluktutin ang pormulasyon at sabihing sinabi raw ni Marx na ang moda ng produksyon ang siyang magdidikta sa larga ng kultural na produksyon. Sa pagbabalik sa argumento ni Benjamin hinggil sa kabalintunaan ng kasayasayan ng sibilisasyon; at sa paglalapat ni Eagleton ng ideyang ito sa pagteteorya ng literatura ay nagkakaroon tayo ngayon ng mas holistikong pagtingin sa ugnayan ng literatura at lipunan.

Ang mga kontradiksyon na iluluwal ng ugnayan ng literatura at lipunan ay patuloy na iiral ngunit marapat na historikal ang paglalapat dito ng kaisipan. Ani pa ni Tolentino sa dagling pinamagatang Sosyalismo:

“Kailangang maniwala tayo sa kinabukasan. Kung hindi, ano pa ang dahilan ng pagpupursigi sa kasalukuyan?

Ang kinabukasan ang magpapalaya sa kasalukuyan.

Ang hindi pa nararanasan ang nagbibigay posibilidad sa ginhawa sa mabigat na nararanasan.

Ito ang utopia na hindi pa nasusulat dahil hindi pa nararanasan.

Ito ang kinabukasan na aakdain nating lahat (157)”

Sa puntong ito, sikapin nating sagutin ang mga tanong nilatag sa umpisa ng sanaysay. Kung ang bawat revival at sintomas din ng pagsulpot ng bago, maaring ang pagsulpot muli ng dagli sa pormang kritikal at reflexibo kagaya ng sa akda ni Tolentino, ay senyales ng paglawak ng mga kasangkapang bumabaka ng panahong ito maging sa larangan ng teorya at panulat. Kung dati ang dagli ay isang pormang matatagpuan sa mga peryodiko, ngayo’y bagamat mas pormal at elitista (dahil limbag sa unibersidad at kung gayon ay hindi masakses agad ng masa at hindi dahil sa nilalaman) laman naman nito ay matalas ng pagtanaw sa kasalukuyan at kinabukasan. Mahalaga ring idiin pa na ang akda ni Tolentino ay lumalampas sa inaasahan sa isang dagli dahil ito ay isang repleksibong akda na bumabakbak sa pader sa gaitang ng gawang malikahain at ng kritisismo. Tunay na sa panahon ng krisis ay may pagluwang at may paglaya sa mga dogmatikong kategoryang akademiko.

Mga Sanggunian:

Eagleton, T. (1990). The Significance of Theory. Masachussets: Basil Blackwell.

_________(1983, 1996) Literary Theory. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

_________(1990, 2000) The Ideology of the Aesthetic. (Masachussets: Blackwell)

Tolentino, R. (2005). Sakit ng Kalingkingan: 100 Dagli sa Panahon ng Krisis. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

Torres-Yu, R. at Aguirre A. (2004). Sarilaysay: Danas at Dalumat ng Lalaking Manunulat Sa Filipino. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

He began writing the Noli in late 1884, when he was still studying in Madrid, Spain, and finished it on February 21, 1887, in Berlin, Germany, while in poverty amidst a harsh winter. Only 25 years old then, he had already produced a 465-page manuscript. It went into publication in March 1887 in Berlin, when its printer churned out its first 2,000 hardbound copies.

Those copies were worth around P300 in all; hence, the printing cost for each copy was 15 cents or less. Rizal sold each copy for five pesetas (one peso) and gave a ten per cent commission to his friends who acted as distributors and sellers (Rizal’s Correspondence with Fellow Reformists, Centennial Edition, Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1963, pp. 126-127).

The Noli is a social novel portraying the Philippines in the years 1882-83, part of the remaining two decades of the waning Spanish rule. It was written in the Spanish language, had 63 chapters and an epilogue, and was dedicated by Rizal to his motherland.

Taken from John 20:17 of the Bible, its title is a Latin phrase which means “touch me not.” In the novel, the one saying it was the malignant social cancer that was pestering the nation. The cancer was saying it because before the Noli, no one wanted to examine or “touch” it. Rizal was the first person to touch it and offer its remedies.

Rizal said that he wrote the Noli to awaken Filipino patriotism and to ask the Spanish authorities in the Philippines and Spain to cure that cancer through drastic reforms in the government, clergy, church, military, and education (ibid., pp. 252, 83-84).

Themes. The two major themes of the Noli are the patriotism of its heroes and the battle between good and evil in which evil prevailed in the end. The evil (wicked priests and government officials) did all their best to defeat the good (heroes).

Though it won convincingly in the end, the evil did not eclipse the other themes of the novel, such as the romances and hopes of its good-natured characters, the defects of the less educated, and the wit, humor, and laughter of its hilarious figures.

Characters. There are two heroes in the novel: Juan Crisostomo Ibarra and Elias. Ibarra was a 23-year-old son of Spanish-Filipino parentage, highly educated, and belonged to a wealthy family. Elias was a poor young man who suffered tyrannies from the Spaniards. They both loved their native land and committed their lives for her betterment.

Ibarra preferred that the Philippines remain a Spanish colony and praised its authorities for attempting to improve its rule. Elias had already lost his faith in the government, yet he still wanted peaceful means to attain reforms. But if they were no longer possible, only then would he opt for an armed resistance to win the country’s independence. Their differing beliefs did not hinder them from becoming friends.

The wealthy Captain Tiago favored the marriage of his only daughter, Maria Clara, to Ibarra. Maria Clara was Ibarra’s childhood friend. Although her parents were Filipinos, she had Spanish features (hair with an almost golden hue and skin as white as cotton), and the fat friar Father Damaso Verdolagas, a Spaniard, was her godfather. Father Damaso was the former parish priest of San Diego, Ibarra’s birthplace.

Other characters are Doña Victorina de los Reyes, a socialite Filipina who ignored her Filipino origin by espousing the Spanish ones; Father Bernardo Salvi, the successor of Father Damaso as San Diego’s parish priest; the Alferez, the Spanish commander of the civil guards in San Diego; Tasio the Philosopher, an old sage residing in San Diego; Sisa, his neighbor; Basilio and Crispin, the young sons of Sisa and sextons in the parish church of San Diego; and more.

Summary. Ibarra returned to the Philippines after his seven-year studies in Europe to fulfill his plans, which were to take over his family’s properties that he inherited from his father, to build a grade school in San Diego, and to marry Maria Clara.

On his return, he was shocked to learn that his father, Don Rafael, was persecuted on wrong charges and died in prison. Father Damaso ordered that Don Rafael’s body be dug up and transferred to the Chinese cemetery. When the gravedigger dug it one dark night, it rained, and because the coffin was so heavy, he just thrust it into the lake.

Ibarra still went ahead with his plans. But unknown to him, he had an adversary who marked him as a dangerous man and an enemy of the Church and State. This adversary devised a rebellion in San Diego in which he made Ibarra as its brains. Before that rebellion broke out, Father Salvi was able to alert the civil guards; thus, it was easily subdued. Ibarra and many others were sent to Manila as prisoners. Elias was able to secure Ibarra’s jewelry and money.

Elias also helped him escape from prison in Manila one night. As the authorities pursued them in Laguna Lake, Elias leapt into the water to divert attention. The soldiers fired at him, and saw traces of blood in the waters, leading them to conclude that Ibarra was killed and drowned. Ibarra remained hiding in the boat on his way to escape.

On December 24, the bloodied and dying Elias arrived in the Ibarra family’s forest in San Diego, where he found Basilio grieving over the dead Sisa. Ibarra also arrived there. With Basilio helping, he buried Sisa’s body and burned Elias’ corpse. Then he dug his possessions that Elias buried, gave Basilio coins, and finally fled, leaving his dear country and Maria Clara.

Friends and Foes. Like what Rizal wished, the Noli gave him fame. It was critically reviewed and praised in Europe and the Philippines, yet it also gave him enemies.

On August 30, 1887, five months after it was published, the Dominican Father Pedro Payo, the Archbishop of Manila, asked Emilio Terrero, the governor general of the Philippines, to ban it in the country. That after the three professors from the University of Santo Tomas whom he appointed to scrutinize it pronounced it “heretic, scandalous, and injurious.”

