NOTES ON RIZAL’S EL FILIBUSTERISMO By Floro Quibuyen (26 June 2021)

Prepared, upon the request of the editors of the Vibal Publishing House, for the
launching of Isaac Donoso’s critical edition of El Filibusterismo (VIBAL, 2021).

1. In what ways does EL FILIBUSTERISMO build on/continue the themes and ideas
set up in NOLI ME TANGERE? Are there any distinguishing factors that
set the FILI apart from the Noli?

Upon finishing his “seguna parte de mi Noli” in 1891, Rizal enthused, in three
successive letters to his friend Jose Ma. Basa that he considers it more profound”,
“more perfect”, “more important”, and “greater” than the Noli.

The Fili grapples with a most crucial issue that goes beyond the simplistic, and often
misleading dichotomy of REFORM versus REVOLUTION. The real opposition is
REVOLUTION versus TERRORISM. The 19th century term in Latin America for
what we today refer to as terrorism is FILIBUSTERISMO.

Simoun was a terrorist, not a revolutionary. He did not initiate a revolutionary

movement, which, in the first place, could not be initiated by one man alone. He did
not abide by what Elías, the Fili’s moral compass, had enjoined him to do. That was
Simoun’s main failing—a fundamentally moral one. It is important to understand
this opposition, for it is the crux of the segunda parte of the Noli. How Rizal resolves
this opposition constitutes his original vision.

It is in the Fili that the root of the colonial problem is stated in all its stark
nakedness—and resolutely addressed. The wrong solutions are eliminated swiftly—
the assimilationism first advocated by the “egoistic Ibarra” (as Rizal had described
him to José Alejandrino) in the Noli and again championed by Basilio and Isagani in
the Fili, and the separatist terrorism (called filibusterismo in Rizal’s time) of the now
deformed Simoun. Thus, Fili leaves us with only one solution, the one advocated by
both Elías in the Noli and Fr. Florentino in the Fili.

2. How did you come to be involved with this edition of El Filibusterismo?

My involvement with the Vibal project began when Isaac Donoso emailed me on
Saturday, 8 February 2014. If I may quote part of his message: “We contacted you
because your statements in the book A Nation Aborted are very brilliant and timely,
in a moment to revaluate Rizal in its fin de siécle context, and not as a redundant

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icon or American superhero. We need a real and mature reading on Rizal, to give new
passion and erudition to young Filipino readers.”

Isaac explained to me what the Vibal project was all about, and what he had done so
far. I was impressed. Realizing that Isaac, a Spanish philologist who had done
commendable scholarly work in both Arabic Studies and Philippine Studies, was
doing something valuable for the Filipino people, I wholeheartedly committed myself
to writing the Foreword.

It was only after writing the fifth draft that I was satisfied enough to send it to Isaac—
by the end of September 2014. His emailed response on 29 September 2014 was
heartening. It was clear that we were kindred spirits regarding Rizal’s Fili:
I think that it is a very interesting text, thrilling and exciting due to the
magnificent way through which you narrate things, the same way that you used
in your A Nation Aborted. I really like that way, because is robust. We arrived to
same conclusions, beyond the dichotomy reform vs. revolution, there is another
message, redemption. But redemption is an ethical issue, far more complex
than political decisions. That is the complexity that Rizal was able to penetrate,
as an ethical model for national redemption, an Imitatio Christi that was to be
achieved by sacrifice, and beyond, political wisdom.
However, Isaac was concerned that my draft was too long and, thus, suggested
certain parts (several pages) be deleted. After revising my manuscript for the final
version, I sent it back to Isaac who then submitted it to Vibal in October 2014.
I am grateful to Isaac Donoso for inviting me to write the Foreword, and to Vibal for
publishing Donoso’s critical edition.

3. What does this edition add to the study of El Fili and Rizal?

It is wonderful that Vibal has come out with a critical edition of the Fili which lays out
page-for-page, paragraph-for paragraph, Rizal’s original text and Charles Derbyshire’s
English translation, with extensive critical notes by the editor, Isaac
Donoso, that also meticulously traces the editorial changes made by Rizal during the
Fili’s printing.

