I have now posted the English translation of the novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente under the documents tab on this website.
The translation was published a year after the Tagalog translation. It was again printed by Isabelo de los Reyes in Manila. The printing of the English version is of much poorer quality. The translator is invisible, as is so often the case.
I am still hard at work on my thesis. I have been collecting relevant primary source materials during my research, many of which I have scanned as Adobe PDF files. I intend to begin making some of these materials available here.
The first item which I am posting is a Novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Originally written by Gregorio Aglipay in Spanish, this text was translated into Tagalog by Juan N. Evangelista and published in 1925 in Manila by Isabelo de los Reyes.
The text is fascinating. It walks through, in the nine days of a novena, a series of scientific, critical, and rational ideas; it instructs the participant in ideas of evolution and natural selection and a historical-critical approach to the Bible and theology.
You can access the entire text from the Documents tab of this website.
This fascinating political cartoon comes from El Debate, a Spanish language news daily during the American colonial period in the Philippines. Tan Malaka, Indonesian communist and cosmopolitan provocateur, was in the Philippines and the colonial administration was threatening him with a lengthy prison sentence. A number of prominent Filipinos came to defense.
Notice the towering figures of Rizal and Plaridel [Marcelo H. Del Pilar] and the approach of the guardia civil. The guardia civil was the loathed tool of repression under the Spanish occupation; here they represent the Philippine constabulary, the likewise loathed tool of repression under the American occupation.
I believe that, in life, Rizal was four feet, eleven inches tall. Here he towers over everyone, much as his statue towers today over every town plaza from the top of a pedestal.
Z.A. Salazar, Agosto 29-30, 1896: Ang Pagsalakay ni Bonifacio sa Maynila, Salin ni Monico M. Atienza (Lunsod Quezon: Miranda Bookstore, 1994).
Bilang pasimula napakalinaw na nagkaroon talaga ng malawakan at koordinadong pagsalakay sa Maynila noong gabi ng ika-29 hanggang umaga ng ika-30 ng Agosto 1896, taliwas sa karaniwang mababasa sa mga libro at artikulo hanggang ngayon. Lumilitaw sa aming pag-aaral na binalak ni Bonifacio na atakehin ang Intramuros mula sa tatlong direksyon: 1) mula sa Silangan (San Mateo, Merikina, pababa ng camino real nagdaraan sa San Jan at papasok sa Sampaloc); 2) mula sa Hilaga (papasok sa Kalookan at Balintawak mulang Bulacan, Pamapangas at Nueva Ecija tungong Tondo at Binondo, kung saan malaki ang baseng pang masa ng Katipunan); 3) mula sa Timog (Cavite at ilang pahagi ng Pasig)…
Bagama’t natuklasan ng mga Kastila ang plano ng Katipunan, itinuloy pa rin ni Bonifacio ang pagsalakay sa Maynila. May mga atake mula sa iba’t ibang sektor, ngunit ang pinakamalakas ay isanagawa sa Sampaloc, Sta. Ana, Pandacan, Makati, San Juan at Pasig. Hindi umatake ang Cavite. Ito ang pangalawang napakalinaw na kaganapan… Bagamat ipagkakaila ni Aguinaldo pagkatapos, klarong-klaro sa mga batis na inaasahan ni Bonifacio ang mga taga-Cavite na sumama sa pagpasok ng Maynila.
