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We did what we ourselves had decided upon—as free people, and power resides
in the people. What we did was our heritage…We decided to rebel, to rise up and strike down the
sources of power. I said, “We are Sakdals…No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right
direction.
Writers are, by the nature of their chosen task, the spearhead of progress. They voice the
grievances as well as the aspirations of a nation; they document its achievements; they treasure
for posterity the worthwhile efforts of man. They are the critics of things as they are; they are the
dreamers of things as they should be; they cannot escape a large part of the responsibiility for the
shape of things to come.
American War of 1899-1913, the yet “uncivilized” masses of Guinea-Bissau and Cape
Verde Islands, to cite just one instance, have begun to build their nation on the ruins of
the Portuguese empire in 1974, a year before the victory of the Vietnamese over the US
empire and its surrogates (Davis 1978).
President Wilson’s “14 Points” proposal came with the breaking-up of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire in 1918. It offered breathing space for tribal groups in Africa, as well
as a motive or rationale to discover a self, a political medium or state, which can
undergo a “recognizable process of self-determination”. Such aspiration is supposed to
be a political reaction to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe, but surely it preceded
Napoleon. Nations such as France or England had long realized such aspiration
“grounded in some existing sentiment of national or racial identity associated with
common territory, language or religion—to form its own sovereign state and to govern
itself” (Scruton 1982, 421). Following this model, the break-up of the Spanish Empire in
the 19th century led to the formation of Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, and Mexico
in the South American wars of independence. Led by creoles disillusioned with
theocratic colonialism, the various nationalities or ethnic communities revolted not so
much in the name of national self-determination but with the ideals of the Frencn
revolution—“liberty, equality, fraternity”—in mind.
Transitional Passages
Clearly, as Lenin once put it, we need to distinguish the “nationalism” of the
oppressed peoples against the jingoist/chauvinist “nationalism” of the oppressor nation
(Lenin 1968; San Juan 2002). This is due to the geopolitical law of unequal and uneven
development between metropolitan powers and subordinate, peripheral formations (for
a succinct formulation, see Harvey 1977). In this context, it might be heuristic to pose
the following inquiry. Was the Spanish colony in 1899, about to be annexed by the
United States, just “an imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson (1983) would label
it? Was it an artifice simply generated by print capitalism and commercial exchange
which triggered consent from the letrado minority? Or was it, in Eric Hosbawm’s (1994)
phrase, an “invented tradition”? Or was the Filipino “nation” a process of active genesis
with plural components, not ethnic purity, as the active catalyzer for the national-popular
patria? This “nation” seems to be still undergoing neocolonial metamorphosis today.
The 1896 revolution against Spain was initially a product of Filipino creolized
ilustrados, foremost of whom were Jose Rizal, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and Marcelo del
Pilar. In Barcelona and Madrid, the propagandists collaborated on the newspaper La
Solidaridad in 1889. Using Spanish, their declared aspirations were universalistic, not
particularistic, namely: “to combat reaction, to stop all retrogressive steps, to extol and
adopt liberal ideas, to defend progress; in a word, to be a propagandist, above all, of
democratic ideas in order to make these supreme in all nations here and across the
seas” (Agoncillo and Guerrero 1970, 143). There was no mention of a common
language, distinct territory, cohesive economic unit—the prime characteristics of a
nation, not of a tribal or racial assemblage.
Andres Bonifacio was one of the original members of the Liga. With the Liga
proscribed, Bonifacio and others organized the Katipunan. Using Tagalog—the native
tongue of the central provinces of Luzon—they articulated the political goal of
separation from Spain, the moral objective of individual rational autonomy, and the civic
ideal of defending the poor and oppressed. Following the credo of mutual aid and
reciprocity, the Katipunan vowed to pay the funeral expenses of it members to undercut
the exorbitant fees of the Church. It demonstrated the dialectic of universal ideals and
concrete action in the process of fashioning a new nation.
Given the anticolonial thrust of the 1896 revolution led by the Katipunan, Filipino
nationalism from its beginning was forged from a national-popular matrix. It was national
in ascribing to the subjugated Indios, the native inhabitants, a cluster of singular
qualities: fraternal sharing of goods, commitment to promises, faith in the enslaved
subalterns’ wisdom and power to create a prosperous, free future. This is the message
of Bonifacio’s manifesto, “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog”: “Panahun na ngayong
4
The failure of the 1896 revolution sharpened the social division of labor, with the
US occupation destroying the productive linkages of family, village and kindred
institutions. The crisis widened the division between city and countryside. Filipino
nationalists tried to resolve their historical predicament by “feeling the elementary
passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying
them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of
history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently
elaborated-i.e. knowledge” (Gramsci 1971, 418). Thus the revolutionary artists’ project
of historicizing emotional patterns was translated into the task of constructing the
hegemonic (moral-intellectual) leadership of the working class, in alliance with the
peasantry, as the foundation of the emerging Filipino nation (San Juan 2015).
complex career can be given here to indicate one example of a nation-building project
(see Mojares 2006; Scott 1982; Anderson 2005).
