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Filibustero, Rizal, and the Manilamen of the Nineteenth CenturyThis article traces the provenance and the multiple layers of meaning, as well as the contradictions encoded, in the word filibustero from its origins among pirates in the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Ameri...

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Filibustero, Rizal, and the Manilamen of the Nineteenth Century

This article traces the provenance and the multiple layers of meaning, as well as the contradictions encoded, in the word filibustero from its origins among pirates in the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the American military adventurers in the nineteenth century, whose complex politics intersected with proindependence Cuban exiles. This history illumines the word’s specific meaning as it entered the Philippines before 1872. At the same time, filibustero can be linked to the Manilamen, natives of the Spanish Philippines who worked as international seafarers, who became involved in mercenary activities, especially in Shanghai. This seaborne genealogy contextualizes the analysis of the filibustero in josé rizal’s second novel. The title of José Rizal’s second novel, Filibusterismo is derived from the simpler term ‘filibustero’. As Ferdinand Blumentritt read Rizal’s Noli me tángere, he asked Rizal what the word filibustero meant for it “must have a certain meaning” that Blumentritt said he could not find. Looking back to the time of the Cavite Mutiny, Rizal replied: “The word filibustero is little known in the Philippines …I heard it for the first time when the tragic executions of the Gomburza took place. Our father forbade us to utter it.” Rizal’s reply suggested that by 1872 the word filibustero was dreadfully circulating among members of the native elite, including Rizal’s family. He asserted that “the common people” had not known the word. If this observation was accurate, it would mean that filibustero was essentially a term deployed by the civil authorities in the Spanish Philippines, appearing in newspapers but evidently not used by the clergy in the pulpit during Sunday mass, the best medium by which a word could reach the masses. 2 Rizal dedicated El filibusterismo to the three martyred priests who were accused of being ‘filibustero’. Indeed, several priests and laymen, including lawyers and businessmen who had agitated for liberal reforms, were arrested during the revolt and presumed guilty of plotting to overthrow the colonial government even prior to the gathering of evidence. In Rizal’s dedication, he fearlessly declared his conviction that the Spanish officials’ treatment of the priests’ case was unjust. In such a context, any “presumptuous fellow” could be labeled a filibustero. 3 From 1872 onward the term filibustero, which made an impression on Rizal even as a lad, remained in circulation among the native elites. Rizal told Blumentritt that he mocked the word in his novel, Noli me tángere. It is used in the title of chapter 4, “Hereje y Filibustero,” which describes the injustices suffered by Don Rafael Ibarra, a just man who was accused of being a filibustero and presumed guilty with neither evidence nor trial. Next we have the El filibusterismo en Filipinas. In this piece Rizal argued that there were no filibusteros in the Philippines, but the word was employed recklessly and anyone who sought a modern and enlightened world was immediately labeled as such. Derisively Rizal wrote that those who did not take off their hats on meeting a Spaniard or who refused to kiss the “sweaty hand” of the friar were labeled filibusteros 4 Given this many-sided history, it is likely that the word filibustero, in all its ambiguity, must have reached the shores of Manila prior to the Cavite Mutiny, but not much earlier. One possible channel could have come from the Spanish consulate in Shanghai, which would have sent confidential reports to both Manila and Madrid.

