In brief
Crisóstomo Ibarra comes home to the Philippines after seven years in Europe to marry Maria Clara and to build a school. He finds that his father has died in prison and that the body has been dug up on a friar’s order. Everything he then tries to do, decently and through the proper channels, is turned against him, until he is framed for a rising he had nothing to do with. Rizal wrote this in Spanish, in Europe, in his twenties, and had it printed in Berlin in 1887. Nine years later the Spanish shot him in Manila.
It is also extremely funny, a Dickensian crowd of snobs, bullies and frauds in a colonial parish. Every Filipino schoolchild meets it, usually as a duty. Readers elsewhere mostly never meet it, and miss one of the sharpest accounts of what a colony does to its people.
The argument
The title is the words of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene (John 20:17), “touch me not”, but the dedication “To My Fatherland” gives it a harder meaning. It speaks of “a cancer of so malignant a character that the least touch irritates it” and says the country shows “a social cancer like to that other”. Rizal proposes to do as the ancients did with the sick, lay the patient on the temple steps so that passers-by may offer a remedy (dedication). He adds what gives the book its moral force: “as thy son, I am conscious that I also suffer from thy defects and weaknesses.”
So this is more than an attack on friars, merciless though that is. The disease has reached everybody: the rich native who buys the government’s favour, the Filipina who pretends she cannot speak Tagalog, the townspeople who stone a man they had cheered. Colonial rule here is less an army than a habit of mind.
The real argument takes place in a boat. In chapter 49 Elias, a fugitive pilot, brings Ibarra the demands of people the Civil Guard and the friars have ruined, and Ibarra, educated and sincere, explains why they must be patient. “On the union with Spain depends the welfare of our country.” Elias asks what to call “a country that is obedient because it is deceived”. By chapter 61 prison has reversed them. Ibarra now sees “the horrible cancer which feeds upon this society” and declares, “I will be a filibuster, a real filibuster”, and it is Elias who answers, “But innocent people will suffer!” Ibarra’s reply is “So much the better!” Rizal does not settle it. A book that ends this way is neither a reformer’s tract nor a call to arms, and it has been claimed as both.
The colony
The Philippines of the 1880s had been ruled from Spain for over three centuries, and much of the actual ruling was done by the religious orders: Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Recollects. They held great estates, and in a country parish the friar could be school inspector, censor and informer in one. San Diego has the comedy of this: “The curate was the Pope in the Vatican; the alferez of the Civil Guard, the King of Italy on the Quirinal” (ch. 11). Rizal’s family leased land at Calamba from the Dominicans, and in the early 1890s a dispute with them ended in eviction.
The memory underneath the book is 1872. After a mutiny at the Cavite arsenal the Spanish garrotted three Filipino priests, Mariano Gómez, José Burgos and Jacinto Zamora, at Bagumbayan. They had been pressing the claims of native clergy against the friars. Rizal was ten. His brother Paciano had been close to Burgos, and around the same time their mother was jailed on a charge of attempted poisoning and marched to prison on foot. He dedicated El Filibusterismo to the three priests by name; the Noli could not go that far, but in chapter 8 Ibarra looks at the knoll on Bagumbayan Field and remembers the old priest who told him that “if knowledge is the heritage of mankind, it is only the courageous who inherit it”. Rizal himself would be shot on that field.
Then there is the word itself. The Glossary of this edition notes that “indio” was “a term used rather contemptuously, the name Filipino being generally applied in a restricted sense to the children of Spaniards born in the Islands”. Rizal’s generation of students in Madrid, the ilustrados of the Propaganda Movement, were in the course of taking “Filipino” for everyone. When Padre Damaso says at the first dinner, “The Indian is so indolent!” (ch. 1), he is stating colonial common sense. The novel exists to contradict him, and Rizal answered him directly in his essay on Filipino indolence in 1890.
The shape of the book
A dinner in Binondo sets out the whole social order on one table (ch. 1). Ibarra goes to San Diego, finds the grave empty (ch. 13), and for a stretch the plot gives way to the town itself: Tasio, the schoolmaster, the sacristan boys and their mother. Then comes the fiesta, with its sermon (ch. 31), the derrick rigged to kill Ibarra at the laying of the school’s foundation stone (ch. 32), and the banquet where Damaso insults his dead father until Ibarra throws him down and raises a knife (ch. 34). Maria Clara stops his arm.