Vernacular Speech-Acts
6
It was in this milieu that the first consistent articulation of class hopes and
nationalist sentiments received symbolic prefiguration in Lope K. Santos’ novel, Banaag
at Sikat (1906). Rendered through allegorical manipulation of typical characters, the
novel focused on the antagonism between capital and labor, with the “national question”
subsumed in the atmosphere of repressive police action and looming treacheries.
Unlike Reyes or the ilustrado Dr. Dominador Gomez, Santos was a soldier in the
revolutionary army in the forests of Laguna and Batangas. He admired Zola, Gorki,
Eliseo Reclus, and other radical thinkers. Together with Cruz, Santos edited the paper
of the printworkers’ union which carried on its masthead the Marxist slogan, “The
emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class
itself” (Richardson 2011, 21). But Santos did not succumb to sectarian workerism (unlike
the US-tutored communists) since his idea of socialism emphasized chiefly moral and
legal egalitarianism. He favored a broad united front of all democratic sectors. The hero
of his novel Delfin, for example, found the U.S. Constitution filled with “socialist
aspirations” informing government policies (Santos 1959, 236). This might explain why
Santos’ book was not prohibited (on this issue, see Torres Reyes 2010; on his refusal to
commodify his novel, see his autobiography Santos 1972, 70-71.). Was Santos trying to
include the ilustrado elite in a hegemonic project of building consensus, even
confounding bourgeois liberal reforms with Marxian socialism?
Traditionally, the novel form in the West often dramatized the individualist quest
for a cosmic purpose and meaning in life. This quest is refracted by Santos and Aguilar
in a social-realist direction, via a mimesis of the dialectical interaction of the collective
whole and its parts. In both Santos and Aguilar’s style, we encounter a realism diverging
from the raw slice-of-life, sensational naturalism of Zola and Norris. Their models were
Rizal, Tolstoy, Hugo, and Balzac. Tagalog realism, often didactic or homiletic, sought to
“lay bare society’s causal network” (Brecht 1975, 424) in delineating the countours of
7
the country’s development, pointing out where the broadest solutions to the most
serious problems afflicting the majority may be found. It is an elaborate refinement of
the melodramatic historicizing realism found in Rizal’s inflammatory Noli Me Tangere
and El Filibusterismo.
The year 1907 also marked the dissolution of the Union del Trabajo de Filipinas
headed by Lope K. Santos. While engaged in union militancy, he edited the daily
newspaper, Muling Pagsilang, which serialized his polemical novel which sold three
thousand copies within the first few weeks—a sign of popular acclaim for a dangerously
provocative act for American censors (Saulo 1990, 7). These two novels deployed the
conventional romantic plot of unrequited or frustrated love as a symptomatic testimony
of how the 1896 revolution (Filipinas figures as adored paramour-cum-mother) was lost
due to betrayal, inherited inadequacies, or fatal convergence of forces beyond the
lovers’ control.
From a synoptic angle, it was the old bondsman’s struggle for recognition by the
aristocratic lord, as Hegel described it.. The ilustrado class (epitomized by T. Pardo de
Tavera and Pedro Paterno) sought modernization via assimilation to the U.S. nation;
they spoke English and joined the bureaucracy. But given the power of feudal oligarchic
instutions and practices that the US colonial regime utilized to control the dissident
population, the democratic ideals purportedly legitimizing it proved ironically discordant.
This created the space for a limited public sphere in which the intellectuals close to the
productive majority can articulate their collective passions by positing an antagonistic
image of the Filipino identity. The utopian promise of independence was translated into
a pretext for crisis that manifested in public discourse. Questions were posed: why and
how can Quezon, Osmena or Roxas speak for the exploited, impoverished nation when
they represent particularistic landlord-comprador interests? Which class can truly
represent the productive populace as “the Filipino nation”?
8
Bardic Interventions
It was only during the administration of Francis Burton Harrison and his
Filipinization of the bureaucracy that the function of articulating the popular content of
nationalism passed on to Quezon and the Nacionalista Party. In the fight against
Leonard Wood, the famous scourge of the Moros, Quezon seized the opportunity of
symbolizing the struggle for independence.
