English: Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll you who you are.

Explanation: It is said that a person is judged by other people by the company he keeps. This is similar to the saying: “Birds of the same feather flock together.”

Do you agree with the saying?

RIZAL IN THE USA: ESCAPING THE ANGLO QUARANTINE, RE-INVENTING “LOS INDIOS BRAVOS”
by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Rizal is both Ibarra and Elias…. Rizal himself is the spirit of contradiction, a soul that dreads the revolution, although deep within himself he consummately desires it…. Rizal is a man who constantly pivots between fear and hope, between faith and despair. All these contradictions are merged together in that love, his dreamlike and poetic love for his adored country, the beloved region of the sun, pearl of the Orient, his lost Eden.

–MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO, “Rizal: The Tagalog Hamlet”*

The only justification for national self-government is the restoration of the dignity of the people. And this dignity will continue to elude us as long as abject poverty, rampant corruption, oligarchs, and landlords remain stark realities of our society. These evils will not be defeated until we liberate ourselves from the chains of mental incarceration. Only upon such release can we recover our own virtues and be, in the words of Rizal, “once more free, like the bird that leaves the cage, like the flower that opens to the air.”

–ANWAR IBRAHIM, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia**

Last July 26, concurrent resolution No. 218 was filed at the 109th session of the U.S. House of Representatives and passed on December 13. It mandated the government to celebrate the centennial of Filipino “sustained immigration” to the U.S. since 1906. About sixty-thousand Filipinos arrive here every year, adding to about three million Filipino residents who have now supposedly crossed all barriers to earn their “well-deserved place” in the Homeland Security State. The inaugural event was the 1906 arrival of 15 contracted laborers for the Hawaii sugar plantations, together with 200 pensionados sent to earn assimilationist credentials in order to serve the colonial bureaucracy.

Actually, after the subjugation of the revolutionary forces of Aguinaldo’s Republic in the war of 1899-1902; after the slaughter of 1.4 million Filipinos and the hanging of Sakay and other “bandits” who resisted U.S. aggression; after the genocidal massacre of thousands of Moros in the first two decades of U.S. rule, Filipinos were colonized subjects, or “nationals,” not immigrants of a sovereign nation. Filipinos were not immigrants, strictly speaking, until 1934 when, after the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, entry of Filipinos to the U.S. was restricted to a quota of fifty a year—until 1946.

We need to correct the stereotyped impression of would-be “model minority” Pinays/Pinoys. Despite the survival in Louisiana of a few descendants of “Indio” fugitives from the Spanish galleons that visited Mexico, Filipinos had no real, effective presence in the consciousness of U.S. citizens until 1899, the outbreak of the Filipino-American War. The name “Filipino” refered to Spaniards born in the Philippines, superior to the brown-skinned “indios.” It was not until the U.S., having “bought” the Philippines after the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, had to send at least seventy thousand troops to “pacify” the islands, suffered over 8,000 dead and killed over a million natives, that Filipinos will appear in the public mind in various guises. Taft’s patronized “brown brothers” soon became the new contingent of recruited cheap labor for the Hawaiian plantations, the Alasakan canneries, and West Coast agribusiness. They replaced the excluded Chinese and other “barred” “Orientals.” The orientalized “immigrant story” of which Filipinos would be one of the characters will not begin until the sixties, with the change in the immigration laws and the demise of the “Manongs,” among them Philip Vera Cruz, one of the leaders in the resurgent labor movement that led to the founding of the United Farm Workers of America.

After 9/11, despite the Congress Resolution, protesting OFW domestics and suspected “terrorists” from Abu-Sayyaf land would soon preoccupy Anglo fear and exacerbate white supremacy.

Ten years before the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana, Cuba, Rizal left Manila for Hong Kong, Japan, and the U.S. He had no inkling of the Lousiana “Manilla men” (surfacing in Melville’s Moby Dick as devious pirates) nor the likes of Pablo Manlapit and militant comrades who would disturb the Hawaii plantation scenario. This episode of the “Pacific crossing” would merit only two pages in Austin Coates’ 1968 biography of Rizal, five pages in Gregorio F. Zaide’s Rizal (1984), and only a paragraph or two in Rafael Palma’s The Pride of the Malay Race (1949). But it is instructive to reflect on this episode as a point of departure for re-assessing our fraught relation with this hegemonic power behind the unrelenting corporate globalization of the planet. Despite nationalist gains in expelling the U.S. occupation of Clark Field and Subic Naval Base in the nineties, the Philippines remains a U.S. neocolony subservient to the Washington consensus and its militarist blueprint for a “New American Century.”

Let us not forget the specific milieu we are inhabiting today: a barbaric war waged by the U.S. ruling elite against any people or nation-state opposing its imperial will—the exploited and oppressed majority of the world. For over a century now, the Filipino people, particularly peasants, Moros, women, and the indigenous communities, have paid an exorbitant price to support the affluence, freedom, and liberalism of this racial polity. Given the total subservience of the current regime to the dictates of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization (all servicing global capital and primarily U.S. corporate business), as well as the puppetry of previous regimes, any change toward “electoral democracy” has proven to be empty ritual. This seems a banal truism.

This is no longer news today. We remain a neocolonial dependency of the United States, with the comprador bureaucracy and military beholden to the Washington Consensus and its current authoritarian program enabled by the now fiercely disputed USA Patriot Act.

We need not recount the hundreds of Filipinos summarily deported, without fair hearing or civil treatment, after 9/11. Nor the continuing intervention in Philippine sovereignty through the presence of thousands of U.S. troops in “Balikatan” exercises, and in reported complicity with the Philippine military in fighting against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Moro National Liberation Front, and others designated as “Abu Sayyaf” terrorists. Racialized “white supremacy” prevails with the Rescission Act of 1945 which deprived Filipino veterans of World War II from enjoying the rights and benefits of those who served under the command of the U.S. Armed Forces in the Far East. It prevails with the barbaric treatment of Filipina domestics and caregivers in the U.S., Europe, Middle East, Asia and elsewhere, while the minority elite, rallying around the corrupt Arroyo regime and the brutal military, perpetrates an unprecedented murder campaign against dissenting citizens amid the widespread poverty suffered by millions forced to send fathers, mothers, sisters or brothers, to work abroad as domestics or recruited contract workers, hailed as “bagong bayani” or ignored as unheroic corpses that arrive three-to-five a day at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

The record OFW remittance of over $8 billion this year has apparently given the Arroyo regime breathing space to regroup. But how long will millions of Filipinos sacrifice themselves to a corrupt and decadent elite?

I.

It is not certain whether Rizal knew or met Aguinaldo—we have no desire to implicate Rizal (as has been done by those sectarians who blindly follow Renato Constantino—see my Rizal For Our Time, 1997) with those who betrayed Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, and others. After the polyphonic novels toying with plural alternatives, Rizal decided on one path: the Liga Filipina and its eventual surrogates.

Rizal of course met or was acquainted with Bonifacio and others in the Katipunan who were involved earlier in the Liga. Despite his exile to Dapitan, he was still playing with utopian projects in British Borneo. Historians from Austin Craig to Rafael Palma, Gregorio Zaide, Carlos Quirino, and Austin Coates have already demonstrated that despite Rizal’s reservations about the Katipunan uprising, his ideas and example (all susceptible to a radical rearticulation) had already won him moral legitimacy and intellectual ascendancy–what Gramsci would call “hegemony”– whatever differences in political tactics might exist among partisans in the anti-colonial united front.

