To do or not to do

One way to get Filipinos to do something is to tell them not to do it. We build overpasses for pedestrians who don’t use them. We draw yellow lines on our streets (what the English call “Zebra crossings”) only to be ignored by both motorists and pedestrians. The notable exception being the pedestrian crossings on Ayala Avenue reserved to seniors, the disabled, and pregnant women that everyone else wants to use. “Ped Xing” on Roxas Boulevard is often mistaken for a street sign. Asked if Ped Xing is a figure from Philippine history, I identified him as the little-known cousin of Limahong, the Chinese pirate who threatened the Spanish Philippines in 1574.

When Catholic bishops opposed the 1957 bill making the reading of Rizal’s novels compulsory in all colleges and universities, people got curious and read them. Six decades on, there is student resistance to Rizal’s novels because it is required. A pity that almost all of us are introduced to Rizal’s novels in translation rather than the original Spanish. In high school, we read abridged editions in Filipino. In college, students are required to read “unexpurgated” editions of the “Noli me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo” in English, but they return to the faulty high school texts, or worse, read the komiks version.

I was not baited into denouncing the teleserye “Maria Clara at Ibarra” because it made no claim or pretension to being an adaptation of Rizal’s novels. If at all, the time travel teleserye encouraged people to return to Rizal’s novels. And many of those who read Rizal not as a school requirement, and not to look for hidden patriotic messages, realized belatedly that the national hero is a wonderful and funny writer.

It is significant that the Church has only risen twice against proposed legislation, and both times they lost: First, with the passage of the watered-down 1957 Rizal law and second with the controversial 2012 reproductive health law. In the Spanish colonial period, when Church and State were not separate, books being imported into the Philippines had to pass through Church censors that determined what was “contrary to faith and morals.” Backlog was high because there were not enough Church censors to competently judge books outside the realm of theology and philosophy. At some point, being on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books became a badge of honor rather than shame. Some of the authors on the list are standard reading in colleges and universities today: Sartre, Voltaire, Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Erasmus, Kant, Descartes, Gibbon, Balzac, Dumas, Zola, and many more. Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” was on the list but was later delisted, the same with particular works of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Dante. Contrary to popular belief, Rizal, Marx, and Darwin were not on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

In the mid-1980s, I was able to acquire a complete bound set of the magazine Renacimiento Filipino cheaply, because it was returned to my favorite bookseller by a buyer who was spooked by all the photos of famous Filipinos on the throes of death or in their coffins: Teodora Alonso holding her son’s skull like the scene from hamlet, coverage of Teodora Alonso’s funeral complete with photos of her in her last days, and also in the coffin. The same for Pedro Paterno. What was bad feng shui for the Chinese collector was a windfall for me because the magazine that ran from 1910-1913 had many engaging photos, rare in the time before scanners, digital cameras, Facebook, and Instagram.

I mistook Renacimiento Filipino for the earlier, more famous periodical El Renacimiento/Muling Pagsilang, a bilingual newspaper in Spanish and Tagalog that closed following a libel suit by Dean C. Worcester, who rightfully felt alluded to as having the characteristics of: a vulture, an owl, and a vampire. The offending article by Fidel Reyes, “Aves de rapiña” (Birds of Prey), was required reading when I was a college freshman. It bored me so much I never dipped into El Renacimiento in the Lopez Museum. Last week, Dr. Mike Hawkins, a colleague in the University of Michigan, gave me his digital files on El Renacimiento. The news may be stale, but the newspaper, as a whole, allows us to imagine social life in the early 20th century, the transition from Spanish to American colonial rule.

(More next Wednesday)

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