Mark Twain’s satiric anti-imperialist blast, “To A Person Sitting in Darkness,” was
unknown throughout the first two decades. But the Genteel Age was ending. Filipinos
had become aware of works by John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman,
Richard Wright, Thomas Mann, among others (Lopez 1976,9). The establishment of the
Philippine Writers League in 1939, twelve years after the 1927 founding of the Writers
Club at the University of the Philippines which fostered the school of “art for art’s sake”
led by Jose Garcia Villa, marked the convergence of the nationalist and the popular
tendencies in the discursive arena. Salvador P. Lopez’s award-winning collection of
essays, Llterature and Society (1940). may be considered the model of the praxis of the
dialectical synthesis of the national-popular posited by Gramsci for societies in
10
transition. Between the death of the old feudal system and the aborted birth of
capitalism, we encounter morbid cultural symptoms of the passage. The manifesto of
the League envisioned writers as “workers in the building up of culture” whose values
reject “economic injustice and political oppression”; they are urged to organize to benefit
the community (Lopez 1940, 117-18). Several members, prominent of whom was
Manuel Arguilla, sacrificed their lives fighting Japanese aggression.
In his book, Lopez cited the case of Teodoro Kalaw who quickly moved from the
Ivory Tower to the civic arena as editor of El Renacimiento. In the confrontation with
Governor Wood. Kalaw discovered that “the only true basis of lasting beauty in literature
is—power,” by which Lopez means the ”power” to speak the truth on behalf of improving
man’s condition and the defense of human freedom everywhere (2004, 297, 303).
Contrary to Herbert Schneider’s notion that the Filipino writers succeeded in capturing
“the Malayan Spirit” (1967, 587) under the twin guidance of Villa’s craftminded teaching
and Lopez’s warning against propaganda, we can argue that the nation projected by
both writers in English (such as Arguilla and Rotor) and in the vernacular reflected the
urgent demands of the peasantry and working class that constituted the nation from the
founding of the Socialist Party by Pedro Abad Santos in 1929 and the Communist Party
of the Philippines in 1930 (a year after which it was outlawed and its officers jailed). In
any case, the “Malayan Spirit” found its incarnation in a poignant story of Narciso
Reyes, “Tinubuang Lupa,” published on the eve of World War II: mourning a dead
relative, the young protagonist listens to his grandfather’s recollection of his father’s
courtship days, memory fusing with anxiety and dreams, instilling in him a profound
cathexis of love for the ancestral home, a sense of national belonging (Reyes 1954,
148).
Before the outbreak of World War II, the struggle for hegemony of the national-
popular concept began to engage with the problem of emancipating the “productive
forces” in the countryside. The peasantry constituted the largest mass base of the
nationalist struggle before and after the inauguration of the Commonwealth, a
transitional period before the grant of formal independence in 1946. With the
Communist Party suppressed and union activism controlled, intellectuals were forced to
pay attention to the public sphere and reconstruct the strategy of the united front of
peasant-workers. The mediation of organic intellectuals became the necessary agency
to effect the catharsis of the economic nexus to the political realm. This was carried out
in Carlos Bulosan’s stories and essays between 1933 and 1940 (San Juan 2009), in
stories by Hernando Ocampo and Brigido Batungbakal, among others(Lumbera 1982,
116).
significance did Ramos’ poetic praxis hold for understanding the possibilities and limits
of artistic intervention in radically transforming colonial society at that specific
conjuncture?
The stage was set for the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth on Nov.
15, 1935. It is now public knowledge that the Tydings-McDuffie Law sealed the abject
dependent nature of the country as source of raw materials and dumping ground for
finished, industrial goods. With the economy and state apparatus (legal system, foreign
affairs, military, currency) controlled by the corporate interests in Washington, the
groundwork was set for stabilizing a neocolony. An oppositional movement was needed
to expose the Commonwealth fraud. Conceived by Ramos, the Sakdal party had been
campaigning against maldistribution of wealth, excessive taxes, and for the confiscation
of large landholdings for redistribution to the landless. Luis Taruc, the leading figure of
the Huk rebellion in the forties and fifties, connected that historical specificity (land
hungry peasantry) and the global actuality of that time in his memoir, Born of the
People:
It had been that way under the Spanish regime for centuries. When the
Americans came, they made boasts about having brought democracy to the
Philippines but the feudal agrarian system was preserved intact.
On the haciendas there were laborers who were paid less than ten
centavos a day. Thousands more earned less than twice that much. From ten
thousand miles away the Spreckles sugar interests in California reached into the
sugar centrals of Pampanga and took their fortune from the sweat of Filipino
labor. (de la Costa 1965, 268).