Pace Constantino, we need understanding before we can have genuine if fallible appreciation. The mythification of Rizal in the popular imagination, as discussed by Reynaldo Ileto in his “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History,” need not contradict or lessen the secular, libertarian impact of Rizal’s writing and deeds on several generations of organic intellectuals such as Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini, Isabelo de los Reyes, up to the seditious playwrights in the vernaculars, the writer/activists such as Lope K. Santos, Amado V. Hernandez, Salvador P. Lopez, and nationalist intellectuals such as Ricardo Pascual, Claro Recto, Angel Baking, Renato Constantino, and others. What is needed, above all, is a dialectical grasp of the complex relations between the heterogeneous social classes and their varying political consciousness—peasantry, workers, petty-bourgeois ilustrado, artisans, etc.—and the struggle for an intelligent, popular leadership of a truly anti-colonial, democratic, mass revolution. A one-sided focus on Rizal as a sublimation of Christ or Bernardo Carpio, or Rizal as “the First Filipino” (Leon Ma. Guerrero, Nick Joaquin), fails to grasp the “unity of opposites” that conceptually subtends the dynamic process of decolonization and class emancipation traversing different modes of production in a sequence of diverse social formations.

We need a historical materialist method to grasp the concrete totality in which the individual finds her/his effective place. After all, it is not individuals or great heroes that shape history, but masses, social classes and groups in conflict that would release, in the process of unpredictable transformations, the potential of humanity’s species-being from myths, reified notions, and self-serving fantasies partly ascribable to natural necessity and partly to the burdensome nightmare of historical legacies.

Can this materialist approach explain the limitations of Rizal’s thinking at various conjunctures of his life? Numerous biographies of Rizal and countless scholarly treatises on his thought have been written to clarify or explain away the inconsistences and contradictions of his ideas, attitudes, and choices. The Yugoslavian Ante Radaic is famous for a simplistic Adlerian diagnosis of Rizal based on his physical attributes. This at least is a new angle, a relief from the exhibitionist posturing of Guerrero and the retrograde obsessions of Nick Joaquin. Radaic, however, failed to honor somehow Rizal’s own psychoanalytic foray into the phenomena of the manggagaway, aswang, and kulam, and other subterranean forms of resistance. How can a person be afflicted with an inferiority complex when he can write (to Blumentritt) a few hours before his death: “When you have received this letter, I am already dead”?

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the American realist William Dean Howells have recognized Rizal’s subtle analysis of human character and totalizing social critique. For his part, Jose Baron Fernandez’s Jose Rizal: Filipino Doctor and Patriot provides us an updated scenario of late nineteenth-century Spain for understanding the predicament of the Propagandistas in building solidarity, cognizant of Retana’s disingenuous apologia. With tactful lucidity, Palma’s classic biography, The Pride of the Malay Race, has demonstrated the fundamental secular humanism of Rizal, the inheritor of Spinoza’s Ethics and the Enlightenment’s legacy (Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant). Rizal shared this secular humanism with other propagandistas, a humanism whose utopian thrust was tempered by scientific rigor, self-critical distance, and fin-de-siecle disenchantment.

In effect, Rizal personified Filipino modernity in the making, an alternative oppositional modernity, to be sure. For how else could one interpret the exchange between Rizal and Fr. Pastells, Fr. Florentino’s reflections in El Filibusterismo, and the rationalist critique of self-deception and mass hysteria in most of his writings? Ambeth Ocampo has forcefully contributed to the demythologization of Rizal (see his Rizal Without the Overcoat) as well as to the discovery of Rizal’s third novel (on this, more below). Each author responds to the pressure of the historical moment and the inertia of the past. However, it seems unquestionable that the conventional appreciation of Rizal tends toward an indiscriminate glorification of his mind, his ideas, his “Renaissance” versatility, and so on. Scholastic pedagogy and the opiate of the masses have both contributed to this idealizing, nominalist tendentiousness.

Rizal was a product of his place and time, as everyone will concur. But due to desperate conditions, others credit Rizal with superfluous charismatic powers that he himself will be the first to disavow. We do not need the pasyon or folk religion to illuminate this mixed feudal-bourgeois habitus (to borrow Bourdieu’s term). We are predisposed by our inescapable bourgeois socialization to focus on the role of the individual and individual psychology (indexed by symptoms of nostalgia and mourning) so as to assign moral blame or praise. This is the self-privileging ideology of entrepreneurial neoliberalism. But there is an alternative position that only a few have entertained so far.

As I have tried to argue in previous essays, Rizal displayed an astute dialectical materialist sensibility. One revealing example of concrete geopolitical analysis is the short piece on Madrid and its milieu excerpted in Palma’s The Pride of the Malay Race (pp. 60-62). Rizal was neither an environmental determinist nor social Darwinist. While gauging the force of social circumstances, he did not succumb to mechanical determinism —although the weight of his familial and religious upbringing may be said to condition the limits of possible variations in his thinking and actions. This materialist intuition is leavened with praxis-oriented realism, as glimpsed from this passage in a letter to Fr. Pastells:

“It is very possible that that there are causes better than those I have embraced, but my cause is good and that is enough for me. Other causes will undoubtedly bring more profit, more renown, more honors, more glories, but the bamboo, in growing on this soil, comes to sustain nipa huts and not the heavy weights of European edifices….

As to honor, fame, or profit that I might have reaped, I agree that all of this is tempting, especially to a young man of flesh and bone like myself, with so many weaknesses like anybody else. But, as nobody chooses the nationality nor the race to which he is born, and as at birth the privileges or the disadvantages inherent in both are found already created, I accept the cause of my country in the confidence that He who has made me a Filipino will forgive the mistakes I may commit in view of our difficult situation and the defective education that we receive from the time we are born. Besides, I do not aspire to eternal fame or renown; I do not aspire to equal others whose conditions, faculties, and circumstances may be and are in reality different from mine; my only desire is to do what is possible, what is within my power, what is most necessary. I have glimpsed a little light, and I believe I ought to show it to my countrymen.

…. Without liberty, an idea that is somewhat independent might be provocative and another that is affectionate might be considered as baseness or flattery, and I can neither be provocative, nor base, nor a flatterer. In order to speak luminously of politics and produce results, it is necessary in my opinion to have ample liberty.”

A dialectical process underlies the link between subjective desire and objective necessity/possibility traced in this revealing passage. Its working can be discerned in most of Rizal’s historical and political discourses. They are all discourses on the permanent crisis in the condition of the colonial subject, a crisis articulating flashes of danger with glimpses of possibility. The virtue of Rizal’s consciousness of his own limitations inheres in its efficacy of opening up the horizon of opportunities—what he calls “liberty”– contingent on the grasp and exploitation of those same limits of his class/national position in society and history. In short, the value and function of human agency can only be calculated within the concrete limits of a determinate, specific social location in history, within the totality of social relations in history.

II.

Granted Rizal’s strategic wisdom, how can we explain his failure to predict the role of the United States in intervening and colonizing the Philippines? In his otherwise perspicacious analysis of the past, present, and hypothetical future in “Filipinas dentro de cien anos” (“The Philippines within a century,” published in La Solidaridad, 1889-1890), Rizal reflects on the United States as a possible player in international geopolitics:

“If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold… Perhaps the great American Republic, whose interests lie in the Pacific…may some day dream of foreign possession. This is not impossible, for the example is contagious, covetuousness and ambition are among the strongest vices… the European powers would not allow her to proceed… North America would be quite a troublesome rival, if she should once get into the business. Furthermore, this is contrary to her traditions.”

There is a curious breakdown of dialectics, if not knowledge of history, in this hypothetical musing. How can Rizal be so blind? Maybe blindness is a function of insight, as academic deconstructionists conjecture. It may be that Rizal had been reading too many eulogistic accounts of the United States circulated in Britain, France, Germany—too much de Tocqueville, perhaps?

In the quoted passage, Rizal’s prophetic stance allows him to moralize on the “strongest vices” of “covetousness and ambition,” but somehow his vision will not permit the “traditions” of the “Great American Republic” from being contaminated by the imperialist virus. He mentions Samoa and the Panama Canal, but seems oblivious of the Monroe doctrine and the nightmarish fear of the Haitian revolution, the first successful revolution of slaves in history. He settles on the fact that U.S. territory was not yet congested; and besides, the European powers will check any imperial ambition the U.S. might show.

