Colonialism and Identity Theme Analysis

If you are still not convinced of the metaphor of the ship of state, look at the mix of passengers. Brown faces and black heads congregate below decks, indios, Chinese, and mestizos crammed among parcels and trunks. While up there above decks, under a canopy that protects them from the sun and seated in comfortable armchairs, are several passengers dressed European-style, friars and bureaucrats smoking fat cigars and contemplating the countryside, taking no notice, it seems, of the captain and crew’s efforts to navigate the river’s shoals.

But the justices of the peace and those in the capital refused to side with him. They were afraid of losing their own positions. […] They were not bad men. They were conscientious, moral, good citizens, excellent fathers, good sons; too good, perhaps. They knew Tales’s situation perhaps better than he did himself. Many of them knew the property’s legal and historical background. They knew that because of their own statutes the friars could not have owned the property. They knew all that and more. They also knew that coming from afar, from across the sea with a hard-earned position, trying their best to carry it out with the best of intentions, to lose it because an indio took it into his head that justice was supposed to be the same on earth as it is in heaven, well, what a crazy idea!

“[…] I stoked the greed, I helped it along, and the injustices and abuses multiplied. I fomented crimes and acts of cruelty so that the people would get used to the idea of death. I contributed to their anxiety so that, when they ran screaming from it, they would look for any solution at all. I shackled business to such an extent that with the country reduced to poverty and misery in the end the people would have nothing to fear. I put measures in place to deplete the treasury, and if that weren’t enough to create a popular uprising, I hit them where it would hurt the most: I made it so that the vulture itself would insult the body that gave it life and would corrupt it.”

“What will you accomplish with Spanish, especially with the few who will actually speak it? Kill off your originality? Subordinate your thoughts to the minds of others and instead of being free, you will really make yourselves into slaves. Nine out of ten of you who think of yourselves as members of the educated upper middle class are renegades to your own country! Those among you would speak that language neglect their own to such an extent that they neither speak it or understand it, and how many of you actually pretend not to understand a single world!”

And they’re not happy with just being unjust, no, or upsetting your country’s traditions […] you have served Spain and the king, but when in their name you ask for justice, they offer no protection. They throw you off your own land without a trial and without even a good reason. They rip you from the arms of your wives and the embrace of your children. Some of you have suffered even more than Cabesang Tales and yet none of you had justice […] without pity or humanity they persecuted you even beyond the grave, as they did to Mariano Herbosa. Cry or laugh on the lonely islands where you wander, unsure of the future. Spain, generous Spain, watches over you and, sooner or later, you will get justice!

The listeners’ enthusiasm became delirious. Isagani hugged Sandoval. Others followed suit. They spoke of their country, of the union, of brotherhood, of fidelity. The Filipinos claimed that if all Spaniards were like Sandoval, everyone in the Philippines would be Sandovals, too. Sandoval’s eyes shone. One might even have believed that if in that moment anyone at all had thrown down a gauntlet, he would have mounted his steed to kill on the Philippines’ behalf.

Only the wet blanket responded. “Fine, very nice, Sandoval. If I were from the Peninsula, I would say the same thing. But since that’s not the case, if I had said half of what you did, you would label me a filibustero.”

The Chinaman respected the jeweler a great deal not only for his wealth but for the rumored influence he had over the captain-general. It was said that Simoun favored the Chinaman’s aspirations and was in favor of the consulate. A certain Sinophobic newspaper had made veiled references to him, though with a great deal of periphrasis, indirection, and sly suggestion, and in its well-known polemic enjoined the partisan newspaper of the people of the queue. Some of the more circumspect people added with nudges and winks that the Dark Eminence counseled the general to value the Chinese while depreciating the rigorous dignity of the natives.

“To subjugate a people,” he said, “there is nothing like humiliating them and debasing them in their own eyes.”

Simoun suddenly stopped speaking, as if he had been cut off. Somewhere inside him a voice asked if he, Simoun, were not indeed part of the trash of that damned city, perhaps even its most destructive ferment. And as the dead rise at the sound of the eternal trumpet, a thousand bloody ghosts, desperate shadows of murdered men, dishonored women, fathers torn from their families, vices engendered and fostered, virtues rejected now rose up in the echoes of that mysterious question. For the first time in his career as a criminal, since Havana, when through vice and bribery he had decided to create a means to carry out his plans, a man without faith, without patriotism, without conscience, for the first time in that era of his life something inside of him came out and protested his actions.