Terrero then asked Father Salvador Font of the Permanent Commission on Censorship to study the book. On December 29, 1887, Font recommended that “the importation, reproduction, and circulation of this pernicious book …be prohibited” for its severe attacks on the religion of the State, the government, Spaniards, the courts, the military, and the integrity of Spain, and because its only objective was the absolute independence of the country (ibid., pp. 736-737).

The novel was therefore banned in the country. Anyone caught possessing, selling, or reading it was putting his life in danger (The Rizal-Blumentritt Correspondence, Centennial Edition, Manila: Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission, 1961, Part 1, pp. 197-198).

But the ban only excited the people. Hundreds of copies were smuggled into the country and sold secretly. Many bookstores found fortune with this book because its price skyrocketed, costing as high as P50 per copy. Rizal profited nothing from those sales (Miscellaneous Correspondence, Centennial Edition, Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1963, p. 98).

Faithfulness. The unpaved roads (dusty or muddy according to the seasons), the one-way wooden and rickety bridges, and the iron grilles that Ibarra twisted when he was a young boy and had remained not straightened were colonial settings painted with faithfulness.

Rizal was able to distinguish progress from stagnation owing to his trips abroad, where he saw that much time, planning, and money were being fueled for growth and advances. In his country, Spain was ineffective to set itself straight as a colonial master; as a result, the colony was in rough, rickety, and twisted conditions.

Despite the many trips, big cities, and beautiful women, Ibarra had not forgotten Maria Clara and had always kept in memory his countrymen and their hopes and grief. His love for her and the one he offered to the country were fused into one single love.

Enlightened citizens, who were few, called the old man Anastacio a philosopher. The ignorant, who were the majority, derided him as Tasio the Lunatic. The books he was writing were not for the people of his time, for they would burn them once they read them. His books were intended for future generations that would be advanced, understand him, and thus say: “Not all slept at the night of our ancestors.” However, his efforts wound up in futility because the pious burned all of his books and writings when he died.

The celibacy of friars was an object of suspicion. Father Damaso was very concerned with the decisions, marriage, and sudden sickness of Maria Clara, to the wonder of the maiden.

At the procession during San Diego’s fiesta, a woman with Filipino features was watching with her Hispanic-looking infant. When Father Salvi was passing them, the infant stretched his hands, joyously calling out “Papa, papa” after him amid the brief silence and malicious winks. The baby cried when his mother held tightly his mouth and brought him away.

When Maria Clara decided to enter the nunnery after learning Ibarra’s assumed death, Father Damaso fought against it because of the life and mystery hiding within the cloister walls.

That of Sisa was a very sad story. She was a mother who was “frail of disposition and had more heart than brain.” Her god was her gambling husband, who began maltreating her after draining her jewelry and, like all false gods, became more ruthless each passing day.

Her two young sons were her angels. One night, Basilio was grazed on the forehead by a bullet from civil guards. His brother Crispin, accused of stealing, was beaten to death by the priest and head sexton in the convent. Because of those incidents, Sisa lose her sanity.

At the novel’s end, Basilio found and ran after his mad mother, telling her that it was he, Basilio, her son. He caught up with her and lost his senses in her bosom. All of a sudden, there was a spark in her brain: she recovered her former self and let a loose cry after recognizing him. Later, the boy woke up to find his poor mother no longer breathing.

These characters are genuine and unforgettable. They depict real people and those real people’s virtues, defects, hopes, or failures in noble, correct, admirable, good, or not-so-good angles. They provoke warmth, excitement, laughter, suspicions, and criticisms, making readers to not forget but rather imitate them for pure fun, or utilize them while criticizing the errors in the government and society. They possess the flesh, blood, and savagism of enduring literature. They are the ones that have made the Noli a great literary work.

The greatness of the Noli Me Tangere created the greatness of Rizal. Rizal’s greatness was further heightened by El Filibusterismo and was rendered immortal and unequalled by his martyrdom on December 30, 1896.

——————

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

A native of Catarman, Northern Samar, now living in Metro Manila. He graduated with an AB History degree from a college in Makati City. He writes in Filipino and English, and since 2000 has been publishing short stories, historical fiction for children, and essays in Liwayway, Junior Inquirer, Philippine Panorama, and The Modern Teacher.

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Fellow, W.E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

1. The publication of Jose Garcia Villa’s Doveglion: Collected Poems by Penguin Books in 2008, edited by his literary executor and introduced by a devotee, may be said to mark not “a growing revival of interest” in Villa’s work—as Luis Francia claims—but rather the final nail on his coffin. It may, however, arouse antiquarian interest and nostalgia for the posthumous return of the repressed. Villa died in Feb. 1997, literally unknown. His last volume, Selected Poems and New, was published in 1958, in which he preserved (as though he were a museum curator) those poems he wrote in the twenty years (1937-1957) that saw his maturation in New York City. No resurgence of interest greeted that last collection. Its centerpiece was “The Anchored Angel,” selected by feudal-vintage impresarios Osbert and Edith Sitwell for inclusion in a 1954 issue of the London-based The Times Literary Supplement.

From then on Villa ceased to be a publicly acknowledged creative writer. In fact, even when he was actively publishing, his recognition was quite limited and confined to a narrow circle of friends and patrons. Except for Conrad Aiken’s 1944 anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, no anthology of significance—not even of minority or ethnic writers—has included Villa’s poems. In effect, Villa remains an unknown writer for most Americans, let alone readers of American or English literature around the world. In the country of his birth, today, only a few aficionados and college-trained professionals are acquainted with Villa’s writings.

2. Where is the Villa file in the Western archive? Francia celebrates Villa’s arrival to the New York literary scene dominated by white writers with the famous 1948 Life magazine photograph. The photo is a palimpsest or tell-tale rebus in itself. Aside from patricians Osbert and Edith Sitwell, whom Villa courted slavishly, we see left-wing or Marxist-inspired poets such as Delmore Schwartz, Horace Gregory, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Randall Jarrell, and certainly non-conformist writers like Tennesse Williams, William Rose Benet, Richard Eberhart, Marianne Moore, and Gore Vidal–Vidal would eventually prove to be the most anti-imperialist maverick of them all. There are no African Americans or other person of color except Villa. E.e. cummings, Villa’s model and idol, is remarkably missing.

In the photo, one may discern some allegorical innuendo which may be happenstance: Villa is sandwiched between the young Vidal and the mature Auden, whose anti-fascist sympathies explicit in his eloquent attacks against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini were quoted and broadcast around the world. In short, the major American and British writers in the photo were mostly veterans of the global campaign against fascism in Europe and also against Japanese militarist aggression one of whose main victims were millions of Filipinos in the only U.S. colony in Asia, the Philippine Commonwealth. Villa was and remained a Filipino citizen throughout his life, and was the only colonial, subaltern subject in the photo.

The Penguin Classic biographical note on Villa cites Villa’s employment as a cultural attaché to the Philippine mission to the UN from 1952 to 1963, at the height of the Cold War, and his position, from 1968 on, as adviser on cultural affairs to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Indeed, Villa was made a National Artist for Literature in 1973, the year after Marcos imposed martial law and began 14 years of bloody and ruthless rampage. This may be merely a trivial footnote to worshippers of Villa’s aura. But it is cynical not to document this connection of the National Artist to the neocolonial state and its oligarchic retainers/clients for the U.S. imperial power.

The Gotham Book reception for the Sitwells, however, already took place in the second year of the Cold War, which Churchill and Truman inaugurated in 1947 with their shrewd incarceration of the Soviet Union in a fabled “Iron Curtain.” The Philippines counted itself America’s most trusted ally in the “Free World” crusade against world communism. The next year, 1949, witnessed the victory of Mao Tsetung against Chiang Kai-shek in China, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the ferocious repression of the Huks in the Philippines led by Col. Edward Lansdale of the CIA, adviser to then President Ramon Magsaysay. Lansdale used the Philippines as an experimental laboratory for the systematic “Phoenix” assassination of communists in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.

3. None of these historical contexts is mentioned by Francia. Villa’s itinerary of success, traced by Francia from the beginning of the poet’s migration to the US in 1930 up to his death in 1997, follows an evolutionary and teleological scheme. There seems to be no real break or interruption in the route to fame. Villa ends in fact “belonging to the pantheon of Asian American literature,” despite minor violations of Eurocentric norms and even though excluded by the gatekeepers of the Asian American canon. Villa received prestige-granting awards from Establishment sources: Guggenheim, Bollingen, Rockefeller, etc. But such prizes did not result in the class-defined distinction only reserved for EuroAmericans for the greater part of the twentieth century.