In his recent treatise A Nation Aborted, Filipino scholar Floro Quibuyen re-emphasizes Rizal’s ultimate objective of national liberation, even though Rizal’s prediction about the U.S. failed to revise Feodor Jagor’s speculation (Rizal as a student read Jagor’s 1873 Travels in the Philippines) about the positive effect of U.S. imperialism. Although impressed by New York’s “concepciones grandes” and conceding with grace that the U.S. “offers a home to the poor who wish to work,” Rizal did not meet anyone resembling O-Sei-San, the Japanese woman who seduced his soul for a month prior to his landing in San Francisco—there was no time nor occasion for libidinal adventure. Nor was he attracted by the immense panorama of mountains, waterfalls, and the urban landscape, so annoyed was he by the Yankee “craziness” about quarantine and “severe customs inspections.” Shades of current Homeland Security surveillance? In fact Rizal was more impressed by the largest liner in the world, the City of Rome, which he boarded for Liverpool after three weeks in the U.S.

What happened to this universalist historian and globalizing polymath? Was Rizal a victim of temporary amnesia in discounting his non-memorable passage through the United States, still haunted by nostalgic images of Pagsanjan Falls while visiting Niagara, in his second trip to Europe?

It is indeed difficult to understand how Rizal failed to draw the necessary lessons from his brief passage through the United States. Perhaps he was too engrossed as a tourist in novelties, enthralled by the Golden Gate Bridge, the Indian statues everywhere “attired in semi-European suit and semi-Indian suit,” Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty, and New York City where (to quote his words) “everything is new!”. Unlike his adventures in Europe, he did not find any inamorata—didn’t have time for dalliance. His travel diary was, in Ocampo’s judgment, sparse and hasty; but his letter to Mariano Ponce (dated 27 July 1888 two months after his passage) reveal a somewhat traumatic experience:

“I visited the largest cities of America with their big buildings, electric lights, and magnificent conceptions. Undoubtedly America is a great country, but it still has many defects. There is no real civil liberty. In some states, the Negro cannot marry a white woman, nor a Negress a white man. Because of their hatred for the Chinese, other Asiatics, like the Japanese, being confused with them, are likewise disliked by the ignorant Americans. The Customs are excessively strict. However, as they say rightly, American offers a home too for the poor who like to work. There was, moreover, much arbitrariness. For example, when we were in quarantine.
They placed us under quarantine, in spite of the clearance given by the American Consul, of not having had a single case of illness aboard, and of the telegram of the governor of Hong Kong declaring that port free from epidemic.

We were quarantined because there were on board 800 Chinese and, as elections were being held in San Francisco, the government wanted to boast that it was taking strict measures against the Chinese to win votes and the people’s sympathy. We were informed of the quarantine verbally, without specific duration. However, on the same day of our arrival, they unloaded 700 bales of silk without fumigating them; the ship’s doctor went ashore; many customs employees and an American doctor from the hospital for cholera victims came on board.

Thus we were quarantined for about thirteen days. Afterwards, passengers of the first class were allowed to land; the Japanese and Chinese in the 2nd and 3rd classes remained in quarantine for an indefinite period. It is thus in that way, they got rid of about 200 [actually 643 coolies, according to Zaide] Chinese, letting them gradually off board.”

Evidenced by this and other works, Rizal definitely understood racism in theory and practice. But it is not clear to what extent he recognized how the absence of “real civil liberty” extends beyond the everyday life of African Americans, beyond the Asians—it is not even clear whether Rizal then considered himself Asian, though in his reflections on how Europeans treated him, he referred to himself as “dark skinned,” a person of color, especially in relation to European women. Rizal never forgot that in spite of being a relatively privileged Chinese mestizo, the Spaniards uniformly considered him an “Indio.”

The term “Indio” casts a subliminal shadow approximating that of the witch, or manggagaway, which Rizal diagnosed thus: the witch is the “she-ass of ignorance and popular malevolence, the scapegoat of divine chastisements, the salvation of the perplexed quacks.” Rizal considers this persona “the diagnosis of inexplicable sufferings,” an idea that would illuminate the logic of “los indios bravos” as a therapeutic ruse, a guerilla maneuver of rectifying names and (like the Noli and Fili) unveiling the cancerous anatomy to the communal gaze.

III.

Was Rizal so magnanimous or charitable that he expunged the ordeal of being quarantined soon after? Not at all. In his travel diary concerning a train ride from Paris to Dieppe in 1889, Rizal encountered an arrogant American taunting his other companions (an Englishman and two Frenchmen). His comments indicate that he never forgot the quarantine, surveillance, and exclusionist procedures he went through in his swift passage through the U.S.:

“I was beginning to be annoyed by the fury of the traveler and I was going to join the conversation to tell him what I have seen and endured in America, in New York itself [Rizal doesn’t disclose what he “endured” in New York], how many troubles and what torture the customs [and immigration] in the United States made us suffer, the demands of drivers, barbers, etc., people who, as in many other places, lived on travelers….

I was tempted to believe that my man’s verbosity, being a good Yankee, came from the steam of a boiler inside his body, and I even imagined seeing in him a robot created and hurled to the world by the Americans, a robot with a perfect engine inside to discredit Europe…. (quoted in Ambeth Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat, 1990; see also Gregorio Zaide and Sonia Zaide, Jose Rizal, 1984).

What can we infer from this hiatus between Rizal’s anger in being quarantined and his belief that the “great American Republic” dare not engage in the brutal adventure of subjugating the natives of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines? Two years after his visit, in Brussels, Rizal replied to Jose Alejandrino’s question what impression did he have of America: “America is the land par excellence of freedom but only for the whites.” This insight is quite remarkable for a Filipino traveler then and today. It exceeds the intelligence of Filipino American pundits who boast of 200% “Americanism,” of Filipinos as hybrid transnationals or transmigrants capable of besting white supremacy. But Rizal, as far as the record shows, did not pursue any consequential inference from his insight.

In his diary, Rizal noted the exhibitionist ubiquity of Indians—once in Reno, Nevada, where he saw “an Indian attired in semi-European suit, and semi-Indian suit, leaning against a wall.” In Chicago, he observed that “every cigar store has an Indian figure, and always different.” That sums up his awareness of American Indians—until the Paris Exposition of 1889 (more on this later). While recognizing the denial of civil liberties to “Negroes” and the degrading treatment of Chinese and Japanese in San Francisco, Rizal was unable to connect these snapshots and observations to the history of the United States as one of expansion, genocidal extermination of Native Americans, slavery of Africans, violent conquest and subjugation of indigenous Mexicans in Texas, California and the territory seized after the Mexican-American War of 1845-48.

What is the historic context surrounding Rizal’s tour of the U.S. in 1886? A historic violent railroad strike had already occurred in 1877; in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively barred the Chinese from entry, a move which did not prevent twenty-eight Chinese from being massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885.

Meanwhile, in the post-bellum South, the basis for segregation was being laid by Ku Klux Klan raids throughout the 1860s and 1870s following the Compromise of 1877 and severe economic depression. In 1886, two years before Rizal’s travels, the Haymarket riot in Chicago led to the prosecution of eight anarchists and the execution of four of them innocent of the crimes they were charged with. It was the era of robber barons, workers’ strikes, immigrant rebellions, and ferocious class wars (as detailed by Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States). In 1890, the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee marked the culmination of the genocidal campaign against the original inhabitants and the closing of the internal or Western frontier.

Rizal seemed not to have followed U.S. history along these tracks, isolating only the puritan revolt against religious persecution and the colonial, quasi-feudal imposition by the British monarchy. So this tradition of struggling for liberty, for separation from European feudalism and the authoritarian English monarchy, was what Rizal associated with the U.S. as an emerging nation-state when he was preoccupied with demanding Filipino representation in the Cortes in 1889-90. The United States stood for Rizal as an example of a country or people that demanded representation—“no taxation without representation” was a slogan that must have appealed to the ilustrado assimilationists, not an Anglo state whose “Manifest Destiny” was already nascent from the time of the massacre of the Pequot Indians in 1636, through the institutionalized slavery of Africans, to the savage subjugation of Mexican territory in 1848. White supremacy acquired its slogan of “Manifest Destiny” in the U.S. victory over Mexico and its annexation of substantial territory once owned by Spain.

