THE FIRST FILIPINO

By Benedict Anderson in Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast

Few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines.
Seen from Asia, the armed uprising against Spanish rule of 1896, which triumphed temporarily
with the establishment of an independent republic in 1898, makes it the visionary forerunner of all
the other anticolonial movements in the region. Seen from Latin America, it is, with Cuba, the last
of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest.
Profoundly marked, after three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, by Counter-Reformation
Catholicism, it was the only colony in the Empire where the Spanish language never became
widely understood. But it was also the only colony in Asia to have had a university in the
nineteenth century. In the 1890s barely 3 per cent of the population know “Castilian,” but it was
Spanish-readers and –writer who managed to turn movements of resistance to colonial rule from
hopeless peasant uprising into a revolution. Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the
Philippines’ new self-identification as “Asian,” almost no one other than a few scholars understand
the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the
outside world – to say nothing of the written archive of pre-twentieth-century Philippine history. A
virtual lobotomy has been performed.
The central figure in the revolutionary generation was Jose Rizal, poet, novelist,
ophthalmologist, historian, doctor, polemical essayist, moralist, and political dreamer. He was born
in 1861 into a well-to-do family of mixed Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Tagalog descent: five
years after Freud, four year after Conrad, one year after Chekhov; the same year as Tagore, three
years before Max Weber, five before Sun Yat-sen, eight before Gandhi, and nine before Lenin.
Thirty-five years later he was arrested on false charges of inciting Andres Bonifacio’s uprising of
August 1896, and executed by a firing squad composed of native soldiers led by Spanish officers.
The execution was carried out in what is not the beautiful Luneta Park, which fronts the shore line
of Manila Bay. ( On the other side of the Spanish world, Jose Marti, the her of Cuban nationalism,
had died in action the previous year.) At the time of Rizal’s death, Lenin had just been sentenced
to exile in Siberia, Sun Yat-sen had begun organizing for Chinese nationalism outside Chine, and
Gandhi was conducting his early experiments in anticolonial resistance in South Africa.
Rizal had the best education then available in the colony, provided exclusively by the
religious Orders, notably the Dominicans and Jesuits. It was an education that he later satirized
mercilessly, but it gave him a command of Latin ( and some Hebrew ), a solid knowledge of
classical antiquity, and an introduction to western philosophy and even to medical science. It is
again vertiginous to compare what benighted Spain offered with what the enlightened, advanced
imperial powers provided in the same Southeast Asian region: no real universities in French
Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, or British Malaya and Singapore till after World War II. From
very early on, Rizal exhibited remarkable literary abilities. At the age of nineteen he entered an
open literary competition, and won first prize, defeating Spanish rivals writing in their native
tongue.
He was growing up at a time when modern politics had begun to arrive in the colony. More
than any other imperial power, nineteenth-century Spain was wracked by deep internal conflicts,
not merely the endless Carlist wards over the succession, but also between secular liberalism and
the old aristocratic-clerical order. The brief liberal triumph in the Glorious Revolution of 1868,
which drove the licentious Isabella II from Madrid, had immediate repercussions for the remote
Pacific colony. The revolutionaries promptly announced that the benefits of their victory would be
extended to the colonies. The renewed ban on the Jesuits and the closure of monastic institutions
seemed to promise the end of the reactionary power of the Orders overseas. In 1869, the first
“liberal” Captain-General, Carlos Maria de la Torre, arrived in Manila, it is said to popular cries of
“Viva la Libertad!” ( How unimaginable is a scene of this kind in British India or French Algeria.)
During his two-year rule, de la Torre enraged the old-guard colonial elite, not merely by instituting
moves to give equal legal rights to natives, mestizos, and peninsulars, but also by going walkabout
in Manila in everyday clothes and without armed guards. The collapse of the Glorious Revolution
brought about a ferocious reaction in Manila, however, culminating in 1872 in the public garroting
of three secular ( i.e. non-Order ) priests (one Creole, two mestizo), framed for masterminding a
brief mutiny in the arsenal of Cavite.
The Rizal family was an immediate victim of the reaction. In 1871, when Jose was ten
years old, his mother was accused of poisoning a neighbor, forced to walk twenty miles to
prison, and held there for over two years before being released. His elder brother Paciano, a
favorite pupil of Father Burgos, the leader of the garroted priests, narrowly escaped arrest and
was forced to discontinue his education. Under these circumstances, in 1882, with his brother’s
support, Jose left quietly for the relative freedom of Spain to continue his medical studies.
