Chapter 2

Literature Under Spanish Colonialism

(1965-1897)
When Spain established her first permanent settlement in the Philippines in 1565, she imposed
on the Filipino people the Spanish monarchy and the Roman Catholic religion, and along with
the two came all the feudal institutions that represented European civilization as far as the new
colony was concerned. In the centuries to come, a distinction would be made between those
Filipinos who settled where they were within easy reach of the power of the church and state in
pueblos (taga-bayan), and those who kept their distance from the colonial administrators and
their native agents, staying close to the sources of their livelihood in the mountains or hinterlands
(taga-bukid, taga-bundok). The distinction went beyond indicating mere geographic origins and
took on overtones of cultural snobbery as the effect of colonization seeped deeper into the
consciousness of lowland Filipinos. In time taga-bayan came to be a flattering term for the
Hispanized and therefore, “urbane and civilized” Filipino, while taga-bukid/taga-bundok was to
mock the indio (native) who had not learned the way of the colonial master and, therefore among
the brutos salvages (savage brutes). In this way did the non-Christian Filipinos come to be
regarded with condescension, if not outright contempt and suspicion, by lowlanders who soon
began to think of themselves as the more “genuine” Filipinos. Although it endowed town
residents with a special status, colonialism constantly reminded them of their subjection to
Spanish might. The name “Filipino”, after all, was reserved for Spaniards born in the Philippines
and everybody else who had only native ancestors was an “Indian.”

Spanish colonial rule was supposed to derive its authority from the union of the Church and
State. The parish priest, however, was practically the Spaniard who had direct contact with
Filipinos. As such, he became the embodiment of Spanish power and culture among colonized
populace. Through their contact with him and the beliefs and values he carried, religion exerted a
pervasive influence on the minds of Christianized Filipinos. The literature of the entire period
was in the main created under his encouragement and supervision, although in the last half-
century of Spanish rule, the attitudes and outlook of medieval Catholicism as these were
represented by the friar/missionary/parish priest began to be challenged by Filipinos who had, by
virtue of a university education, come into the orbit of liberal minds in the nineteenth-century
Spain and Europe.

A Confluence of Two Cultures. Monopoly of printing presses by religious orders prior to the
nineteenth century explains the religious content of early written literature. The Dominican were
the first to set up a printing press, and Doctrina Christiana (Christian Doctrine 1593), the first
book ever published in the Philippines, was their output. Early in the seventeenth century, the
Franciscans, Jesuits and Augustinians put up their respective presses and turned out grammars,
dictionaries and catechism and confession manuals. The first printed literary work in Tagalog
appeared in one of the books produced by the friar-lexicographer Francisco Blancas de San Jose.
This was the poem “May Bagyo Ma’t May Rilim (Though It Is Stormy and Dark).” This was
published in Memorial de la vida Cristiana (Memorandum Book of Christian Life, 1605) along
with poems by San Jose himself and by the bilingual poet Fernando Bagongbanta.

Written in praise of the book in which it appears, “May Bagyo Ma’t May Rilim” uses turbulent
nature imagery to affirm Christian heroism. Significant is the use of the seven-syllable line, the
monorime and talinghaga (metaphor) of precolonial poetry. In this poem by an anonymous
author, we have a meeting of two cultures. Christian ideals brought over by the Spaniards are
contained in a poetic form that bears all the earmarks of indigenous culture on which colonizers
were building a new colonial culture. The work exemplifies what the missionaries were doing to
oral literature they found among the Filipinos. Being such a pervasive presence in Philippine
society during the three centuries of Spanish colonialism, the songs, riddles, proverbs and tales
of pagans understandably made the missionaries and parish priest apprehensive, especially
because a number of uprisings motivated by religious nativism had erupted early during the
colonial period. Oral literature was “Christianized” where it could not be suppressed or
eradicated, but very little of it saw print. What found its way into books was only a handful of
literary works that, in the twentieth century, had given the impression that there was hardly any
worthwhile developments in the literary field prior to the nineteenth century. Of course, such an
impression had reckoned literary development only in terms of published works. Needless to say,
new oral lore kept enriching traditional literature which continued to circulate among the masses,
the overwhelming majority of whom had lost the ability to read after the Roman alphabet
supplanted the indigenous syllabary.