Once he was advised to return to Spain to be cured of a liver ailment and the newspapers spoke of him as if he were Antaeus needing to set foot in the mother county to renew his strength, though this Antaeus found himself small and insignificant at court. He was a nobody there and he missed his beloved adjectives. He had no relations with the first families, his lack of education afforded him no prominence in the scientific or academic communities, and his backwardness and friary politics came off simplistic in those circles. So, disgusted and put out, he took nothing from it except that there they kicked sand in your face and played rough. He missed the submissive houseman in Manila who suffered all his impertinence and who now seemed preferrable.

“The French language really doesn’t have the rich sonority or the varied and elegant cadences of the Castilian language. I cannot fathom, I cannot imagine, I cannot formulate an idea of French orators and I doubt they have ever existed, nor could they exist in the true sense of the word, in the strict sense of the idea.”

Rest in peace, sad daughter of my wretched country! Bury in your tomb the charms of youth, withered in their prime. When a people cannot provide its maidens with a peaceful home, a shelter of holy freedom, when a man can leave only dubious words to a widow, tears to his mother, slavery to his children, it’s better to condemn you all to perpetual chastity, drowning in your womanhood a future, damned generation.

But Paulita had heard that to get to Isagani’s village you had to go through mountains where there was an abundance of little leeches and just thinking about it made the coward in her tremble convulsively. Spoiled and indulged, she simply said that she would only travel there by coach or train.

Isagani, who had by then forgotten all his pessimism and now could see everywhere only roses without thorns, said to her, “Soon every island will be crisscrossed by a network of steel, ‘Where rapid / and fleeting / locomotives / speeding will go,’ as someone once said. Then the most beautiful corners of the archipelago will be open to everyone.”

“Then? When? When I’m old?”

“Oh, you have no idea what we’ll be able to do in just a few years,” Isagani replied.

“Get rid of them and the indio will cease to exist. The friar is the father, the indio is the word! The friar is the sculptor, the indio the statue, because everything we are, everything we think, and everything we do we owe to the friars, to their patience, to their work, to their three centuries of modification of what Nature afforded us. And in a Philippines without friars or indios, what will happen to the poor government, in the hands of the Chinese?”

“I agree with you that we have our defects. But whose fault is that? Yours, after three and a half centuries of our education in your hands, or ours, when we bow down in the face of everything? If after three and a half centuries the sculptor has only been able to create a caricature, it will almost definitely come out poorly done.”

“Or perhaps the clay is inadequate…”

“Even less adept then, because if the clay is so inadequate, why waste the time? But he’s not only inept, he’s a fraud and a thief, because even knowing that his work is useless, he continues to do it just to get paid. And he’s not only inept and a thief, he’s corrupt, because he opposes any other sculptor who wants to try out his own talent to see if it’s worth the effort. The fatal jealousy of the incompetent!”

In the garden, he came upon his coach, which was waiting for him.

“One day when you declare your independence,” he said to the lackey who had opened the coach door, taking heart, “remember that there were some in Spain who didn’t lack the courage to suffer for you and fight for your rights.”

“Where to, señor?” the lackey inquired. He hadn’t understood a word, and just wanted to know the destination.

“What will the world say when they see such carnage?”

“The world will applaud, like it always does, saying that the strongest, and the most violent, are in the right,” Simoun answered with a cruel smile. “Europe applauded when the Western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in the Americas, and surely there are not to be found much more moral or peaceful nations. […] Europe applauded when a powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccan Islands, it applauds as England destroys the primitive peoples in the Pacific to implant its emigrants there. Europe will applaud the way it applauds the end of a play, the end of a tragedy. The masses will hardly take notice, in the end, and will see only the effect. Commit a crime well and you will be admired and you’ll end up with more supporters than you would have had you committed a virtuous act, carried out with timidity and modesty.”

“The glory of saving a country doesn’t mean having to use the measures that contributed to its ruin! You have believed that what crime iniquity have stained and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can purify and redeem! That’s wrong! Hatred creates nothing but monsters. Only love can bring about wondrous things. Only virtue is redemptive! No, if someday our country can be free, it will not be by vice and crime, not by corruption of our children, by cheating some, and buying others. No, redemption supposes virtue, sacrifice, and sacrifice, love!”