IV.

To recapitulate the logic of our rehearsing this narrative: Rizal traveled through the United States from April 28 to May 16, 1888, a quite hectic flight through the continent of the “New World.” Although he experienced briefly if intensely the violence of white supremacy in transit, he clearly manifested no understanding of the plight of the American Indians then. Rizal was sensitive to the discrimination shown to African Americans, but not to the indigenous folk that he would soon notice a year after, this time as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the Paris Universal Exposition of May1889. When he and other propagandistas watched some Indians riding their agile horses, elegantly sporting war feathers and other colorful regalia, they were—judging from the tone of their praise–enchanted at the proud and dignified bearing of these performers.

The modernity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show registered its aura in the sensibility of these Malayan ilustrados. Thereafter Rizal confided to his friends: “Why should we resent being called Indios by the Spaniards? Look at those Indios from North America—they are not ashamed of their name. Let us be like them. Let us be proud of the name Indio and make our Spanish enemies revise their conception of the term. We shall be Indios Bravos!” (Zaide, Rizal, p. 156). Analogous to the revisionist “black is beautiful” symbolism of the sixties, Rizal’s re-signifying of “los indios bravos” signifies a bold paradigm-shift, a transvaluation of meanings and values, linked to a wider political-cultural movement of change among subject-peoples.

By no stretch of the imagination can this be interpreted as nostalgia for the ghostly ancestors haunting the transcribed pages of Morga’s Sucesos. Nor can it be plausibly construed as redolent of the “rhetoric of mourning,” loss, and melancholia that, for neoFreudian analysts, animate texts such as “El Amor Patrio” or Rizal’s letters to his mother. It displays what Christine Buci-Glucksmann (in La raison baroque, 1984) calls the operations of a modernist aesthetics of novelty, fragmentation, unexpectedness, play of artifice, theatricality, etc., that one can also discern in the transgressive allegories of El Filibusterismo and Makamisa, Rizal’s unpublished, incomplete third novel.

And so, when Rizal and his compatriots (Del Pilar, the Luna brothers, Mariano Ponce, and others) witnessed a rousing performance of the “U.S. Wild West” managed by Buffalo Bill Cody, according to biographer Leon Maria Guerrero, they were all inspired by the “plumed warriors of the prairies” to the point of organizing “Los Indios Bravos,” a mutual aid association devoted to promoting intellectual and physical prowess (manly sports using sword, pistol, judo and other arts of self-defense). This anticipated the Liga Filipina that he would set up in January 1892 on his return to the Philippines—the catalyzing agent for the formation of the clandestine, Jacobinic Katipunan led by Andres Bonifacio.

The famous 1890 photograph of Rizal, Luna and Ventura posing with their fencing swords has been read as an “image of masculine solidarity” presumably because Luna’s wife, Paz Pardo de Tavera, was cut out from the photo and marginalized. On the other hand, it can be read as a parable, an instance of rest in motion, bodies pausing during a sequence of action. It thus evokes the contrived theatrical pose of the American Indians in the Wild West Show, precisely the bearer of a futurist, not backward-looking, trajectory the significance of which is intimated by Buci-Glucksmann: “The theatricality of desire or history therefore accomplishes the project of modernity as representation, while destabilizing it towards the vanishing-point of the non-representable Other.” This Other is none other than Rizal (borne from our own re-inscribing ordeal of representation) traversing perilous U.S.A. territory.

Historians inform us that “Los Indios Bravos” replaced the ephemeral “Kidlat” Club which Rizal organized when he arrived in Paris from London on March 19, 1889. It seems that within “Los Indios Bravos,” a dissident underground cell of cadres existed with the coded designation “Redencion de los Malayos” (Redemption of the Malays), a society inspired, among others, by Rizal’s acquaintance with the Dutch author Multatuli (E. D. Dekker) who wrote Max Havelaar (1860), a famous exposure of the miserable conditions of the Malay inhabitants oppressed by Dutch colonizers in the Netherlands East Indies. “Los Indios Bravos” would then extend to primarily dark-skinned peoples in the continents dominated by European/Western powers.

The Eleventh U.S. Census in 1890 declared the Western frontier closed. Three years earlier, in 1887, the Dawes Act provided for the settlement of pacified Indians on homesteads. A year after the Paris Exposition, on December 29, 1890, 146 Indians (including 44 women and 18 children) were massacred at Wounded Knee. This was one of the many ways in which the religious Indian revival pivoting around the Ghost Dance and its vision of the Promised Land for dispossessed aborigines in militarized reservations, a progenitor of twentieth-century national liberation struggles of third world peoples, was suppressed by an industrializing U.S. empire.

We do not know yet whether any of the Filipino propagandistas acquired any knowledge of this part of U.S. history, a suppression that would be replicated at home in the bloody onslaught on the Colorums, assorted Rizal cults, revitalization movements like the Lapiang Malaya, and others with their improvised, provocative local “ghost dances.”

Some American scholars claim that this appreciation of the spectacularized Indians by Rizal and his comrade-partisans functions as the positive “American factor” in which the U.S. was not just a negative but a usable instrument for the reformists. The performance of the commodified Indians was supposed to have stimulated the “masculine solidarity” of the Filipinos in exile, reinforcing their rebellion against the androgynous friars who ruled their homeland. (This argument should not be confused with Howard Dewitt’s view that the Rizal cult helped Filipinos assimilate into mainstream California.) Which “America” is being invoked here? The problem may be located in the confusion of the plight of the subjugated indigenous communities with the Anglo-Saxon Republic and its racializing mission of “Manifest Destiny” that led to the genocidal brutality against the natives themselves as well as against the internally colonized Mexicans, Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and numerous communities in the peripheral dependencies once called the “third world.”

First of all, those Indians participating in the commerical exhibitions were victims of the 1889 military campaign against ghost dancers who were sentenced to a choice between prison or joining the Wild West Show (Ian Frazier, On the Rez, 2000). They were not exactly untamed bodies with free spirits. Moreover, these naive Americanists have also ignored the long Eurocentric tradition (from Montaigne to Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and the romantic writers of Germany and England) of exalting the “noble savage,” a compensatory binary to the demonizing opposite, to which Rizal and his comrades responded sympathetically.

Thus Rizal’s (and other propagandista’s) temporary identification with the “plumed warriors” cannot be understood without this deeply implanted romanticizing framework of mind or sensibility which can mobilize energies for self-emancipation or self-denegation, depending on the political program which it advances. In this case, however, the image of the American Indian was quickly sublimated or absorbed into the larger, more potent Malay subject which became paramount to Rizal during his exile in Dapitan in 1892 when his Borneo project of a “new Calamba” (Rizal’s extrapolation of the “promised land”) was prohibited by the Spanish Governor Despujol.

Ignoring the mechanistic “novelty” of the American experiment, Rizal was truly a man of his time. He preferred Europe and its familiar protocols and decorum —even if he tried to re-live and eulogize the past of his ancestors through his annotations of Judge Morga’s history of pre-Spanish Philippines. It was proof that he had decided on a protracted guerilla strategy: to burrow underground like the “old mole” in enemy territory. We surely cannot fault Rizal for not being able to foresee the slaughter of 1.4 million Filipinos in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, nor the massacre of 600 Muslim men, women and children at Mt. Dajo, Jolo, in 1906, and 3,000 Muslim women, men and children at Mt. Bagsak in 1913.

Today the Bangsamoro Nation remembers all these in their struggle for secession, for the right of self-determination, which Rizal himself would support, even though while in Dapitan, Mindanao, he (given his Catholic indoctrination and later his Masonic freethinking) rarely paid attention to his Moro brothers and sisters nearby. Surveilled constantly by spies during his scientific and displinary labors, Rizal was unable to render homage to the Moros’ “free spirit” an instance of which he glimpsed in the packaged spectacle of Buffalo Bill’s American Indians, already a symptom of self-aggrandizing Eurocentrism, self-deceptive decay, and death.