Spanish Imposition, Filipino Response. Reading, writing and arithmetic were taught in
catechetical school which was usually the farthest the Filipino of that time could go in education.
Of course, the main purpose of schooling was to impart the fundamentals of Christian Doctrine
to the children who would in time, take over from the adults as loyal subjects of the monarch and
devoted flock of the Church. Up until the eighteenth century, it was a rare Filipino who had
schooling beyond the catechetical level, so that anyone who could read the Roman alphabet
learned Spanish well enough to write it and interpret it for the missionaries became a privileged
person. Among these Filipinos, referred by the colonizers as ladinos (“Latinized” i.e. able to read
and write in one of the Latin languages), were Pedro Bukaneg (the Ilokano poet to whom the
published version of Lam-ang is often attributed), Tomas Pinpin (the printer/author of a manual
titled Ang Librong Pag-aaralan ng mga Tagalog ng Wikang Castilla[The Book the Tagalogs
Must Study in Spanish], 1610) and Fernando Bagongbanta. The first Filipino literary artist, the
first one to come up with a long work that bore the signs of conscious design and careful
composition, was Gaspar Aquino de Belen. The long poem Ang Mahal na Passion ni Jesu
Cristong Panginoon Natin (The Sacred Passion of Jesus Christ Our Lord, 1704) appeared as an
addendum to Aquino’s translation of a Spanish devotional work. Written in Tagalog octosyllabic
verse, the poem relates the events leading to the crucifixion, starting from the Last Supper, in
strophes of five monoriming lines. In its time, Ang Mahal na Passion was treasured as a
Christian narrative poem intended to replace the epic poems of the pagan past. Now, it deserves
to be admired for the vigor of the poet’s earthly language and for his insight into the psychology
of the biblical figure who emerge vividly as though they were the poet’s own contemporaries.
Like the traditional epics Aquino’s poem was sung to a fixed melody and was intended to edify
its audience at special occasions.
After Aquino, the genre that evolved came to be designated as pasyon, a permanent tribute to the
1704 poem. A related genre in the native theater was the sinakulo, a stage play on the passion
and death of Christ. Both the pasyon and sinakulo were performed during the Lenten season, and
this endowed them with a ritual significance that left a deep impression on the consciousness of
generations upon generations of Christian Filipinos who at given times in their history alternately
saw Christ as a model of humility and submissiveness to religious and secular authority, and as a
rebel with the zeal and reckless daring of a visionary preparing the way for the ideal society.

The fact that Aquino was a layman in the employ of the Jesuit printing press reveals quite a bit
about conditions for the productions of literature during the seventeenth century. Missionaries
were the literary patrons of the day being the ones who owned and ran the printing presses.
Works in the vernacular were intended for use by missionaries in their work, so that whatever
was published were communicated orally to the populace. As a bilingual Filipino of his time,
Aquino stood apart from his countrymen, his position in the Jesuit press and the opportunity to
publish a long work indicative of the esteem he had earned by virtue of his ability to absorb the
culture of the colonial power.

In the eighteenth century, the ability to affect the manners and the mores of the Spaniards was a
sign of a higher socio-economic status. It was perhaps during the second half of this century that
the komedya reached full development as a theater genre. The komedya drew its plot from the
medieval Spanish ballads about highborn warriors and their colorful adventures for love and
fame, providing Filipino viewers a glimpse of idealized European society that exemplified the
virtues of religious piety and steadfast loyalty to the monarch. Along with the sinakulo, it
satisfied the people’s curiosity about a period and a society that stood in direct contrast to the
instability and misery of life in their time and their country.

Two types of narrative poems became popular at about the same time that komedya appeared in
the Philippines. These are the awit and korido, both of them drawing their subject matter from
the same Spanish ballads that provided many komedya with plots. The awit differed from the
korido in that its strophe consisted of four monoriming dodecasyllabic lines while the strophe of
the latter consisted of four monoriming octosyllabic lines. Both were sung or chanted, never
simply read, and apparently they circulated the way oral literature circulated, enabling the more
popular ones to reach a wide audience at a time when the greater majority of the population was
illiterate.

