IT'S XIAOTIME!

The Manila Times, Walking History Column

March 17, 2018

MICHAEL “XIAO” CHUA

WHEN I was young, I found my mother’s old copy of a book entitled The Social Cancer. When I opened it, I was surprised that it was actually an English translation of José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere by Charles Derbyshire, published in 1912. It used to be a very popular translation until perhaps the more modern rendering by María Soledad Lacson-Locsin published by Bookmark in the year of the centenary of Rizal’s martyrdom, 1996.

I often wondered why Derbyshire translated the title that way rather than using the actual Latin name of the novel which meant “Touch Me Not.” Noli Me Tangere, in ecclesiastical Latin, should be pronounced as “noli me tan-je-re.”

Rizal actually explained himself where he got the title in a letter to Félix Resurrección Hidalgo dated March 1887:

“Noli me tángere, words taken from the Gospel of St. Luke, means: do not touch me at all. The book therefore contains things that no one in our land has ever until the present time spoken of because they are so delicate that they did not consent at all to being touched by anyone. I myself have tried to do what no one has wanted to. I felt obliged to answer the calumnies that have been heaped over us and our country for centuries: I’ve described our social situation, our lives, our beliefs, our hopes, our desires, our grievances, our sorrows.”

As Ambeth Ocampo said, it doesn’t mean Rizal was always right. Everyone makes mistakes. The quote is actually from John 20:17.

And given Rizal’s explanation, it still not easy to connect the dots and make sense of it all. What was Rizal referring to that should not be touched? Until one reads Rizal dedication, which is often neglected when one discusses the novel. This dedication is most important because it clearly identifies to the readers—namely “A mi Patria,” “To my Mother Country” (ironically, the novel is written in Spanish, a language not understood by many of his countrymen in the Philippines. Was he talking about Mother Spain? His actual target audience were the Spaniards whom he was pleading to reform Filipinas, but maybe he was really thinking of the Filipino People)—that the “delicate things,” “calumnies,” were the CANCER of society. That is what Derbyshire was referring to in the title of his translation:

“Recorded in the history of human suffering are cancers of such malignant character that even minor contact aggravates them, engendering overwhelming pain…. Therefore, because I desire your good health… I will do with you what the ancients did with their infirmed: they placed them on the steps of their temples so that each in his own way could invoke a divinity that might offer a cure.” (Translated by Harold Augenbraum)

A few years back, someone told me that the phrase “Noli Me Tangere” itself is actually a name of a kind of cancer which when treated, will only get worse. When I said this to a bunch of arrogant Spanish tourists while I was touring them at the Rizal Shrine in Fort Santiago, one of the ladies said she was a cancer doctor and that there was no such thing.

Then I searched some old medical books and found that “Noli Me Tangere” is indeed a skin cancer called lupus erythematosus (The Medical Examiner, Volume 3, p. 86;The Medical Museum Or A Repository of Cases, Experiments, Researches and Discoveries, p. 491;A practical treatise on the diseases of the eyelids, p. 137.)

So, there you go, the English title “The Social Cancer” is actually clearer than “Touch Me Not.” Because Rizal, the medical student, knew that the ills he exposed on the steps of the temple that he wanted to cure would just explode. Rizal hoped that when it did, Spain would finally listen and offer reforms. But the opposite happened. Once the cancer was exposed, revolution was inevitable.

One thing is for sure, in writing about the social cancer, Rizal emphasized the common misfortunes of people in the archipelago. It was not only, as Penguin Classics cited, the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance against European colonialism. According to Setsuho Ikehata, and even Benedict Anderson, this helped Indios to realize they had a common misfortune. They may not have read the novel themselves, but those who did told others about Padre Salvi, Padre Damaso, Doña Victorina, Sisa, and others, gossiped about it and thought Rizal was such a great and brave guy writing about these.

With the Noli Me Tangere, Rizal helped to create us as a nation, and that we should all have the courage to stand for it.

Some people say that Rizal is obsolete. How I wish. But have we really recovered from the social cancer that Rizal was writing about more than a hundred years ago?

