Articulating revolution: Rizal in F. Sionil Jose's Rosales Saga
MANILA, Philippines – Creative practice is of many kinds. It is already, and actively, our practical consciousness. When it becomes struggle the active struggle for new consciousness through new relationships that is the ineradicable emphasis of the Marxist sense of self-creation it can take many forms. It can be the long and difficult remaking of an inherited (determined) practical consciousness: a process often described as development but in practice a struggle at the roots of the mind not casting off an ideology, or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
In his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
For Filipinos striving to “make their own history,” no tradition weighs as heavily “on the brain of living” as the legacy of Jose Rizal. All of Philippine historiography has had to come to terms with him; some have written hagiographies, others denounced “veneration without understanding.” Frequently, Rizal, portrayed as the wealthy ilustrado author who opposed revolution, has been counterpoised with Bonifacio, seen as the working class revolutionary leader; or again, Rizal is seen as the non-violent pre-Gandhian resister who opposed the violent tactics of the Katipunan.
No matter what stance is taken, one fact is inescapable: Rizal cannot be ignored. The tack taken in interpreting Rizal will unequivocally determine the understanding gained from Philippine history and literature.
The Filipino novelist, F. Sionil Jose, with his masterful fictional recreation of 100 years of Philippine history in the five-volume Rosales saga, allows us a radical reappropriation of Rizal and enables a fresh understanding of his significance in Philippine history. Sionil Jose does not approach Rizal on the established terms of Philippine historiography; he neither “casts off ideology” nor “learns phrases about it.” He confronts the Rizalian hegemony in the “fibres of the self” and, in Williams’ phrase, “articulates a newly possible consciousness.” It is this confrontation and articulation that I intend to explore in this paper.
There are a fascinating series of parallels between the lives of Rizal and Sionil Jose. Before embarking on an analysis of Sionil Jose’s writing, a summary examination of these parallels will be worthwhile. This comparison is not only of interest, but necessary; Sionil Jose is alert to the convergences between their histories and his awareness of this has had an obvious effect upon both his actions and his writing.
Both Rizal and Sionil Jose wrote with a mastery that commanded global attention, in what was in essence a foreign language Rizal in Spanish, Sionil Jose in English. Rizal and Sionil Jose were both translated widely. Sionil Jose’s work has been translated into 22 languages.
For both Sionil Jose and Rizal, because of their global readership and the languages in which they wrote, the question of intended readership has frequently been raised. What audience was Rizal imagining when he wrote Noli Me Tangere?
In a conversation with Malaysian poet and scholar, Muhammad Haji Salleh, Sionil Jose attempted to answer the same question for his own work: “I’m very happy to be read abroad by so many people. But I am not writing for Russians, I’m not writing for the Dutch or the Europeans. I am writing for my own countrymen. I am happy that I am read abroad, but I’ll be far happier if there are more Filipinos who read me because, after all, I am Filipino. I think I have something to say to my own countrymen.” While deeply rooted in Philippine nationalist tradition Sionil Jose, like Rizal before him, transcends the limitations of nation in a committed internationalism. He demonstrated this in both his work as founder and secretary of the Philippine branch of PEN and as publisher and editor of Solidarity magazine, where he published articles from Benigno Aquino, Mochtar Lubis, Yukio Mishima, Richard Kim and others, and compiled issues on subjects such as “Architecture and Development in Southeast Asia.” The most intriguing glimpse of Sionil Jose’s cosmopolitanism is a collection of conversations compiled by Miguel A. Bernad. In these transcribed conversations one finds Sionil Jose discussing Malaysian literature with Muhammad Haji Salleh, Doestoevsky and Marxism with Russian philologist Igor Podberezsky, comparing the writings of Shusaku Endo and Soseki with Yoshiko Wakayama, arguing over Pramoedya Ananta Toer with Mochtar Lubis, discussing non-violence and Ivan Illich with Sulak Sivaraksa, or Chinese identity in Southeast Asia with Edwin Thumboo.
Yet, while an internationalist, he remains a far more situated internationalist than Rizal. Sionil Jose can be found at his little bookshop on P. Faura street in Ermita by any who would seek him. When receiving the 1980 Magsaysay Award, Sionil Jose was characterized as “The Writer Who Stayed Behind.” The polyglot, polymath Rizal is an extraordinarily difficult act to follow, yet Sionil Jose has successfully undertaken a wide variety of tasks: journalist, publisher, editor, owner of a bookstore and an art gallery, historical scholar, activist and author.