This edition enables both teachers and students of the Rizal course to embark on a
deeper understanding and more intelligent appreciation of Rizal’s work.

The Vibal critical edition ought to be a required text in Rizal courses, especially at the
tertiary level, and should be available in every school library. It can also be a valuable
resource in courses on comparative literature, Philippine literature, and Spanish
language/translation.

The El Filibusterismo is the culmination of the Rizalian oeuvre, which started when
Rizal was a teen-aged student at Ateneo Municipal. But it is the culmination not
merely in a chronological sense—it is the crowning piece in Rizal’s historical-political
project, whose main point was to present his case against Empire and to lay down the
basis for the formation of a robust Filipino nation, a community which enables every
member to flourish, to realize their full human potential. This is at the core of the

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intense debate between Isagani and Fr. Fernandez in the Fili’s chapter 27, “El fraile y
el filipino.”

Rizal built his case against colonial conquest, the greed of Empire—and the
brutalizing and dehumanizing violence that comes along with it—over four years,
from the Noli (1887), to his annotated critical edition of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas
Filipinas (1880), to his anticolonial essays “La indolencia de los filipinos” (1890) and
“Filipinas dentro de cien años” (1890), to finally, the Fili (1891), which rounds up
the whole argument.

As we shall see, the Katipunan completely understood what we may call the Elías-
Florentino solution to the colonial problem as early as 1892, just a year after the
Fili’s release. And so did Mabini, when he took upon himself the task of morally
guiding the Revolution in 1898. Indeed, both the Katipunan of 1892 and Mabini in
1898 were following the moral injunctions of Elías and Fr. Florentino—which
constituted Rizal’s vision for the formation of the Filipino nation.

4. How do Rizal's other writings connect with the Noli and the Fili? How important
is it to study Rizal's other writings?

It is essential that we do a rigorous reading of the Noli-Fili as one novel—as enjoined

by Nick Joaquín, Miguel Bernad, and Leonard Casper. But this is not enough. We
also need to do what I propose to call “critical hermeneutics,” which consists of three
linked interpretative strategies: the reading of texts in terms of their historical
context, intertextual analysis, and triangulation.

Applied to the Noli-Fili, this would involve rigorously interpreting the

metaphorical/allegorical as well as the discursive texts (for example, the declarations
and arguments of Simoun, Isagani , and Fr. Florentino) in terms of two questions:

First, how are they linked to the other texts of Rizal, in which he directly and
unequivocally expresses his political, historical, religious and ethical views: 1) his
correspondence with fellow ilustrados, with Blumentritt, and with family members,
and 2) the scholarly output of his intensive research at the library of the British
Museum—his annotations to Morga’s Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, his historico-
sociological study “Sobre la indolencia de los filipinos,” and the astonishingly first-of-
its kind futuristic work “Filipinas dentro de cien años”?

Second, how do they relate to the critical historical-political issues and debates of his
day (pertaining not only to the Philippines but to all colonies of Spain—Cuba and
Puerto Rico—as well as those of the French, Dutch, Portuguese, British, and the
USA): the moral question of colonial conquest, the debates on assimilation into
empire versus separation from the empire, monarchy versus republicanism in Spain,
and the ethics of decolonization and social transformation.

Scholars who ignore Rizal’s readily available correspondence and critical essays that
appeared in La Solidaridad and the historical/geopolitical developments in Rizal’s
time could still miss the whole point of the Noli-Fili, even if they were to read it in the
original Spanish text.

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5. Rizal's life and his work have been analyzed exhaustively over the years, from
a variety of perspectives. Will we continue to discover new dimensions or aspects
for study?

I don’t think Rizal’s life and work have been “exhaustively” explored and analysed. A
lot of the work done so far have merely been updated repetitions, or, at best,
variations on the same familiar themes. There’s still a lot to be explored and studied
in the life and work of Rizal—especially if these are done from a comparative
historical perspective and in a longer time frame.