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the peak of the awit as a poetic genre in the
masterwork of the poet Francisco Baltazar (1788 – 1862) popularly known as Balagtas. Of
Balagtas’ total output, only three complete works are now available: a short farce (La India
Elegante y El Negrito Amante [The Fashionable India and Her Negrito Suitor], n.d.); a full length
komedya (Orosman at Zafira [Orosman and Zafira], ca. 1857-60) and a well-known awit
(Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at laura sa Cahariang Albania [The Life Florante and Laura
Went Through in the Kingdom of Albania]ca. 1839). In spite of the lack of a big corpus of
published works, historians put Balagtas in the forefront of Philippine Literature, designating
him as the first of two literary giants of the period of Spanish colonialism. Filipino writers during
Balagtas’ time wrote not for a reading but for a “listening” audience, so many written works
seemed to have existed only as manuscripts that passed from hand to hand. However,
opportunities for publishing were opening up with the establishment of commercial printing
presses in Manila. The colony had begun to enjoy a measure of economic progress resulting from
the development of cash crops; direct trade between Spain and the Philippines; and active
participation of foreign firms in the export trade. Economic prosperity stimulated the growth of
Filipino middle class which had the money and the leisure to avail itself of the trappings of
European culture in terms of education, clothes, food, ornaments and social graces. Whereas
before, printed works were almost exclusively for the use of missionaries, now they and become
available to the wealthy, literate members of the middle class.

Florante at Laura was indicative of the pressures that acted upon the Filipino man of letters
during the early part of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, there was inescapable
awareness that he could reach his audience mainly through the traditional method of oral
performance, literacy being limited up until then to very few Filipinos. On the other, there was
the drive to display the writer’s credentials, the most important of which was urbanity manifested
in the ability to reflect the culture of colonial masters. Thus, Florante at Laura was in the form
of the awit familiar to Filipino lovers of traditional verse, and it was sung like the ancient epics
and more recent pasyon. At the same time, it bore marks of classical learning manifest in the
allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, and its figurative language was clearly patterned after
the extravagant rhetoric of Spanish poetry of the Middle Ages.

The poem related the story of two lovers who are parted by the political intrigues fomented by an
evil member of the royal household of Albania. Because he is jealous of Florante who has won
Laura’s hand, Adolfo seeks the death of Florante after he seizes the throne of Albania. When
Albania comes under the power of Adolfo, Florante is away fighting in a war. He is lured into a
trap by his rival and is exposed to wild beasts in a forest outside the kingdom. On the verge of
certain death, Florante is rescued by Aladin who has wandered into the forest. Aladin is Persian,
son of a wicked sultan who wants Aladin’s sweetheart for himself. In another part of the forest,
Laura is about to be ravished by Adolfo but is saved by Flerida, a Persian princess in the disguise
of a warrior, who has been searching for her sweetheart who was banished by the sultan. The
voices of the women are heard by the warriors and there is a joyous reunion. News comes that
Albania has been liberated. Florante and Laura are proclaimed the new monarchs, and Aladin
and Flerida submit themselves to Christian baptism.

Mahiganting Langit (Vengeful Heaven) is the first of the celebrated soliloquies that make
Florante at Laura a rich source of ethical precepts many of which have entered the traditional
lore of Filipinos. The passage is the well-loved lamentation by Florante in which he bewails the
lot that has befallen Albania in a recital of the effects of tyrannical rule often interpreted as
Balagtas’ indictment of colonial oppression by Spain. Whether the political meaning was part of
the original design of the poem is a matter no longer susceptible to proof, for neither Balagtas
nor any of his contemporaries left records to help the modern readers resolve the issue. The fact
is, however, that in the last half of the nineteenth century, Jose Rizal and his generation were to
read foreshadowings of nationalism in Balagtas’ poem. It would seem that oral transmission of
the poem from one generation of readers and listeners to another had allowed the growing
disaffection of Filipinos with Spain to collect around the text until the poem was thought to be an
accurate reflection of the misery and outrage of a people refusing to be crushed by foreign
oppression. Thus, it happened that by the time the Propaganda Movement was agitating the
emerging Filipino intelligentsia to articulate their grievances against colonial rule, Florante at
Laura had, by the agency of popular tradition, turned into an imaginative work anticipating in an
allegorical form the reformists’ own condemnation of colonial abuses.

Taken purely as poetry, Florante at Laura unquestionably towers above other works written in
Tagalog before it. Skill in manipulating the rich mellifluous music of the Tagalog language and a
deft hand in creating artful metaphors highly prized by lovers of traditional poetry – these put
Balagtas in a class by himself as a Tagalog poet. All succeeding poets in the language were to be
measured against him, so that the appearance of modern Tagalog poetry in the twentieth century
was to come in the form of a revolt against Balagtas.

