Category: elmer ordonez

Rizal and socialism (3)

By Elmer Ordonez

UTOPIAN socialism may well have been an influence on Rizal—considering that his close friend Juan Luna enthused over Le socialisme contemporain, described as “a conflation” of various schools of socialist thought from utopians like St. Simon and Robert Owen to Marxist, anarchists and Christian socialists. Rizal could not well have advocated the more radical strains of socialism in his North Borneo (Sandakan) settlement project despite his use of an anarchist character in Simoun in his second novel El Filibusterismo and the fact that his Noli, although devoid of anarchism, was first translated into another European language by anarchists Ramon Sempau and Henri Lucas, whom Isabelo de los Reyes befriended in Montjuich castle prison.

The utopian spirit in fact pervades in the literature of the prime movers of the Philippine revolution like Andres Bonifacio in his “Dapat mabatid ng mga Tagalog” and Emilio Jacinto’s “Kartilya,” both published in the one issue of Kalayaan, the Katipunan publication. Apolinario Mabini in his Decalogue also manifested the moral and ethical foundations of an imagined Filipino community; Rizal’s musings through his characters like PilosopongTasyo and Padre Florentino and his last thoughts of motherland in “Mi Utimo Adios” attest to an idealized national community, an Eden lost (because of colonialism) that must be regained through education and struggle for freedom.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Europe was entering what left writers call “the age of early globalization” marked by social and political unrest, imperialist ventures, and the beginnings of the disintegration of ruling dynasties that culminated in the First World War and its aftermath, revolutions in many countries like the Russian in October 1917.

What Rizal must have sensed during his writing of his second novel Fili (from 1988-1890) found their way into the novel. The terrorist acts of anarchists during the period – bombings and assassinations — were a regular occurrence. Rizal’s death by firing squad, it is argued, must have caused indirectly to the assassination of Spain’s president Canova in 1897. The U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899 was followed by the assassination of President McKinley in Buffalo, New York, the following year. Both were assassinations were carried out by anarchists

It would seem that at the time of Rizal’s exile to Dapitan and before the turn of the century the anarchist movement had already decided to bring about radical social change through deeds, to destroy government and raze the cities and build new societies. The age of propaganda through literature had given way to a period of action according to the anarchist vision.

In Rizal’s Fili, Simoun the anarchist had a dual mission, to destroy the colonial establishment that persecuted him and his family and to rescue Maria Clara, Ibarra’s beloved, from the nunnery. His bombing mission failed and no mayhem took place. Simoun as the disguised Ibarra learned too late about the sad fate of his beloved. Simoun was not a failed anarchist terrorist, and so was Conrad’s character Verloc in The Secret Agent (1905) who inveigled his wife’s half-wit brother to blow up Greenwich observatory, symbol of western science, ending up with the bomber blowing himself to bits instead.

It was then deemed doubtful that the anarchists would be interested in also publishing Fili with a failed anarchist character and with personal reasons for carrying out his terrorist project.

Of Rizal’s contemporaries, Isabelo de los Reyes was the one most influenced by anarchist and Marxist socialism by virtue of his close association with the radicals in the notorious Montjuich in Barcelona. He was first brought to this jail after his arrest in the wake of the 1896 revolution; when released he immediately joined in the street fighting in Barcelona, armed with a revolver. Despite his earlier differences with Rizal, Isabelo is believed to be responsible for the posthumous publication of the first translation of Noli in 1898, albeit bowdlerized with its strictures on the friars and the church, toned down. The anarchist publication series was interested in Noli for just depicting a colonial society.

Isabelo de los Reyes managed to return to the country in 1901 lugging with him books by Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Zola, Malatesta, and others. He organized the Union Obrero Democratico, but he was arrested later by American authorities for leading workers strikes and marches. He entered politics and won a seat in the city municipal board and later in the Senate. He went to the Senate riding in a caretela, refusing the use of a car because it consumed gasoline sold by big business. He lived in the working class district of Tondo. Poor health forced him to devote his time to the Philippine Independence church which he founded with Gregorio Aglipay.

New leaders took over the union which had changed its name – leaders from both the ilustrado and working class like Dr. Dominador Gomez, Lope K. Santos, Herminigildo Cruz, and Juan Feleo. Santos would write the first socialist novel Banaag At Sikat (1906). It was a matter of time for proletarian leaders, armed with the socialist vision of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to gain ascendancy in worker organizing and national liberation struggles.

Rizal was a trailblazer in this respect.

