Dying for a Dream

Many writers have places, real or imagined, linked with their names – Joyce’s Dublin, Hardy’s Wessex, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha – but I don’t know of any who have a province named after them, other than José Rizal, the Filipino author of Noli Me Tangere. The province of Rizal was created in 1901 (two years after the country was ceded to America by Spain), to honour the best-known martyr of Philippine nationalism. It stretches from the Laguna de Bay, the largest lake in the country, to the edge of Manila, the city my father moved to in the 1960s.

I followed as a migrant teenager from Ceylon, beginning to dream of writing but uninterested in history or national heroes. So my first encounter with Rizal’s name was not on a page but in a car, driving through Rizal province to the Antipolo hills which look down on the city that had become my home. In today’s world, Manila may not seem so surreal, but in 1960s Asia the mix of a Spanish colonial heritage and American materialism was startling. The city had a distinctly Hispanic air to it, especially in the houses of the better-off, combined with more than a hint of the Wild West. American English was spoken in the malls, Spanish in the drawing-rooms. There was still a serious debate about what should be the national language, Spanish having been eclipsed by English and Tagalog. Society ladies in embroidered finery sipped coffee from elegant china, and not so far away American GIs on R&R from the war in Vietnam roamed the streets looking for hostess clubs and massage parlours. There was no other place quite like it, real or imagined. A hundred years earlier, when the Philippines were still ruled by Spain, José Rizal was startled by Manila for very different reasons. He came to the city from his home town of Calamba to study at Ateneo, a prestigious Jesuit school and university. His family was well-to-do and educated. His mother recited Tagalog poetry and read Castilian prose. Rizal studied hard and did well academically, but by the time he graduated he had started to see the city, and the country, as oppressed by the colonial system. At the age of 21, seeking freedom from the friars, he set sail for Europe: the go-to destination then, before California took its place. In free-thinking Europe, he discovered a cosmopolitan world of exiles and artists, independence movements and political idealism. There too he began his first novel, Noli Me Tangere. Written deliberately, even provocatively, in Spanish, it was published in Germany in 1887, at his own expense, in the hope of awakening his countrymen. It is arguably the first significant anti-colonial novel by an Asian author. Rizal was then 25 and his book would change both the political future of his country and his own future. Rizal’s subversive book generated political agitation, so when he returned to the Philippines he found himself suspected of treason. He left again for Europe where he wrote his second novel, El Filibusterismo – a darker sequel. When he next returned to Manila, he was immediately exiled to the island of Mindanao. Four years later, he offered to go to Cuba to work as a doctor. He was allowed to set sail, but then the authorities panicked. He was brought back to Manila, charged with treason and imprisoned. On 30 December 1896, he was executed by a firing squad. Although Noli is said to have provided the spark for the fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule, Rizal’s preferred route appears to have been non-violent constitutional reform. A dreamer who studied ophthalmology, he sculpted, painted and wrote poetry, plays and essays as well as fiction. His last poem, Mi Ultimo Adios, written in his death cell, is a poignant farewell envisioning an afterlife ‘where there are no slaves, tyrants or hangmen / Where faith does not kill . . .’ Contrary to Auden’s claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, things did happen as a result of that poem. Its fourteen stanzas were copied immediately after his death for family and friends, and then within months printed for the general public. They had a galvanizing effect on the independence movement. In 1902, the poem was read out in the US Congress, paving the way for autonomous government in the Philippines. Yeats once asked, ‘Did that play of mine send out / certain men the English shot?’ In Rizal’s case, the question is redundant. He was shot because of his words, and many others died in the course of the revolution that was inspired by his writing. But Rizal’s world, despite its intimate connection with Spain, seems to have been invisible to both Auden and Yeats, as it has been to many other readers of English. It should not be so. Noli tells the story of Crisóstomo Ibarra, a young Filipino who returns home after seven years in Europe. He is an idealist who hopes to reconnect with his roots, improve his country and marry his childhood sweetheart. Things do not go well. In Manila, he finds his father has been persecuted, and has died in prison. Crisóstomo’s attempts to improve his community lead to his excommunication from the Church. His childhood sweetheart rejects him and retreats into a convent. His friends are killed. Crisóstomo ends up on the run. It seems Rizal was looking ahead to his own return with some trepidation. Noli is not autobiographical, but it does foretell the trials he would face. The writing is urgent, passionate, caustic. The book opens with the announcement that Captain Tiago – a rich, land-owning liberal gentleman – is giving a dinner party in his grand Manila house.

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 very fondly 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.

You can see why the colonial class in Manila might have been upset by the book, and why Rizal was hailed as a guiding spirit by the revolutionaries who wanted to be rid of ‘parasites’. No one else was writing so sharply and so mockingly in the Philippines or indeed anywhere in the colonial world in 1887 – not even his Indian contemporary Tagore. Noli combines satire with large doses of melodrama. Rizal is youthful and earnest in exploring the political uses of fiction. But there is also a playfulness and joy in his use of language that Seamus Heaney elsewhere celebrates as the ‘self-delighting inventiveness’ of poetry. The issue of language lies at the heart of the novel and is used as the battleground for identity. Crisóstomo’s sweetheart goes silent after refusing to marry him. Crisóstomo himself shocks his listeners by championing Tagalog. In his writing Rizal challenges the dominance of Spanish by using a Spanish peppered with Tagalog words, opening up the language in a way we tend to think of as a much more recent post-colonial phenomenon. I imagine it is a difficult book to translate but amazingly it now retains its position as the foremost Filipino novel read almost always, certainly in its homeland, in translation. Two years ago I went back to Manila and visited Rizal’s old university of Ateneo where, despite his attacks on religion, he is still regarded as their most illustrious graduate, one who apparently returned to the faith in his last moments (although the authenticity of his reaffirmation of Catholicism is fiercely disputed by some). In the Ateneo library, at last I began to read about the man known as the First Filipino. Then, with the help of Ateneo colleagues, I visited the jail in Fort Santiago where Rizal was imprisoned and followed his footsteps (inlaid in brass) to the spot where he was executed. And only now, remembering the dreams of writing I had as a boy, heading for the cool hills of Rizal province, have I come to appreciate the extraordinary achievement of Noli: a novel that captured a society in its pages, and then transformed it in reality.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Romesh Gunesekera 2018