He spent the next five years in Europe, studying on and off, but also travelling widely—
to Bismarck’s Germany and Gladstone’s England, as well as Austro-Hungary, Italy and
France—picking up French, German, and English with the ease of an obsessive and gifted
polyglot. Europe affected him decisively, in two related ways. Most immediately, he came
quickly to understand the backwardness of Spain itself, something which his liberal Spanish
Friends frequently bemoaned. This put him in a position generally not available to colonial
Indians and Vietnamese, or, after the Americans arrived in manila, to his younger countrymen:
that of being able to ridicule the metropolis had ridiculed the natives. More profoundly, he
encountered what he later described as “el demonio de las comparaciones,” a memorable phrase
that could be translated as “the specter of comparisons.” What he meant by this was a new,
restless double-consciousness which made it impossible ever after to experience Berlin without
at once thinking of Manila, or Manila without thinking of Berlin. Here indeed is the origin of
Nationalism, which lives by making comparisons.
It was this spectre that, after some frustrating years writing for La Solidaridad, the organ
of the small group of committed “natives” fighting in the metropole for political reform, led him
to write Noli Me Tangere, the first of the two great novels for which Rizal will always be
remembered. He finished it is Berlin just before midnight on February 21, 1887—eight months
after Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill was defeated, and eight years before Almayer’s Folly was
published. He was twenty-six.
 The two most astonishing features of Noli Me Tangere are its scale and its style. Its
characters come from every stratum of late colonial society, from the liberal-minded peninsular
Captain-General down through the racial tiers of colonial society—creoles, mestizos, chinos
(“pure” Chinese) to the illiterate indio masses. Its pages are crowded with Dominicans, shady
lawyers, abused acolyte, corrupt policemen, Jesuits, small-town caciques, mestizo schoolgirls,
ignorant peninsular carpetbaggers, hired thugs, despairing intellectuals, social-climbing devotes,
dishonest journalists, actresses, nuns, gravediggers, artisans, gamblers, peasants, market-women,
and so on. (Rizal never fails to give even his most sinister villains their moments of tenderness
and anguish.) Yet the geographical space of the novel is strictly confined to the immediate
environs of the colonial capital, Manila. The Spain from which so many of the characters have at
one time or another arrived is always off stage. This restriction made it clear to Rizal’s first
readers that “The Philippines” was a society in itself, even though those who lived in it had as
yet no common name. That he was the first to imaging this social whole explains why he is
remembered today as the First Filipino.
The novel’s style is still more astonishing, for it combines two radically distinct and at
first glance uncombinable genres; melodrama and satire. For all its picaresque digressions the
plot is pure opera. The novel opens with the wealthy, handsome, and naively idealistic mestizo,
Don Crisostomo Ibarra, returning from a long educational sojourn in Europe with plans to
modernize his home town and his patria, and to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, the
beautiful mestizo daughter of the wealthy indio cacique, Don Santiago de los Santos. At first he
is welcomed with respect and enthusiasm, but the clouds soon gather. He discovers that his
father has died in Prison, framed by the brutal Franciscan friar Padre Damaso, and that his body
has been thrown into the sea. Later he will lean that Damaso is the real father of his bride-to-be.
Meanwhile, the young parish priest Padre Salvi secretly lusts after Maria Clara, and has covered
up the murder of none of his young acolytes. Gradually, Ibarra also learns of the sinister origins
of his own line in a cruel, carpetbagging Basque, who, after ruining many local peasants, hanged
himself. He makes friends with Don Tasio, the local freethinking philosophe, with liberal-
minded local caciques, even with the Captain-General himself, as well as with the mysterious
indio rebel Elias. ( The dialogues between the two men on whether political reform is possible in
the Philippines or a revolutionary upheaval inevitably continue to this day to be a part of
Philippine progressive discourse and historiography.) Meanwhile, the friars and their various
local allies scheme to abort Ibarra’s marriage and his plans for establishing a modern school in
his home town. Finally, Padre Salvi, learning of a planned rebel attack on his town, frames Ibarra
as its instigator and financier. The young man is imprisoned in a wave of antisubversive arrests,
torture, and executions, but escapes with Elias’s help, and ends as an outlaw. Maria Clara, to
avoid being forced into a loveless marriage with an insipid peninsular, chooses to become a nun,
and compels her real father whom she confronts with his adultery, to help her take her vows. She
disappears in a convent where, however, Padre Salvi has managed to get himself appointed as
spiritual adviser, so the “nameless horrors” lie in wait for the unfortunate girl.
