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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 responsibility for the shape of things to come.
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 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 that 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 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. General ideas of autonomy and group integrity coalesced
with unique language and customs to produce the nation/nationality and the
multifaceted philosophies of nationalism.
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). We need to historicize any specific
phenomenon or event to integrate form and content in an intelligible synthesis. 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 Hobsbawm’s (1994) phrase, an “invented tradition”? Or was the
SAN JUAN 3
Filipino “nation” a process of active genesis with plural components, not ethnic purity, as
the active catalyzer for the national-popular patria?
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 as a vehicle for reformist agitation. Using Spanish to communicate to their
colonizers, 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
assemblage.
SAN JUAN 4
Andres Bonifacio was one of the original members of the Liga. With the Liga
proscribed, Bonifacio and his former associates in the Liga 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 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 its members to
undercut the exorbitant fees of the Church. It demonstrated the dialectic of universal
ideals and concrete local 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 plebeian-popular matrix. It was
national in ascribing to the subjugated Indios, the indigenes, 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
dapat na lumitaw ang liwanag ng katotohanan, panahon na dapat nating ipakilala na
tayo’y may sariling pagdaramdam, may puri, may hiya at pagdadamayan….Kaya o mga
kababayan! ating idilat ang bulag na kaisipan at kusang igugol sa kagalingan ang ating
lakas sa tunay at lubos na pag-asa na mag tagumpay sa nilalayong kaguinhawahan ng
bayang tinubuan” (Agoncillo 1963, 69). Productive work defines honor, self-respect,
sensibility. Truth inheres in communal sharing. From this perspective, one can infer that
the nation being formed will be rooted in the dynamic relations of oppressed, toiling
subjects who have become conscious of their collective plight and, in forging solidarity
through actions, begun to to fashion a liberated future.
SAN JUAN 5
The failure of the 1896 revolution sharpened the social division of labor, with the
US occupation destroying the productive linkages of family, village and other
institutional affiliations. The imposition of English competency as a prerequisite to
careers in government and business divided the populace; disciplinary regimes installed
in schools, hospitals, civil service, trained Filipinos to think individualistically in a
competitive environment. Peasants released from debt peonage became “free” wage
laborers thrown into an anomic urban space where the market fragmented their
psyches. The crisis of the old communal mores and primordial affinities widened the
division between city and countryside. Defeated and repressed, 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). Pedro Gatmaitan’s poem “Pinaglahuan” illustrates this
pedagogical-ethical diagnosis of the fragmentation of the collective psyche (Lumbera
and Lumbera 1982, 204-205). As shown in the practice of writers such as Lope K.
Santos, Jose Corazon de Jesus, Benigno Ramos and others, the revolutionary
intelligentsia’s 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 national identity
(Saulo 1990; San Juan 2015).
SAN JUAN 6
Reyes was a political realist, not a doctrinaire syndicalist wedded to devoting his
energies solely to trade-union work. Consequently, he participated in electoral-
parliamentary struggles in the first two decades of American rule. While his belief in the
SAN JUAN 7
Vernacular Speech-Acts
It was in this milieu that the first consistent articulation of class hopes and
nationalist sentiments found symbolic prefiguration in Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat
(1906). Rendered through allegorical manipulation of typical characters, the novel
focused on the antagonism between capital and labor, with the ideal of national
autonomy sublimated in the menace of repressive police action and compatriot’s
treacheries. Unlike Reyes or the ilustrado elite such as Maximo Kalaw, Rafael Palma, or
Claro Recto, Santos was a plebeian soldier in the revolutionary army. 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). Santos did not succumb to sectarian “workerism” (unlike the US-
tutored communists who marginalized peasants and privileged factory workers) 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 liberal utilitarian reforms
with Proudhonian socialism?
Traditionally, the novel form in the West often dramatized the individualist quest
for a lost 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 contours of 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 figural realism found in Rizal’s inflammatory
Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
The year 1907 when Pinaglahuan was published 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 didactic
narrative. Three thousand copies of the novel were sold within the first few weeks—a
sign of popular acclaim for a dangerously provocative polemic for American censors
(Saulo 1990, 7). These two novels by Santos and Aguilar deployed the conventional
romantic plot of frustrated love as a symptomatic testimony of how the 1896 revolution
(the motherland figures as adored paramour-cum-mother) was lost due to betrayal,
inherited inadequacies, or fatal convergence of forces beyond the lovers’ control. The
theme evokes the allegory of Balagtas’ Florante at Laura as well as the misfortune of
Crisostomo Ibarra and Maria Clara in Noli Me Tangere.
massacre of Moros occurred in the battle of Bud Bagsak, Jolo, where 600 men, women
and children were slaughtered by troops commanded by Gen. Leonard Wood (Tan
2002, 176}. Such non-Christian victims were not yet fully accounted for in the maturing
conscience of nationalists who, today, assume the role of colonizers for the reactionary
optic of historians Stanley Karnow and Glenn May.