Now monumentalized, however, Villa—Francia continues his accolade—was “a creature of his age.” In other words, he conformed to the conventional, standard pattern—Villa’s models were all European, traditional, and respectable. In what way then did he demonstrate his originality, his bold deviation from the norms, so as to earn or deserve admission to the mausoleum of modernism? Aside from his technical innovations, not always appreciated or accepted by the arbiters of the Anglo-American mainstream canon, in what way was Villa a rebel, a dissident writer, who challenged the standards of his day and initiated a new, radically innovative aesthetics and world-view?

Technician of the Sacred

4. As time has proved, the technical innovations of “reversed consonance” and “comma poems” were too idiosyncratic and problematic to stimulate much concern among younger writers or academic scholars. Unlike sprung rhythm or Ezra Pound’s imagist movement, they were not associated with a substantial body of work that has social and historical breadth and resonance. Villa’s themes of angelic rebellion, the solitary genius, and artistic exceptionality that have also preoccupied contemporary poets such as Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and others, have proved too rarefied or linguistically constricted as to appeal to readers who expect more elaboration in terms of concrete determinations and cultural or social exemplification.

For this occasion, I will not dwell on the rather familiar and tedious recitation of Villa’s debt to the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition, from the Bible to the Metaphysicals, Hopkins, e.e.cummings, etc. This has been thoroughly explored by numerous essays by American critics, including Villa’s sponsors, from Edward O’Brien to Babette Deutsch and Mark Van Doren. In my previous essay on Villa in The Philippine Temptation and elsewhere, I surveyed the ambivalent and often duplicitous tenor and implication of the existing commentary on Villa. Many of them are actually ironic or back-handed compliments, either subtly or openly condescending and certainly patronizing in a rather sly and coy manner. No Filipino critic is acknowledged as contributing worthwhile knowledge about Villa.

In any case, Francia quotes Timothy Yu, a Chinese-American scholar at Stanford University, as an authority on the poet. Yu argues that while Villa was heavily Orientalized by his critics and patrons—Sitwell’s insulting portrait of Villa as a “green iguana” is certainly unprecedented—and thus fixated or reified, Villa resisted this placing of his work in the Western canonical hierarchy. In fact, Yu contends that Villa “threatens to overturn the Orientalist hierarchy at the heart of modernism.” After much specious and speculative argument, Yu suggests that Villa is not really Asian American but a transnational writer, one bridging the Philippines and the U.S., a transmigrant artist belonging to several continents, in effect a writer with universal or global appeal, such as that exerted by Salman Rushdie or V.S. Naipaul, by the authors of Sargasso Sea and The English Patient.

5. Francia contends that Villa is that kind of universal writer, despite his critics’ praise of his command of English as a foreign language to him, because he resembles Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov in his mastery of the “imperial language.” This is quite a plea. First of all, like Yu, Francia commits the fundamental mistake of ignoring the colonial and neocolonial status of the Philippines in the international hierarchy of nation-states and national cultures. Conrad’s Poland and Nabokov’s Russia are not in the same subordinated position as the Philippines, nor are they exactly identical as socioeconomic formations with specific modes of production. Like most of the proponents of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and kindred neologisms, Yu and Francia do not really understand the historical and political subordination of a U.S. colony to the quite complex and subtle strategies of a U.S. imperial hegemon distinguished for claiming “exceptionalism.” If they have some inkling of it, it is superficial and not integral to their evaluation of Villa.

In fact, Yu and Francia have willy-nilly, without being aware of it, endorsed “American exceptionalism,” despite their gestures of being against imperialism or colonialism as such. Why? By equating Villa with Conrad or other postcolonial writers now in vogue, they convert the Philippines into an independent entity, if not equal partner, with the colonizer. It is as if Conrad and Nabokov were natives of Puerto Rico, or Guam, or even Hawaii. Transnationalism is the alibi of special pleading for a subaltern poet who made good in the metropolitan center, who proved an exceptional pupil of colonial tutelage and demonstrated agency for postcolonial mimicry.

Francia’s exorbitant claim that Villa was fluent in all three languages, Tagalog and Spanish and English, makes his other judgments suspect. Without even alluding to the deeply subjugated position of the Filipino body-soul after centuries of Spanish, U.S. and Japanese domination, and the ideological utility of English as a weapon of colonial manipulation, Francia ends up mystifying the situation of Villa as a Filipino subject, ascribing to him the identity of a “prophet” and an “unusual man,” thus belonging to no country or culture—in effect, a universal creature for all or none. This rescue of Villa strikes us as a hubristic act of “salvaging,” as the term is used during the dark days of the Marcos “martial law” regime.

6. Yu is to be credited with analyzing the covert and patent mode in which American and British patrons or handlers really colonized and neocolonized Villa without scruples. Yu aptly focuses on Edith Sitwell’s heavily racialized depiction of Villa as “this presumably minute, dark green creature, the colour of New Zealand jade, spinning these sharp flame-like poems” some of which are bad in Sitwell’s view. Yu also notes that apart from the Orientalizing distortion, his patrons reduced or inflated Villa into an alien mystic, a foreign body, an outlandish race. As Sitwell emphasized, “But Villa is a Filipino” to excuse the unacceptable nature of his comma poems.

Yu, however, overestimates Villa’s proto-transnational status. He completely ignores the political and cultural changes that have occurred in the Philippines from the time of Marcos’ despotic rule to the present, believing that Chua’s volume marks a nationwide resurgence of interest in Villa.

There is some legitimacy in noting that Villa’s work and its reception is a “trans-Pacific phenomenon.” But that is not a simple geographical placing but a geopolitical one that the equalizing and leveling inference borne by the prefix “trans” occludes and even expunges from our critical intelligence. In short, Yu is ignorant of the profound anti-colonial and anti-imperialist history of the Filipino people from the time it resisted U.S. invasion in 1899 at the outset of the Filipino American War through the peasant uprisings in the first twenty years, to the Sakdal and Huk rebellions in the thirties, forties and fifties, up to the New People’s Army and Communist resurgence in the sixties up to the present. That is, Yu is blind or insensitive to the long durable history of revolutionary action that has formed the physiognomy and cultural tradition of the Filipino people from the time of Magellan up to the present.

Lacking this historical trajectory of the political-cultural transformation of a whole people, its national-popular habitus and sensibility, it is unwise to calculate Villa’s current worth—both his use-value and exchange-value as a producer of cultural artifacts such as books like the Penguin Classics—and future value, if any. It is unwise, that is, to measure Villa as a Filipino poet worthy of the national-popular tradition of asserting national integrity and autonomy.

Problems of Valorization

7. Villa can indeed be used for cosmopolitan exchange, but his use-value remains unknown or hypothetical so far. Now that I have introduced the twin sides of value—use and exchange—I want to quickly delineate the historical contexts necessary to appraise Villa’s writings as produced carriers or bearers of value. Such value is necessarily social and implicated in the multilayered social, political and cultural conflicts of his time.

The hypothesis often posited by devotees of Villa, as illustrated by Francia’s allegation that “Villa had no fashionable cause to advance or defend except that of poetry itself” is no doubt self-serving and apologetic, to say the least. It is meant to justify Villa’s naïve aestheticism. But what it does is to eviscerate whatever surviving element of worth remains in these highly mannered, stylized and deliberately antiquated poetic discourse. It fails to contextualize Villa’s calculated and reflexive essentialism and aesthetic purism.

To say that Villa is concerned only with art or poetry is to say nothing much, unless you compartmentalize culture in a Byzantine fashion and artificially exaggerate the division of social labor and products of that labor into really specialized niches. In that case, poetry is a freakish and weird sport, a disease whose etiology is unknown or an accidental product of labor which nobody really understands and appreciates. What is poetry in itself? Can one define an essence by itself without locating the totality from which it is distinguished? From Plato up to Hegel, metaphysics never postulates an essence without the intermediary surroundings and the whole structure from which it acquires its status/definition as an essence, or a distinctive if distilled element. I want to call attention again to Theodor Adorno’s essay, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” and also to Pierre Bourdieu’s genealogy of European aestheticism in The Rules of Art to demonstrate how “art for art’s sake” is a historical symptom of the bourgeois artist’s alienation from a commodified, reifying milieu.