So far, so Puccini, one might say. Yet this melodramatic plot is interspersed not only with
brilliant sketches of colonial provincial society, but with the novelist’s own unquenchable
laughter at the expense of his own inventions—so that Tosca changes into Goya’s Capricho.
Consider the famous opening of the novel:
Towards the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly known as Capitan Tiago, was
hosting a dinner which, in spite of its having been announced only that afternoon, against his wont, was already
 the theme of all conversation in Binondo, in the neighboring districts, and even in Intramuros. Capital Tiago
was reputed to be a most generous man, and it was known that his home, like his country, never closed its door
to anything, as long as it was not business, or any new or bold idea.

Like an electric jolt the news circulated around the world of social parasites: the pests or dregs which
God in His infinite goodness created and so fondly [cariñosamente] breeds in Manila. Some went in search of
shoe polish for their boots, others for buttons and cravats, but all were preoccupied with the manner in which to
greet with familiarity the master of the house and thus pretend that they were old friends, or to make excuses, if
the need arose, for not having been able to come much earlier.

This dinner was being given in a house on Anloague street, and since we can no longer recall its
number, we will try to describe it in such a way as to make it still recognizable—that is, if earthquakes have not
ruined it. We do not believe that is owner would have had it pulled down, this task being ordinarily taken care
of by God, or Nature, with whom our government also has many projects under contract.

Or consider the opening of the novel’s final chapter (“Epilogue”), which come
immediately after the story has reached its grim, gothic conclusion:
Many of our characters being still alive, and having lost sight of the others, a true epilogue is not
possible. For the good of the public we would gladly kill [matariamos con gusto] all our personages starting with
Padre Salvi and finishing with Doña Victorina, but that is not possible…let them live: the country, and not we,
will in the end have to feed them.

This kind of authorial play with readers, characters, and reality—which reminds one of
Machado de Assis’s sardonic Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas published five years earlier—is
quite uncharacteristic of most serious nineteenth-century novels, and gives Noli Me Tangere a
special appeal. It is what has always doomed nationalist attempts to put the book on stage or
screen. It was surely this same laughter that earned Rizal the implacable enemies who brought
him ot his early death.
It is impossible to read Noli Me Tangere today in the way a patriotic young Manileño of
1897 would have read it: as a political hand-grenade. We all have the specter of comparisons
crouched on our shoulders. It was only the second novel every written by a putative Filipino, the
first being minor, experimental trash. So what about other great colonial novels by the
colonized? There is nothing in the Americas, nothing in the rest of Southeast Asia, nothing in
Africa till three-quarters of a century later. What about the comparison with metropolitan Spain?
It has been said that Rizal borrowed heavily from Galdos, in particular, from his 1876 anti-
clerical novel Doña Perfecta. But Rizal’s novel is so superior in scale and depth that this
“borrowing” is very doubtful. In his voluminous correspondence Rizal never mentions Galdos—
whose opinions on colonial questions were whole bien-pensant. The one Spanish writer for
whom he had a passionate admiration was not a novelist at all, but the brilliant satirical journalist
Jose Mariano de la Larra, who had committed suicide in 1837, at the attractive age of twenty-
eight.
And Tagore, Rizal’s exact contemporary? Here one sees profound contrast. Tagore was
the inheritor of a vast and ancient Bengali literary tradition, and most of his novels were written
in Bengali for the huge Bengali population of the Raj. The mother tongue of Rizal was Tagalog.
a minority language spoken by perhaps two million people in the multilingual Philippine
archipelago, with no tradition of prose writing, and readable by perhaps only a few thousand. He
tells us why he wrote in Spanish, a language understood by only 3 per cent of his countrymen,
when he invokes “tu, que me lees, amigo o enemigo”—“you who read me, friend or enemy.” He
wrote as much for the enemy as the friend, something that did not happen with the Raj until the
work, a century later, of Salman Rushdie.
Rizal could not know it, but there were to be huge costs involved in choosing to write in
Spanish. Five years after his martyrdom, a greedy and barbarous American imperialism
destroyed the independent Republic of the Philippines, and reduced the inhabitants once again to
the status of colonial subjects. American was introduced as the new language of truth and
international status, and promoted through an expanding school system. By the eve of World
War II, it had (narrowly) become the most widely understood language in the archipelago.
