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Lunch Note #006: Noli Me Tangere
May. 2nd, 2025 01:31 pm
I'm reading through José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and, as with many older novels, I'm reading through it slowly and writing down passages that I feel like I want to return to. One such passage is this one:
And it's a passage that stands out to me because it is a crystallization of many of Rizal's critiques throughout the novel. And these criticisms are felt most acutely by Sisa and her sons, Basilio and Crispín. Sisa is trapped in a loveless, abusive, and neglectful marriage to her husband. Her sons are trapped in servitude to the church, which has a system that is set up to keep them impoverished and indebted in this life forever. While this quotation might paint a bleak picture for the poor, it is a setup to a nuanced view of faith:
Rizal makes this turn to the second person fairly often. In a way, these shifts to a kind of collective first person or to the second person to bring the reader into the story, to implicate them in the events ("You" who "blessed the poor") is a kind of defining feature of this book, and one of the reasons why, in my opinion, it's an example cited in Benedict Anderson's influential 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson writes of Rizal's sly acknowledgement of his audience, of this shared community who would know exactly the kinds of characters he is writing about in this novel, thus creating the "imagined community" of Filipinos who read the book—specifically those who are affluent and educated enough to read the criticisms of a major institution. That Philippine national identity has coalesced around this book then is also no surprise: it remains (from what I've heard) a part of a shared national curriculum and canon.
Though I've all but left the Catholic church (I don't know if there's a formal process to leave, or if just not going to church anymore counts enough), I am still fascinated by the structure and the spectacle the Church as an institution continues to draw. With the death of Francis and the choosing of a new pope, my hopes are on the Filipino, not just because he's Filipino, but because if this book was part of a present-day Filipino priest's secular education, then it is no wonder that that priest might focus so much on poverty and be amenable to a more expansive view other social issues.
Anyway, what have you done to uplift the poor today?
[The poor] have no novenas, nor do they know the jaculatory prayers or the verses or the oremus the friars have composed to prevent them from developing their own ideas or their own emotions, nor do they understand them. They pray in the language of their misery. Their souls cry for themselves and for the dead whose love belonged to them. Their lips may offer up salutations, but all their minds can do is scream in complaint and screech in lamentation. (p. 90)
And it's a passage that stands out to me because it is a crystallization of many of Rizal's critiques throughout the novel. And these criticisms are felt most acutely by Sisa and her sons, Basilio and Crispín. Sisa is trapped in a loveless, abusive, and neglectful marriage to her husband. Her sons are trapped in servitude to the church, which has a system that is set up to keep them impoverished and indebted in this life forever. While this quotation might paint a bleak picture for the poor, it is a setup to a nuanced view of faith:
You who blessed the poor, and you, shadows in torment, will the simple prayer of the poor make you happy, offered up before a badly engraved print by the light of a timsim? Or do you long for tapers placed before bloody images of Christ or small-mouthed Virgins with glass eyes, or with a priest's mechanical droning of the mass in Latin? (p. 90)
Rizal makes this turn to the second person fairly often. In a way, these shifts to a kind of collective first person or to the second person to bring the reader into the story, to implicate them in the events ("You" who "blessed the poor") is a kind of defining feature of this book, and one of the reasons why, in my opinion, it's an example cited in Benedict Anderson's influential 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson writes of Rizal's sly acknowledgement of his audience, of this shared community who would know exactly the kinds of characters he is writing about in this novel, thus creating the "imagined community" of Filipinos who read the book—specifically those who are affluent and educated enough to read the criticisms of a major institution. That Philippine national identity has coalesced around this book then is also no surprise: it remains (from what I've heard) a part of a shared national curriculum and canon.
Though I've all but left the Catholic church (I don't know if there's a formal process to leave, or if just not going to church anymore counts enough), I am still fascinated by the structure and the spectacle the Church as an institution continues to draw. With the death of Francis and the choosing of a new pope, my hopes are on the Filipino, not just because he's Filipino, but because if this book was part of a present-day Filipino priest's secular education, then it is no wonder that that priest might focus so much on poverty and be amenable to a more expansive view other social issues.
Anyway, what have you done to uplift the poor today?