8. I suggest a historical-materialist appraisal by situating Villa’s labor as part of social labor occurring at definite periods of history. Of course, it is assumed that such labor is artistic—the shaping of materials into a concrete formally-specific product, its formal characteristics being already given as a distinctive quality of his work. But the hermeneutic process does not end at the level of formal analysis; rather, that serves as a point of departure for further empirical and functional analysis and theorizing. I suggest the following large contexts, what might be described as “conditions of possibility,” lived collective situations that can frame Villa’s work and allow the further specification of its qualities and possible effects. What Villa’s response to these contexts were, remains unknown, and what has been documented need to be further specified by class analysis of Philippine and US society and the cultural and intellectual formations in which the texts and the circumstances of their production and reception are inscribed.

Look Homeward, Angel, Now

9. The Philippines into which Villa was born may be described as a tributary socioeconomic formation produced by three hundred years of Spanish colonization. The Filipino nation was in the process of being born from the collective endeavors of Filipino propagandists and agitators in the nineteenth century, an offshoot of numerous peasant-worker revolts and indigenous insurrections throughout the islands culminating in the Katipunan revolt of 1896. This process was aborted by the US imperialist intervention in 1898 as part of the Spanish-American War and the defeat of Spanish imperial forces in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Villa’s father was a high military officer and adviser to General Emilio Aguinaldo, the president of the first Philippine Republic, who succumbed to US military and political power. Villa welcomed the invaders and in fact assimilated to US metropolitan culture, despite weak oppositional or disrespectful impulses and tendencies.

When Villa was born in 1908, the US military and civil administrators were in the process of stifling the survivors of Aguinaldo’s revolutionary army. Macario Sakay, one of Aguinaldo’s officers, and his comrades were hanged a few years earlier; but the insurrectos would continue up to the second decade, with the Moro resistance proving the most resilient and formidable. Villa grew up in this milieu of cruel terror against seditious, recalcitrant natives. Later on, with strong nationalist protests, Villa saw the accomodationist and conciliatory policies of the Americans winning over Quezon and the oligarchs. Villa left before the Commonwealth was established in 1935.

When Villa was an adolescent, Filipino nationalism smoldered in the organizing efforts of workers in Manila and peasants in Central Luzon, primarily those involved in the Colorum insurrections of Tayug and other towns in the twenties, and later the Sakdalista uprising in the thirties. By the time Villa was a medical and law student in 1929, just a year before his move to the U.S. in 1930, the Communist Party of the Philippines had already been founded after years of agitation, propaganda and mobilization of union workers and peasants. This occurred even as Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmena and other members of the Filipino oligarchy, through parliamentary and legal means, continued to demand immediate independence from the colonial power. Villa left at the time of heated debates on how that demand was to be articulated locally and in the metropolitan heartland.

Meanwhile, Filipinos have struck an autonomous path in the U.S. They have been organizing and agitating in the Hawaii plantations, and later in the West Coast and Alaskan salmon canneries, since their advent in the first decade of this century. Carlos Bulosan narrates their odyssey in his 1948 chronicle America Is in the Heart. Their efforts culminated in bloody strikes together with Japanese and other ethnic workers in the first two decades of the twentieth century, through the Bolshevik revolution of 1918 and the fascistic Palmer raids before and after World War I. Pedro Calosa was expelled from Hawaii only to lead the Tayug revolt in Pangasinan a few years later.

10. The era of the “Great Depression” in the US after the 1929 Wall Street collapse, up through the Communist-led organizing of workers in the thirties and early forties, to the beginning of World War II—this is the main arena in which Villa found himself struggling for recognition as a serious poet. The Depression was symptomatically recorded in the experiences of his deracination and isolation in New Mexico represented in epiphanic episodes in his 1933 short stories collection, Footnote to Youth. By 1933 he was residing in New York City where he experienced the nadir of the Depression. None of his works indicates that he registered any visible sustained response to the massive mobilization of American writers and artists in support of Republican Spain, against Franco’s fascist military supported by Hitler and Mussolini. His compatriots, Salvador Lopez, Manuel Arguilla and others in the Philippine Writers League, were active in that worldwide solidarity campaign, just as Auden, Spender, Orwell, Malraux, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others were contributing their share to that united front of democratic, anarchist, and socialist partisan resistance of the proletariat. Arguilla and other Filipino intellectuals, Villa’s contemporaries, sacrificed their lives to free the Philippines from brutal Japanese oppression.

One can also submit that the Depression years and the mobilization of Filipinos against Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines constitute the time period in which we should judge Villa’s major works found in Have Come Am Here (1942) and Volume Two (1949). It is interesting to speculate how e.e. cummings, with his exploits in World War I and its aftermath, might have influenced Villa by his erasure from Villa’s texts; and how the New York critics and their dissident or leftist inclinations might have aroused in Villa either negative or positive reactions. This is a project for future Villa scholars.

11. Meanwhile, I would underscore a salient contextual parameter for appraising Villa’s intellectual genealogy. It was this period of Villa’s apprenticeship in New York City (circa 1933-1940) that, across more than 6,000 miles of the continental-Pacific divide, witnessed the most fertile dissemination and cultivation of radical, socialist, Marxist-inspired ideas in the Philippines. This decade culminated in the founding of the Philippine Writers League on February 26, 1939, and the institution of the Commonwealth Literary Award by President Manuel Quezon on March 25, 1939. Unprecedented in the annals of Filipino cultural life, the debates sparked by these two events (recorded in a slim volume entitled Literature Under the Commonwealth edited by Manuel E. Arguilla, Esteban Nedruda, and Teodoro A. Agoncillo) need to be juxtaposed with Villa’s reflections on art and its place in society and its humanistic horizon.

Villa’s absent presence functions as the subtext of those exchanges. It may be inferred from the ideological conflict between the partisans of the “art-for-art’s sake” camp and the socialist or left-wing group of A.B. Rotor, Salvador P. Lopez, Federico Mangahas, Jose Lansang, M. De Gracia Concepcion, and others. While Villa’s aestheticism was indirectly defended by A.E. Litiatco and J. Lardizabal, the majority of participants in the exchange subscribed to a committed and ethically conscientious stand, even though personalities like Carlos P. Romulo, Leopoldo Yabes and R. Zulueta da Costa expressed mediating, reformist or conciliatory views in response to Rotor’s call for a populist, worker-oriented literature (invoking the authority of Plekhanov and Gorki).

Lopez’s essay on “Proletarian Literature: A Definition” laid out the classic and more dialectical perspective than Rotor’s programmatic appeal for partisanship. But Rotor’s citation of Thomas Mann, who was an exile in the U.S. (like Brecht and countless European artists), stressed the need for writers removed from their homelands to join in active struggle against anti-humanist terror. The author of such masterpieces as The Magic Mountain and “Death in Venice” stated that “it is not enough today to concern himself with Right, Good and Truth only within the limits of his art. He must seek these qualities in the politico-social sphere as well, and establish a relation between his thought and the political will of his time” (1973, 21).

Sacrifice Without Redemption

12. The beginning of World War II and the entire period of Japanese occupation of the Philippines saw Villa either employed or in close contact with the exiled government of the Philippines Commonwealth, via writers connected with the government (Carlos Romulo, Bienvenido Santos, and others). Villa’s contemporaries in the Philipppines either fought with the American colonizers in Bataan and Corregidor, and later in the underground resistance to Japanese occupation; while others in exile, such as Carlos Bulosan, described Filipino anguish at the plight of their families back home and Filipino eagerness to join the US army to help liberate the homeland from the misery and oppression of the Japanese aggressors.

How did Villa interpret this agonizing interregnum between US colonial rule and the second Philippine Republic emerging from the ruins and rubble of Manila, the city of his birth and of his ancestors? His rebellion against god and surrogate authorities, against literal and symbolic patriarchs, and his refusal to belong to any physical/real country may be an expression of his fear, dreams and hope of liberation from all family entanglements and sociopolitical constraints. It is not clear whether Villa married Rosemary Lamb during this period, whether he raised his children during these years of the beginning of global pax Americana and the Cold War, and what particular ordeals of his personal life configured and contoured his cultural politics. The impact on Villa of the Cold War vicissitudes remains a blank in the critical commentary on his career.