Spanish gradually disappeared, so that by the time a quasi-independence was bestowed in 1946,
ithad become unreadable. Not merely the novels, essays, poetry, and political articles of Rizal
himself, but the writing of the whole nation-imagining generation of the 1880s and 1990s had
become inaccessible. Today, most of the work of the brilliant anticolonial propagandist Marcelo
del Pilar, of the Revolutions’s architect Apolinario Mabini, and of the Republic’s tragically
assassinated general of genius Antonio Luna remain sepulchred in Spanish.
Hence the eerie situation which obliges Fiipinos to read the work of the most revered
hero of the nation in translation—into local vernaculars, and into American. Hence also a politics
of translation. Translations of Noli Me Tangere into most of the major languages of the
Philippines were bound to fail, not merely because of the absurdity of the many Spanish
characters “speaking” in Tagalog, Cebuano, or Ilocano, but because the enemigo readers
automatically disappear, and the satirical descriptions of mestizos and indios speaking bad
Spanish, and Spanish colonials slipping into bad Tagalog, become untranslatable. The most
important American translation, done by the alcoholic anti-American diplomat Leon Maria
Guerrero in the 1960s—still the prescribed text for high schools and universities—is no less
fatally flawed by systematic bowdlerization in the name of official nationalism. Sex,
anticlericalism, and any perceived relevance to the contemporary nation are all relentlessly
excised, with the aim of turning Rizal into a boring, long-dead national saint.
Which brings us to the present translation, more or less timed for the centenary of Rizal’s
execution. A few years ago, Doreen Fernandez, one of the Philippines’ most distinguished
scholars, deeply disturbed by the corruption of Rizal’s texts, went in search of a compatriot
linguistically capable of making a reliable translation. She eventually found one is Soledad
Lacson-Locsin, an elderly upper-class woman born early enough in this century for Rizal’s
Spanish—by no means the same as 1880s Madrid Spanish—to be second nature to her. The old
lady completed new translations of both Noli Me Tangere and its even more savage 1891 sequel
El Filibusterismo just before she died.
In most respects, it is a huge advance over previous translations, handsomely laid out and
with enough footnotes to be helpful without being pettifogging. But the Barbarous American
influence is still there, to say nothing of the basic transformation of consciousness that created,
for the first time, within a year or so of Rizal’s execution, a national ideal of “the” Filipino.
In Rizal’s novels the Spanish words filipina and filipino still mean what they had
traditionally meant—creoles, people of “pure” Spanish descent who were born in the Philippines.
This stratum was, in accordance with traditional imperial practice, wedged in between
peninsulares ( Spain-born Spaniards) and mestizos, chinos, and indios. The novels breath
nationalism of the classical sort, but this nationalism has to do with love of patria, not with race:
“Filipino” in the twentieth-century ethnoracial sense never appears. But by 1898, when
Apolinario Mabini began to write –two years after Rizal’s execution—the old meaning had
vanished. Hence the fundamental difficulty of the present translation is that filipino/filipina
almost always appear in the anachronistic form of Filipino/Filipina: for example, “el bello sexo
esta representado por españolas peninsulares y Filipinas” (“the fair sex being represented by
peninsular and Creole Spanish women”) is rendered absurdly as “the fair sex being represented
by Spanish peninsular ladies and Filipinas.”
The other problem is a flattening of the political and linguistic complexity of the original,
no doubt because Mrs. Lacson-Locsin was born just too late to have had an elite Spanish-era
schooling. When Rizal had the racist Franciscan friar Padre Damaso say contemptuously,
“cualquier bata de la escuela lo sabe,” he mocking inserted the Tagalog bata in place of the
Spanish muchacho to show how years in the colony had unconsciously creolized the friar’s
language. This effect disappears when Mrs. Lacson-Locsin translates the words as “any
schoolchild knows that.” Rizal quotes three lines of the much-loved nineteenth-century Tagalog
poet Francisco Balagtas in the original, without translating it into Spanish, to create the necessary
intercultural jarring, but quoting the poem in the same language as the text surrounding it erases
the effect. The ironical chapter heading “Tasio el loco o el filosofo” shrinks to “Tasio,” and one
would not suspect that the chapter heading “A Good Day is Foretold by the Morning” was
originally in Italian. The translator also has difficulties with Rizal’s frequent, sardonic use of
untranslated Latin.
There are a few prophets who are honored in their own country, and Jose Rizal is among
them. But the condition of this honor has changed this by giving the great man back his sad and
seditious laughter. And it is badly needed—if one thinks of all those “social parasites: the pests
and dregs which God in His infinite goodness created and tan cariñosamente breeds in Manila.”