More than a simple paralleling of Rizal, however, Sionil Jose has consciously chosen to grapple with many of the same issues that occupied Rizal as well, redefining each in the light of their social significance for the struggling Philippine poor. When he established his magazine Solidarity, he “took over the name from the ilustrados: “As they propagandized against the Spanish rulers, I felt that Solidarity should propagandize against the native oligarchs.” Like Rizal, Sionil Jose is deeply concerned with defining nation and nationalism and with ethnic identity.
The most fascinating continuity between Rizal and Sionil Jose is also the most pertinent for understanding the role of Rizal in Sionil Jose’s writing: the understanding of the Philippine past. In light of Rizal’s pained quest for the pre-Hispanic Philippines and in his annotated edition of de Morga, Sionil Jose’s reflections are especially fitting:
“Should we then be palsied and grieving because we have no Angkor Wat, no Borobudur? Never, because traditions have often shackled people, disabling them, imprisoning them in barnacled concepts. Tradition can easily be transformed into necrophilia, into the paralysis of worship. We are therefore fortunate that we look towards the future, without so many encumbrances of the past. We respect this past, whatever little there is of it that will sustain us, because this past also confirms our truest virtue that we are a heroic people.”
The same theme is repeated in a conversation with the Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa:
“We have a great inferiority complex when it comes to Thailand, Indonesia, and to much of continental Southeast Asia because the remnants of your ancient civilizations are there for you to see and to learn from, and your history is a continuum from the past. Basically, it is not so much a problem of identity for us, but the absence of a unified past, of a great cultural tradition… sometimes I kid our famous archaeologists, F. Landa Jocano and Jess Peralta. I tell them, ‘Hey, when are you going to dig up our Angkor Wat?’ But we know that these monuments will not be there because of the nature of our own ancient culture…
“But, like I said, we have always been a heroic people, too. Our history has shown that. While other countries did not fight at all for their freedom, we did. Muhammad Haji Salleh said he envies us for our history. Although we were a Spanish colony, we had a revolution against the Spaniards. We also had a great war with the Americans. You know, the first atrocities that the Americans committed in Asia were not in Vietnam, they were committed against the Filipinos. They called us niggers, insurrectionists. They massacred whole villages but we also killed hundreds of them. In fact one of the most heroic battles against the Americans happened in Tirad Pass. And then, of course, there was the war with the Japanese. Most of the countries in Southeast Asia did not really oppose the Japanese as strongly as we did. Although there was opposition in other countries, it was in the Philippines that they were most bitterly opposed.”
The repeated juxtaposition of revolutionary heroism and the missing past is not accidental. For Sionil Jose, revolution itself is the uniquely Filipino heritage; it is the continuity that underlies all of the Philippine past. This revolution, he states, “means the transfer of power from one class to the other, from the exploitative class into the class that has no voice or is the object of oppression. Remember, when I talk of revolution I always speak as a Filipino. We have a revolutionary tradition.” Sionil Jose places Rizal squarely within this tradition. “I always told them (the NPA cadres) that they did not have to mouth these Leninist and Maoist slogans, that they did not have to be Maoist to be revolutionary… I told them from the very beginning that there is enough in our revolutionary tradition to give fuel to their aspiration. All they had to do was to dig into what Mabini wrote, what Rizal wrote.”
This interpretation on the part of Sionil Jose is hardly straightforward. Rizal as revolutionary? Revolutionary not in some figurative sense, but along the lines of Mao demanding the “transfer of power from one class to another”? Given the class origins of Rizal, his famed rejection of the Katipunan’s call for revolution, and the fierce debates surrounding his life, death and writings that have dominated Philippine historiography, is not such an assertion, at the very least, rather glib and in need of substantiation? Yet Sionil Jose, without qualm, makes this controversial assertion. Why?
Having drawn up a series of parallels between the lives of Sionil Jose and Rizal, I cannot resist pointing out a glaring difference between the two which make Sionil Jose’s statement even more perplexing: the difference of class. I will allow the juxtaposition of two extraordinary childhood accounts to suffice as explication of this difference.