13. It is also curious to note that Francia and other commentators are silent on Villa’s 1955 autobiographical statement found in Stanley Kunitz’s edited reference work, Twentieth Century Authors. While confirming certain facts about the author’s career, no one seems to want to quote Villa’s own ventriloquial characterization of his general artistic, philosophical creed embodied in the last paragraph of the entry. While I used this previously in The Philippine Temptation, let me quote it again for those not familiar with it:

Recently someone remarked to Villa that he found Villa’s poetry ‘abstract,’ contrary to the general feeling for detail and particularity that characterizes most contemporary poetry. Villa comments: “I realize now that this is true; I had not thought of my work in that light before. The reason for it must be that I am not at all interested in description or outward appearance, nor in the contemporary scene, but in essence. A single motive underlies all my work and defines my intention as a serious artist: The search for the metaphysical meaning of man’s life in the Universe—the finding of man’s selfhood and identity in the mystery of Creation. I use the term metaphysical to denote the ethic-philosophic force behind all essential living. The development and unification of the human personality I consider the highest achievement a man can do (1955, 1035-1036).

Actually, if one examines carefully Villa’s 1940 essay “Literary Criticism in the Philippines” or the 1953-54 essay “The Condition of Philippine Verse,” one will easily find abundant recurrent motifs about essence, unity, synthesis, etc. For example, he contrasts the “essence of prose” as substance, inferior or secondary to poetry’s essence, which is “magic and magic of utterance” (2002, 291). Antithetical to a dialectical mode (as in Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas), Villa’s thought exhibits close affinities to an Augustinian dualism (positing binaries such as sacred intellect versus profane body), which manifests a Manichean tendency that leads to a Gnostic conception of life and a Neoplatonic cosmology.

In short, Villa has remained uncannily faithful to his earliest fundamental insights or convictions about art and poetry. His belief in some essential property of language that is inherently “poetic” resembles the belief of romantic poets in some divine or supernatural inspiration. This is an old notion already proved fallacious by modern linguistics. In the early decades of the last century, the famous linguist Roman Jakobson laid to rest both the romanticist and Russian formalist’s search for the poetic essence of language as something separate from its communicative and expressive functions. Nonetheless, the continuity of Villa’s error is premised on a habitus or entrenched mentality of aristocratic individualism sprung from a tributary feudal social formation, a belief that some incommensurable virtu or thaumaturgic mana inheres in the poet’s soul or spirit that the human body and worldly reality cannot fully realize, hence the singular identity of the poet transcends time and space, biographical particulars, sociohistorical specificity. It floats as a monadic presence, angelic in cast but parasitic on the immanent forms that somehow fail to achieve rising to the level of transcendence. This, together with the concrete facts about Villa’s location in Philippine society and his U.S. situation, contributes to explaining the roots of Villa’s dogmatic stance in his criticism and peculiar views about society and ordinary life. Further research into the influences and crucial turning-points of Villa’s life is needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Negative Beatification?

14. Finally, the framing sequence of the Cold War from 1947 to Villa’s death in 1997 is a fifty-year enclosure that spells the exhaustion of Villa’s style and idiom of mystical lyricism and theatrical self-dramatization. Note that in the fifties and sixties, New York witnessed the beginning of the Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, Frank Ohara, etc.), aside from the profound and radical influence of Charles Olson and diverse new American poetics that replaced Eliot and Pound’s New Critical formalism.

One may hazard the guess that the influence and support of e.e.cummings may have reinforced Villa’s insulation/distance from movements such as objectivism, the narrative and historical epic experiments of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, the populist drive of the Beatniks, and the more expressionistic work of Robert Lowell, John Ashberry, and their epigones in the sixties and seventies. Villa seemed detached or removed from the actualities of the New York cultural milieu, not to speak of the whole North American continent and Europe. Note that Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, and others were deep in surrealism and cubism and resourceful cinematic innovations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Villa’s 1949 book Volume Two and his 1958 Selected Poems and New were all produced in the shadow of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the raging civil war between the puppet Republics of Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, and Garcia against the Huks and their millions of sympathizers. With the relatively stabilized world of the fifties under Eisenhower, Villa virtually terminates his active career and lapses into the typographical doogles and games of the “Adaptations” and “Xocerisms.” It is indeed the distinctive impulse of modernism to “make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s terms; to break the traditional pattern, disrupt the conventional mold, and strike out on new ground. But Villa’s innovations, whether the comma poems, reversed consonance, or adaptations, are superficial attempts to mimic the novelties of Mallarme, Rilke, e.e. cummings, or Marianne Moore. The Cold War created the vacuum of universalized exchange-value in which Villa’s use-value—his dialogue with god and angels—became superfluous or fungible. It became mere paper not acceptable as legal tender because its use-value evaporated.

15. It is in the era of neoliberal globalization, the unchallenged reign of commodity-fetishism and global finance’s “free market” (now undergoing serious meltdown), that Villa finally becomes a “classic” author. One of Villa’s Xocerisms may provide a clue to the exhaustion of his linguistic register, poetic lexicon, and mannered style: “To reinvent God is unnecessary; all He needs today is a designer name.” Indeed, Villa may have been reduced by his editor and devotees as a “designer name” useful to build prestige, firm up a reputation or aura, and promote status-conscious careers.

It is ironic to find a poet obssessed with uniqueness, singularity, essence, genius, angels, exceptionality, gods, now being swallowed up in the homogenizing universe of cultural commodities and the culture industry. But perhaps this is a fitting and appropriate end: the dissolution of genius, the angelic imagination, in the totality of exchange whose value, while pretending to be absolute, is also absolutely zero. Nihilism may be the authentic vocation of Villa, a nihilism that may abolish art and all poetry, as well as nations, identities, etc. If so, then Villa has finally succeeded and conquered the last bastion of meaning and intelligibility: language that means and signifies nothing. Is our conversation about him also null, nada, devoid of sense or import? If so, then the only logical alternative (to follow Wittgenstein) is silence. –##

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor. xx “Lyric Poetry and Society.” Telos

Arguilla, Manuel, Esteban Nedruda and Teodoro A. Agoncillo. 1940;1973. Literature Under the Commonwealth by Manuel Quezon, Carlos P. Romulo, Salvador P. Lopez, et al. Manila: Philippine Writers League, 1940; rept. Alberto S. Florentino, 1973.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. The Rules of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kunitz, Stanley, ed. 1955. Twentieth Century Authors. First Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson.

San Juan, E. 1998. “Salvaging the Disappeared Poet: The Case of Jose Garcia Villa.” Unpublished lecture at the University of Michigan, 1989. Accessible in the Website, “The Philippines Matrix Project”
—-. 1996. The Philippine Temptation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
—–. 1995. “In Search of Filipino Writing: Reclaiming Whose America?” in The Ethnic Canon. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Villa, Jose Garcia. 2008. Doveglion: Collected Poems. Ed. John Edwin Cowen. New York: Penguin Books.
——. 2002. Essays in Literary Criticism. Ed. Jonathan Chua. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Yu, Timothy. 2004. “The Hand of a Chinese Master: Jose Garcia Villa and Modernist Orientalism.” MELUS 29. Accessible at

When I wrote Noli Me Tangere, I asked myself whether bravery was a common thing in the women of our people. I brought back to my recollection and reviewed those I had known since my infancy, but there were only few who seem to come up to my ideal. There was, it is true, an abundance of girls with agreeable manners, beautiful ways, and modest demeanor, but there was in all an admixture of servitude and deference to the words or whims of their so-called “spiritual fathers” (as if the spirit or soul had any father other than God), due to excessive kindness, modesty, or perhaps ignorance. They seemed faded plants sown and reared in darkness, having flowers without perfume and fruits without sap.

However, when the news of what happened at Malolos reached us, I saw my error, and great was my rejoicing. After all, who is to blame me? I did not know Malolos nor its young women, except one called Emilia, and her I knew by name only.

Now that you�ve responded to our first appeal in the interest of the welfare of the people; now that you have set an example to those who, like you, long to have their eyes opened and be delivered from servitude, new hopes are awakened in us and we now even dare to face adversity, because we have you for our allies and are confident of victory.