IV.

We can understand this omission of the U.S. from the ilustrado consciousness then—unless selected aspects of its “progress” is transported to Europe and other parts of the world as commodified spectacles (via Hollywood movies, Internet ads, etc.). So concentrated were the energies and time of Rizal and his compatriots Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Mariano Ponce, and others on stirring up the conscience of the Spanish public in Madrid and Barcelona that they neglected studying closely the political and economic history of the United States. In their heroic perseverance, they missed the uncanny “signs of the times.” It could not be helped.

And so little did Rizal suspect that the “great American Republic” would be the next executioner of Filipino nationalists and radical democrats, the global gendarme terrorizing subversives such as the New People’s Army combatants, the Moro separatists, Fidel Castro, Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Maoists in Nepal, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, and so on.

For Rizal and his compatriots, Europe was the fated arena of battle, more specifically Spain. During Rizal’s first sojourn in Europe (1882-1887), social ferment was quietly taking place between the dissolution of the First International Working Men’s Association in 1881 and the founding of the Second International in1889 with Marxism as its dominant philosophy. Marx died in 1883. Meanwhile two volumes of Capital have been published and were being discussed in Europe during Rizal’s first visit to Paris. The second volume of Capital was published in 1885 when Rizal moved to Paris after finishing his studies at the Central University of Madrid.

Engels was still alive and active, residing in London when Rizal was annotating Morga’s Sucesos at the British Museum in 1888-1889. During his second sojourn (1888-1891), Rizal completed El Filibusterismo published in Ghent, Belgium, in 1891. Meanwhile Engels’ writings, in particular Anti-Duhring (1877-1878), have been widely disseminated in German periodicals and argued over.

The Second International Workers’ Congress organized by Marxists was held in Paris in July 1889. May Day demonstrations for an eight-hour work day started in Europe in 1890. German Social Democracy was thriving. Given his numerous visits to Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, England, and Spain, and his contacts with intellectuals (Blumentritt, Rost, Jagor, Virchow, Ratzel, Meyer, aside from the Spaniards Morayta, Pi y Margall, Becerra, Zorilla, and others), it was impossible for Rizal to escape the influence of the socialist movement and its Spanish anarchist counterpoint. Indeed, a letter (dated 13 May 1891) by his close friend, the painter Juan Luna, conveyed Luna’s enthusiasm over Le socialisme contemporaine by E. de Laveleye, “which is a conflation of the theories of Karl Marx, La Salle, etc; Catholic socialism, the conservative, evangelical,…which stresses the miseries of contemporary society.”

Based on an inspection of Rizal’s library in Calamba and citations in the Epistolario, Benedict Anderson concludes that Rizal had no interest, or awareness, of socialist currents except those filtered through Joris Karl Huysmans. Rizal’s singular modernity, in my view, cannot be so easily Orientalized by U.S. experts like Anderson, Karnow, Glenn May, and their ilk. On the other hand, Anderson’s uncouth reference to the “narrow nativism” and “narrow obsession with America” of Filipino intellectuals will surely delight the Westernized Makati enclave and his acolytes in Diliman and Loyola Heights. Or even those speculating on Rizal’s homosexual tendencies despite his insouciant flirtations with las palomas de baja vuela (as attested to by close companions Valentin Ventura and Maximo Viola). Do we still need such patrons of Rizaliana/Filipiniana at this late date of cynical, coercive globalization?

In his Solidaridad period, Rizal was just beginning to learn the fundamentals of geopolitics. The United States was out of the picture. It is foolish to expect Rizal and his compatriots to know more than what their circumstances and class orientation allowed. Scarcely would Rizal have a clue then that the U.S. control of Filipino sovereignty would continue through the IMF/WB stranglehold of the Philippine economy for over 40 years after nominal independence in 1946, an unprecedented case—the only country so administered for the longest period in history! This can throw some light on the country’s chronic poverty, technological backwardness, clientelist slavishness to Washington, witnessed of late by the export of over 9 million contract workers as “servants of globalization” and the country’s dependence on the 8.5 billion dollars worth of overseas annual remittances to service the humongous foreign debt and the extravagant “indolence” of the few rich families and their politician flunkeys.

One may speculate that Rizal’s memory of his ordeal in San Francisco and New York, had he lived longer, might have resonated beyond his detention in the prison-fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona (where Isabelo de los Reyes was also confined) and influenced the ilustrado circle of Trinidad Pardo de Tavera and other supporters of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the early decades of the last century. Its resonance needs a counter-intuitive inventory. In Culture and Imperialism, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, founder of postcolonial studies, extolled the Malayan author Syed Hussein Alatas for his exemplary anti-imperialist book, The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977).

But Said failed to mention Rizal in his chronicle of decolonizing movements even though Alatas himself acknowledged his great indebtedness to Rizal whose 1890 article, “On the Indolence of Filipinos” published in La Solidaridad, may be considered the pathbreaking discourse of refusal and revolt. Rizal is still the marked absence, lacuna, or silence in the texts of canonical postcolonial and subaltern studies dominating North American/European academies, with the Philippines not even noticed in such scriptural anthologies as The Post-Colonial Studies Reader edited by Bill Ashcroft et al or the recent Postcolonial Studies and Beyond edited by Ania Loomba et al.

Finally, we return to confront once again Rizal’s “Manifesto” of 1896 written in his prison cell in Fort Santiago. Against the gradualist thrust of this “Manifesto” (surely a ruse to gain time) can be counterposed the overwhelming evidence of Rizal’s conviction that where the other party cannot listen to reason, force must be used (while civic education proceeds), with separatist liberation the only ultimate alternative. Padre Florentino’s invocation (“God will provide a weapon…”) was fulfilled in Rizal’s banishment and the replacement of the Liga by the Katipunan. It is enough to cite again Rizal’s resolute determination to give his life for the liberation of his people (in the two letters to his brother and to his family) as well as many confessions to Blumentritt, Ponce, Del Pilar, Fr. Pastells, and others, of his readiness to sacrifice his life for the redemption of the masses. The itinerary of his activities in Europe, Hong Kong, and Dapitan suffice to quell any doubt about his commitment.

Let us recall Rizal’s statement to General Alejandrino: “I will never head a revolution that is preposterous and has no probability of success because I do not like to saddle my conscience with reckless and fruitless bloodshed; but whoever may head a revolution in the Philippines will have me at his side.”

V.

In the long run, the criterion of solidarity with the insurgent masses imposes its critical verdict without reprieve. Rizal struggled all his life against the tendency toward individualism. He confided to Del Pilar: “What I desire is that others appear…” To Padre Vicente Garcia: “A man in the Philippines is only an individual, he is not a member of a nation.”

But Rizal also will not submit to tradition for its own sake, to supercilious authority, to unreasonable conformism: “I wish to return to the Philippines [he wrote to Ponce], and though it may be a temerity and an imprudence, what does it matter? Filipinos are all so prudent. That is why our country is as it is…. And since it seems to me that we are not doing well on the road of prudence, I will seek another road.” Several paths were tested in the Noli and Fili, including Simoun’s “anarchical nationalism,” Cabesang Tales’ guerilla foco, urban insurrection, etc. In the opinion of Eugenio Matibag,*** both novels were multivoiced, intricately dialogic in nature, and so open to the “play of an emancipatory desire that continues to move the Philippines today.”

Of course, we don’t need to read Rizal to seek to overthrow the current intolerable system. Limited by his ilustrado class conditioning, but open to the influence of collective projects and spontaneous popular initiatives, Rizal was a nationalist democrat “of the old type,” as the idiom goes. But proof of a more genuinely populist and radical conception of change may be found in the third novel, recently recovered for us by Ambeth Ocampo in Makamisa (Anvil 1992).