“Graduation time came, and I went to my mother … when I asked her if I could buy a new pair of shoes because my old shoes wouldn’t fit anymore, she said: ‘Son, we have no money.’ And when she said we had no money, I knew that there was no money. So graduation evening came. There we were on the stage, and I looked at all my classmates, and all of them wore shoes. And I was the only one, Igor, who had no shoes, absolutely the only one. But I didn’t want to go up onstage on bare feet so I had a pair of wooden shoes. And when I walked to the front to say my piece and get my diploma, I had to be very careful. I lifted my feet so that my wooden shoes wouldn’t make a sound on the stage.”
F. Sionil Jose, conversation with Igor Podberezsky
“The Rizal family belong to the principalia, a town aristocracy in Spanish Philippines. It was one of the distinguished families in Calamba… From the farms, which were rented from the Dominican Order, they harvested rice, corn and sugarcane. They raised pigs, chickens and turkeys in their backyard. In addition to farming and stockraising, Dona Teodora managed a general goods store and operated a small flour-mill and a homemade ham press. As evidence of their affluence, Rizal’s parents were able to build a large stone house that was situated near the town church and to buy another one. They owned a carriage, which was a status symbol of the ilustrados in Spanish Philippines and a private library… which consisted of more that 1,000 volumes.”
G. Zaide, “Jose Rizal”
Yet, despite the polarity of their class backgrounds and the controversies over Rizal as an ilustrado reformist, Sionil Jose points to Rizal as a revolutionary, stating: “I’ve always told people that the greatest influence on my writing is Rizal.”
How can we reconcile these antagonisms?
The answer, I believe, lies in Sionil Jose’s greatest work, his fictional quintet recreation of Philippine history, the Rosales Saga. By examining this work, in particular the concluding volume, Mass, and exploring Sionil Jose’s deft literary appropriation of Rizal, we observe Sionil Jose at his best poignant, pointed, brilliant. In the character of Pepe Samson, the reader is led to a confrontation with the hegemony of the non-revolutionary Rizal in the “fibres of the self” and to the articulation of ”a newly possible consciousness” a Rizal read within the trajectory of the revolutionary tradition that Sionil Jose portrays as uniquely Filipino.
Sionil Jose wrote, “The Noli and the Fili also confirm the iron rule that writers must be contextual, rooted affectionately and tenaciously in the land of their birth and in the experiences and travail of their people.” No words could more elegantly describe the Rosales saga, than “rooted affectionately and tenaciously” in the travail of the Filipino people.
Filipino writers, to write contextually, must “start with what we have, the mud of our villages, the poverty of our slums, and build from there no matter how arduous the effort, no matter how niggardly the material.” This, then, for Sionil Jose is the Philippine context: the mud of villages and the poverty of slums. Yet Sionil Jose does not lapse into the realm of the naturalistic novel, so despised by Georg Lukacs, descriptively hemming his characters into a world they did not fashion, a world that irresistibly shapes and damns them to the anathemas of Tondo and Cabugawan. Rather, the Rosales saga portrays “not just poverty as such, but the relationships which engender this poverty.”
The poverty that runs from the beginning to the end of the Rosales saga is caused; it is the product of class relations and oppression and it is resisted. This resistance, the agency of the Filipino masses, is embodied ultimately in the character of Pepe Samson. Pepe Samson, as the conscientized masses, overcomes the rift between intellectual and revolutionary, and is the “redeemer” of both the Filipino people and of Jose Rizal. This requires explication.
F. Sionil Jose’s Rosales Saga is composed of five books, which, organized according to their internal historical setting rather than the chronology of composition, begin with Po-on.
Po-on, set in the 1890’s, tells the story of Eustaquio (Istak) Salvador, progenitor of Tony and Pepe Samson, protagonists of The Pretenders and Mass, respectively. Istak, an Ilokano peasant, migrates from Ilocos to Rosales in Central Luzon and settles near the hacienda of Don Jacinto. He encounters Apolinario Mabini and joins Gregorio del Pilar at Tirad Pass to fight against the American invaders and dies there.
Tree, the second novel in the saga, is told from the perspective of a child the grandson of Don Jacinto in Po-on. He witnesses with both limited comprehension and yet, with complicity, the oppression of the peasant farmers of Rosales at the hands of his father and of the hacendero over his father, Don Vicente Asperri. His father is killed in the Colorum peasant uprisings.