No longer does the Filipina stand with her head bowed nor does she spend her time on her knees, because she is quickened by hope in the future; no longer will the mother contribute to keeping her daughter in darkness and bring her up in contempt and moral annihilation. And no longer will the science of all sciences consist in blind submission to any unjust order, or in extreme complacency, nor will a courteous smile be deemed the only weapon against insult or humble tears the ineffable panacea for all tribulations. You know that the will of God is different of that of the priest; that religiousness does not consist of long periods spent on your on your knees, nor in endless prayers, big rosarios, and grimy scapulars, but in spotless conduct, firm intention and upright judgement.

You also know that prudence that does not consist in blindly obeying any whim of the little tin god, but in obeying only that which is reasonable and just, because blind obedience is itself the cause and origin of those whims, and those guilty of it are really to be blamed. The official or friar can no longer assert that they alone are responsible for their unjust orders, because God gave each individual reason and a will of his or her own to distinguish the just from the unjust; all were born without shackles and free, and nobody has a right to subjugate the will and the spirit of another. And why should you submit to another your thoughts, seeing that thought is noble and free?

It is cowardice and erroneous to believe that saintliness consists in blind obedience and that prudence and the habit of thinking are presumptuous. Ignorance has ever been ignorance, and never prudence and honor God, the primal source of all wisdom, does not demand that man, created in his image and likeness, allow himself to be deceived and hoodwinked, but wants us to use and let shine in the light of reason with which He has so mercifully endowed us. He may be compared to the father who gave each of his sons a torch to light their way in the darkness bidding them keep its light bright and take care of it, and not put it out and trust to the light of the others, but to help and advice each other to find the right path. They would be madmen were they to follow the light of another, only to come to a fall, and the father could unbraid them and say to them: “Did I not give each of you his own torch,”, but he could not say so if the fall were due to the light of the torch of him who fell, as the light might have been dim and the road very bad.

The deceiver is fond of using the saying that “It is presumptuous to rely on one�s own judgment,” but, in my opinion, it is more presumptuous for a person to put his judgment above that of the others and try to make it prevail over theirs. It is more presumptuous and even blasphemous for a person to attribute every movement of his lips to God, to represent every whim of his as the will of God, and to brand his own enemy as an enemy of God. Of course, we should not consult our own sense that is most reasonable to us. The wild man from the hills, if clad in a priest�s robe, remains a hillman and can only deceive the weak and ignorant. And, you will be lucky if the carabao does not become lazy on account of the robe. But I will leave this subject to speak of something else.

Youth is a flower-bed that is to bear rich fruit and must accumulate wealth for its descendants. What offspring will be that of a woman whose kindness of character is expressed by mumbled prayers; who knows nothing by heart but awits, novenas, and the alleged miracles; whose amusements consists in playing panguingue or in the frequent confession of the same sins? What sons will she have but acolytes, priest�s servants, or cockfighters? It is the mothers who are responsible for the present servitude of our compatriots, owing to the unlimited trustfulness of their loving hearts, to their ardent desire to elevate their sons. Maturity is the fruit of infancy and the infant is formed on the lap of its mother. The mother who can only teach her child how to knell and kiss hands must not expect sons with blood other than of vile slaves. A tree that grows in the mud is unsubstantial and good only for firewood. If her son should have a bold mind, his boldness would be deceitful and will be like the bat that cannot show itself until the ringing of the vespers. They say that prudence is sanctity. But, what sanctity have they shown us? To pray and kneel a lot, kiss the hand of the priests, throw money away on churches, and believe all the friar sees fit to tell us; gossip, callous rubbing of noses�

As to the gifts to God, is there anything in the world that does not belong to God? What would you say of a servant making his master a present of a cloth borrowed from that very master? Who is so vain, so insane that he will give alms to God and believe that the miserable thing he has given will serve to clothe the Creator of all things? Blessed be they who succor their fellow men, aid the poor and feed the hungry; but cursed be they who turn s dead ear to supplications of the poor, who only give to him who has plenty and spend their money lavishly on silver altar hangings for the thanksgiving, or in serenades and fireworks. The money ground out of the poor is bequeathed to the master so that he can provide for chains to subjugate, and hire thugs and executioners. Oh, what blindness, what lack of understanding!

Saintliness consists in the first place in obeying the dictates of reason, happen what may. “It is acts and not words that I want of you,” said Christ. “Not everyone that sayeth unto me, Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven.” Saintliness does not consist in abjectness, nor is the successor of Christ to be recognized by the fact that he gives his hand to be kissed. Christ did not give the kiss of peace to the Pharisees and never gave His hand to be kissed. He did not cater to the rich and vain; he did not mention scapularies, nor did he make rosaries, or solicit offerings for the sacrifice of the mass or exact payments for His prayers. Saint John did not demand a fee on the River Jordan, nor did Christ teach for gain. Why, then, do the friars now refuse to stir a foot unless paid in advance? And, as if they were starving, they sell scapularies, rosaries, bits, and other things which are nothing but schemes for making money and detriment to the soul; because even if all the rags on earth were converted into scapularies and all the trees in the forest into rosaries, and if the skins of all the beasts were made into belts and if all the priests of the earth mumbled prayers over all this and sprinkled oceans of holy water over it, this would not purify a rogue or condone sin where there is no repentance. Thus, also, through cupidity and love of money, they will, for a price, revoke the numerous prohibitions such as those against eating meat, marrying close relatives, etc. you can do almost anything if you but grease their palms. Why that? Can God be bribed and bought off, and blinded by money, nothing more nor less than a friar? The brigand who has obtained a bull of compromise can live calmly on the proceeds of his robbery, because he will be forgiven. God, then, will at a table where theft provides the viands? Has the omnipotent become pauper that He must assume the role of the excise man or gendarme? If that is the God whom the friar adores, then I turn my back upon that God.

Let us be reasonable and open our eyes, especially you women, because you are the first to influence the consciousness of man. Remember that a good mother does not resemble the mother that the friar has created; she must bring up her child to be the image of the true God, not of a blackmailing, a grasping god, but of a God who is the father of us all, who is just; who does not suck the life-blood of the poor like a vampire, nor scoffs at the agony of the sorely beset, nor makes a crooked path of the path of justice. Awaken and prepare the will of our children towards all that is honorable, judged by proper standards, to all that is sincere and firm of purpose, clear judgement, clear procedure, honesty in act and deed, love for the fellow man and respect for God; this is what you must teach to your children. And, seeing that life is full of thorns and thistles, you must fortify their minds against any stroke of adversity and accustom them to danger. The people cannot expect honor nor prosperity so long as they will educate their children in a wrong way, so long as the woman who guides the child in his steps is slavish and ignorant. No good water comes from a turbid, bitter spring; no savory fruit comes from acrid seed.

The duties that woman has performed in order to deliver the people from suffering are of no little importance, but be they may, they will not be beyond the strength and stamina of the Filipino people. The power and good judgment of the woman of the Philippines are well known, and it is because of this that she has been hoodwinked, and tied, and rendered pusillanimous; and now her enslavers rest at ease, because so long as they can keep the Filipina mother a slave, so long they will be able to make slaves of her children. The cause of the backwardness of Asia lies in the fact that there the women are ignorant, are slaves, while Europe and America are powerful because there the women are free and well educated and endowed with lucid intellect and string will.

We know that you lack instructive books; we know that nothing is added to your intellect, day by day, save that which is intended to dim its natural brightness; all this we know, hence our desire to bring you the light that illuminates your equals here in Europe. If that which I tell you does not provoke your anger, and if you will pay a little attention to it then, however dense the mist may that befogs our people, I will make the utmost efforts to have it dissipated by the bright rays of the sun, which will light, though they may be dimmed. We shall not feel any fatigue if you help us: God, too, will help to scatter the mist, because he is the God of truth; He will restore to its pristine condition the fame of the Filipina in whom we now miss only a criterion of her own, because good qualities she has enough and to spare. This is our dream; this is the desire we cherish in our hearts; to restore the honor of a woman, who is half of our heart, our companion in the joys and tribulations of life. If she is a maiden, young man should love her not only because of her beauty and her amiable character, but also on account of her fortitude of mind and loftiness of purpose. Which quicken and elevate the feeble and timid and ward off all vain thoughts. Let the maiden be the pride of her country and command respect, because it is a common practice on the part of the Spaniards and friars here who have returned from the Islands to speak of the Filipina as complaisant and ignorant, as if it should be thrown into the same class because of the missteps of a few, and as if women of weak character did not exist in other lands. As to purity what could the Filipina not hold up to others!

