(Nota Bene: I have added new material to Chilean and Filipino History.)
If an opera has been created inspired by Padre Burgos' novel, that's good, it means it is still in the consciousness of artists. However, nobody speaks about the context. The work of art is a dual creation: (1) the visible product, and (2) the invisible experience of the artist -- the social and historical process.
When you share the iceberg of a work of art, the experience is qualitatively different than if you see the work of art purely as an experience in the moment. All Filipinos may have heard of Rizal or read the English translation of the Noli, but without the context, it will not mobilize any profound register, it will not create _connections_ that have the power to change the vision of oneself in the world, and of others.
If I emphasize that the Spanish friar orders covered up their crimes by suppressing or destroying historical records, is it because I am anti-religion or an atheist? Of course not. In the 1990s I came across a paper written by a Spanish historian priest and there was a line in there that for all the statements about the evil deeds of the religious orders, there is no historical documentation.
Well, the murder of Governor General Fernando Bustamante y Bustillo is certainly documented.
A prose collection (Obras Literarias, Libro II, Prosa por José Rizal, Edición del Centenario, Manila, Comisión del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961, Apéndices, "El concubinato de doña Olalla de Rojas y Justina Tolentina con los Agustinos Fr. Francisco de Victoria y Fr. Juan de Torres", sin fecha, 296), includes a historical document that Rizal had copied down as a student, the proceedings of the trial in 1650 of two Augustinian friars who had been living in concubinage with two Filipina women, when Diego Faxardo-Andrés de Gálvez was governor general of the archipelago.
Modern Spanish historians study the economics, the relations between the Church and the colonial administration, but they leave out the documentation on the microhistory and the writings of the Hispanic Filipino political radicals (here I include Padre Burgos) -- because it is really us, the Filipino scholars, who should go back, read their writings and reconstruct that microhistory, the history of mentality, of the Hispanic Filipino interiority, for modernity. The Spanish historians aren't interested in that, apart from the writings of José Rizal, reprintings and academic studies (philology, literary criticism).
This "discovery" (I read the document, thinking at first that it was a fictional work, then to my surprise realized it was a court document copied down by a young student) of Rizal's obsession with reconstructing the past struck a chord in me. In 2004 I learned that there were some Filipiniana books in the Budge Library, a collection housed in Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, and for several months I went there to copy down the Jagor book and this jewel:
El Tribunal
del
Santo Oficio de la Inquisición
en las
Islas Filipinas
Por
J.T. Medina
Santiago de Chile
Imprenta Elzeviriana
MDCCCXCIX (1899)
(1852-1930) Expert on the colonial history of Filipinas, especially the history of the printing press. Had a huge collection of priceless manuscripts and first edition books, and thank God the Republic of Chile still has not lost its respect for its cultural treasures. He became good friends with Retana in Madrid, after self-exiling to Spain after the 1890 revolution in Chile which culminated in the suicide of President Balmaceda (a precursor of Salvador Allende -- Balmaceda wanted to modernize Chile's economic base and the Catholic Church and right wing breast-beating aristocracy defeated him).This is the Sala Medina in the Biblioteca Nacional where I go and copy materials whenever I can (which has been impossible for a few years now). The first picture is at a weird angle: taken from the floor, so you can see the _gorgeous_ tables and chairs too. Everything is made of wood and metal. No plastic, no acrylic.
The reconstruction of that lost history, insofar as we the Filipinos of the 20th-21st centuries are concerned, as the inheritors of the neocolonial American regime's nearly completely successful attempt to erase it by taking away the language it is written in, is a SACRED OBLIGATION. We must RESTORE the historical continuity that was RUPTURED, and that continues to have grave consequences for the PRESENT and therefore, for the future.
I mean, we have got to reconnect the broken, ripped-apart social fabric, the memory of a time when the Filipino psyche was imbued with the WILL to UNION, LIBERATION and SPIRITUAL REBIRTH.
And this is a huge job that will provide homework, employment, cultural productions for the generations of the foreseeable future. Man oh man, it is a Motherlode.
Our ancestors are pointing to that North Star.
I for one believe that I am not the only crazy person who feels this, because each and every nation is a collective CONSCIOUSNESS, consciousness is ENERGY, energy is INTELLIGENT, and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. ENERGY IS WHOLE. When it is fragmented by men and women who are in contradiction, alienation, obsession with power, dead matter, enslaved by ego, the ENERGY SICKENS. And sickens everything. I for one do not like sick energy. I was born to it, raised in it, and I could never sleep the sleep of the living dead. I ran away. And now I'm moseying back.....virtually. You don't have to run away like I did. I've done my part and the Universe has got me woke. The Universe wants you woke and the Mountain has gone to Mohammed. I'm just a messenger.
My Christmas wish for my fellow Filipinos is this. To follow our True North.
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