The third novel, My Brother, My Executioner, tells the story of two half-brothers, Victor, an Ilocano Huk leader, and Luis Asperri, the illegitimate son of Don Vicente. They share the same mother, Nena. Luis Asperri is raised by Don Vicente, becomes a journalist and writes liberal calls for land reform. Upon the death of Don Vicente, Luis inherits the hacienda, and having grown comfortable and attached to privilege, he refuses to redistribute any of the land. The village where he was born is razed to the ground, his grandfather killed and his mother, driven insane by circumstances, wanders in Manila. The book ends with the confrontation between the brothers on the hacienda. The Huks arrive, the hacienda is burned down and Luis dies a despairing death.
The Pretenders tells of the life of Tony Samson, grandson of Istak. The story begins by narrating his death by suicide and then proceeds to recount why this occurred. Tony has risen from his peasant beginnings and from the squalor of his room in Manila and traveled on scholarship to the United States, obtaining his doctorate from Harvard. Tony’s father is in Bilibid prison for having killed his landlord (the father of the narrator in Tree) during the Colorum uprising. Tony Samson has written a dissertation criticizing the role of the ilustrados in the Philippine Revolution.
Tony marries a rich mestiza, daughter of the industrialist Don Manuel Villa, and begins working for his father-in-law. One by one, Tony Samsonùs most treasured beliefs are destroyed by compromise and corruption. Tony Samson learns that his childhood sweetheart, Emy, in rural Rosales had a child after he left for the United States and that the boy, Pepe, is his own son. Tony Samson, overwhelmed by his guilt and the loss of his integrity, asserts his refusal to be co-opted any longer by the luxury and corruption of the Villas by committing suicide.
Pepe Samson, illegitimate son of Tony Samson, is the hero of the final volume of the Rosales Saga, Mass. Raised in the rural poverty of Rosales, Pangasinan, Pepe Samson travels to Manila to study in the University Belt. He lives in the home of his aunt, in the same squalid room over the railroad tracks that his father once occupied. Pepe is initially driven only by his desire for food and sex. He briefly supports himself as a runner for a local drug pusher.
At the University Pepe is introduced to radical politics through The Brotherhood, through the teaching of Professor Hortenso, and through his friendship with the committed radical Toto. Pepe moves to Tondo and lives in a slum with a priest, Father Jess. There he learns of revolution from a former Huk rebel, Ka Lucio. Toto is shot during a demonstration on Mendiola Bridge and Ka Lucio is later murdered. Pepe’s journey from common person to revolutionary hero is nearly complete. He is arrested by government forces, tortured and released.
In the Brotherhood, Pepe encounters the figure of Juan Puneta, an exceedingly wealthy man who claims he wants to help the Brotherhood by contributing money. Puneta is a figure of unmitigated evil, a traitor to the Brotherhood and responsible for the deaths of both Toto and Ka Lucio. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim writes “Puneta is an inhuman creation representing the class enemy; thus, the violent extermination of that enemy is made imaginatively acceptable.” Pepe kills Puneta in his empty mansion in Pobres Park. Pepe returns to Rosales to work in the revolution.
The Rosales Saga is an epic achievement, covering 100 years of Philippine history, from the execution of the three priests, Gomez, Burgos and Zamora, in 1872 to the declaration of martial law in 1972 when Pepe Samson takes to the hills. In its stunning narrative sweep, its intricate intertextuality, and its remarkable character development, the Rosales Saga not only presents a coherent picture of lived Philippine history, but addresses many crucial debates in Philippine historiography along the way.
Lim argues that “Manila, a rich contradictory mix of wealth and squalor, opportunity and degradation, is the ruling spirit in Mass.” Manila is indeed viscerally alive in the novel.
Recto! Rectum of Manila! Here are the odors of the posterior, particularly when the sun is warm and there would be a busted sewer gushing yellowish froth, and flies as big a bottle caps on the garbage piles. They will all be swept clean when the revolution comes and this Recto, this will be the boulevard of great erudition; it will be the avenue of hope. It already is to thousands upon thousands like me, for it is here where I go to school.
