Searching for Rizal’s Pangasinan poem

Could national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, have written a poem in Pangasinan language? Local historians in Pangasinan province wanted to find this out, after a former marketing executive claimed that his father used to read a book that contained Rizal’s poems in Pangasinan.

Ramon Santillan, 59, who worked in a Makati City-based pharmaceutical company, said his late father, Alejandro Santillan, used to read the poems aloud from a book when they were children. His father died in 1976.

“The book was about a half-inch thick, half the size of a short bond paper,” Santillan said.

But he said he had forgotten the book’s title. He claimed though that he memorized three stanzas of the poem when he was in grade school but could recall only two stanzas now.

The poem, “Say Inkatoo,” talks about humility, a trait which, Santillan said, his father wanted him and his siblings to emulate.

“I memorized three stanzas of the poem because I like the message,” Santillan said. Two stanzas of the poem, which he could recall, had been posted on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152012025299842&set=gm.579684345442639&type=1&theater).

Arabela Arcinue, president of the Pangasinan Heritage Society, said the poem should encourage historians to look for the book.

“If his father was able to own one, surely, there are others out there who are in possession of it right now,” Arcinue said.

But Pangasinan poet Santiago Villafania said the poem was written in modern Pangasinan language and in didactic form, a poetry which Rizal was not known to write.

Translation?

“There were, perhaps, Pangasinan writers in the past who translated Rizal’s works … If the poem is a translation, which of Rizal’s poems?” Villafania said.

Arcinue said it was possible that Rizal wrote and spoke in Pangasinan language because his great great grandfather was from Lingayen town.

Rizal’s mother, Teodora Alonso, was a great granddaughter of Manuel Quintos, a gobernadorcillo (mayor) of the capital town in the 1740s.

In Austin Craig’s book, “Lineage, Life and Labors of Jose Rizal: Philippine Patriot (1913),” Rizal’s great grandfather, Manuel Facundo Quintos, was described as “an attorney of Manila, graduated from Santo Tomás University, whose family were Chinese mestizos of Pangasinan.”

The lawyer’s father, who was his namesake, Craig wrote, had been “municipal captain” of Lingayen.

In his last will and testament executed on May 24, 1802, the younger Quintos declared that he was a native of Lingayen and he was married to Regina Ursua, a Chinese mestiza of Cavite province.

Among the couple’s three children was Brigida Quintos, who married Alberto Alonso, eventually becoming Teodora Alonso’s parents.

Arcinue said scions of political families in Lingayen still fondly remember Rizal’s visit to his relatives, as told to them by their ancestors.

“It is well-known that Rizal visited his cousin and sweetheart, Leonor Rivera, in nearby Dagupan City, where she resided for a few years and taught piano [lessons],” Arcinue said.

“But very few people know that he also visited her in nearby Lingayen when Leonor would stay in the house of her uncle, Leoncio Bauson, a brother of her mother, Doña Betang Bauson,” she added.

Arcinue said Msgr. Luisito Ungson, a scion of the Bausons, once told her that Rizal also stayed with the family of Don Sisenando Bengzon, who was once mayor of Lingayen.

“[The Bengzon] house is still standing there,” she said.

Arcinue said her mother once told her that her grandfather, Jose Sayson, was one of Rizal’s friends in Lingayen.

Good old times

“While these young gentlemen of those good old times were bantering together, Rizal would be doing something else at the same time, like carving a hard young guava fruit… into some form of art. For him, there should be no time wasted,” Arcinue said.

She said there was also a story about how some women played a bad joke on Rizal during one of his visits.

Arcinue said she heard the story from Nieves Bengson Cudala, daughter of former Pangasinan Rep. Antonio Bengson and aunt of former Rep. Antonio “Joe” Bengson III.

“[The ladies] played a bad joke on him by putting some cotton in the main dish inotekan (dinakdakan). They watched him eat and waited for his reaction. But he disappointed them when he just swallowed the food, cotton and all without any hint of discomfort,” she said.

Arcinue said that according to Ungson, Rizal left his cane in the house of Leoncio Bauson.

“He said it was also there where Leonor, in a state of depression and frustration on her upcoming marriage to [English engineer] Charles Kipping, cut her long tresses and left it there for good,” she said.

Unfortunately, she added, the heirs of the Bauson family burned everything when Mrs. Bauson passed away. They only saved the letters of Bauson, with some bits of information about Rizal and Rivera.