The discovery of a text of Orosman at Zafira in 1974 does not only confirm the poet’s
superiority to his predecessors but, above all, suggest that Balagtas’ prodigious talent found
fuller and freer expression in the theater. Political ambition that in Florante at Laura was
described as “the cause of every evil deed´ is the force that keeps things happening in Orosman
at Zafira. The three – part play is about the assassination of Mahamud, sultan of Marruecos and
father of Zafira, and the consequent moral and civil disruptions that culminate in the
disintegration of the family of the usurper Bousalem, grand pasha of Tedenst and father of
Abdalap and Orosman. Mahamud’s death and Boulasem’s takeover in Marruecos occasion a
revolt headed by Zelim, the pasha of Duquela who thinks he is more worthy of the throne.
Seeking to avenge her father’s death, Zafira joins forces with Zelim but the two of them are
defeated by Boulasem’s army which is under the leadership of Boulasem’s two sons. On the day
of victory, Abdalap schemes to win the support of the army and gets himself proclaimed as the
new sultan. The unrest created by the sudden change of leadership gives Zelim the opportunity to
organize the opposition against Abdalap who meets his end in a duel with Zelim.

Three love plots are women in the story of Boulasem’s bid for power. In the first, Abdalap and
Orosman are rivals over Zafira’s love. Abdalap, against Bousalem’s wishes. wants Zafira for
himself and one of his motives in overthrowing his father is to possess Zafira. Zafira is in love,
however with Orosman, who thereby finds himself torn between love for a sworn enemy of his
father and devotion to a parent fighting a war to hold on to power that had been usurped. The
second plot is about Abdalap and Zelima. Abdalap abandons Zelima when he becomes
enamoured with Zafira. Spurned by her lover, Zelima turns into a ruthless justice who joins the
plot to unseat Abdalap. In the third plot, Gulnara, a lady in Mahamud’s court, falls in love with
one of the sultan’s generals but remains steadfast in her loyalty to Zafira during the days of
revolt against Bousalem.

Although the komedya was traditionally about Christians and Moors, Balagtas chooses, as he did
in Florante at Laura, to rise above the theme of religious war. His real concern, it would appear,
is with the clash of human motives when men and their women are caught up in the turmoils of
social disorder. In Orosman at Zafira, this concern engages him in the creation of character
portraits that have greater depth and dimension than the conventional cardboard heroes and
heroines of the celebrated awit, revealing a more mature artist than the one we know through
Florante at Laura. The verse as utterances by characters tossed about by passion and ambition as
they move against a background of court intrigue, battles and personal confrontations, surpasses
in many places the grandeur of the poetry of the earlier work.
As a matter of fact, the lines are more sinewy and substantial, always equal to the task of
allowing us insights to the characters and the situations which the plot embroils them. Given all
the conventions and the cramping limitations of the komedya as a popular dramatic form in the
nineteenth century, Balagtas had been able to create an artistically intricate and absorbing study
of power and passion.

Prose by Filipinos did not make its appearance in print until the nineteenth century, although
prose works by missionaries using the vernacular had been published since the early years of
conquest. Modesto de Castro was a native priest who lived in the first half of the nineteenth
century, notable for his sermons in Tagalog. His lasting contribution to the history of literature
was the popular book of manners called Pagsusulatan ng Dalawang Binibini na si Urbana at
Feliza (Exchange of Letters between Two Maidens Urbana and Feliza, 1864). Sa Katungkulan
sa Bayan (On Public Office) and Sa Piging (At a Banquet) are excerpts from the book that help
us appreciate the profound influence of De Castro’s prescriptions and proscriptions on the social
behavior of Christian Filipinos, not only in the Tagalog region but in other regions as well where
the work reached the people through translation. In literature, Urbana at Feliza was to establish
the stereotypes of popular characters who were to people Tagalog dramas and novels in the early
years of the twentieth century.