This city, alternately beloved and despised by Pepe Samson, is held in dialectic tension with the country life of Rosales, also vividly imaged. The towering figure of Pepe in the final novel spans the chasms that have dominated all the previous novels: the gaps between country and city, between peasant and proletariat, and between revolutionary and intellectual. The narrator of Tree writes in mental instability in the city, guilty of the sins of the countryside; Luis and Victor embody this split in their fratricidal struggle Luis, the city, and Victor, the countryside; Tony Samson is filled with longing and regret over his rural past now lost in the corruption and comfort of the city; but Pepe Samson by his revolutionary activity resolves this dialectical tension, struggling everywhere for the realization of the same thing: the liberation of the Filipino people. Raymond Williams writes, “In some of the fundamental thinking of Marx and Engels, there is a formulation which is at once the most exciting, the most relevant and yet the most undeveloped in the whole revolutionary argument. Engels wrote of socialism as ‘abolishing the contrast between town and country, which has been brought to its extreme point by present-day capitalist society.’ It can be restated theoretically. The division and opposition of city and country, industry and agriculture, in their modern forms, are the critical culmination of the division and specialization of labor which, though it did not begin with capitalism, was developed under it to an extraordinary and transforming degree.” Williams concludes: “We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided. That is a personal decision but then a social action.” Pepe does exactly this: he overcomes the division of country and city through a personal decision that becomes social action. A corresponding divide exists, one especially relevant in a country where the left has long floundered between Maoist and “Orthodox” Marxist discussions over the agents of revolutionary transformation, i.e., the divide between the peasantry and the proletariat. Pepe Samson, in his person and his in actions, shows this forced split for the doctrinaire humbuggery that it is.
In an intriguing aside to-ward the beginning of Mass, Pepe tells the story of a provincial sacristan and herbolario, Lakay Benito, who taught Pepe an oracion in Latin “a charm to ward away malevolent dogs… which I should not repeat to anyone, else it would lose its potency.” Here, it is impossible not to recall Reynaldo Ileto and ideas of popular religiosity and peasant resistance. In an essay entitled “Our Heroic Heritage,” Sionil Jose recounts speaking to a group of Rizalistas in Tagulod, Nueva Ecija. “I stood before the simple altar where a portrait of Rizal had been placed, flanked by lighted candles. They had worshipped here and imbibed Rizal in their very marrow… I told them that Rizal had inspired me, that I wrote because I wanted to return memory to my countrymen.” This is the world that Ileto explored of aged Rizalistas, of oraciones and anting-anting and of peasant resistance couched in the language of popular religiosity.
Is this, then, the redemptive moment for Rizal in Sionil Jose? A peasant “underside”? No. Pepe Samson not only reunites the forced dichotomy of country and city, but also that of peasant and proletariat, and ultimately of intellectual and revolutionary. Ileto’s writings admirably recover the voice of those silenced by history; he capably writes a ”history of the inarticulate.” Pepe Samson is no longer inarticulate, however; far from it. He speaks with passion, eloquence and sincerity. Rizal’s redemption in Sionil Jose will be found elsewhere.
In the early stages of Mass, while Pepe is still working as a runner, the drug pusher Kuya Nick, offers him an opportunity worthy of Rizal’s Simoun. By pushing drugs he argues you are catering to the vices of the wealthy, you are destroying the rich by supplying their decadence. Pepe rejects the idea. The independent, shady filibuster will not transform Philippine society. The prose in Mass, Lim argues, “moves unselfconsciously from the personal individual character, I-Pepe, to the public communal self we, the people.” Pepe speaks curtly to an ilustrado during a political debate, “I am the masses.” Pepe Samson becomes the embodiment of the Philippine masses. Isolated, individual, anarchist acts such as Simoun’s bomb are rejected in favor of mass action.
It is in the resolution of forced dichotomies that Pepe Samson plays his redemptive role in Mass. Characters throughout the saga have represented fragments of the coherent whole that is Pepe Samson; Luis and Tony’s intellectual abilities, Victor and Tony’s father’s revolutionary activity, all find their dialectical resolution, their sublation in Pepe Samson.
The crux for this interpretation is the figure of Tia Nena. Having lost her mind by the end of My Brother, My Executioner she reappears in Mass as the domestic helper of Father Jess. When asked by Roger Bresnahan, “Is there a good deal of Rizal in your writing?” Sionil Jose answered, “Oh, yes! As a matter of fact, that woman, Sisa, has affected me so much that I used her in My Brother My Executioner as the mother of these two men, Luis and Victor. And she goes insane there, just as in Rizal’s novel. But in the Rosales novels, I’m tying the loose strings together so that she regains her sanity in Mass.”
