Welcome to Streetprint Manila

Streetprint Manila is a research project that is part of a larger research endeavour called “Six Continents and Between”. Initiated by Prof. Gary Kelly of the University of Alberta, 6CAB seeks to investigate popular print culture across various geographical, sociocultural, and ethnolinguistic contexts. More specifically, it aims to look at reading patterns and preferences of the Filipino Everyman, or those whom we would largely consider members of the “masa” class.

Alternative Canons

The Canon As Elite: The Case of José Rizal’s Novels

What constitute canonical literature in the Philippines are primarily the two seminal novels of the Philippines’ national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal. His Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, 1887) and its sequel El Filibusterismo (Reign of Greed; The Filibustering, 1891) are considered foundational texts in the Philippines for the role and influence they have played in the colonial revolution against Spain. The novels’ protagonist is Crisostomo Ibarra, the son of a wealthy Filipino-Chinese businessman. Having studied in Europe for seven years, he returns to the Philippines only to find out that his father died in prison after incurring the wrath of the corrupt Spanish clergy who wielded the true social and political power at the time. Ibarra heroically tries to fulfill his father’s wish of building a school for all the indios, or uneducated Filipino folk. Ibarra envisions a school where the students will be taught the Spanish language, a privilege that is reserved only for those who are scions of affluent families. Through education and an ability to discourse with their masters, the Ibarras believe that the country’s progress would prove possible. However, the machinations of corrupt friars, led by the villainous Father Damaso, lead to Ibarra’s excommunication and imprisonment.

Escaping from prison and fleeing the country, Ibarra returns thirteen years later in the events of El Filibusterismo as Simoun, a wealthy yet cynical jeweler who insinuates himself into high society and influences the members of the upper class to commit abuses against the masses, with the eventual goal of instigating a revolution among the masses that will topple the status quo. In the final chapters of the book, Simoun’s quest for vengeance is distilled in a plan to commit mass murder against the members of Philippine high society.

The colonial situation during Rizal’s time reinforced the diglossic divide in Philippine language, and is an important factor in the process of literary production and transmission. Being a member of the intellectual and foreign-educated elite called ilustrado, Rizal’s background and political agenda dictated that he write primarily in the colonial language of Spanish with the end of engaging the political center in his discourse. The publication history of Rizal’s novels (Noli in Berlin, Germany; Fili in Ghent, Belgium) and their subsequent translation to the “low” language a full decade after Rizal was executed in Bagumbayan (1896) for subversion indicate that Rizal did not write for the common Filipino but primarily for colonial Spanish government and other educated Filipinos such as himself. In this sense, Rizal’s texts can be seen as being at “variance with [themselves, for they are] assertions of bourgeois nationalism allied to a classical and quasi-aristocratic culture, its standard bearers the Catholic church… and those avatars of creole and Chinese mestizo elite” (Roskies 9). The foundational novel that we consider emblematic of Filipino nationhood and identity, and which is considered the quintessential Philippine text, does not seem to be written for Filipinos at all.

The example of Rizal’s novels highlights how members of the intellectual elite, who have the means to produce works in the high language, often produce works that represent an aspect of the colonial context that is detached from the experience of the greater majority; essentially, as gatekeepers of ideology, they present and re-present a canonical, though not necessarily encompassing, view of the colonial context. Filipino literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera claims that this situation is true even in contemporary times, citing that writers who write in the high language “have been pushed into a position not unlike that of the ilustrado class…. Reading, writing, and thinking in a language that only a small percentage of the population can command, they tend to write for one another…, and for the few readers whom they can reach” (13-14). However, there is an expedient element of necessity in such a representation; those who write texts that are considered literary do so as a matter of preference (it is their context) and necessity (to be read). Ironically, those who read “literature” only read those written in the high language because these are the only texts considered “literary”, perpetuating a complex dilemma of canonical bifurcation. What this shows is that traditional notions of canon and national literatures, especially in the case of postcolonial states, are defined by the exclusive dominance of the elite and fragmentation along sociocultural and politico-economic lines.