A more likely channel would have been through the Caribbean. But the route traversed the United States, specifically via exiles from Cuba, who kept alive the spirit of filibustering. A segment of exiled Cubans in the US appropriated filibustero as a political badge of honor and a symbol of their determination to win freedom from Spanish rule.“El Filibustero” was the title of a poem and the name of a newspaper that attempted to dredge up support for filibustering expeditions to Cuba. It described itself as the “organ of Cuban independence”. And then from Cuba the word hopped to Puerto Rico on Izquierdo’s own baggage, and, with an awareness of the “similarities” that bound the Philippines to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, he introduced the Caribbean colonial army slang in Manila to apprehend the events of 1872. The negative sense of filibustero was what dominated Rizal’s explanation to Blumentritt. 5 In the Fili the filibustero as phantom is exemplified by the character of Simoun. what emerges most vividly in the novel is the ability of the filibustero to corrupt colonial authorities, impelling them to commit more acts of injustice that would deepen social disorder and foment people to rise to free themselves from their debasement and this circular haunting. Not only were some Manilamen “real” filibusteros, of the mercenary variety in earlier times as well as of the liberationist kind in the revolutionary period as we shall see momentarily, but the decimation of the Spanish ruling clique was foreshadowed in Rizal’s dedication of the book to Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora and what the regime accused them of intending to accomplish: freedom through the killing of all Spaniards. Hesitating to appropriate the term filibustero as a badge of honor, Rizal, as writer in exile, nonetheless used the image of the filibustero to conjure a possibly explosive end of Spanish rule in the Philippines. -Caroline Hau identifies that Noli Me deals with a fake rebellion staged by a Spanish priest to frame a young reformist. The Philippine colonial state itself was quick to react to any hint, even rumor, of conspiracy or rebellion- even a fake one-with full force of its military might, as seen in the Noli. The Fili turns the screw because revolution is no longer just talk, but it assures flesh, form, and intent in the figure of the filibustero Simoun . His strategy is basically to stir up trouble, stimulating greed and corruption, instigating crime, committing acts of cruelty, and feeding the desire to plunder NEXT So, the word Filibustero as mentioned by the previous reporter multilingual origins of the term the French flibustier, in turn derived from the Dutch vrijbuiter and English freebooter . In pirate novels produced in such Latin American countries in the context of war of independence from Spain and the ensuing civil wars and challenges of nation making, filibustero came to embody both positive ideas of independence (freedom) and negative ideas of plunder (terror). So now let’s talk about Simoun Like filibustero, “Simoun” is multivalent and plurilingual. 

A simoun is literally a scorching, dry desert wind that sweeps across the region stretching from the Middle East to the Maghreb. The simoun’s suffocatingly high temperature (55 degrees centigrade), low humidity (as low as 10 percent), and strong

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wind (billowing dust and sand) make it extremely dangerous to humans and animals, which have been known to suffer heat stroke. Also, simoun has religious significance, it has nineteenth century commentaries on the Bible as the fabled “East Wind” that serves God’s purpose by bringing locusts and famine, drying up springs, destroying ships, and parting the Red Sea. But the simoun wind also has political significance, providing simile and metaphor for the winds of revolution, most notably the French Revolution, and the complex “images of freedom and terror” reverberate across the world.

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Places such Cuba (where Simoun spent time and met the governor-general) and the Carribean parts of South America that are now Colombia and Panama were “contact zones” with intense links to French territories, links historically created by “slavery and the slave trade, smuggling, piracy, cimarronaje (marronage), and hidden movements of all kinds”. The - French Revolution was known to have had a deep impact on Francisco de Miranda and Simon Bolivar, and the Napoleonic Wars in Spain had ignited the initial conservative revolution of the Creole elites as part of the latter’s effort to contain the more radical demands of the pardos (free people of color), slaves, and poor whites who in turn drew inspiration from the Haitian Revolution against French colonialism, which broke out just a few years after the French Revolution. The French Revolution’s own “complex images of freedom and terror” - its positive message of equality, liberty, and fraternity, and its negative message of violence, bloodshed, and judicial executions (most often symbolized by the Terror) - come into play in the associations surrounding the Fili’s Simoun. The simoun of revolution endows political action with the apocalyptic force of nature, capable of shaking up, if not destroying, a colonial order already riddled with violence and social and moral corruption. On the other hand, the reader is not given any hint of what Simoun’s plans for transforming society are after the successful overthrow. Instead, the Fili leaves open the questions of what kind and extent of reform - with revolution as the “ultimate reason” (la ultima razon), the final means by which people insist on bringing about change - are needed to break the cycle of oppression and retribution and how to offer some measure of institutional safeguards against incalculable violence.