The centrality of Sisa for Sionil Jose is made apparent in his essay on Rizal. “I saw in Sisa my own mother and much later, the symbol of Filipinas (i.e. the Philippines). I recreated Sisa and her two sons, Crispin and Basilio, in my novel My Brother, My Executioner.”
Sisa, symbolic both of Sionil Jose’s mother and of Filipinas, recovers her wholeness, her sanity in Mass. From the loss of her two sons, the split personae of revolutionary and intellectual, she regains them in her adopted son Pepe Samson. In what would be an otherwise unintelligible scene, Pepe finds Tia Nena “mumbling before her stove about her sons. ‘My Luis… My Victor…’ over and over again. I went to her once and asked, ‘Tia what were you saying? ‘Victor? Luis?’ She turned abruptly to me, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I had two sons,’ she said, in a voice that was almost sepulchral. ‘One was white, the other was black…’ ‘I have two hands,’ I tried to humor her, ‘the left and the right…’”
At the end of the novel, Tia Nena accompanies Pepe, now seen as her adopted son, back to Rosales as he embarks on his revolutionary work. The fragmented Filipinas is restored in the person of Pepe Samson. This restoration can be labeled redemptive; in fact Sionil Jose calls it exactly that. “I made Pepe the redeemer in Mass.”
In the fictional dissertation, The Ilustrados, by Pepe’s father, Tony Samson, he writes, “The ilustrados the intellectuals should have no role in the Revolution, in any revolution. They equivocate, they argue, they procrastinate. Writers and academics who think they have a role in revolution are flattering themselves; what they really want to do is to be part of it, to lead it, without having to raise the sword.” Pepe Samson examines his past as he prepares to embark on his revolutionary activity at the end of Mass: “I was an instrument to be manipulated and though I had the right credentials, I was naive, I was an ‘adventurist’ not ‘intellectual’ enough to understand and accept the ideological basis for revolution.”
At the book’s end, Pepe is now both revolutionary and intellectual. He overcomes the rift between intellectual and revolutionary; he is the resolution of the imposed dichotomy between mental and manual labor and the embodied redemption of the Filipino masses.
In one of the most extraordinary passages in an extraordinary book, Pepe’s thoughts are recorded in a flash of enlightenment before he kills Juan Puneta.
So this then is how it will be; they talk of modernization, about increases in the gross national product, and they want the bright young minds honed in the best universities in America to work and raise this country and these people from the garbage dump of history and up up to the dizzying heights of air-conditioned bedrooms, flush toilets and cemented streets. They can do this and they will do it because that is the iron compulsion of the times, and the rationale behind it is nationalism. They will use Rizal and all the bones of the illustrious dead to be the foundation of their dreams and they will be convinced theirs is the true light, that they are acting on behalf of the people and they know what is best for the clod, the toilers dumb carabaos that plow the fields. But who will talk about the dignity of men, about the living wage, the education of children, the care of the sick? Manila’s hospitals are abattoirs; the districts of the poor are nightmare swamplands. The highest officials go abroad on shopping sprees with the people’s money; why should their subalterns do less when the most powerful have secret bank accounts and other accoutrements of luxury for which they have robbed the people? And we are asked to support them, to believe them they who have drained us of our blood, who have tortured us and raped us. More than these, we are supposed to love our bondage because it is the mark of our allegiance to nation and therefore, to God. If in the past we had done it was because we did not know; we had been bound to them by a mistaken sense of loyalty, by gratitude because we felt then that we would not survive without their kindness, their patronage. But it is different now. Our eyes have been opened and certainly not by them, but by the fact that we cannot be deceived forever. Now we will fling back to them the very sop they have drowned our protests with. Nationalism means us for we are the nation and the vengeance we seek will never be satisfied till we have gotten measure for measure all that was stolen from us. I live in Tondo, I came from Cabugawan. I want not just the irrevocable end to my poverty, but justice as well.
The exploiters of the Filipino masses will “use Rizal and the bones of the illustrious dead to be the foundation of their dreams.” Sionil Jose has confronted this use of Rizal, has confronted this hegemony in the “fibres of the self” and has triumphed. He has succeeded in articulating the vision of a redeemed Sisa/Tia Nena, redeemed in the revolutionary Philippine masses, in Pepe Samson and in his intellectually conscious revolutionary struggle.
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Originally published Dec. 17, 2004
