The clergy are shown to encourage ignorance, superstition and social inequity on a grand scale. The book is a savage critique of the church, exposing brutality, venality and sexual exploitation of women. On the same page his narrator says of Captain Tiago’s house that he doesn’t think that the owner would have demolished it ‘because this sort of work is usually reserved for God or nature, which has, it appears, many projects of this type under contract with our government’. The Spanish authorities who read this book in the 1880s could be in no doubt, then, about this challenge, and Rizal had the church in his sights too. In those days Captain Tiago was considered the most liberal of men, and it was known that the doors of his house, like those of his country, were closed to no one but tradesmen or perhaps a new or daring idea. Towards the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, who was generally known as Captain Tiago, gave a dinner party that, despite its having been announced only that afternoon, which was not his usual practice, was the topic of every conversation in Bimondo and neighboring areas, and even as far as Intramuros. The author’s satirical intent is evident in the very first paragraph: Rizal would be dead within ten years, executed by firing squad in Manila. Ostensibly it is a love story, but one set against a backdrop of repression and violence. Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) (1887) by José Rizal is such a book, for although its author advocated reform not independence, the novel was so instrumental in articulating a Filipino identity that it provoked resistance against the Spanish colonial regime. The pen is mightier than the sword, they say, and it is not often that one has the opportunity to read a novel that has forged an independence movement.
0 kommentar(er)