The Growth of Nationalist Consciousness. A royal decree in 1863 opened new horizons to the
emergent middle class when it provided for a complete educational system consisting of
elementary, secondary and collegiate levels. From the early Filipino products of this system were
to come the writers who would go beyond Tomas Pinpin and Fernando Bagongbanta did in the
seventeenth century as Filipinos using the Spanish language for literary purposes. Pedro Paterno
(1857- 1911) and Jose Rizal (1861-1896) were writers who employed Spanish no longer to
propagandize for the Christian religion but for a changing concept of “Filipino,” which at this
stage had ceased to refer only to Philippine-born Spaniards and now included Spanish mestizos,
Chinese mestizos, and Hispanized indios.

In 1880, Pedro Paterno put together a collection of his Spanish poems under the title
Sampaguitas (native fragrant flowers), a book more notable for what it symbolized than for its
value as literature. By its insistence on being “Filipino” Sampaguitas marked the beginning of
national consciousness among the Filipino intelligentsia. Ninay (1885), like Sampaguitas,
insisted on its “nationality.” The first Filipino novel ever, the book tells of the young woman
Ninay who dies of heartbreak brought on by separation from her sweetheart Carlos and
aggravated by the loss of her parents. The plot of the novel is unfolded through a narrative device
that gives the author an excuse to take the readers on a folkloristic tour of Philippine customs and
traditions intended to bring out the uniqueness and exoticism of Spain’s Asian colony.

Younger than Paterno by only four years, Rizal showed himself to be of an entirely different
temperament. He was only eleven years old when the priest-martyrs Gomez, Burgos, and
Zamora were executed in 1872, but as his Spanish novels would reveal, he was sensitive to the
forces that were building up in Philippine society as the clamor for reforms was met with
repression that in turn generated a more insistent clamor for change. Noli Me Tangere (Touch
Me Not, 1887) tells about the young man Ibarra who, having obtained a university education in
Europe, comes home to the Philippines full of the zeal and idealism of a dedicated reformist.
Ibarra believes that education holds the key to social change and gears his energy in this
direction. However, he finds himself obstructed at every turn by two friars: Fray Damaso who is
later revealed to be the father of Ibarra’s sweetheart, Maria Clara; and Fray Salvi who covets the
love of Maria Clara. Through the machination of Fray Salvi, an uprising is organized is
organized which implicates Ibarra as financier and leader of rebels. An outlaw named Elias, who
owed Ibarra his life, comes to the young man’s aid. A successful escape is engineered for Ibarra,
but Elias loses his life when he is hit by bullets intended for the fleeing Ibarra.

Noli Me Tangere marks the first time realism as a literary concept entered Philippine writing.
Previous poetry and drama drew heavily from Spanish ballads for their subject matter, presenting
their audience with images of a society belonging to the long ago and far away. In Paterno’s
Ninay, the locales and the characters were Philippine but have been romanticized that they might
as well as have been foreign. When Noli Me Tangere portrayed contemporary Philippine society,
it was with the end of analyzing the problems of the colony so that something could be done to
solve them. What gives it power and worth, in spite of its formal weaknesses, is Rizal’s searing
indictment of the Spanish colonial regime and his devastating portraits of colonialists and their
tools. The chapter “Capitan Tiago” is a masterful character study in which touches of irony and
wit leaven the author’s heavily detailed commentary on the weaknesses of the native elite that
make them prone to exploitation by their foreign masters.

El Filibusterismo (The Filibuster, 1891) is a sequel to Noli Me Tangere. A mysterious stranger

named Simoun is bent on hastening the downfall of the colonial regime, employing the double-
tactic of abetting the corruption of friars and civil officials through money on the one hand, and
on the other, instigating an armed rebellion among the masses. Actually Simoun is Ibarra in
disguise. He has come back to rescue Maria Clara from the convent which she sought virtual
entombment after the rumored death of Ibarra. As a novel, El Filibusterismo is even more
loosely plotted than Noli Me Tangere but its wealth of political insight makes it an interesting
window into Rizal’s mind. It is a bitter book, attesting to Rizal’s darkening vision of the
possibility of enlightened rule by Spain in the immediate future. The final chapter of the novel is
a dramatic working out of the novelist’s view of revolution through character analysis, in which
Simoun’s pain and anguish are juxtaposed with Padre Florentino’s quietism and moral certitude
to bring the novel to a deeply moving conclusion.

