Friday, August 18, 2017

Noli Me Tangere

The Latin phrase - it is a complete sentence actually - literally means “Do Not Touch Me”.  It is the title of the first of two novels written by Jose Rizal – Philippine national hero – that helped to spark and sustain the revolution against the 300-year Spanish rule over the 7,000 island archipelago just off the mainland of Southeast Asia.  Tragically, Jose Rizal was tried and found guilty of treason against the Spanish-ruled government.  He was executed by firing squad on December 30, 1896.  If the execution was delayed for just a bit, his story would have taken a different turn. In less than a year and a half, the Spanish American War was declared on April, 1898 and on May 1, just days after, Commodore George Dewey sailed into and entered Manila Bay to engage the Spanish armed forces, or what’s left of it - to a quick capitulation. The Spanish American War was over that summer in July, 1898.  It was a very short war indeed, for which the new American democracy, then relatively still a political infant itself, just barely over a century old, was given the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines – the spoils of an uncontested war. 300 years under Spanish colonial rule versus a mere 50 years as a U.S. territory made for a glaring contrast.  Of lesser importance in the general scheme of things but quite personal to me is that a century after the pivotal event it gave me the ability to write this in English.

Noli Me Tangere

“In the catalogue of human ills there is to be found a cancer so malignant that the least touch inflames it and causes agonizing pains; afflicted with such a cancer, a social cancer, has your dear image appeared to me, when, for my own heart’s ease or to compare you with others, I have sought, in the centers of modern civilization, to call you to mind.  …
To this end, I shall endeavor to show your condition, faithfully and ruthlessly.  I shall lift a corner of the veil which shrouds the disease, sacrificing to the truth everything, even self-love – for, as your son, your defects and weaknesses are also mine.”
 --- Europe, 1886   Jose Rizal

I re-read the novel once more, perhaps for a third or fourth time since high school. It was originally written in Spanish, printed in Berlin, at Rizal’s personal expense, and distributed mainly in Manila in mid- 1860’s.  It had since been translated into other languages, including Tagalog, but as luck would have it from what I already described from three paragraphs above, I was able to read it in English. The story, obviously, has not changed, but my perspective had and I view it differently now.  What is hard to believe is that its relevance is, to me, even more valid if not terribly more pressing, not just for the Philippines but for every country that is in dire strait presently. It is more so for countries that had in their past a prolonged subjugation of their people by a foreign entity, for far too long.

Jose Rizal, if I were to surmise, used “Noli Me Tangere”, as a plea by a nation, by a people, begging not to be touched  because it was suffering from a cancer that was metastasizing, thus much too painful to the touch.  It was a social cancer, a political malady, a moral disease that was gnawing at the very cultural fabric of a people under stress and too sick to even realize it was gravely ill. Juxtapose that analogy around the world today and we see that in places like Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras and Cambodia, and every place where hidden beneath a frail façade, under a semblance of order, where a functioning government or society seems to function well with a calm exterior, there is a cancer from within.

As in the actual physiological form of cancer, the national maladies come in various virulent forms. Similarly, there is no vaccine for it and the task to fight it is not short of total excision. It is also very difficult to detect.

We see these warnings uttered over a century ago, albeit from an obscure writer from an obscure land.  The examples are as varied as the carriers of virulence come in many forms.  Just recently, America had been gripped by a condition that if we are not careful could metastasize into something horribly deadly.  If slavery was a cancer, the civil war was a raging battle to excise it and the country had begun to heal beginning at the turn of and through the mid-20th century, that went into remission. For a while there, perhaps out of a hopeful longing, most of the nation see only the scabs of many wounds all over the country. Then perhaps the scabs had plateaued and only slightly noticeable.  Events of late, particularly in Charlottesville, VA, some sectors of our society succeeded in picking at the scabs.  The scales are beginning to unravel and it is seen to bleed.  The blood will divide the nation which will carry with it errant cancer cells that can spread once more. There does not seem to be any agreement in how to stop the bleeding, even as everyone seems to agree that re-opening the wounds will only cause pain, and there is no predicting what salve will work, let alone if there is any willingness from all sides to offer relief.  Again, if we are not too careful, the scabs will re-open wounds once more and we may find the cancer too painful to the touch.  Then, we will all be begging, “Noli Me Tangere”, as Jose Rizal once said.




The Spanish-American War had a handful of profound turning points for the Filipino people, not the least of which was the unshackling of three-hundred years of bondage, the dramatic improvement in education, the sudden surge in literacy, and exposure to modern knowledge. BUT, it was clear, as had also happened elsewhere, the people went from one colonizer to the next.  Granted, relatively speaking, the natives were now handled with softer gloves but they were virtually a colony once more, though legally a U.S. “territory”. Places like Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, even Hawaii, were protected territorial entities as well.  History books are vague about whether the Philippine Islands were a U.S. Colony until its independence on July 4, 1946. Let us set that aside because prior to all of those events, stormier ones preceded the history before 1898, three to four centuries earlier.

This is not a knock on the countries today that were involved in the colonization of half of the world then (between 1400-1500) but we must mention them by name as part of the historical record, adding quickly that today’s population are not the same ones then; in fact, we are addressing entirely different governments responsible for the colonies 3-4 centuries ago.  But we will be remiss not to identify, for lack of a better word, “the common denominator”.

The Philippines, from one side of the globe, had one thing in common with countries halfway from the other side.  The maladies they suffered, the subjugation of the native peoples, the superficial progress and their present day symptoms of trouble, can be traced to the colonization by Spain and Portugal of all of South America and the Caribbean and of course The Philippines. Then the French, the Belgian, the Dutch and British colonies made up the rest, covering the other parts of Asia and Africa.  Some countries fared better than others, post-colonial period, and historians and political scientists will agree or disagree with the how and why but the fact of the matter is the one nagging question: How come colonized countries had always suffered from stunted growth – economically and politically? If we run our fingers on the globe, starting from Mexico, southerly to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, all the way to Venezuela, Brazil and Chile, then from Algeria to Libya, Chad, Sudan to the Congo to South Africa, we see a pattern of free people that have a hard time governing themselves after their independence. If dictatorship or flawed elections, coups and violent turnover of government power were not the method, corruption was and still is the primer beneath the exterior paint that outwardly shows a people deeply reliant on a confused culture, a devotion to religion, but an unparalleled compliancy.

These colonized people were not properly prepared by a rushing exit of the colonizers.  Often the exits were forced by revolution combined with a weakened resolve by the colonizers either out of guilt or by its own internal upheavals at home.

BUT, we should set that all aside.  It is part of history. We learn from it and not repeat it. Looking back at the past does not move any nation one foot forward towards a better future. The social, economic and political cancer does not go away completely. Instead it only goes into remission. It stays hidden within the folds of human nature.  It calls for an even stronger resolve because cancer cells now can cross oceans and over connected lands.  A cancer cell hunts and destroys the good cells in order to perpetuate itself, to flourish and reproduce. If we allow ourselves to be willing hosts and be the welcoming recipients with our complacency, political correctness, unabashed but divisive political beliefs, and the unwillingness to recognize the symptoms, then we will split ourselves while the cancer keeps subdividing to make more malignant cells.  If we allow that, then soon we are only setting ourselves up to scream, “Noli me Tangere”.

{Post note: Noli Me Tangere is a downloadable PDF in various translations. I read the one translated by Leon Maria Guerrero who, as a Filipino himself, did a fine job of converting the original Spanish into words relatable to every Filipino citizen today. The other translations were all superbly done as well.}

  

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