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It has been also argued that Rizal drew inspiration from anarchism for the novel. It was written in a time when anarchists were engaged in “propaganda by the deed”, a tactic that anarchists and social revolutionaries formally adopted at their international meeting in London in 1881. For most of the nineteenth century, Spain had been wracked by the power struggle among the monarchy, church, army, and bourgeoisie. Spaniards waged a war of independence against Napoleon’s armies and were able to promulgate the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, which provided for a constitutional monarchy, universal suffrage, and civil liberties. But Ferdinand VII annulled the constitution upon his returns from exile. This struggle between absolutist monarchy and the army had borne fruit in the Philippines with the Creole revolts and conspiracies of the 1820s. The church - which in earlier centuries had served as “social conscience” on behalf of the exploited peasantry and colonial population - now played a major role in the attempt to impose a theocracy in Spain (on behalf of Ferdinand’s brother Don Carlos), triggering the Carlist Wars. Rizal’s Fili anticipates the wave of bombings that occurred in Spain and France in 1892-1894 which would be discussed by the next reporter.

NEXT SO is SIMOUN AN ANARCHIST? Simoun in no way corresponds to the prototypical anarchist, since the Fili does not provide any detailed discussion of the substantive ideas of a just and harmonious society founded on antihierarchy, mutualism, reciprocity, associationism, and cultivation of the individual’s potential that the anarchist movement had sought to realize. His plan somewhat falls between lone-wolf moral-symbolic terrorism and state-smashing strategic terrorism (and possibly Robin-Hood expropriatory, gives the involvement of Cabesang Tales’s group), concerned as it is with revolutionary upheaval, but largely reticent on the anarchist principles of solidarity, collectivism, and freedom. NEXT As we all know Simoun failed in his plans. When Simoun asks the priest why God has not helped him carry out his plans, Florentino answers that this is because Simoun has chosen means of which God could not have approved. Rizal leaves open-ended through Simoun’s silence which raises another possible interpretation of the relationship between revolutionary action and revolutionary consciousness, one not based on priority of one over the other, but on their mutual determination: just as political action is contingent on the remolding of minds and social relations, so too political action has the potential to transform society by remolding selves and social relations. For all that the Noli and the Fili ultimately pulled back from demanding the separation of Filipinas from Spain, the fact remains that they pointed to the horizon of struggle and independence. Even better, they offered a potent political fantasy, a series of thought experiments, in which revolution might be organized by people as “la ultima razon” to bring about change. This conjuring of revolution had an electrifying effect on Filipinos back home who had read these novels or, failing that (because of tight censorship), had heard - through rumormongering - about the radical content of these novels from others. NEXT Self-sacrifice and the negation of self that it entails have long been integral to the theory and practice of nationalism and are two elements of nationalism’s emotional core. It has also been argued that core elements as well in revolutionary violence. Giorgio Agamben (2009), basing on Walter Benjamin’s (1986) idea of sovereign violence, argues that revolutionary violence is not “a violence of means, aimed at the just end of negating the existing system.” Violence that enforces the law and violence that defies the law are “no different from the violence aimed at establishing new laws and new power” because in each of these instances of violence, “negation of the other fails to become a negation of the self”. Agamben suggests that the “limit and irrepressible truth of revolutionary violence” lie in the act of crossing the “threshold of culture and occupying a zone inaccessible to language.” Rizal’s novels point to the horizon of liberation necessary to found a (national) community, while keeping always in view the ethical dilemma of debating and realizing the means by which justice and freedom must be earned, fought for, and died for. All efforts to make community, no matter how just or right, are haunted by the specter of the massacre of innocents. No movement, no matter how just its cause, can take life with impunity, nor demand sacrifice from the people in whose

name it fights for liberation. The Noli’s formulation of the ethical dilemma of fighting for change would haunt theories of political and social transformation in the century INTERPRETING EL FILIBUSTERISMO: TRANSCONTINENTALISM AND PROLEPSIS TRANSPOSITIONS The main subplot of El Filibusterismo is the ultimately unsuccessful campaign of the students to have the state establish an academy for (lay) instruction in the Spanish language – the first step towards the hispanicization of the population. In historical fact, there was never any such students’ campaign in Manila, and in any case Weyler would not have tolerated it for a moment. After the campaign for a Spanish-language academy has failed, mysterious subversive posters appear all over the university one night, leading the regime to indiscriminate arrests - a clear replication of Canovas's raids on the Central University of Madrid. The mysterious posters quickly cause a general panic, fed by wild rumors of insurrections and invasions of ferocious bandits, which recall the Mano Negra panic in Andalusia in 1883, and foreshadow the so-called "revolutionary" peasant attack on Jerez early in 1892. It is interesting that Rizal works to anchor these plot developments in the Philippines by giving the relevant chapter the Tagalog title Tatakut, which means "panic."