 

Revolutionary Routes: Elias wrestling the crocodile

By Elmer Ordonez

IN the center of Tiaong, Quezon, stands a run-down mansion with a sculpture of Elias, the rebel in Rizal’s Noli , wrestling a crocodile. Both house and sculpture were designed by Tomas Mapua for the Herrera-Umali family in 1928 in a period of growing radicalism. The Elias sculpture may well be the “objective correlative” of Angela Stuart Santiago’ s Revolutionary Routes, a family saga dating back to early people’s struggles during the colonial/post-colonial periods.

As Nita Umali-Berthelsen (the author’s aunt) notes: “The crocodile was a symbol of greed. The struggle between Elias and the monster gave rise to many suppositions, some flattering, others not at all.” (Tayabas Chronicles, The Early Years, 1886-1907, 2002). Revolutionary Routes (2011) sheds new light on the context and meaning of the sculpture.

Creative non-fiction is a relatively new term for biography/autobiography, family chronicles, memoirs, and other literary forms that hew closely to fact but may be written in a style akin to fiction, modern or post-modern, with an eye for detail. As family history, Revolutionary Routes focuses on five characters, forebears of the author, starting with Paula, a peasant woman from Bina-ngonan. who marries Julio Herrera of Tiaong. For refusing to pay the exorbitant fee for the church burial of a child cholera victim, and burying instead the remains outside the church, Paula is jailed and then forced to walk with four guardia civiles from Tiaong to Tayabas. This recalls the experience of Rizal’s mother who was accused wrongly and made to walk from Calamba to Sta. Cruz, Laguna to be jailed.

Paula’s husband, Julio Her-rera, is also a peasant who manages to acquire land which produce enables them to send their son, Isidro, to school. He works as personal secretary of the commissioner of religious affairs, escribano, and notary. Through diligence Isidro Her-rera becomes a landowner who actively takes part in the revolution, and is jailed by the Americans.

A rising young politician Manuel Quezon befriends the Herreras and plays a role in the misfortune of Isidro’s son-in-law, Tomas Umali of Lipa, Batangas.

Tomas Umali, lawyer/writer running a school in Manila, meets Conchita Herrera, and doesn’t relent his courtship which leads to their union in marriage. He gives up his school and law practice in the city, and settles with Conchita in Tiaong. Quezon and Tomas are partners in a railroad expropriation case in the province. Later Umali is charged with estafa but Quezon, on his way to become resident commissioner in the US Congress, is not. Tomas flees to Macau where he joins the revolutionary council made up of political exiles Artemio Ricarte, Vicente Sotto, Macario Adriatico, and others. In time no less than US president William Howard Taft intervenes toward Umali’s exoneration in the railroad expropriation case. Who was behind this? The author speculates it was Quezon himself or his fellow masons who had earlier abandoned him.

Tomas’s son-in-law Crisos-tomo Salcedo’s run-in with Vicente Umali in UP law school yet and later over the job of justice of the peace in Tiaong is said to be at the root of his tragedy. Both are members of the PQOG (President Quezon’s Own Guerrillas); their rift ends with the brutal murder of Crisostomo.

Narciso Umali, Tomas’s son, also a guerrilla officer, enters post-war politics marked by electoral fraud in 1949 when Elpidio Quirino won over Jose P. Laurel in what was then said to be the dirtiest election ever. Narciso wins as Nacionalista congressman but is later falsely charged with rebellion complex with murder and arson over the Huk raid and burning of the house of the town mayor and the death of some policemen. This is the most trying ordeal of the Herrera-Umali family who struggle, Sisyphus-like, to win justice for Narciso. In 1958 Narciso is pardoned by President Carlos Garcia, and outlives all his tormentors.

The above summary does not do justice to the rich but somber tapestry that the author weaves from family memoirs, testimonies, letters, newspaper clippings, published historical material, court orders, petitions and interviews. It catalogues the friar abuses, corruption, double dealing in patronage politics, insurrections, and colonial /neocolonial greed as well as the customs, mores and cuisine at the turn of the century. In parts the book reads like a Jacobean play full of intrigue, betrayal, violence, and retribution.

The Narciso Umali case occurred during the height of the anti-communist drive involving President Magsaysay and his CIA adviser Col Lansdale in the early 50s. (My older brother, a scout ranger, was killed in action in 1953. As student and later instructor in UP I saw and became a victim of McCarthyite witch-hunting on campus.)

Revolutionary Routes is not only a social history of Tayabas but of a feudal/colonial country marked by rebellions and oligarchic politics. Historian Reynaldo Ileto says the book could well be an alternative history of the Philippines.

The author admits to an “anti-colonial bias” in writing the book. But aren’t histories written from the “perspective” of victors in the war or those who were vanquished and exploited by colonialism? Who else will express the racial memory and struggles of a people but writers and artists bearing witness.