Eduardo Castrillo | Spirit of Pinaglabanan (1974)
Cut and welded brass with sculptured concrete
Barrio Paraiso, San Juan.Napakalinaw rin, at ito ang pangatlong kaganapan, na bagamat hindi naagaw ni Bonifacio ang Intramuros, hindi rin nakuhang lipulin ng Kastila ang kanyang mga puwersa at, sa kabila ng pagtutol nina Aguinaldo, napilitan din ang mga ito na sumama sa Himagsik … Samakatuwid, naging mitsa ng Rebolusyon ang pagsalakay sa Maynila…
Hindi kabuuan - ang kabuuan ng Kapilipinuhan - ang abot-tanaw ni Aguinaldo. Ito ang pang-apat na bagay na nalinaw sa pagaaral. Nakatuon sa pagsakop lamang ng mga bayan (pueblos) ang istratehiya ni Aguinaldo at ng mga kasamahan niya sa Cavite. Masasabing ang pinakamataas na lebel ng kanilang kamalayang militar sa panahong ito ay ang pagugnay-ugnay ang mga bayan sa Cavite. Taliwas kay Bonifacio, hindi nakita ni Aguinaldo sa yugtong ito ng Rebolusyon na ang ulo ng kaaway ay naroon sa Intramuros…
Ang lumilitaw bilang huling napakalinaw na katotohanan mula sa aming pag-aaral ay ang pagiging napakahusay na utak militar, sa istrehiya man o sa taktika, ni Andres Bonifacio …
Pahina vii - xiv.
The aging binding cracks audibly whenever you turn a page. Fray Totanes’ one hundred fifty seven year old instructional grammar of the Tagalog language is bound in a soft, flexible and yellowed vellum. In fading calligraphic script, Lengua Tagala is branded onto the spine.
A colonial dictionary or grammar is always, at least in part, a technology of rule. The Tagalog language is divided into discrete Spanish units of meaning; its fibres are parsed into Romance syntax. Totanes’ one hundred forty page grammar was not created to promote mutual understanding; it was written to enable the linguistic competencies of inculcation, exploitation and domination.
We do not have to read in this manner, however. A lexicon can be read with an eye to other ends. Used with caution the colonial word book allows us to reconstruct the linguistic evolution of the language that has been parsed, to suture and poultice the vivisected speech of a dominated people.
This is not all. The grammar opens a window onto the collective colonial psyche. Every example, every demonstration of the subjunctive mode or the passive infinitive, allows us access to the speech patterns and daily routine of the colonial friar.
Flipping through Arte de la Lengua Tagala, I find page after page bearing silent witness to the terror of the quotidian.
Reynaldo Ileto. “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History.” In Reynaldo Ileto. Filipinos and their Revolution: event, discourse and historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.
I am working on my thesis; it is a critical re-examination of Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution. Looking through my old notes, I found the following ideas. My critique is now much more sharply focused than these criticisms were.
This work left me feeling unsettled and critical.
A sentence in Ileto’s concluding paragraph clarified for me the unease that I had felt throughout the article: “These leaders [Lantayug, et. al.] have, until recently at least, always belonged to the ‘dark underside’ of the struggle for independence dominated by such ilustrado notables as Quezon, Roxas and Osmena.” It seems clear to me that the division between an ilustrado led resistance and a ‘dark underside’ is a false dichotomy.
There are a multitude of underside resistances, many of them with a very different self-concept from the one put forward by Ileto. It would appear that in a attempting to ‘retrieve’ history from below, Ileto has manufactured a monolith: a Filipino ‘underclass’ that conceives of power and loób in terms that sound remarkably like those used by Benedict Anderson in his “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.”
Where in this underside would Ileto fit the Union Obrera Democratica, the first Filipino labor movement, which was forming at this time, was composed entirely of working class Filipinos and whose perceptions were sharply different from that of Ileto’s underclass? Where to put Isabelo de los Reyes’ and Gregorio Aglipay’s Iglesia Filipina Independiente? Do Macario Sakay and the Republika ng Katagalugan really fit Ileto’s description?
It would involve an extensive investigation of sources, but it seems likely that Ileto’s ‘underside to Philippine history’ was actually a minority of lower class resistance movements.
Continue reading ‘Notes on Ileto’s “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History”’
Jessica Hagedorn. Dream Jungle. Penguin Paperbacks, 2004.
Dream Jungle could have been titled Dream Country as far as I was concerned. It was an intriguing, fascinating story set in some country I have never been to: the Philippines of the veteran tourist. The lower-class and working-class Filipinos in this book all had the appearance of being Filipino, but this veneer quickly showed itself false. Rizalina, Candelaria, Sputnik, Bong - all spoke in what was to me an unintelligible language.