The Manila Times, Walking History Column
April 28, 2018
MICHAEL “XIAO” CHUA

JOSÉ Rizal wrote the Noli Me Tangere for the benefit of the indios. But it was not meant for indios to read. The mere fact that he wrote it in the Spanish language and not Tagalog tells us that he had a different audience in mind: The Spaniards and their government, so that they could grant the necessary reforms to the indios, which included representation, the granting of equal rights and the distinction of being a province.

But if Rizal was exposing the ills of Spanish colonialism in the Noli Me Tangere, then why did he want Filipinos to actually become part of Spain?

The German political scientist Manuel Sarkisyanz, the author of Rizal and Republican Spain, said that there were actually two Spains during Rizal’s time. The Spain in the Philippines, ruled by frailocracy and backwardness, and the real Spain which was ruled by republicanism and liberalism. Rizal and his contemporaries in the Propaganda Movement, who lived in Europe, apparently liked and fell in love with the idea of bringing liberal Spain to the Philippines.

According to early Rizal biographer, the American Austin Craig: “Early in his stay in Madrid, Rizal had come across a secondhand copy, in two volumes, of a French novel, which he bought to improve his knowledge of that language. It was Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew, that work which transformed the France of the 19th century. The book, he writes in his diary, “affected him powerfully, not to tears, but with a tremendous sympathy for the unfortunates that made him willing to risk everything in their behalf. It seemed to him that such a presentation of Philippine conditions would certainly arouse Spain, but his modesty forbade his saying that he was going to write a book like the French masterpiece.”

Some write-ups point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which exposed the inhumanity of slavery and which was credited with having fueled the American Civil War—as Rizal’s inspiration for the Noli Me Tangere. It was more likely the Wandering Jew, which Andres Bonifacio had also reportedly read.

Some argue that what the propagandists tried to achieve with satire is how the so-called “fake news” works today for propaganda purposes. Although I should stress that the Noli was presented as a representation of truth and not the truth, whereas disinformation is presented as reality and news. It was fictionalized history. He heard real stories and put them together in characters, caricaturing them for effect. Padre Salvi and Padre Damaso, for example, reflected the arrogance, cruelty and backwardness of the colonial system.

But some have suggested that in his portrayal of women, Rizal was a misogynist. All his women characters were undesirable: Doña Consolacion was cruel, Doña Victorina epitomized colonial mentality, Sisa was too weak she became mad, and what people think as the symbol of the Philippines and the Filipino woman, Maria Clara, was actually a weak and treacherous woman, who did not fight for her love and gave away to Padre Salvi her lover Crisostomo Ibarra’s letters to her, which were used to implicate him in a revolt. Incidentally, the only strong woman in the Noli, Elias’ lover Salome, was taken out of the novel for the sake of cost-cutting.

But this is an unfair assessment of Rizal. Could it be that even if Rizal was not writing for Filipinos per se, he was not just exposing the ills of colonialism but also giving a necessary wake-up call for Filipinos to change their bad attitude. According to Austin Craig, “…the book had now become less an effort to arouse the Spanish sense of justice than a means of education for Filipinos by pointing out their shortcomings. …misgovernment may be due quite as much to the hypocrisy, servility and undeserving character of the people as it is to the corruption, tyranny and cruelty of the rulers.”

According to Gen. José Alejandrino, in his memoir The Price of Freedom, Rizal told him that he regretted killing Elias in his novel. Ibarra, who continued on to become Simoun in the second novel, eventually failed in his plans to overthrow the Spaniards because he was “an egoist who only decided to provoke the rebellion when he was hurt in his interests, his person, his loves and all other things he held sacred.” According to Rizal, Elias should have led the revolution because he was a “noble character, patriotic, self-denying and disinterested— necessary qualities of a man who leads a revolution.”

So Noli Me Tangere was less a condemnation of our colonial masters than a warning to us Filipinos. It is also about our faults and weaknesses. We read it not just for history, but read it with the fresh eyes of the present. For Rizal once noted, “The slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow.” We should ask, how much of the social cancer still exists in our very soul today?