Revolutionary Routes is indeed creative non-fiction at its best.

Rizal and socialism (2)

By Elmer Ordonez

MY earlier column (8/7) dwelt on the influence of socialist ideas on Rizal and his fellow propagandists in Europe. I noted that of the two contending strains of socialism in late 19th century, Marxist and anarchist, the latter had more impact on Rizal and Juan Luna, judging by their literary and art works. El Fili-busterismo has an “anarchist and putschist” for main character, Simoun, while Luna has paintings depicting the underclass of France.

Luna also has a letter to Rizal describing the pitiful conditions of workers in a Paris iron foundry and enthusing over Contemporary Socialism. (I recall my own encounter with Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station in the 50s, tracing the concept from Saint-Simoun, Owen and Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx and Engels to Lenin.) If Luna had lived to the 20th century would he have developed into a full-blown proletarian artist?   

Rizal’s close friend Trinidad Pardo de Tavera had taken in two young Russian women who were in Paris as political refugees because of their nihilist views (nihilism is a variant of anarchism). Epifanio San Juan, Jr. surmises that the two women radicals could have been introduced by de Tavera to Rizal. However there is no mention of this in Rizal’s correspondence nor of any reply to Luna’s letter about his visit to the Parisian iron foundry. Nor is there any reference to radicals or their work except to Max Havelaar, the anti-Dutch colonial book written by the Dutch-Indonesian mestizo Edward Douwes Dekker using the pseudonym, Multatuli. At the time Rizal was annotating Morga’s Sucesos in the British Museum where he must have come across Max Havelaar and become interested in Philippine studies and Malay resistance to colonialism in the region. . (cf. John Nery, Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia).

In 1898 ilustrado nationalist Isabelo de los Reyes met all kinds of socialists/radicals during his detention at the Montjuich castle prison, where Rizal two years earlier was confined for several hours before being shipped back to Manila to face trial for treason and the firing squad. De los Reyes as a deported filibustero in 1896 participated in violent street protests in Barcelona. Since then Filipino intellectuals (like Dr. Dominador Gomez, Aurelio Tolentino, Lope K. Santos, Faustino Aguilar, Herminigildo Cruz) and other labor leaders had been exposed to socialist books, here or abroad. In the 20s Marxism-Leninism arrived in Manila and labor groups, armed with this ideology, formed the Communist Party (1930).

Reader Alvin F. pointed out that utopian socialism was also an influence on Rizal, citing Dapitan as a manifestation. Indeed, In that quiet Mindanao town, Rizal, using his immense skills, tried to build a model community with progressive education, organic farming and cash crop cultivation, a waterworks system benefiting the whole town, free medicine for the poor, among other social services.

Having given up propaganda work with La Solidaridad, Rizal returned to Manila via Hongkong with his Tagalog translation of The Rights of Man and his agenda to organize the indios as a national polity toward their social and economic development and mutual protection, preparing them for self-government and ultimate liberation. These from the objectives of La Liga Filipina.

The Liga had a short life because of Rizal’s deportation to Dapitan. In his exile, he transformed the land that he bought along the coast into a mini-colony of students, some members of his family including his sisters, and his common-law wife, and the locals who work on the agricultural and livestock farms.

Rizal would have done these and more in the 6,000 acres made available to Rizal by the British authorities for his proposed Filipino colony in Sabah. Rizal’s proposal was rejected by the Spanish governor-general who would not spare Filipinos in a country already short of labor. He probably meant shortage of compulsory labor because the indios, disaffected for centuries, were fleeing from “bajo la campana” (under the bell) to the countryside or hinterlands where they were at risk of being branded tulisanes.

Rizal had for some time thought about a Filipino colony since the dispossession by the friars of Rizal’s family and other inquilinos and their tenants in the Calamba hacienda. If the Sabah project had materialized under progressive-minded Rizal it would have shown up Spanish governance.

Building ideal or model communities is the essence of utopian socialism. The term “utopian” is derived from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516); its precedents are Plato’s ideal Republic and St. Augustine’s City of God. In the first half of the 19th century, in the wake of the French revolution, socialism and communism (coined by anarchist Etienne Cabet) became current, with Karl Marx and Frederic Engels using the term in the 1848 “Communist Manifesto“ in a metaphorical way as “the specter haunting Europe” to scare the ruling classes beset with social upheavals.

Marx and Engels used “scientific socialism” as opposed to the “utopian” concepts of communitarian living of Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier who had anarchist ideas from the start like cooperatives, credit unions, mutual support, labor reform, and women rights (Fourier). In 1892 after the death of his comrade, Engels issued his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. That year Rizal returned to Manila.

