Rizal, proto-blogger?

READING HIS letters and diaries, one can easily get the impression that Jose Rizal would have welcomed blogging. At least I did. I am not too certain, however, whether he would have taken to Twitter.

“Excuse the paper and the pencil,” he writes his good friend Fernando Canon, a classmate at the Ateneo and eventually a general in the revolution, on July 7, 1887, about a month before landing back in Manila. “I am on board [the ship], I don’t know where the inkstand is and I have no other paper but this.”
In other words, a man who couldn’t help writing was making do with whatever he could find. (Mariano Ponce, another friend who collected Rizal’s letters for posterity, dutifully notes that both paper and pencil were in blue.)

Rizal ends with a note asking Canon to circulate the letter: “Tell our friends to consider this letter as addressed to them also. Tomorrow I buy paper at Port Said. Tell them [this] news of mine.”

In truth, the note was unnecessary. Most of Rizal’s letters were meant to be shared; in fact, several months after the “Noli Me Tangere” began to circulate in March 1887, and Rizal had become the most famous native and the most dangerous man in the Philippine colony, more and more of his letters were copied and passed from hand to hand. This passing-on was why someone like Apolinario Mabini, who never met Rizal, could relay information from Manila to Marcelo del Pilar in Madrid that was culled from a “private” letter of Rizal’s, a mere week after Rizal had written it. And this was also why, when Spanish colonial agents raided the warehouse where Andres Bonifacio worked, they found a cache of Rizal’s letters to various correspondents, carefully copied by hand.

Alternative press

A compulsive writer, an engaged audience, an alternative medium: Aren’t these qualities we associate with good blogging?

To be sure, there was not much of what we now call the mainstream press in the Philippines then; almost all attempts to break into print, even the openly distributed “Diariong Tagalog” of 1882, were what we today would define as alternative: Limited circulation, touch-and-go affairs, vulnerable to official whim.
But while Rizal wrote copiously for actual newspapers with a formal circulation list (like journals in Germany and newspapers in Hong Kong and, of course, La Solidaridad in Spain), he continued to write letter after unofficially but widely circulated letter. A few hundreds of them survive.

But it isn’t enough for a blogger to write. As the maturing of the so-called blogosphere in the last few years shows, the writing must be consistent and informed by a specific vision for bloggers to retain their readers.

Now Rizal was nothing if not consistent. For instance, he believed deeply in the power of personal example. The sidebar, designed in the form of a blog, gathers some of his writings about the need for Filipinos like himself to set a good example.

We can detect a similar concern about authorial purpose in a letter dated Dec. 30, 1882, during his first Christmas in Spain. To his slightly older sister Maria, he leaves the following fateful instruction: “I should like you to keep all my letters in Spanish beginning, Mis queridos padres y hermanos [My dear parents and siblings], because in them I relate all that has happened to me. When I get home, I shall collect them and clarify them.”

Dominant media

The most dominant form of media in the 19th century was the novel. Rising literacy levels and increased leisure time had created mass audiences in industrializing economies; it was only a matter of time before Rizal, inhaling the liberating air of Europe, realized he should write a novel, too.

He was almost the first Filipino to write a novel. Pedro Paterno had written “Ninay” in 1885. Some time after Paterno, Rizal and other Filipino expatriates in Spain planned to jointly write a book on the Philippines. It never came to pass (for one thing, three of the co- authors wanted to write about women), and this failure was what finally drove Rizal to write the Noli.

At first, he wanted to write it in French, then the world’s preeminent language, and to this end Rizal hired a tutor to improve the French he had learned in school. He finally decided to write in Spanish, however, because, as he wrote his great friend Ferdinand Blumentritt, “I wanted to write something for my people.” At this stage in the evolution of his views on language, Spanish was the preferred means of communication with his paisanos.

This series of decisions makes it easy to argue that, if Rizal were alive today, he would be busy working in television, or accumulating page views on the Internet, either on YouTube or through a blog. He was filled with a desire to form his people into a nation, and to do that he sought out the most effective media then available.

But, in my view at least, he would have found the 140-character limit on Twitter constricting. He was making arguments about civil liberties and Filipino equality for the first time, and to do so he would need all the space that a long letter (such as his famous epistle in Tagalog to the women of Malolos), a fortnightly like the Soli, or indeed a novel like the Noli or the Fili, could give.

The author’s “Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia” will be launched at the Ateneo de Manila on Friday, July 8.