Rizal’s poetry, like his novels, was to leave a deep imprint in the works of succeeding writers.
The best of the poems are personal and deeply-felt, the patriotic fervor evoked by imagery
growing around a situation that is always drawn with restraint. A las Flores de Heidelberg (To
the Flowers of Heidelberg) and Mi Ultimo Adios (Final Farewell) represent two different modes
– the first is conventional, only hinting at the pain of the exile; the second sonorous and
incantatory, achieving a cumulative emotional impact by piling detail upon evocative detail until
the climactic penultimate stanza. Rizal’s patriotic verse is particularly affecting and memorable
because in it we have a poet’s personal sacrifice for the country dovetailing with his art.

The essay as literary form found a congenial time to develop during the campaign for reforms in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Propaganda Movement (1872-1896) provided the
impetus for its development – issues had to be clarified, abuses and injustices denounced,
accusations refuted, future action laid out. The newspaper La Solidaridad (The Solidarity, 1889 –
1895) as the organ that would project the views of the movement was founded “to fight all forms
of reaction, to impede all retrogression, to hail and accept all liberal ideas, and to defend all
progress…” It was in the pages of La Solidaridad that the essay became Philippine Spanish
literature’s significant contribution to Philippine literature. Through Su Excelencia, Señor Don
Vicente Barrantes (His Excellency, Sir Don Vicente Barrantes) by Rizal and Assimilacion de
Filipinas (The Assimilation of the Philippines) by Marcelo H. Del Pilar, we get a taste of the
flavor and impact of essays by the two leading propagandists. Sardonic and caustic humor is
expertly wielded by Rizal as a weapon in his attack on the Spanish journalist whose writings on
the Philippines were marked anti-Filipino, and essay is decidedly a masterpiece of the genre. Del
Pilar’s essay is of an altogether different type, a coolly rational and dispassionate analysis of the
issue of assimilation.

Marcelo H. Del Pilar (1850-1896) , also Plaridel in some of his Spanish essays, was well-versed
in the art of poetic-jousting called duplo before he assumed the post of editor of La
Solidaridad.The long poem Sagot ng Espanya sa Hibik ng Pilipinas (The Response of Spain to
the Pleas of the Philippines) was a companion piece to Hermenegildo Flores’ Hibik ng Pilipinas
sa Inang Espanya (The Plea of the Philippines to Mother Spain), the poems together being a
portrayal of the sad plight of the Philippines under the “monastic supremacy” of the friars. Del
Pilar was especially effective as a parodist. Ang Pasyong Dapat Ipag-alab ng Taong Baba sa
Kalupitan ng Fraile (The Passion Story That Ought to Inflame the Hearts of Persons Subjected
to the Cruelty of Friars) illustrates Del Pilar’s use of popular “sacred” forms to give his anti-friar
attacks a keen cutting edge. “Dupluhan” is a fragment from a duplo discourse in which the form
of the folk game has given patriotic content.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, it became increasingly clear to the intelligentsia
subscribing to the Propaganda Movement that the campaign for reforms was not bringing about
desired changes in the colonial policy. The shift from Spanish to Tagalog as the language of the
nationalist movement signaled more than a change of medium; it was above all a shift of tactics.
A new audience was being addressed – the Filipino masses rather than Spanish liberals and
fellow native intellectuals. This meant that reformism had been abandoned and the revolution
had begun.