To be continued.
eaordonez2000@yahoo.com

Iconoclasm in art / failure of nerve

By Elmer Ordonez

Senator Edgardo Angara may well have put the “Kulo” controversy to rest by not recommending sanctions against the CCP board. All possible sides were heard at last Tuesday’s Senate probe presided over by the former UP president. Enlightened and benighted views and questions were entertained. Angara seemed satisfied that the CCP board promised to review their procedures for exhibits.

All’s well that ends well? Here’s my take on the issue:

Weeks of pressure from the Church clergy/ partisans including Palace intervention compelled the CCP board to pull out the entire “Kulo” exhibit, not just the controversial installation “Polytheism” of Mideo Cruz.

CCP chair Emily Abrera said the board did not “cave in” to the pressure but a decision was reached, by referendum, to withdraw the exhibit before its expiry today. Against the closure were Abrera, Florangel Braid, and Carol Espiritu while a majority of six including CCP president Raul Sunico were for closure for reasons of “public safety.”

The exhibit had already been shown at Ateneo and UP Diliman and no problem arose from viewers. The exhibit was to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Rizal by alumni artists of Rizal’s alma mater, the University of Santo Tomas, celebrating its 400th year of its founding. Historically, the UST’s school of fine arts under the late National Artist Victorio Edades was a pioneer in modernist art while the University of the Philippines was still following the classical style with Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino as leading lights. Edades’ 1928 exhibit triggered a running debate between the moderns and the conservatives.

At the about the same time Jose Garcia Villa was suspended from the UP for his “obscene” poem “Man-Songs” by a committee led by traditional poet Dean Jorge Bocobo who must have thought Villa’s modernist work was “bad writing.”

The advent of modern art or “the shock of the new” came rather late in the Philippines. Mideo Cruz’s installation would have been in its element during the time of “Dadaism” in Europe. Edades’ works were modern in style but were they infused with “ideology and politics” like Picasso’s anti-fascist “Guernica?” Edades’ “The Builders” had a proletarian touch; his students were more into depicting Filipino history and identity like the murals of Carlos “Botong” Francisco.

“Dadaism” itself (with Marcel Duchamp as a favorite example with his “Fountain,” a urinal hanging from his installation) was a protest against the senselessness of the First World War and against bourgeois art. He did not expect the public would tolerate his “shock art.” Just as the academe in Loyola and Diliman did not create a big fuss over Cruz’s work. Thanks to a TV camera man who showed shots to the bishops when the trouble began.

“Kulo” or revolutionary ferment was obviously inspired by Rizal’s iconoclasm in the last decades of the 19th century when Rizal and the Propagandists produced incendiary literature that would lead to the 1896-1898 Revolution that ended Spanish colonial/monastic rule. Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar were particularly scathing in their anti-friar writings. The two novels of Rizal to this day are taught in some schools expurgating or sanitizing passages considered offensive to the Church.

Constantino Tejero of Inquirer thinks Cruz’s “Polytheism” is expressive of “racial memory embedded in the subconscious”— a virtual history of church and colonial abuses up to the present. Lito Zulueta also of Inquirer consigns Cruz’s work to iconoclastic art. Iconoclasm has a long history of idol-smashing (literally and figuratively) in religion, politics, culture and art. The Church itself destroyed images and icons carried by its forces deemed responsible for their defeat in battle.

In Rizal’s time the theocratic state responded to his “blasphemous” and “heretical” novels by banning them and ultimately having him shot by firing squad. Today, if some defenders of the faith have their way, they would perhaps have the offending artist burned at stake like Joan of Arc, and those responsible in the CCP for approving the exhibit, charged in court and made to resign.

Those who find Cruz’s work offensive have the right to protest or to picket the exhibit but do they have the right to resort to vandalism or arson? The latter act conjures images of book-burning, and history is replete with examples of this kind of censorship in totalitarian and supposedly democratic societies. The Church provides the faithful with an index of approved books bearing the phrase “nihil obstat” or nothing objectionable. “Prior restraint” cannot be imposed in a pluralistic society.

The UP Arts studies department statement provides the aesthetic and intellectual justification for engaging controversial art works in discussion rather than banning them. It says: “While there are contending interpretations of an image presented by art, the ethical course of action is to process the contentions and that is what art ensures: a process of communicative action. The closure of an exhibition only achieves the closure of democratic, informed and thoughtful engagement.”

The CCP board may still redeem itself by standing their ground against the recrudescence of obscurantism and repression. They will not be alone.

eaordonez2000@yahoo.com