We already remarked that workers in Manila in the first two decades of American
rule were clamoring for Philippine independence, perhaps not having yet heard that the
“working men have no nation,” as the Communist Manifesto proclaimed (Kiernan 1983,
344). But the natives were not all industrial workers then; the proletariat was a minority.
Nonetheless they all inhabited a place and time that determined their identities whose
physiognomy was actualized in the manifold contradictions of sociopolitical forces that
shaped the rhythm and texture of their everyday lives. As always, time-space
coordinates need to be mapped and understood. The fulfillment of the human-species’
potential can only be realized in a historically specific locus, in a concretely determinate
time-space axis where freedom and necessity, naturalism and humanism, converge—a
partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be
born” (Smith 1979, 125).
From a synoptic angle, the struggle for national emancipation is a larger version
of 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
advocated assimilation—a parody of the creole assimilationists. But given the power of
feudal tributary institutions and practices that the US colonial regime utilized to control
the dissident population, the democratic ideals purportedly legitimizing it proved
ironically discordant. The oligarchic literati swallowed the two-party system managed by
a centralized American bureaucracy, implementing compadre ethics (kinship and
regional affiliations) and client-patronage expediency. For politicians such as Manuel
Quezon, Sergio Osmena, Manuel Roxas and others, Teresita del Rosario-Hanrath
notes, “the question of independence became a question of timing rather than a moral
stance against the encroachment of an imperialist power,” so that their avowed
nationalism became “passive and conciliatory” (1988, 46). This is insightfully
SAN JUAN 10
The crisis began even before Aguinaldo surrendered to General Funston. When
the capitulationist ilustrado clique defected to the U.S. hegemon, a significant group of
intransigent intellectuals, represented by Apolinario Mabini (1969), remained faithful to
the principles of the Katipunan. They articulated in vernacular the cause of the peasant-
worker alliance kept alive up to Sakay’s capture in 1907. The Moros continued their
resistance up to 1913. As noted earlier, playwrights such as Tolentino, Abad and others
resorted to allegorical modes using Tagalog for wider appeal, defying the Sedition Law
of 1901 prohibiting “scurrilous libels against the Government of the United States.”
Though persecuted and ostracized, they conducted underground agitprop maneuvers.
Periodicals like the Spanish El Renacimiento and the Tagalog Muling Pagsilang
opposed colonial impositions such as the use of English as an “ideological state
apparatus” (Althusser 1971). In 1908, El Renacimiento published a scathing attack on
Dean Worcester, then Secretary of the Interior, for using his office to enrich himself (see
the famous editorial, “Aves de Rapina” (see English translation in Reyes [1983]).
Charged for libel, Teodoro Kalaw, editor, and Martin Ocampo, the publisher, were
sentenced to a jail term and fined (Agoncillo and Guerrero 1970, 298-300; Kramer 2006,
342-44).
SAN JUAN 11
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. Read symptomatically, the intramural
“Cabinet Crisis” 0f 1923-27 staged a battle for moral ascendancy. Quezon lost but
gained moral high ground when he asserted: “I would rather have a government run like
hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans” (Agoncillo 1974, 31).
But this rhetoric did not alleviate the worsening plight of the peasant majority severely
exploited by rapacious landlords This diehard caciquism originated from the inquitous
land-tenure system that the American administators preserved, thus keeping the
economy underdeveloped and their oligarchic parasites in power (Labor Research
Association 1958; Pomeroy 1970). Various quasi-religious, millenarian uprisings
occurred throughout the islands, the most serious of which were led by Ruperto Rios
(Tayabas), Felipe Salvador (Central Luzon), Dionisio Magbuelas or Papa Isio (Negros),
the Pulajanes in Leyte, the Colorums during the 1920s, followed by the Tangulan
movement, the Tayug Colorum, “banditry” ascribed to Teodoro Asedillo and Nicolas
Encallado (both members of the communist front Congreo Obrero/Kapisanan ng Anak-
Pawis); and the Sakdalista rebellion in the thirties (Constantino 1975, 270-74, 364-67;
Veneracion 1987).