Ramos’ mobilizing organ was the weekly newspaper Sakdal, using Tagalog as
the medium of communication. It began as a vehicle of Ramos’ criticism of the Quezon
regime as composed of lackeys of American imperialism, the landlord-comprador bloc,
the Church hierarchy, and the Philippine Constabulary whose brutal treatment of
peasants sparked violent resistance. The self-righteous Stanley Karnow echoes the
Establishment dismissal of the rebel: “Filipinos thrive on abusive polemics, and Ramos’
vitriolic genius made him an instant celebrity” (1989, 273). Other groups like the
Tanggulan, a patriotic secret society founded by writer Patricio Dionisio, a former
member of the Communist-led Congreso Obrero, voiced their grievances in Sakdal,
making it a national-popular tribune of the disenfranchised masses.
In effect, the Sakdal movement replaced the official political parties as the
articulator of mass sentiments and aspirations, the grassroot “structure of feeling.” The
Sakdal program targetted the educational system glorifying American culture, the
American military bases, and the U.S. stranglehold on the economy. Their leaders
advocated “complete and absolute independence” by December 1936. In the 1934
election, several Sakdal party’s parliamentary strategy proved effective in electing three
representatives, a provincial governor and several municipal posts in provinces adjacent
to the metropoitan center of power. Ignored by Quezon and the oligarchic clique, the
12
A few days before the plebiscite on the Constitution designed to legitimize the
Commonwealth, the peasantry staged a bloody uprising on May 2, 1935 involving at
least sixty thousand armed partisans in nineteen towns. Earlier their peaceful
demonstrations were harassed and permits for assemblies revoked. In the three towns
where the rebellion centered, fifty-seven peasants were killed, hundreds wounded, and
over five hundred jailed (Agoncillo 1970, 418). Ramos was then in Japan, negotiating
for support; eventually he was extradited and jailed. His admiration for the Japanese
ethos and achievement failed to be critical of the reactionary, racist patriotism of its
leaders then gearing up for brutal imperial conquest of his homeland (see Moore 1966).
Unacknowledged Legislator?
Earlier we noted how the orator-poet Jose Corazon de Jesus was fired from his
job for criticizing an American teacher, Miss Brummit, for insulting Filiinos. Ramos joined
his fellow writer and lambasted Quezon’s shameless public subservience to the
American colonizers, for which he was immediately fired. Ten days after, Ramos set up
13
the periodical Sakdal, followed by the founding of the Sakdalista political party in
October 1933. Language became again, as in the first decade, the crucial arena of
ethical and ideological struggle. Given the fact that “all poetry is in origin a social act, in
which poet and people commune” (Thomson 1946, 58), Ramos’ use of the vernacular—
essentially magical and emotive—was a wager of affirming the communicative praxis of
his art. His verses reflect constellations of feeling directed and controlled by the social
ego, by necessities of his particular time and place, in order not only to interpret but to
change the entire social order (Caudwell 19370.
From his youth, Ramos depended on his audience for realizing the value of his
declamatory talent. Without the crowd of listeners and their responses, he is not an
artist; with them he became poeta revolucionario (Almario 1984, 17). He forfeited the
individualist hubris of Villa and chose the task of actualizing the popular virtues inherent
in the tradition of revolutionary Tagalog writing. Under the aegis of winning hegemony
for the plebeian citizenry, “popular” art means (in Brecht’s aphoristic lexicon) “intelligible
to the broad masses, taking over their own forms of expression and enriching them/
adopting and consolidating their standpoint / representing the most progressive section
of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership: thus intelligible to other
sections too / linking with tradition and carrying it further / handing on the achievements
of the section of the people that is struggling for the lead” (1975, 423). I quote Ramos
”Filipinas” composed in the transitional years 1929-30 before he was expelled from the
colonial bureaucracy and committed himself to the redemption of its victims:
Unlike the typical didactic and moralizing poems that were commodified in the
mass periodicals, Ramos’ poem departs by ascribing this lament of sorrows to the
maternal figure of the nation. This follows a long allegorical tradition from Hermenegildo
Flores’ “Hibik ng Filipinas sa Ynang Espana” (Ileto 1998, 11) to “Joselynang Baliwag”
and Bonifacio’s “Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa” (Maceda 1995, 209-212). The imagistic
cluster of pollution, abandonment, mourning, and dispossession suggests a miserable
predicament that cries for urgent remedy, so antithetical to the utopian pastorals of
Fernando Amorsolo and his counterparts in literature (see examples in Abueg 1973).
The tone is simultaneously elegiac and hortatory. Not only does the poem advance the
popular tradition, enriching and transmitting to the next generation the standpoint of the
masses, but it also challenges the “children” to assume leadership. The mother’s
exhortation to reclaim the stolen homeland and to stop enduring such privations
invokes Rizal, the national icon and martyr.
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