Would Rizal’s stature be altered if he had completed this novel? Since this is not the occasion to elaborate on the insurrectionary imagination of Rizal, I can only highlight two aspects in Makamisa. First, the boisterous entrance of the subaltern masses into historical time and space. In the two novels, Elias, Sisa, Cabesang Tales, and others interrupted the plot of individual disillusionment, but never substantially moved to the foreground of the stage. This new mise en scene is rendered here by the demystification of religious ritual via the physical/sensory motion of crowds, rumor, money talk, animal behavior, Anday’s seduction, and so on. This staging maneuver of the narrative escapes from the symbolic Order (sacred space) represented by the Church, as dramatized in the multiaccentual speculations on why Padre Agaton disrupted his public performance.

In this context, the play of heteroglossia, the intertextuality of idioms (indices of social class and collective ethos), and the stress on the heterogeneous texture of events, all point to the mocking subversive tradition of the carnivalesque culture and Menippean satire that Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his works on Rabelais, Menippean satire, and Dostoevsky (see The Dialogic Imagination). Makamisa easily falls into this generic category. This is the root of the polyphonic modernist novel constituted by distances, relationships, analogies, non-exclusive oppositions, fantasies that challenge the status quo. Rizal could have inaugurated the tradition of an antiheroic postmodernist vernacular centered on the antagonism of ideological worlds if he completed Makamisa in this unprecedented direction.

Second, the tuktukan game accompanying the Palm Sunday procession is Rizal’s proof that folk/indigenous culture, a spectacle staged at the site of the monological discourse of the Church, transgresses prohibitions and allows the body of the earth, its sensory process and affective becoming, to manifest itself. We confront the unconscious of the colonial structure in the essential motifs of carnivalesque ribaldry and topsy-turvy outlawry: “the high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laugher and tears “(in Julia Kristeva’s gloss).

Paradoxes, ambivalences, Dionysian fantasies, odd mixtures of styles that violate orthodox decorums, and diverse expressions of ideological themes and chronotopes—all these characterize the Menippean satirical discourse exemplified in Rizal’s third novel as well as in Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, De Sade, Lautreamont, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Joyce. (One wonders if Rizal read Dostoevsky or Gogol’s Dead Souls with its grotesque phantoms of the rural underworld.) According to Bakhtin, we find in Rabelais’ work the dramatic conflict between the popular/plebeian culture of the masses and the official medieval theology of hegemonic Christianity. Variants may be found in postmodernist works of magical realism (Garcia Marquez, Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie).

In brief, Makamisa—the title, “just after the mass,” speaks volumes– is the moment of Rabelaisian satire and carnival feast in Rizal’s archive. It may be read as Rizal’s attempt to go beyond the polyphonic relativizing of colonial authority and Christian logic in the Noli and Fili toward a return to the body of the people, not just folkways and the over-privileged tropology of the pasyon, but to the praxis of physical labor, the material/social processes of eating and excretion, sexual production and reproduction, collective dreams and the political unconscious. Unconscionable petty-bourgeois melancholy and the dandiacal pathos of mourning are definitely over. It is the moment of unfinalizable becoming, the moment of the Katipunan revolution, the hour of the cry of Balintawak.

Once more, at the ultimate reckoning, we encounter the spectre of Rizal at the barricades, arming the emergent collective spirit for storming the decaying fortifications of Makati and Malacanang Palace, envisioning a land where “there are no slaves, no hangmen, no oppressors,/where faith does not slay,” reincarnated Indios Bravos in the long march across the frontiers of Europe and the USA toward the “Pearl of the Orient Seas, our Eden lost….”

___________

*Miguel de Unamuno,”The Tagalog Hamlet,” in Rizal: Contrary Essays, edited by Petronilo B. Daroy and Dolores S. Fferia (Quezon City: Guro Books, 1968): 3-16.

**Anwar Ibrahim, “The Birth of the Asian Renaissance,” in The Philippine Revolution and Beyond, Vol. 1 (Manila, Philippines: Philippine Centennial Commission, 1998): xxiii-xxvi.

***Eugenio Matibag, “El Verbo del Filibusterismo: Narrative Ruses in the Novels of Jose Rizal,” Revista Hispanica Moderna (New York: Hispanic Institute, 1995): 250-264.

[This is a revised and longer version of an earlier essay entitled “Understanding Rizal Without Veneration.”]

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

E. SAN JUAN is co-director of the Board of Philippine Forum, New York City, and heads the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press)US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave) and IN THE WAKE OF TERROR (Lexington Books). Three books in Filipino were launched in Manila, Philippines, in 2007: HIMAGSIK (De La Salle University Press), TINIK SA KALULUWA (Anvil), and SAPAGKAT INIIBIG KITA (University of the Philippines). Last year, two books were issued: BALIKBAYANG SINTA; AN E. SAN JUAN READER (Aeneo University Press) and FROM GLOBALIZATION TO NATIONAL LIBERATION (University of the Philippines Press). He is currently Spring 2009 Fellow of the WEB Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

JOSE GARCIA VILLA, R.I.P.: Post-mortem and Autopsy Report on the Death and Resurrection of a Filipino Poet in the Imperial Metropole
(Lecture given on 7 Jan 2009, at Ateneo University, Loyola Heights, Quezon City, Philippines)

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

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Ed’s Notes: The following article was first published on 29 August 2000 at emanila*pilipino, then re-published on 28 November 2004 at emanila’s My Filipiniana section.
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What would you call the language that you use, Tagalog? Pilipino? Filipino? Why do foreigners and Pilipinos in other countries call the Philippines national language Tagalog? Here at home, why is the national language still gets called Tagalog after the change in name 17 25 years ago? Is Tagalog different from Pilipino? From Filipino? Let’s look at these differences based on concept and appearance.

Tagalog is the language in Bulacan, Batangas, Rizal, Laguna, Quezon, Cavite, Mindoro, Marinduque, some parts of Nueva Ecija, Puerto Princesa and also Metro Manila. This then is a natural language, with its own native speakers. It is one particular language that is spoken by one of the ethnolinguistic groups in the country, the Tagalogs. Even on the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legaspi in 1565 to Manila, they noticed that many Pilipinos were speaking it (Tagalog).

Tagalog got involved in the national arena when President Manuel Quezon declared a national language based on Tagalog on 30 December 1937 (Executive Order No. 134). Starting in 1940, it (the Tagalog-based national language) was taught in all public and private schools.

Pilipino is based on Tagalog

Meantime, the language Pilipino was the Filipino National Language (in 1943) that was based on Tagalog beginning in 1959, when Department Order No. 7 was passed by then Secretary Jose Romero of the Department of Education. This same name (Pilipino) was also used for the official language, the language for teaching and subject in national language starting 1959. This stopped only when Filipino was approved as the national language. Filipino was (the name) used to call the national language in the 1987 Constitution (1973 although the official language was still Pilipino).

It was apparent that Pilipino was also Tagalog in concept and structure and there was no Pilipino language before 1959. Also, there was no Filipino language before 1973. Pilipino is different from Filipino even though both became national languages because these are different concepts — one was based on only one language and the other on many languages in the Philippines, including English and Spanish.

Because it was based on Tagalog and usage by the Tagalogs, the non-Tagalogs were not given the opportunity to become part of the enrichment and development of Pilipino. And in the schools, (the word) aklat is more correct (to use) than libro; takdang-aralin than asaynment; pamantasan than kolehiyo/unibersidad; mag-aaral than estudyante. It was quite a long period that Tagalog prevailed and “swayed”. In applying for a job, for example, teacher and translator in Pilipino, the Tagalog (native speaker) would get hired before the non-Tagalog. What only turned out to be the problem then was which (variety of) Tagalog is “more beautiful, better, appropriate” that was disputed among the Tagalogs from Bulacan, Laguna and Batangas. Occurrences such as these were labelled by Professor Leopoldo Yabes then as “Tagalog Imperialism”. People were so conditioned to Tagalog that inspite of the change on how to call the national language (Pilipino, Filipino), Tagalog was still used by Pilipinos and foreigners when referring to it.