Nevertheless, the returning Spaniards and friars, talkative and fond of gossip, can hardly find time enough to brag and bawl, amidst guffaws and insulting remarks, that a certain women was thus; that she behave thus at the convent and conducted herself thus with the Spaniards who on the occasion was her guest, and other things that set your teeth on edge when you think of them which, in the majority of cases, were faults due to candor, excessive kindness, meekness or perhaps ignorance and were all the work of the defamer him self. There is a Spaniard now in high office, who has sat at our table and enjoy our hospitality in his wanderings through the Philippines and who upon his return to Spain, rushed worth with into-print and related that on one occasion in Pampanga he demanded hospitality and ate, and slept at the house and the lady of the house conducted herself in such and such a manner with him; this is how he repaid the lady for her supreme hospitality! Similar insinuation are made to the friars to the chance visitor from Spain concerning their very obedient confesandas, hand-kissers, etc., accompanied by smiles and very significant wingkings of the eyes. In a book published by D. Sinibaldo de Mas and in other friar sketches sin are related of which women accused themselves of the confessional and of which the friar made no secret in talking to their Spanish visitor seasoning them, at the best, with idiotic and shameless tales not worthy of credence. I cannot repeat here the shameless stories that a friar told Mas and to which Mas attributed no value whatever. Everytime we hear or read anything of this kind, we ask each other: Are the Spanish women all cut after the pattern of the Holy Virgin Mary and the Filipinas all reprobates? I believe that If we are to balance accounts in this delicate question, perhaps� But I must drop the subject because I am neither a confessor nor a Spanish traveler and have no business to take away anybody�s goodname. I shall let this go and speak of the duties of women instead.

A people that respect woman, like the Filipino people, must know the truth of the situation in order to be able to do what is expected of it. It seems an established fact that when a young student falls inlove, he throws everything to the dogs � knowledge, honor and money, as if a girl could not do anything but sow misfortune. The bravest youth becomes a coward when he married and the born coward becomes shameless, as if he had been waiting to get married in order to show his cowardice. The son, in order to hide his pusillanimity, remembers his mother, swallows his wrath, suffers his ears to be boxed, obeys the most foolish orders, and become an accomplice to his own dishonor. It should be remembered that where no body flees there is no pursuer; when there is no little fish, there can not be a big one. Why does the girl not require of her lover a noble and honored name, a manly heart offering protection to her weakness, and high spirit incapable of being satisfied with engendering slaves? Let her discard all fear, let her behave nobly and not deliver her youth to the weak and faint-hearted. When she is married, she must aid her husband, inspire him with courage, share his perills, refrain from causing him worry and sweeten her moments of affliction, always remembering that there is no grief that a brave heart can not bear and there is no bitterer inheritance than that of infamy and slavery. Open your children�s eyes so that they may jealousy guard their honor, love their fellowmen and their native land, and do their duty. Always impress upon them they must prefer dying with honor to living in dishonor. The women of Sparta should serve you as an example in this; I shall give some of their characteristics.

When a mother handed the shield to her son as he was marching to the battle, she said nothing to him but this: “Return with it, or on it,” which mean, come back victorious or dead, because it was customary with the routed warrior to throw away his shield, while the dead warrior was carried home on his shield. When a mother received word that that her son had been killed in battle and the army routed, she did not say a word, but expressed her thankfulness that her son returned alive and the mother put on mourning. One of the mothers who went out to meet the warriors returning to battle asked if if her three sons had been victorious or not. We have been victorious � answered the warrior. If that is so, then let us thank God, and she went to the temple.

Once upon a time a king of theirs, who had been defeated, hid in the temple, because he feared the popular wrath. The Spartans resolved to shut him up there and starve him to death. When they were blocking the door, the mother was the first to bring the stones. These things were in accordance with the custom there, and all Greece admire the Spartan woman. Of all women � a woman said jestingly � only you Spartans have power over the men. Man, the Spartan women said, was not born to live life for himself alone but for his native land. So long as this way of thinking prevailed and they had that kind of women in Sparta, none was there a woman in Sparta who ever saw a hostile army.

I do not expect to be believed simply because it is I who am saying this; there are many people who do not listen to reason, but will listen only to those who hear the cassock or have gray hair or no teeth; but while it is true that the aged should be venerated, because of their travails and experience, yet the life I have lived, consecrated to the happiness of the people, add some years, though not many of my age. I do not pretend to be looked upon as an idol or fetish and to be believed and listened to with the eyes closed, the head bowed, and the arms crossed over the breast; what I ask of all is to reflect on what I tell him, think it over and sift it carefully through the sieve of reason.

First of all. That the tyranny of some is possible only through cowardice and negligence on the part of others.

Second. What makes one contemptible is lack of dignity and object fear of him who holds one in contempt.

Third. Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allowed himself to be guided by the thought of other is like the beast led by a halter.

Fourth. He who loves his independence must first aid his fellowman, because he who refuses protection to others will find himself without it; the isolated rib of the buri palm is easily broken, but not so the broom made of the ribs of the palm bound together.

Fifth. If the Filipina will not change her mode of being, let her rear no more children, let her merely give birth to them. She must cease to be the mistress of the home, otherwise she will unconsciously betray husband, child native land, and all.

Sixth. All men are born equal, naked, without bonds. God did not create man to be a slave; nor did he endow him with intelligence to have him hoodwinked, or adorn him with a reason to have him deceived by others. It is not fatuous to refuse to worship one�s equal, to cultivate one�s intellect, and to make use of reason in all things. Fatuous is he who makes a god of him, who makes brutes of others, and who strives to submit to his whims all that is reasonable and just.

Seventh. Consider well that kind of religion that they are teaching you. See whether it is the will of the God or according to the teachings of Christ that the poor be succored and those who suffer alleviated. Consider what they are preaching to you, the object of the sermon, what is behind the masses, novenas, rosaries, scapularies, images, miracles, candles, belts, etc., etc.; which they daily keep before your minds; ears and eyes; jostling, shouting, and coaxing, investigate whence they came and whether they go and then compare that religion with the pure religion of Christ and see whether the pretended observance of the life of Christ does not remind of the fat mik cow or the fattened pig, which is encouraged to grow fat not through love of the animal, but not grossly mercenary motives.

Let us, therefore, reflect and consider our situation and see how we stand. May these poorly written lines aid you in your good purpose and help you to pursue the plan you have initiated. “May your profit be greater than the capital investment,” and I shall gladly accept the usual reward of all who dare the people the truth. May your desire to educate yourself be crowned with success; may you in the garden of learning gather not bitter, but choice fruit, looking well before you eat because on the surface of the globe all is deceit, and the enemy sows weeds in your seedling plot.

All this is the ardent desire of your compatriot.

JOSE RIZAL
*** Reprinted from the Jose Rizal web site, www.joserizal.ph, for the benefit of emanila.com users. For clarity, changes to the text and layout had been made to the original Jose Rizal web site publication. Posted: Dec 17, 2002, emanila*pilipino

Marubdob na mga halik ang naglalaro sa labi
Ng inang pagkagising na sa kandunga’y bumabati;
Sabik kawitin ng bisig ang kanyang liig na pili,
At pagtatama ng tingin, mga mata’y ngumingiti.

Kamatayan ay matamis nang dahil sa Inang-Bayan,
Doo’y kaibigang tangi bawa’t sikatan ng araw;
Nguni’t ang simoy ng hangi’y mapait na kamatayan
Sa taong walang sariling lupa, ina’t kasintahan.

*** Hinango sa Kabanata XXIII – “Ang Pangingisda,” Noli Me Tangere ni Dr Jose Rizal. Isina-Tagalog nina Domingo de Guzman, Francisco Laksamana at Maria Odulio de Guzman. 5th edition. National Book Store, 1950

 Posted: Hunyo 25, 2003, emanila*pilipino

Masayang sa iyo’y aking idudulot
ang lanta kong buhay na lubhang malungkot;
maging maringal man at labis alindog
sa kagalingan mo ay aking ding handog.

Sa pakikidigma at pamimiyapis
ang alay ng iba’y ang buhay na kipkip,
walang agam-agam, maluag sa dibdib,
matamis sa puso at di ikahapis.