Bardic Intervention
classes to protest Miss Mabel Brummit’s racist behavior. This was a repeat of the
desecration of the Filipino flag by another American teacher in March 1921, an occasion
that de Jesus seized on to attack imperial arrogance: “Bago ka magturo, /dapat mong
makuro, / na bawat bandila ay mahal sa puso / ng bumabandilang sa lupa ko tubo,/
Kung ang isipan ninyo’y baluktot at liko, / dapat kang itapon sa banging malayo./Ikaw’y
isang guro / na salat sa turo” (Atienza 1995, 194).
The romantic poet-orator’s charisma revealed its political edge again. Nine years
after this incident, de Jesus felt compelled to intervene again. He asserted national
pride by defending the students who were expelled: “Kung ang ituturo natin naman
dito. / panay na pagyuko sa Wika ng amo, / panay na sumision at lambot ng ulo, / ay
gagawa kayo ng lupaing hilo” (quoted in Almario 1984, 35). This form of polemical
engagement via “secondary orality” (Ong 1977), witnessed in de Jesus’s intervention,
evokes an aura of authority that surrounds the letrado as a populist tribune found in
Latin America. The Philippines shares a similar tradition in which the practice of the
spoken word “conjures together the presence of the communal and the sacred”
(Beverley and Zimmerman 1990, 16), the unlettered voice of the people finding
resonance in a village-oriented discourse opposed to the official print culture of the
English-speaking urbanites. By the end of the thirties, however, the writers using
English (Manuel Arguilla, Arturo Rotor, R. Zulueta da Costa) had become politicized by
circumstances following the insurgencies in the countryside, the post-1929 Wall Street
crash, and victorious fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as in militarized
Japan. It would be instructive to examine some testimonies of this politicization in
relation to the Philippine Writers League and the Sakdalista uprising.
socially conscious artists encouraged to be “the interpreter of the hope and despair, the
freedom and predicament, the tradition and destiny of man in his time” (Lopez’s words
cited in Ordonez 2010, 29). No mention of predatory US colonialism or capitalist greed
is found in the League’s founding documents.
In his book, Lopez cited the case of 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 Schneider’s notion that the Filipino writers succeeded in capturing “the
Malayan Spirit” (1967, 587) under the twin guidance of Villa’s craft-minded teaching and
Lopez’s warning against propaganda, we can argue that the nation projected by writers
in English (Arguilla, Lansang, Bulosan, Laya) and in the vernacular (Deogracia Rosario,
Brigido Batungbakal) reflected the urgent demands of the peasantry and working class,
the constituent powers of the nation attested to by the historic merger of the Socialist
Party led by Pedro Abad Santos and the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1930 (a
year after which it was outlawed and its officers jailed).
Conscienticizing Fables
In any case, what James Joyce called “the uncreated conscience of the race”
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). We could investigate as pedagogical exempla
the texts of Deogracias Rosario’s “Greta Garbo” and “Aloha,” both subtle critiques of
white-racial supremacy; Hernando Ocampo’s “Rice and Bullets,” Arguilla’s “Epilogue to
Revolt,” Juan Laya’s His Native Soil, or Batungbakal’s “Aklasan.” But more instructive
for this occasion is this speculative gloss on Arturo Rotor’s memorable story, “Convict’s
Twilight” found in his 1937 collection The Wound and the Scar.
SAN JUAN 14
Several lessons on the enigma of communication are offered by the pathos of the
ending. Routine noise supervenes. The doctor fails to make contact with Cornelio’s wife,
compensating for this failure by staging a conventional technique of closure, and
making sure we give credit to the naive, somewhat pious hubris of a fictive intelligence.
Nature as healer returns, smoothing frictions and easing tensions, recuperating the
sentimental atmosphere of the beginning of the narrative:
But I could not make out anything….The silence recalled the forest, a great
forest at twilight, the afterglow tinting the tallest trees a dull red, the animals
slinking to their lairs, the wind being arrested in its flight as it passed
through the lattice of leaves. The light failing was consciousness leaving a sick
body, restlessness and strife and pain being replaced by a profound
peace. I seemed to hear the sound of a distant bell tolling, and that and the
silhouette of the woman kneeling naturally brought the thought of angelus:
the woman was praying, the silence itself was a prayer, the darkening
world’s daily invocation at twilight (1971, 381).
