Rizal's Filipina/s
We can expect several books, films, video documentaries, maybe visual art exhibits, theater and dance pieces to be produced this year in commemoration of our national hero’s life. 2011 marks the sesquicentennial of Jose P. Rizal’s birth. That means 150 years; recall how Ateneo de Manila University, which as a boy, Pepe attended, had its sexy sesqui only too recently.Some friends and I started putting a big book together early last year, wanting to jump the gun on everyone else.
Unfortunately, the Grand Guignol anthology Rizal Plus got derailed for sometime, no thanks to a variety of delaying tactics engineered by ye olde imp. But we remain hopeful we can finally get it up to speed soon, and still manage to have it out well before June 19, our hero’s 150th anniversary.
It would be a great pity if we don’t, as it will have quite a line-up of writers, from the late Adrian Cristobal to such outstanding contemporary literary stylists as Erwin E. Castillo (on Rizal’s favorite Smith & Wesson pistols); Carlos Cortes of Cebu (on Rizal’s skills as a chess player); Cesar Ruiz Aquino of Dumaguete; Victor Jose Peñaranda of Bai, Laguna (on the enigmatic brotherhood of Dimasalang); our fellow STAR columnists Butch Dalisay, Maribel Garcia and Wilson Lee Flores; Luis Francia of New York and Sylvia L. Mayuga with letters addressed to Lolo Pepe; Rodel Rodis of San Francisco (on the parallels between Rizal and Ninoy Aquino); Alfredo “Ding” Roces of Sydney (on Rizal as a sculptor and artist), John Nery who’s currently based in Singapore, working on another book, also on Riza. The last writes on “What Rizal thought of journalists.”
Then we also have the Seattle-based scholar Vince Rafael; the Rizalist Sir Lucien Spittael of Brussels, Belgium, a member of KGOR, El Filibusterismo Chapter; Lito B. Zulueta on “Rizal at the University of Santo Tomas: The misunderstood years (1877-1881)”; Howie Severino’s “Who called Rizal ‘little bad boy?’: Recalling the national hero’s romantic romp through Europe”; Pete Lacaba with two essays, as well as an excerpt from his film script of Rizal in Dapitan; Paolo Mendoza on “Rizal in the Time of Facebook”; and the astrological birth and death charts of our National Hero, with an essay titled “Jose Rizal, the Philippines and the Cosmos.”
We have premier poets such as Cirilo F, Bautista, Willy Sanchez of Chicago, Eric Gamalinda of New York, and Lourd de Veyra. And we have a superb cast of visual artists weighing in, from Sydney’s top-rate editorial cartoonist Edd Aragon to his counterpart in Singapore, Dengcoy Miel. Our favorite literary goddess Gilda Cordero Fernando also contributes several illustrations.
We will have reprints, that is, we will include articles that have appeared in various publications, and which we believe need to be collected for posterity.
It’ll be a superlative book — all for our revered Jose.
Here now is one piece that may or may not appear in the Rizal Plus anthology — an excerpt from “The Beautiful Filipina in Philippine Literature” which first appeared in Magandang Filipina: Beauty for Life, edited by our dear departed friend Reynaldo Gamboa Alejandro, published by Unilever Philippines in 2005.
It is a collaborative essay I co-wrote with Dr. Cesar Ruiz Aquino — who’s certainly a master at the appreciation and evaluation of pulchritude, and which. The excerpt is taken from the part that dwells on the Filipina Muse as seen by Dr. Jose Rizal as writer.
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If it’s true that we may gauge the literary artist by the quality of his description of “the woman loved,” to borrow Alain-Fournier’s phrase, it should be more than fun to raid our literature for such a portrait — which we may conveniently call a portrait of the Muse as Filipina.
Rizal’s “kayumangging kaligatan,” as the Tagalogs call it, is not describing Maria Clara who is mestiza. The young woman is not a character in any of Rizal’s novels but a figure from Philippine myth and legend — Mariang Makiling, from whom, at any rate, Maria Clara is clearly descended, especially in the following aspect, that “Mariang Makiling was very charitable and had a good heart.”
This is in truth Rizal’s Muse, who appears in yet another literary work of the national hero outside the Noli. In an unfinished prose piece to which he gives the title Memories, Rizal recollects a summer encounter he had while vacationing in the provinces. He was, he writes, only sixteen at the time, while the young woman he liked was “of fourteen or sixteen summers, fair, slim for her age, with her black tresses loose, almost reaching her heels. She wore a red skirt girded under her shoulders, a black tapis over it which traced the contour of her virginal form....”
The Muse (very likely Leonor Rivera, in Lingayen) appears in her two aspects: young maiden and crone. The work was left unfinished — but perhaps only those with a historical interest at stake will feel a loss. The young maiden returns as Maria Clara in Rizal’s immortal novel.
It appears that Rizal’s type (archetype!) is gentle and kind, and though he qualifies this in Mariang Makiling, the quality always surfaces without strain.
In the fishing excursion chapter of the Noli Me Tangere, Maria Clara is struck by Elias’ sadness and, taking pity, hands him some biscuits. When later Elias visits the hut of his sweetheart, Salome, they get to talking about Maria Clara. And Salome, in turn, is a mirror image of Maria Clara in her reaction. Just as Elias is Ibarra’s double, so is Salome Maria Clara’s.
Literally, she is the poor man’s Maria Clara, but the latter’s soul twin really, enforcing the impression that Rizal’s Muse was sweet and, unlike that of John Keats’, sweet to the end. In his “Mi Ultimo Adios” he calls Josephine Bracken “dulce extranjera,” sweet stranger.
Perhaps the most intriguing touch in the Noli is the juxtaposition of the pious fuss, centered in the images of the saints, particularly Our Lady, by the aunts — which Rizal pokes equally relentless fun at — and the cumulative sense the reader gets that the beautiful Maria Clara is herself the Virgin.
“I saw her again. She is beautiful as the virgin!” exclaims the distinguisado towards the novel’s end. The scandalous truth of her birth and begetting only intensifies this by way of irony and paradox.
The line must be drawn between the Virgin as an image of the transcendent, as divine, and the Virgin as a persistence, in our consciousness, of the immemorial goddess of myth and magic. It is in this latter sense that Maria Clara is the Virgin. And it is in this sense that Philippine folk, male and female, invoke the Virgin as the inevitable simile and touchstone for female beauty — “parang birhen.”
But the Filipino ultimately bows to the commanding wishes of the Filipina, who is strong and sure, as much of her love as of her sensing of fate. Thus the parting scene between the lovers in Rizal’s Noli:
“‘I am nothing but a fugitive… on the run. Soon they will discover my escape, Maria…’
“Maria took the young man’s head in her hands and kissed his lips repeatedly, embraced him and afterwards brusquely pushed him away from her.
“‘Go! Go quickly!’ she told him. ‘Go, farewell!’
“Ibarra looked at her with glowing eyes, but at her gesture the young man left staggering, vacillating.”
Ah, the Filipina!