The Taglish and Tagalog phrases in the novel felt plastered onto the conversations as marks of ‘authenticity.’ The English spoken by the lower class Filipino characters could not have been phrases translated from Tagalog nor would this have been English that the characters would be likely to have known.
While there is certainly the possiblity for vulgarity in Philippine languages, it would not be spoken the way it is depicted in this book. Lina refers to a “piece-of-sh*t boat” (14) or declares “f**k my father;” these are untranslatable phrases - non-existent in Tagalog and not said in Philippine English.
Perhaps Hagedorn is deliberately creating a cliché Philippines and we are intended to recognize it as false, but I do not think so. The dialogue reads as if it was written by a lasallista imagining how her katulong speaks. And I do not believe that I can be anymore scathing than that.
The encounters between social classes feel forced and unreal. Hagedorn cannot convey the sensibility that emerges from sleeping on a banig mat, subsisting on rice and tuyo, and going about your daily life in a shantytown. In the end one feels that the text is the work of someone who goes around her New York apartment shouting “kaliwa, kanan!” therapeutically [1], because her tongue would become tied if she tried shouting “Katarungan ang sigaw ng mga mangagawa, ibagsak ang kasalukuyang mapangaping sistema!“
[1] See the article, Ghost Town by Hagedorn in TIME Asia.
I am intrigued by Isabelo de los Reyes’ prologue to Claudio R. Miranda’s Costumbres Populares.
Tenemos, por otra parte, muchas leyendas, supersticiones, juegos etc. imitados de los españoles: la mitad ó casi la mayor parte, como el anting-anting, las leyendas de Bernardo Carpio, Cristóbal etc. y muchos de nuestros juegos como el baticobre (batir el cobre), la gallina ciega y casi todos los conocidos.
Isabelo de los Reyes. “Prologo.” In Claudio R. Miranda. Costumbres Populares. Manila: Cultura Filipina, 1911.
What are we to make of de los Reyes’ assertion that anting-anting is a borrowing? I have often wondered at the much overlooked superstitious medieval tenor of Spanish catholicism. Might not this have informed, even shaped, what has been subsequently read as the ‘underside to Philippine history?’
I am torn over the person of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje.
Clearly, this Dutch colonial scholar was an academic of first rank, a scholar of the old variety. He was someone who simultaneously grappled with minutiae and enormous sweeping topics, who ceaselessly produced notebooks from his study, who was not daunted to move into completely new fields of endeavor and to draw parallels between disjunct areas of inquiry. A linguist, an historian, a sociologist – his ideas and writings are apparently still defining on several topics. Encounters with scholars of this variety are always inspiring and daunting at the same time.
There is an ethical, normative obligation laid upon our scholarship to be simultaneously objective and committed to human liberation.
Snouck not only did not live up to this obligation, he failed to meet the much less stringent Hippocratic requirement: to do no harm.
Vicente Rafael, “Patronage and Pornography: Ideology and Spectatorship in the Early Marcos Years,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2. (Apr., 1990), pp. 282-304.
Rafael’s article, “Patronage and Pornography,” is thought-provoking but, ultimately, quite problematic.
Rafael’s idea of a shift in patronage politics occuring with the rise of late modern capitalism - of a commodification of patronage - makes perfect sense. However, to my mind, an important clarification would have made this point far more lucid and relevant to twentieth century Philippine politics.
Patron-Client politics - the guise of the personal over the symbiotic, but inherently unequal, relationship between patron and client - serves, above all, to obscure class relations. Patron client politics shore up Gramsci’s “primordial and gelatinous” early civil society and defend existing relations of production, primarily by disguising exploitation. Whether exercised by the colonial hegemon or the hacendero, patron-client relations serve to manufacture consent among their clientèle and by separating classes into client groupings manage to inhibit the formation of class consciousness.
In this light the “simulation of patronage,” of which Rafael speaks, would be the attempt, by the use of revised tactics, to inhibit the formation of class consciousness. Rafael’s concrete examples do not seem to fit with this idea, nor in some cases do they seem to work at all.
Continue reading ‘Notes on Rafael’s “Patronage and Pornography”’
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