The Katipunan used the vernacular of Manila and surrounding provinces as its official language.
Consequently, Tagalog came to be associated with nationalism, and literature that was to be
written in it in the years to come would play up the nationalist cause. Katipunan supremo Andres
Bonifacio (1863-1896) and Emilio Jacinto (1875-1899) used Tagalog to advantage as a tool for
organizing the masses. “Katapusang Hibik ng Pilipinas” (The Ultimate Plea of the Philippines)
refers back to Flores’ “Hibik” and Del Pilar’s “Sagot” and builds on the situation implied in the
two earlier poems wherein a daughter in desperate straits call on her mother for succor.
Bonifacio’s poem, aiming to establish once and for all the break from reformism, makes the
daughter speak out in renunciation of the “negligent and perfidious” mother. The Katipunan
manifesto “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog (What the Tagalogs Must Know)” is a simple
and forthright essay rallying the Filipinos in the struggle against Spain. It might be safely
assumed that the manifesto traveled along the route of oral literature, bringing the call to arms
Filipinos wherever the Katipunan could penetrate. The same could not be said of Emilio
Jacinto’s short essays that have come down to us under the title Liwanag at Dilim (Light and
Darkness). These seem to have been intended for publication in the Katipunan newspaper
Kalayaan (Freedom) of which Jacinto was the editor. The style and method of “Ang Ningning at
Liwanag” (Shiny Light and Bright Light)” and “Kalayaan” suggest that these were meant to be
pondered over the way printed articles demand to be read. To compare them with Modesto de
Castro’s “letters” in Urbana at Feliza is to realize that between 1864 and 1896 a profound
change of values had taken place, and the new values to be propagated demanded a new lucidity
so that Filipinos who would grasp them would know how to translate them into action. The
Revolution that led to the proclamation of independence in Kawit, Cavite, brief though it was,
gave Filipinos a feel of how it was to be in control of their fate. Soon enough, regionalism and
capitulationism began to undermine the solidarity of those in the leadership. When Spain ceded
the Philippines to the United States at the treaty of Paris in 1898, the Philippine Republic was
doomed. Apolinario Mabini was among those who tried through reason and passion to keep the
Revolution going. But the Republic was up against a powerful imperialist country and the class
interests of rich middleclass Filipinos. Mabini was steadfast as a revolutionary at a time during
the Philippine-American Was when opportunism was pulling his fellow intellectuals towards
collaborationism. When General Franklin Bell, the ruthless commander of the American forces
in Batangas, called for the surrender of the Filipino revolutionary forces on the ground that it was
the duty of an army faced with insurmountable odds to lay down its arms, Mabini wrote back and
when copies of his reply were read by Filipino soldiers, there was a widespread approbation of
his staunch position vis-à-vis the general’s remarks. Mabini’s letter partakes of the same rational
air that informs his major work La Revolucion Filipina (The Philippine Revolution, 1902), a
quality that bespeaks the author’s prodigious intelligence and wisdom.

Women as a literary artist doubtless existed prior to the nineteenth century. It may be presumed
without fear of contradiction that in precolonial times, alongside the menfolk, women also
invented riddles, proverbs, songs and tales. When the printing press was introduced by the
Spaniards and with it the custom of appending by-line to a literary piece as a sign of ownership,
mysteriously not a single poem or essay ever got attributed to woman. Why? Researchers have
not yet come up with a definitive reply. Perhaps writing for print carried with it set of
expectations that women, in the social setting of the times, were not given the opportunity to
meet. The literary forms that Spanish colonial culture had introduced necessitated a certain
amount of familiarity with rules of writing as these had been laid down in Spain and Europe, and
the severely limited education made available to women did not give them access to such
knowledge. Nonetheless, writing by women, though this did not see print, was going on. Urbana
at Feliza, in which two sisters exchange letters on sundry topics that included the requisites of
public office and proper decorum at the dinner table, suggests that the personal letter was widely
cultivated as a form of expression by women. As researchers in women writing go deeper into
the literary past, we ought to be getting fine samples of the letter as a genre specially developed
by women.

Under the less constricting socio-political atmosphere in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
early literary pieces by women surfaced, all of them poems. Three samples are the Ilokano poet
Leona Florentino, whose opinions and married life departed from the moral and social
expectations of the period. One poem is the Supremo’s wife Gregoria de Jesus who address her
deceased husband, Andres Bonifacio, poignant in its recollection of details of her bereavement.
The third bears the names of nine women, each one an allegorical pen-name, pleading their case
as victims of the ravages of U.S. colonial rape. All these pieces, each in its own way, dramatize
the constricted role of women in society dominated in the public sphere by male colonial
officials and in the home of fathers and husbands.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the body of written Philippine literature was in general
largely religious, consisting of poems and homiletic essays printed in Catholic pamphlets and
newspapers. The greater bulk of secular literature existed in oral tradition and in manuscripts that
circulated among the author’s friends. This was made up of poems, plays and songs on romantic
subjects taken from medieval Spanish ballads. Nevertheless Philippine literature may be said to
have come of age during this period, in that it had become aware of its distinctness as the product
of colonized people struggling against the rule of foreign power. The writings of the
intelligentsia involved in the Propaganda Movement and, later, of the leaders of Revolution of
1896 trace the emergence of Filipino people. The self-conscious literature that this emergence
brought forth marks the beginning of a truly Filipino literature.

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*The Instructor claims no ownership to everything that is presented in this module. The content of this
module is sourced from Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology by Bienvenido Lumbera and
Cynthia Nograles Lumbera.