After this everything closes in quickly: excommunication, a false rising in which the curate has a hand (ch. 55), the crowd stoning the prisoners (ch. 58), and the discovery that Maria Clara gave up his letter to save a secret of her own, that she is Damaso’s daughter (ch. 60). The chase on the lake (ch. 61) feels like Dumas, and Rizal then does something Dumas never would. The last chapter leaves the main characters and goes to a mad beggar woman and her son in a forest on Christmas Eve. Elias, dying, says the line every Filipino reader knows: “I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land! You, who have it to see, welcome it—and forget not those who have fallen during the night!” (ch. 63).
The Epilogue then tells what became of everyone, in the tone of a gossip column. On a stormy night a figure is seen on the roof of the Santa Clara convent, and next day a nun “with tears and tales of horror” begs a government visitor for help and is declared a madwoman. “Nothing more was said of the affair, nor of the ill-starred Maria Clara.” The most frightening thing in the book is told as a rumour.
The voice
The narrator is a social host of alarming wit. “We will go in, O you who read this, whether friend or foe” (ch. 1), he says at Tiago’s door. Benedict Anderson built part of his account of the national novel in Imagined Communities on this opening: a dinner discussed across a Manila the reader is assumed to know, so that a shared community exists before anyone argues for it.
Language itself is the comedy and the injury. Damaso’s sermon (ch. 31) runs half in Spanish and half in Tagalog, and “none of those present understood the drift”. The schoolmaster who greets Padre Damaso in Spanish is laughed at and told, “Be content to talk your own dialect and don’t spoil Spanish, which isn’t meant for you” (ch. 19). Doña Consolacion, a Filipina married to the alferez, makes a point of mangling Tagalog so as to seem European, then gives herself away when she shouts at Sisa in it (ch. 39). This is a novel in the colonial language about who may use it.
Ibarra also brings back a curse. Riding past the Botanical Garden, “the demon of comparison brought before his mind” the gardens of Europe (ch. 8). Anderson took his book The Spectre of Comparisons (1998) from this phrase.
The people
Ibarra
The liberal who believes the system can be reasoned with. Rizal shares his hopes and exposes them; Elias tells him, with a truth he does not want, “your heart deceives you” (ch. 61). He even discovers in chapter 54 that his own Basque great-grandfather falsely accused Elias’s grandfather and destroyed that family. His innocence is partly what money buys.
Maria Clara
Ibarra calls her “the poetic incarnation of my fatherland” (ch. 7). Later generations turned her into a model of the modest, suffering Filipina, and her name went on a national dress. Nick Joaquin, among others, complained of the sugary stereotype that resulted. In fact she is a girl destroyed by the priests who own her, and her fate is the novel’s most terrible judgement on them. Rizal’s cousin and long love Leonor Rivera, married off to an Englishman in 1890, is commonly taken as her source.
Elias
The man with no country to go back to. His story of a family pursued across three generations for a fire they did not start (ch. 50) is the book’s other history of the Philippines.
Sisa, Basilio and Crispin
Rizal gives the poor their own plot and it is the hardest to read. Crispin, a small sacristan, is accused of theft and beaten (ch. 15); Sisa is marched through the town by soldiers (ch. 21) and loses her reason. Her name became a film title.
Damaso, Salvi and the Espadañas
Damaso is a loud bully who is also capable of love, which makes him worse, and his last scene with his daughter (ch. 62) is the one moment the book gives him pain. Salvi is thin, patient and truly sinister. Doña Victorina, with her false curls and her pretended Spanish, drags round a fraud of a husband she has called “Doctor” (ch. 42); she is the funniest character in the book and a bitter joke on anyone who wants to be taken for a Spaniard.
Tasio
The old philosopher writes in hieroglyphs: “I’m not writing for this generation, but for other ages”, so that readers will say, “Not all were asleep in the night of our ancestors!” (ch. 25). It is the author’s sad self-portrait.