Offhand I can cite some promising areas for comparative research. First, how does
Rizal compare or contrast in terms of political, creative, and scholarly work with
other heroic moral-intellectual leaders, such as Dr. Ramon Betances of Puerto Rico
and poet Jose Marti of Cuba, or of Argentinian-born Cuban revolutionary Dr. Che
Guevara, or revolutionary priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, or
Martinican-born Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist Dr. Frantz Fanon, or novelist
Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia, or Dr. Sun Yat Sen of China, just to mention a
few comparative examples. Second, how would Rizal’s amazing entrepreneurial and
community development work in Dapitan compare with other wondrous social
experiments elsewhere, such as Robert Owen’s New Lanark in Scotland, or Fr. Jose
Ma. Arizmendiarrieta’s Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain, or of Mayor Juan
Manuel Sanchez Gordillo’s Marinaleda in Andalusia, Spain?

Another promising subject of research in the ethnology of precolonial Austronesian

peoples is the pioneering work of Theodore Waitz that Rizal got interested in and in
fact had started translating into Spanish for the benefit of his countrymen.
Unfortunately, Waitz, arguably the greatest German ethnologist in his time, is by and
large unheard of in the Philippines. This is partly due to the misattribution of Rizal’s
translation of the work of Waitz by the National Historical Commission. The “Notes
on Melanesia, Malaysia and Polynesia” and “The People of the Indian Archipelago,”
in the volume Political and Historical Writings (Manila: National Historical
Commission, 1972), are mistakenly attributed to Rizal, when, in fact, they are Rizal’s
direct translations of pp. 1–10 and 10–16, respectively, of Theodore Waitz’ “Die
Malaien” (1865). Consisting of 194 pages, “Die Malaien” (The Malays) is the first of
the two-part fifth volume “Die Völker der Südsee” (The Peoples of the South Seas)
from Waitz’s massive six-volume work Anthropologie der Naturvolker which Rizal
had assiduously read prior to his embarking on an intensive research project at the
British Library in London.

But misattributing authorship is not the only problem with the Rizaliana editions of
the National Historical Commission. Equally concerning are the stunning
mistranslations in English. Let’s consider just two examples.

In the National Historical Commission’s 1972 English translation of Rizal’s Spanish

translation of the first 10 pages of Waitz’s “Die Malaien,” the island named Isla de
Pascua in Rizal’s text is incredibly mistranslated—twice—as CHRISTMAS ISLAND
(which lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Indonesia)! Isla de Pascua is the
Spanish equivalent of Paasch-Eyland (18th-century Dutch for Easter Island), the
name given to the island by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen when he first visited
it on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722. Thus, the correct translation, obviously, of Isla de

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Pascua is EASTER ISLAND (Rapa Nui to the natives) which lies in the South Pacific
Ocean off Chile—14,374 kilometers away from Christmas Island.

Another mistranslation is the place name CAYO-HUESO in Antonio Luna’s January

1892 letter to Rizal. In his letter, Luna affirmed both the struggle for independence
and Rizal’s North Borneo re-settlement plan for evicted Calamba farmers as in fact
two linked projects. But his last sentence is horribly mistranslated into English. The
place name CAYO HUESO in the sentence was mistranslated as “keystone”—“Borneo
will be a keystone for us, and very probably I may also be one of its inhabitants, if
circumstances compel me”. The correct translation for CAYO HUESO is Key West,
one of the small islands in the USA’s Florida Keys—which became a place of refuge
and revolutionary base during the Marti-led Cuban revolution against Spain in the
late 19th century.
Such egregious mistranslations remain uncorrected to this day. If the National
Historical Commission refuses to do its proper job, perhaps Vibal Publishing can
step in and issue an urgently needed new critical edition of Rizal’s letters and
historico-political essays and notes or borradores—critically annotated and correctly
translated—for the sake of students and teachers of the compulsory Rizal course and
scholars of Rizal Studies.

6. How do the things Rizal portrays in Noli and Fili continue to be relevant to our
world today?

As long as the human condition remains, as long as there is oppression, tyranny and
injustice, as long as the imperative of progress requires a revolution—the kind that,
in the words of Fr. Florentino, God sanctions, a revolution in which hate has no
place, a social transformation driven only by love, virtue and sacrifice—Rizal’s Fili
will continue to be relevant in the Philippines and in the world. And herein lies the
Fili’s profundity and greatness—Rizal takes us by the hand into the very heart of
darkness and shows us the way out towards the Light.