This conditioning also brought about the negative reaction from the non-Tagalogs.

Languages that are widely used like Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Ilokano were put aside. This in turn became the reason for changing the national language from Pilipino (Tagalog) to Filipino in the Constitution of 1973 and 1987.

Additions to the Filipino alphabet

The term Filipino for the national language did not come from the English word Filipino for the citizens of the country. The F here also did not come from English. These are misconceptions. It (Filipino) derived from the revised concept of (a) national language on the basis of all languages in the Philippines, including English and Spanish. There is an F sound in several languages in the Philippines as in afuy (apoy/fire), kofun (kaibigan/friend) of the Ibanag, afyu flafus (magandang umaga/good morning) of the Bilaan, fidu (peste/pestilence) of the S. Cotabato Manobo, etc. The use of F signified that Tagalog is no longer the only basis of the national language because there is no such sound in Tagalog. P replaces any f sound in Tagalog as in pamilya (familya/familia) and reperensya (referencia/reference). There were also additions to the Filipino Alphabet. From 20 letters in Tagalog, the letters became 28 in Filipino. Added were the 8 letters c, ch, f, j, rr, v, x, z to accommodate the sounds from the languages in the Philippines, English and Spanish.

The essence of the concept of Filipino as based on the languages of the Philippines is its being the national lingua francua. In the communication of each Pilipino with one another especially in the cities, they are using a language that fellow Pilipinos know even if they have a native language like Cebuano, Ilokano, Pampango, Tausug, Kalinga, etc. This language is serving as the second language and lingua franca. Filipino is the primary lingua franca in the country. As a result, it should not be expected that aklat will be used but libro or buk (book), not silid-aralan but klasrum, not pahayagan but diyaryo/peryodiko, not manananggol but abugado/lawyer. It is likewise hard to argue ‘why borrow when we have our own’? Who the ‘we’ there should be defined, the Tagalogs only or the majority of the Pilipinos?

Cebuano variety of Filipino

Because it is indeed the lingua franca and second language, varieties of these are being formed as a result of interference or mixing of the first languages of the speakers. So if a Cebuano will use Filipino, (something like) this could not be avoided: Nagbasa ako ng libro (bumasa ako ng libro). Before 1973, the said sentence is wrong because Tagalog indeed was the basis. But now this is considered as the Cebuano variety of Filipino.

The change in attitude towards Filipino and calling it Tagalog will not simply disappear.

But the time will come especially when those non-Tagalogs themselves lose the inhibitions to use Filipino so that they will contribute words that will become part of the national language.

If this happens, perhaps, calling the national language of the Philippines as Tagalog will then be forgotten.

Note: This translation from the Filipino version is by Antonio Senga, Filipino Language Studies coordinator, NT University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, 22 August 2000.

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Dr Pamela C. Constantino is Professor in the Department of Filipino and Literature of the Philippines (Departamento ng Filipino at Panitikan ng Pilipinas), University of the Philippines, Diliman. She was a former chairperson of the said Department and currently president of SANGFIL (Sanggunian ng Mga Kolehiyo at Unibersidad sa Filipino), an organisation of the Departments of Filipino from various colleges and universities in the country at the tertiary level.

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Additional information about Tagalog

Tagalog can mean:

• The Tagalog language, the most widely spoken of the Philippine languages.
• The Tagalog people, the second-largest Filipino ethnic group.
• The Tagalog script, the ancient writing system of the Tagalog people.

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2008, because of the number 8, is said to be a year of new beginnings and resurrections; it is also the ‘Year of Grace’ for Catholics. But by the way things are in our country, we seem to face another year of the same: for most of us – crisis, corruption and poverty with entertainment from politico-military theatrics; for the very few – the good life. The whys and wherefores of this national situation rattle our consciousness as we try, once more, to recall and make sense of the martyrdom of Dr. Jose Rizal 111 years ago.

Was his death at the hands of a Filipino firing squad who themselves were at the mercy of a Spanish firing squad behind them, worth all his hope: Yo muero cuando veo que el cielo se colora y al fin anuncia el dia tras lobrego capuz (I am to die when I see the heavens go vivid, announcing the day at last behind the dead night) that he could one day behold his beloved joya del Mar de Oriente secos los negros ojos, alta la tersa frente, sin ceno, sin arrugas, sin manchas de rubor (Jewel of eastern waters: griefless the dusky eyes: lifted the upright brow: unclouded, unfurrowed, unblemished and unashamed!)?

One hundred and eleven years have passed and still Inang Bayan’s dusky eyes are full of grief, her brows are still neither lifted nor upright – still clouded, still furrowed, still blemished, still ashamed! Paradoxically, the problems are different yet the same: nor more foreign colonizers, only the Filipino elite; no more struggle for independence, just the daily struggle for freedom from want and freedom from fear.

As generation Y would ask: what’s up with that?

Could we perhaps be approaching our national problems with the same mind sets that created the problems in the first place?

If we are, could we be bound to go round and round till we die of exhaustion, like the caterpillar that follows its own tail? Albert Einstein is known to have observed: “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it”.

Gawad Kalinga stalwart Tony Meloto, in his ‘Spirituality in Nation Building’ speech, said: “My choices define who I am, influence those around me and affect the state of my country and my world.” No one can disagree with such a statement. But one could add: My choices are marked and circumscribed by my own definitions, perceptions, beliefs and understandings of myself, my family my nation. In other words, my own definitions (beliefs) delimit my choices.

Examples of the distortive effects of such beliefs and internal definitions are provided by the classic stories of humans raised by wolves/gorrillas, or those of swans raised by ducks, or of eagles raised by chicken, or pigs raised by dogs, dogs raised by cats or lions raised by sheep. For humans exploited by other humans and made to believe their supposed inferior nature, there is no end to possible citations on the abominations of slavery and of the oppressive conditions starkly expressed in Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man With the Hoe”, which we can very well relate to our own “Men, Women and Children with Scavenger Hooks” in Tondo and other garbage dumps.

Is it possible we truly are of a higher, nobler nature yet have come [or made by others - more appropriately, allowed others to pressure us] to believe we are only good for a little corner of this downtrodden world (as in the song: DITO BA [sa sulok na ito])?

For we could ask, like Rizal in ‘Cervantes in Argamasilla de Alba’: “Miguel,Miguel [Filipino, Filipino], why does your courage surrender to the blows of fate? If the cedar of Lebanon [molave of the Philippines] defies the horrid roaring of the hurricane; if the hard rock, when the violent sea rages against it to the clamor of wrathful tritons, can stand firm: why do you, invincible genius, despair?”

In the same poem, Dr. Rizal prefigured the difficulties we now face: “I heard your groans against strict destiny; and I opened the awe-inspiring book where your tremendous fate, inscribed in ominous colors, can be seen. Thorns shall you find along the way, sown there for you by fraud and falsehood; and you shall grapple with your dark fate as the maimed gladiator grapples with death.”

And then counsels a way out: “So go, Miguel, [Filipino] let your clear mind, focus of light, shine on your land to redeem a demented multitude by tearing down the dark, dark veil. And like fraught cloud, hurl expertly in your lofty flight a sizzle of lightning to tumble down the god of madness and to bring forth celestial good.”

What is this “dark, dark veil” we must tear down? And whence do we get this “sizzle of lightning”?

Is the veil perhaps related to our conception of our own “pagka-tao”? Our being human?