DANSONS LA RAVACHOLE After the Jerez uprising, a series of serious explosions started in Paris, the work of the half-Dutch, half-Alsatian Francois-Claude Koenigstein, better known as Ravachol, a criminal with a record of murder and robbery. He was quickly caught and put on trial. Claiming that he had acted in revenge for violent police repression against a workers' demonstration in Clichy, followed by the trial of some workers at which the prosecutor demanded (but did not win) the death penalty, Ravachol told the court that he had acted on revolutionary anarchist principles. On July 11 he was guillotined. This was the first political execution in France since the massacres of the Communards.

In spite of his dubious past, Ravachol's death made him an instant hero of the anarchisant Left on both sides of the Pyrenees.

On September 24, Paulino Pallas threw two bombs at the Captain-General of Catalonia, General Arsenio Martinez Campos. This attentat resulted in one death, and several grave injuries. Pallas was executed by firing squad a month later. On November 7, Salvador Santiago threw a huge bomb into the Barcelona Opera House causing a large number of deaths and severe injuries among scores of the city’s moneyed elite. Then eventually he was caught in hiding. After declaring he had acted to avenge Pallas, whom he knew and admired, he was garroted at Montjuich.

Then, on December 9, Auguste Vaillant hurled a large bomb into the French Parliament, which killed no one, but wounded several of the deputies. On February 5, 1894, he was guillotined. The first instance in French memory of the death penalty being used in a case where no victim had died. The culmination of this wave of anarchist bombs came with a series of deathdealing explosions in Paris immediately following Vaillant’s execution, and clearly in part intended to avenge him. The perpetrator was found to be Emile Henry, a young intellectual born in Spain to fleeing Communard exiles. He too was quickly caught and guillotined.

None of these five famous bombers fit Simoun’s personal profile except for henry.

Henry’s rhetoric uncannily reproduces that of Simoun. There is in him a negative photograph of the aristocratic “socialist” Rodolphe, who practices his own vigilante justice on evildoers and exploiters, of Des Esseintes. At the same time, however, Simoun is an anticolonial nationalist, with a revolution of sorts on his mind. Simoun has no plans for the aftermath of his successful vengeance, and nothing in El filibusterismo suggests that anyone else has either: only a dream of “liberty,” formless and utopian. (This must be one reason why the conspiracy has to fail.) It is exactly here that Rizal marked the crisscrossing of anticolonial nationalism and “propaganda by the deed,” with its planless utopianism and its taste for self immolation. At the same time, however, the examples, stated and unstated, are all of violent "successes." Seen in the light of this rhetoric, a "success" of this type was becoming imaginable in the Philippines. Five years after the publication of El filibusterismo Andres Bonifacio would begin an armed insurrection on the outskirts of Manila.

AN ENIGMATIC SMILE

The novel's final pages are filled with a lengthy dialogue between the dying Simoun and Father Florentino, with whom he has found temporary refuge. Simoun poses to the priest the question of Ivan Karamazov: If vuestro Dios demands such inhuman sacrifices, such humiliations, tortures, expropriations, misery and exploitation of the good and innocent, telling them simply to suffer and to work, Qué Dios' es ése? (What kind of God is this?) Florentino replies with a lengthy homily justifying the divinity's ways to man. He tells Simoun that God understands all his sufferings and will forgive him, but that he has chosen evil methods to achieve worthy ends, and this is inadmissible. Most commentators have assumed that the old priest represents Rizal’s last word on the politico-moral drama of the novel. But to make this judgment so easily requires overlooking two things. First, Simoun says nothing during or after the homily, and he may not even be listening. He makes no proper confession and nor does he ask for forgiveness. Moments later he is dead. Second is the strange brief chapter near the end,

called "El misterio," of whose seven pages in the original manuscript, three were blacked out by the author.

We are in the house of the rich Orenda family, at which three callers have arrived in the chaotic aftermath of the failed explosion and armed incursions. One of the visitors is the young blade Momoy who attended the fateful wedding party of Paulita Gomez and was a befuddled witness to what happened. Another is the student Isagani, who seized the let...