How it was made
Rizal, born in Calamba in 1861, went to Spain in 1882 to study medicine. In Madrid in January 1884 he proposed that a group of Filipino students write a book about their country together, having been struck by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They did not contribute, and he wrote it alone, in Madrid, Paris and Germany, while training as an eye doctor. He cut one chapter himself, “Elias and Salome”. His friend Máximo Viola lent him the money to print 2,000 copies in Berlin, and by 21 March 1887 he could send one to his friend the Austrian scholar Ferdinand Blumentritt.
Readers and critics
A committee of the University of Santo Tomas, at the archbishop’s request, condemned the book as heretical and subversive, and it was banned. When Rizal came home in 1887 Governor-General Terrero summoned him, and Rizal told Blumentritt that he was being called a German spy, a Protestant and a sorcerer. He was deported to Dapitan in 1892, arrested on his way to Cuba when the Revolution broke out in 1896, and shot on 30 December. Shortly before his death he wrote a manifesto disowning the rising that had used his name.
That disowning is the core of the Filipino argument about him. In 1956 the Rizal Law made his novels compulsory reading in the schools, against ferocious opposition from the Church, which threatened to close its schools. Senators Claro Recto and José Laurel carried it through, with a compromise on who must read the unexpurgated text. Renato Constantino’s Veneration Without Understanding (1969) replied from the left: Filipinos had been given a hero who rejected revolution, agreeable to their American rulers, and should ask why. His critics reply that the evidence for American sponsorship is thin and the dichotomy false, and the Elias chapters seem to me to support them. Unamuno called Rizal “the Tagalog Hamlet”, the same dispute seen from Spain.
This translation
Charles Derbyshire’s (1880–1933) version was published in Manila and New York in 1912, under American rule. Its title, The Social Cancer, comes from Rizal’s dedication but replaces his. Chapter by chapter against the Spanish text on Gutenberg, all 63 chapters and the epilogue are there, each running roughly 5 to 20 per cent longer than the original. Sampled passages follow it closely. It keeps the Tagalog and the mangled Spanish, usually with a footnote, and its “demon of comparison” is exact. Its prose is stiff in places.
The footnotes are a document of their own: Bagumbayan is “now called Wallace Field”, a rock in the Pasig lies “near Fort McKinley”, and in the Gutenberg text one note misdates Rizal’s execution to 1906. So you read a book against one empire in the voice of the next. Harold Augenbraum has criticised León Ma. Guerrero’s 1961 The Lost Eden for cutting passages, and Anderson exposed its bowdlerising and its removal of Tagalog, so the old translation has its uses.
Afterlives
It has been filmed since the silent era; Gerardo de León’s 1961 film is the classic. GMA’s Maria Clara at Ibarra (2022–23) sent a modern student into the story. The characters have become common nouns. In September 2010 Carlos Celdran, dressed as Rizal, walked into an ecumenical gathering in Manila Cathedral and held up a sign reading “Damaso” in protest at the Church’s campaign against the Reproductive Health Bill. He was convicted of offending religious feelings. A novel that can still get someone convicted is not over.
How to read it
- Read it for the comedy first. Chapters 1, 31 and 42 are social satire of the first order.
- Treat chapters 49, 50 and 61 as one debate. Decide who is right, then ask whether Rizal’s own last months change your answer.
- Do not skip the footnotes. They explain local terms and show what an American-era reader was thought to need.
- Compare editions. Harold Augenbraum’s Penguin (2006) is the readiest modern English; María Soledad Lacson-Locsin’s (1996) restores the cut chapter but has drawn sharp criticism for its style; Virgilio Almario’s Tagalog (1997) is the one for readers who can use it.
Read next
- José Rizal, El Filibusterismo (1891). Ibarra returns under another name to set fire to the colony.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The book that gave Rizal the idea that a novel could indict a system.
- Multatuli, Max Havelaar (1860). The Dutch East Indies exposed by a former colonial official, a generation earlier.
- Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind (1980). A later Indonesian novel of the colonial-educated native, the book’s nearest relative in the region.