SAN JUAN 15
The iconic image is disturbing, not pacifying. Is this an apologia for the colonial State
prison system? Does this mean that the English-speaking Filipino official can no longer
communicate with the victims of the system? Does this imply that the class divisions
have sharpened beyond repair, that a disalienated community seems irrecoverable?
Rotor poses these alternatives. He also may be reminding the elite, the professional
class, of the limits of their technocratic competence, and the systemic obstacles against
moves for solidarity, justice, equality, compassion. Communication needs to be restored
between the intelligentsia and the common people. This implication is not far-fetched.
Rotor himself exhorted his fellow writers to “understand what is social justice, and why
some peasants in Bulacan were caught stealing firewood from a rich landowner’s
preserves” (quoted in Ordonez 2010, 29)
Actually, the peasants were not just engaged in poaching. Before the outbreak of
World War II, the struggle for hegemony of the national-popular bloc 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 as provided by the Tydings-McDuffie Act. With the Communist
Party suppressed and union activism curtailed, intellectuals were forced to pay attention
to public exchanges across property lines. They were urged to 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 into political praxis.
This was carried out in Carlos Bulosan’s stories and essays between 1933 and 1940
(San Juan 2009), in works by Teodoro Agoncillo, Amado Hernandez, Benigno Ramos,
among others (Lumbera 1982; 1998).
The stage was set for the inauguration of the transitional nation called “Philippine
Commonwealth” on Nov. 15, 1935. The jockeying politicians (Quezon versus Osmena)
took center-stage, not the people. It is now the consensus that the Tydings-McDuffie Act
sealed the abject dependency of the country as a source of raw materials and a
dumping ground for finished, industrial goods. With the economy and state apparatus
(court system, foreign affairs, military, currency) controlled by the corporate interests in
Washington, the groundwork was set for stabilizing a neocolony (Pomeroy 1970). The
elite managers had been tested within the two-party patronage mechanism. Except for
those owned by Americans, the Manila newspapers and its corps of journalists and
publicists were all administered by the wealthy Madrigal or Roces families; they served
either Quezon or the temporary opposition, as recalled by Hernando Abaya in his
memoir of the thirties (1984, 32-47).
For various reasons, the urban intelligentsia followed Quezon and the
pensionado gateway to success. But neither Abaya nor Renato Constantino, despite
their pettybourgeois background, succumbed to the betrayal of the nationalist cause as
their elders (for instance, Carlos Romulo) or contemporaries did (for Constantino’s
background, see Ofreneo 2001). US colonial compromises rested on the client-patron
relationship which operated chiefly on force, not persuasion nor extra-economic
compulsion. US colonial “tutelage” relied on the enforcement of rules of property-
ownership and traditional distribution of wealth rather than on equity or proportionate
sharing. This structural-functionalist paradigm of clientelism continues to serve
academic experts and media pundits in explaining the failure of Filipino nationalism,
despite the inescapable historical reality of dependency and socioeconomic inequities
that continue to energize the revolutionary tradition in current popular discourse and
actions (Bauzon 1987; Woddis 1972, 38-40). For further elaboration of this argument,
suffice it for me to recommend Renato Constantino’s “Origin of a Myth” (1970) for its
lucid critique of the fabled American “tutelage” and “special relations” between the
neocolony and the imperial hegemon.
It did not take a long time before an oppositional movement emerged to expose
the Commonwealth fraud: the Sakdalistas. Conceived by the poet-intellectual Benigno
Ramos, the Sakdal party had been campaigning against unequal wealth, excessive
taxes, and for the confiscation of large landholdings for redistribution to the landless.
Luis Taruc, the leading personality of the Huk rebellion in postwar years, spliced that
historical specificity (land hungry peasantry) of the Philippines with the global crisis of
capitalism at 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
SAN JUAN 17
into the sugar centrals of Pampanga and took their fortune from the sweat
of Filipino labor. (cited in de la Costa 1965, 268).
Quezon and his autocratic clique ignored Ramos’ appeal to the landless
peasantry and its allies. A few days before the plebiscite on the Constitution designed to
legitimize the refurbished colonial order, the peasantry staged a bloody uprising on May
2, 1935 involving at least sixty thousand armed partisans in nineteen towns. It spread to
the provinces of Laguna, Rizal, Cavite, Tayabas, Bulacan, and adjacent regions. 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 by the Philippine Constabulary (Agoncillo 1970,
418). The nation-state’s coercive apparatus stifled the constituent power of its citizens.