Saan man mautas ay dikailangan,
cipres o laurel, lirio ma’y patungan
pakikipaghamok, at ang bibitayan,
yaon ay gayon din kung hiling ng Bayan.

Ako’y mamamatay, ngayong namamalas
na sa silinganan ay namamanaag
yaong maligayang araw na sisikat
sa likod ng luksang nagtabing na ulap.

Ang kulay na pula kung kinakailangan
na maitina sa iyong liway-way,
dugo ko’y isabong at siyang ikinang
ng kislap ng iyong maningning na ilaw.

Ang aking adhika sapul magkaisip
ng kasalukuyang bata pang maliit,
ay ang tanghaling ka at minsan masilip
sa dagat Silangan hiyas na marikit.

Natuyo ang luhang sa mata’y nunukal,
taas na ang noo’t walang kapootan,
walang bakas kunot ng kapighatian
gabahid man dungis niyong kahihiyan.

Sa kabuhayang ko ang laging gunita
maningas na aking ninanasa-nasa
ay guminhawa ka ang hiyas ng diwa
hingang papanaw ngayong biglang-bigla.
pag hingang papanaw ngayong biglang-bigla.

Ikaw’y guminhawa laking kagandahang
akoy malugmok, at ikaw ay matanghal,
hiniga’y malagot, mabuhay ka lamang
bangkay ko’y masilong sa iyong Kalangitan.

Kung sa libingan ko’y tumubong mamalas
malagong damo mahinhing bulaklak,
sa mga labi mo’y mangyayaring itapat,
sa kaluluwa ko hatik ay igawad.

At sa aking noo nawa’y iparamdam,
sa lamig ng lupa ng aking libingan,
ang init ng iyong paghingang dalisay
at simoy ng iyong paggiliw na tunay.

Bayaang ang buwan sa aki’y ititig
ang iwanag niyang lamlam at tahimik,
liwayway bayaang sa aki’y ihatid
magalaw na sinag at hanging hagibis.

Kung sakasakaling bumabang humantong
sa krus ko’y dumapo kahit isang ibon
doon ay bayaan humuning hinahon
at dalitin niya payapang panahon.

Bayaan ang ningas ng sikat ng araw
ula’y pasingawin noong kainitan,
magbalik sa langit ng boong dalisay
kalakip ng aking pagdaing na hiyaw.

Bayaang sino man sa katotang giliw
tangisang maagang sa buhay pagkitil;
kung tungkol sa akin ay may manalangin
idalangin, Bayan, yaring pagka himbing.

Idalanging lahat yaong nangamatay,
mangagatiis hirap na walang kapantay;
mga ina naming walang kapalaran
na inihihibik ay kapighatian.

Ang mga bao’t pinapangulila,
ang mga bilanggong nagsisipagdusa;
dalanginin namang kanilang makita
ang kalayaan mong, ikagiginhawa.

At kung an madilim na gabing mapanglaw
ay lumaganap na doon sa libinga’t
tanging mga patay ang nangaglalamay,
huwag bagabagin ang katahimikan.

Ang kanyang hiwagay huwag gambalain;
kaipala’y maringig doon ang taginting,
tunog ng gitara’t salterio’y mag saliw,
ako, Bayan yao’t kita’y aawitin.

Kung ang libingan ko’y limat na ng lahat
at wala ng kurus at batang mabakas,
bayaang linangin ng taong masipag,
lupa’y asarolin at kauyang ikalat.

At mga buto ko ay bago matunaw
maowi sa wala at kusang maparam,
alabok ng iyong latag ay bayaang
siya ang babalang doo’y makipisan.

Kung magka gayon na’y aalintanahin
na ako sa limot iyong ihabilin
pagka’t himpapawid at ang panganorin
mga lansangan mo’y aking lilibutin.

Matining na tunog ako sa dingig mo,
ilaw, mga kulay, masamyong pabango,
ang ugong at awit, pag hibik sa iyo,
pag asang dalisay ng pananalig ko.

Bayang iniirog, sakit niyaring hirap,
Katagalugang ko pinakaliliyag,
dinggin mo ang aking pagpapahimakas;
diya’y iiwan ko sa iyo ang lahat.

Ako’y patutungo sa walang busabos,
walang umiinis at berdugong hayop;
pananalig doo’y di nakasasalot,
si Bathala lamang dooy haring lubos.

Paalam, magulang at mga kapatid
kapilas ng aking kaluluwa’t dibdib
mga kaibigan bata pang maliit
sa aking tahanan di na masisilip.

Pag pasasalamat at napahinga rin,
paalam estranherang kasuyo ko’t aliw,
paalam sa inyo, mga ginigiliw;
mamatay ay siyang pagkakagupiling!

Pagsasalin ng “Mi Ultimo Adios” ni Andres Bonifacio

*** This material was transferred from emanila*pilipino (Dec 29, 2002)

En campos de batalla, luchando con delirio,
Otros te dan sus vidas, sin dudas, sin pesar.
El sitio nada importa: cipres, laurel o lirio,
Cadalso o campo abierto, combate o cruel martirio.
La mismo es si lo piden la Patria y el hogar.

Yo muero, cuando veo que el cielo se colora
Y al fin anuncia el dia, tras lobrego capuz;
Si grana necesitas, para tenir tu aurora,
i Vierte la sangre mia, derremala en buen hora,
Y durela un reflejo de su naciente luz!

Mis suenos, cuando apenas muchacho adolescente,
Mis suenos cuando joven, ya lleno de vigor,
Fueron el verte un dia, joya del Mar de Oriente,
Secos los negros ojos, alta la tersa frente,
Sin ceno, sin arrugas, sin manchas de rubor.

Ensue�o de mi vida, mi ardiente vivo anhelo.
i Salud! te grita el alma que pronto va a partir;
i Salud! iah, que es hermoso caer por darte vuelo,
Morir por darte vida, morir bajo tu cielo,
Y en tu encantada tierra la eternidad dormir!

Si sobre mi sepulcro vieres brotar, un dia,
Entre la espesa yerba, sencilla humilde flor,
Acercala a tus labios y besa el alma mia,
Y sienta yo en mi frente, bajo la tumba fria,
De tu ternura el soplo, de tu holito el calor.

Deja a la luna verme, con luz tranquila y uave;
Deja que el alba envie su resplandor fugaz;
Deja gemir al viento, con su murmullo grave;
Y si desciende y posa sobre mi cruz un ave,
Deja que el ave entone su centico de paz.

Deja que el sol, ardiendo, las lluvias evapore
Y al cielo tornen puras, con mi clamor en pos;
Deja que un ser amigo mi fin temprano Ilore;
Yen las serenas tardes, cuando por me alguien ore,
Ora tambien, oh patria, por mi descanso a Dios.

Ora por todos cuantos murieron sin ventura;
Por cuantos padecieron tormentos sin igual;
Por nuestras pobres madres, que gimen su amargura;
Por huerfanos y viudas, por presos en tortura,
Y ora por ti, que veas tu redencion final.

Y cuando, en noche oscura, se envuelva el cementerio,
Y solos solo muertos queden velando alle,
No turbes su reproso, no turbes el misterio:
Tal vez acordes oigas de c etara o salterio;
Soy yo, querida Patria, yo que te canto a tu.

Y cuando ya mi tumba, de todos olvidada,
No tenga cruz ni piedra que marquen su lugar,
Deja que la are el hombre, la esparza con la azada,
Y mis cenizas, antes que vuelvan a la nada,
En polvo de tu alfombra que vayan a formar.

Entonces nada importa me pongas en olvido;
Tu atmosfera, tu espacio, tus valles cruzaro;
Vibrante y limpia nota sere para tu oido:
Aroma, luz, colores, rumor, canto, gemido,
Constante repitiendo la esencia de mi fe.

Mi Patria idolatrada, dolor de mis dolores,
Querida Filipinas, oye el postrer adios.
Ahi, te dejo todo: mis padres, mis amores.
Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores;
Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios.

Adios, padres y hermanos, trozos del alma mia,
Amigos de la infancia, en el perdido hogar;
Dad gracias, que descanso del fatigoso dia;
Adios, dulce extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegria;
Adios, queridos seres. Morir es descansar.

Originally posted Dec 29, 2002 at emanila*pilipino