If we try to reach back into the dawn of time, we cannot be sure, but can only grasp some straws of data: like forbears travelling across land bridges from mainland Asia, the archipelago getting settled at least 50,000 years ago [Tabon cave man was carbon-dated at 22,000 years], peoples coming in as seafarers, living as separate tribes, spawning at least 171 native languages-not dialects, practicing animism, getting influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism (Shri Vijaya,7th Century and Majapahit,13th Century), Islam (14th Century), Catholicism (16th Century), Protestantism (19th Century) and the rest of global influences up to the present—all piling on top of another, for the Filipino survives by adapting…

Yet almost all our languages refer to our being human beings or persons as “tao” or “tawo” or some phonetic variation thereof. These are the languages referred to, in the felicitous words of Dr. Rizal in “Sa Aking Mga Kabata”: Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa kanyang salita mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda (Who does not love his own tongue is far worse than a brute or stinking fish). There are reportedly 13 native Philippine languages with at least one million native speakers; one or more of these languages is spoken natively by more than 90% of Filipinos and we call humans/persons/man-woman as “tao” or similar sound: Albay-Bikol: tawo; Bikol: tawo; Cebuano: tawo; Hiligaynon: tawo; Ilokano: tao; Ilonggo: tawo; Kapampangan: tau; Kinaray-a: taho; Maguindanao: tawo; Maranao: taw; Pangasinan: too; Tagalog: tao; Tausug: tau. When we say “tao” we mean some human, one with higher consciousness or noble nature. Thus we say, “magpakatao ka!” Be free, aware and responsible! When we knock on a door and say “Tao, Po!” (definitely not the equivalent of ‘any body home?’), we are declaring a human being is here, not an animal or the wind! Nothing inanimate!

Did our various ethno-linguistic groups get influenced by the Chinese tradition of “tao” from their philosophical heritage of taoism? May be. But if there was that close an influence, why not use the Chinese term for persons, as in shen or gui? “Tao” in Chinese conception “can be roughly stated to be the flow of the universe, or the force behind the natural order. Tao is believed to be the influence that keeps the universe balanced and ordered. Tao is associated with nature, due to a belief that nature demonstrates the Tao. The flow of qi as the essential energy of action and existence, is compared to the universal order of Tao. Tao is compared to what it is not, like the negative theology of Western scholars. It is often considered to be the source of both existence and non-existence”. That concept seems to be too big and grandiose compared to our daily usage of ‘tao’.

Might not this lower level conception of “tao” be a part of the dark veil?

In Mark 12:28-31, when Jesus was asked by a Scribe as to which of the commandments is first and most important of all [in its nature]?, the Lord replied: “The first and principal one of all commands is: Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord; And you shall love the Lord your God out of and with your whole heart and out of and with all your soul (your life) and out of and with all your mind (with your faculty of thought and your moral understanding) and out of and with all your strength. This is the first and principal commandment. The second is like it and is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. (Amplified Bible)

The logic of our mind would ask: Where is the instruction to love ‘yourself’? Why did Christ immediately go from loving God with all-our-all and then to loving our neighbor as we love ourselves? Shouldn’t there have been the progression of loving God, loving yourself and then loving your neighbor as yourself? Shouldn’t the directions of love have been up, in, then out? Why is there no distinction between the ‘up’ and the ‘in’? And why is the second like the first?

Did the Lord, Jesus Christ, mean there really is no distinction between “the Lord your God” and “yourself” because God is within each of us? And therefore when you love God, you actually love yourself (no ‘up’ but simply ‘in’)? Thus, there can only be two commands–which are like each other–because when you love your neighbor, you also love God?

If that be so, can I dare say: I AM GOD? AND SO ARE YOU? Can each of us say, like Christ: “I and the Father are one”?

Can we conclude then that the dark veil is the wrong belief that each of us is separate and distinct from God? And that all the evil in the world are but the consequences of our ignorance of “God within” and of our insistence that God is simply out there from Whom we can ask any thing, Whom we can treat as an ATM, and Whom we can blame for every thing?

This is worth considering. After all, “all descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses” [Buddha]. In Peter Russell’s “A Scientist’s Oddyssey”, he found that “when mystics say ‘I am God’, or words to that effect, they are not talking of an individual person; their inner explorations revealed the true nature of the self, and it is this that they identify with God; they are claiming that the essence of self, the sense of ‘I Am’ without any personal attributes, is God”.

Yet even to think of it, has been fraught with danger. Tenth century Islamic mystic al-Hallaj was crucified for using language claiming identity with God. Fourteenth century Christian priest and mystic Meister Eckhart was summoned before Pope John XXII and forced to “recant everything he had falsely taught”, when he preached that “God and I are one”.

Thomas Merton, a contemporary scholar and mystic, wrote: “If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable am that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center, I pass into the infinite I am which is the very Name of the Almighty.” St. John of the Cross, acclaims: “The soul is in itself a most lovely and perfect image of God”.

A teaching from ‘The Impersonal Life’, Anon, states: “I AM you, that part of you who is and knows… that part of you who says I AM and is I AM… I AM the innermost part of you that sits within, and calmly waits and watches, knowing neither time nor space… It was I Who directed all your ways, Who inspired all your thoughts and acts … I have been within always, deep within your heart.”

So, can we say that when we declare: I AM TAO, we really mean I AM GOD in principle: co-creator of all that happens to me, my nation, my world?

Can we then cite our constitution that “Sovereignty resides in the people, and all government authority emanates from them” and mean it from the divine perspective of sovereignty? Therefore, can we then take any person or group of persons, natural or juridical, who seeks to undermine, defeat, modify or in any other way prevent or make difficult the full and free expression of the people’s will (as in election fraud) to be perpetrators of treason or the substance thereof, because these are acts of treachery against the sovereign and designed to injure the integrity of the sovereign?

Can we then call upon the Armed Forces of the Philippines to judiciously exercise its role of being “the protector of the people and the State” … “to secure the sovereignty of the State” against any and all who would prevent or otherwise disturb the full and free exercise of such sovereignty by the people?

Given the lifting of this veil of separateness and being at-one-ment with the Lord, can we now make sense of Dr. Rizal’s exhortation of the Philippine youth?: “Look up with tranquil face, Philippine youth, on this day and shine, manifesting the grace and gallantry of your line, fair hope of this land of mine! xxxx Bearing the good light of art and science, to the battleground descend, O youth, and smite: loosen the heavy pound of chains that keeps poetic [and national] genius bound”.

In the same vein, can we now appreciate Dr. Rizal’s optimism about the capabilities of the Filipino in his ‘Hymn to Talisay’?: “We are children that nothing frightens, not the waves, nor the storm, nor the thunder; the arm ready, the young face tranquil, in a fix we shall know how to fight. We ransack the sand in our frolic; through the caves and the thickets we ramble; our houses are built upon rocks; our arms reach far and wide. No darkness, and no dark night, that we fear, no savage tempest; if the devil himself comes forward, we shall catch him, dead or alive.”

What does Dr. Rizal expect of us, who now remind ourselves of his ultimate sacrifice?

In “Hymn to Labor” he has ‘The Boys’ end the play with the following stanza: “… And the ancients will say when they see us: ‘These are worthy, behold, of their breed!’ Not by incense are the dead more honored as by sons who are glorious indeed. For his country at war, for his country at peace, the Filipino will stand guard, will love and will die!”

There is then the matter of honoring him (and other heroes passed into the great beyond) by being ‘glorious indeed’.

Could we honor him with right words and right actions?

After all: “You shall also decide and decree a thing, and it shall be established for you: and the light [of God's favor] shall shine upon your ways.” (Job 22:28, Amplified Bible). Moreover, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and they who indulge in it shall eat the fruit of it [for death or life] (Proverbs 18:21)

By the power of our tongues, let us ‘hurl a sizzle of lightning’ by decreeing, in full realization at the moment of utterance, the significance of our unity with the Lord God Almighty:

I AM TAO! Sovereign. Uncommon.

“Out of Time’s abyss and Eternity’s vast cavern I rise:
I am the New Year. Now I have come to govern”.
[Rizal's 'The New Year' - A Fragment]
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About the author: Edwin D. Bael is Knight Commander of the Knights of Rizal. He was Consul General of the Philippines in Los Angeles 2000-2002. He now resides and works in San Diego, California.

Note: The English translations of Rizal’s works in Spanish are quoted from “The Complete Poems and Plays of Jose Rizal translated by Nick Joaquin”.