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). His intelligence did not discriminate over
means or modalities of action, however undemocratic provided the goal of
independence is achieved. In practice Ramos was committed to the mobilizing the
disenfranchised and the outcasts, Fanon’s “wretched of the earth.” Eventually, the
Sakdal leadership’s opportunist stance abandoned its mass base by devoting itself to
the propagation of the Japanese-sponsored program of “Asiatic Monroeism”
SAN JUAN 18
Unacknowledged Legislator?
Ramos’ situation has been replicated many times. Earlier we noted how the
orator-poet Jose Corazon de Jesus was fired from his job for criticizing an American
teacher for insulting Filipinos. 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 the periodical Sakdal, followed by the
founding of the Sakdalista 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 affect-inducing—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
1937). Like an innovator in music, he sought to break the cycle of repeated codes of
communication, construct difference, and perform a simulacrum of the sacrifice that
colonial violence extracted from the natives in order to project a vision of a prosperous
SAN JUAN 19
egalitarian community, albeit in the utopian, prophetic realm of declaimed poetry (for the
semiotic interface of noise and music, see Attali 1985).
From his youth, Ramos needed an audience for realizing the value of his
oratorical talent. Without the crowd of listeners and their responses, he was not an
artist; with them he became poeta revolucionario (Almario 1984, 17). He forfeited the
egocentric hubris of Villa and chose the task of actualizing the dialogic and
carnivalesque virtues sedimented in the tradition of revolutionary Tagalog discourse. He
felt compelled to popularize ideals and principles. 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).
Disseminating and communicating practicable knowledge of society was a prime
objective for the artist. He conceived of himself as an educator. I quote Ramos
”Filipinas” composed in the transitional years 1929-30 before he was expelled from the
clientelist machine and committed himself to the task of partisanship for its victims:
Nasaan ang aking mga iniibig, [Where are the people I love,]
ang mga anak kong may pusong malinis? [my children with pure hearts? ]
Nahan ang panulat na namimilansik [Where is the pen that strikes fire
upang ang kadimla’y mawala sa langit? [ so that darkness may vanish from the
sky}
Nahan ang matapang na mga makatang [Where are the brave poets
tutula ng aking puhunang dalita? [singing of my capital grief?
Nahan ang maraming anak na nanumpang [Where are the children who swore
tutubusin ako sa aking pagluha? [to redeem me in my lamentation?
Kung kahapon ako’y inapi ng Dasal [If I was tortured by Prayer yesterday
ngayon ay lalo pang kaapi-apihan. [now I languish in worse servitude
Namatay ang aking Magiting na Rizal [My valiant Rizal died
at patuloy pa rin ang kanyang kaaway. [His enemies continue to thrive
Ang mga lupa kong kinuha’t ginaga, [My lands were stolen and plundered,
SAN JUAN 20
nahan, o anak ko, nangabalik na ba? [where, my child, have they been
returned
At kung hangga ngayo’y di mo nakukuha [If until now you have regained nothing
ano’t natitiis na ululin ka pa? [how can you tolerate being deceived?
In this poem, the agonistic wager is over the homeland, the habitat, and its re-
possession. Unlike the typical didactic and moralizing poems that were commodified in
the mass periodicals, Ramos’ poem departs from the stereotype by ascribing this
lament 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; on music and nationalism,see Trimillos 1998). 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 and music (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. Noises of violence and mourning
must be subdued or chanelled to a new musical setting.
Undoubtedly the poet cannot be divorced from the activist intellectual. Not even
the eloquent “social justice” slogan of Quezon could distract from the Sakdal’s collective
dream of emancipation, as distilled in Ramos’ poems and as passionately voiced by
Salud Algabre (quoted as epigraph) as she reminisced on her participation in the
rebellion. Ramos’ speech-acts effectively communicated a message of hope to a people
yearning for dignity and self-determination, This is more symptomatic because his
intervention occurs at a conjuncture where the commodification of the slogan of
“independence” seduced the more privileged stratum of the citizenry whose privileged
SAN JUAN 21
idiom (English) detached them from the pain, joy, anguish, and dreams of the majority
of their neighbors, kin, and companions. This condition of subalternity has worsened
today in the neoliberal intensification of commodity-fetishism against which
conscienticized Filipino artists are uniting with cultural activists in other countries, just as
Rizal, Reyes, Ramos, and the members of the Philippine Writers League did in the last
turbulent century. The imperative of forging anew a national-popular vision out of the
ruins and relics of the historical archive deserves priority when we draw up the agenda
for the long delayed, urgent, and ineluctable transformation of our homeland. —##
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