The novel as a social text

In 1902, Isabelo de los Reyes – a radical scholar, propagandist and founder of the Philippine Independent Church – started the Union Obrera Democratica, the first labor union against the Americans. The Americans had been in the country for only three years when they snuffed out the dreams of Asia’s first independent country and turned it into just another colony. The Americans promptly imprisoned De Los Reyes to prevent the growth of the seed that he had recently planted.

The young writer Lope K. Santos was a member of this labor union. Remember that this was just a few years after the Spaniards had executed Dr. Jose Rizal at Bagumbayan for being “the spirit of the revolution.” This was just three years after the United States had colonized the Philippines. Nationalist feelings still ran high. American culture – language, literature, music, film and basketball – had yet to take root. The soil in many parts of the country was still soaked in blood. Poems and novels in Tagalog were being published in the newspapers. These works that harked back to a glorious past and satirized a troubled present were being written, published and read. Love of country was the mantra of the day.

The eminent historian, Professor Teodoro Agoncillo, wrote: “Most influential of these works, however, was Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat. Avidly read by the masses and the intellectuals, the book in no small measure influenced the workers in fighting for economic, social and political reforms. As a result, more and more labor unions sprouted; strikes were resorted to by the laborers, particularly those engaged in cigar and cigarette manufacture, to the discomfiture of the capitalists who had been accustomed to pushing the workers around.”

But who was this person who wrote not just the first proletariat novel in the Philippines, but the first one in Asia?

Lope K. Santos was born in 1887 in Sampaloc, Manila, the son of a worker in the printing press. Even at a young age, he was already familiar with the printer’s ink. Unfortunately, his father died when he was still young, and the boy worked in another printing house. That printing house published the Balarila ng Wikang Tagalog by Father Mariano Sevilla. The young boy showed an early interest in the arts: he read the poems his father had written, he helped in theater and he joined poetry jousts.

He took a course in Education but was forced to work for the Spaniards, so he could draw his salary as a government employee. After the signing of the Pact of Biak-na-Bato peace treaty, Santos worked as a guard in Intramuros. Later, he helped distribute firearms and food under the command of General Pio del Pilar when the Philippine-American War erupted.

He moved houses, always on the run from the enemy, and then he met a group of journalists, the brightest and bravest in the country: Rafael Palma, Teodoro M. Kalaw, Rafael Corpuz, Jose Palma, Patricio Mariano, Honorio Lopez, Valeriano Hernandez Peña, Faustino Aguilar and Francisco Lacsamana. They were not only journalists; many of them were also poets and novelists. Santos had found his milieu.

After the Americans finally subjugated the Filipinos in a long, costly and bloody war, the second wave of colonization began. Along with the entry of the Thomasites, the American teachers who came aboard the cattle ship USS Thomas, arrived the long container vans with books in English: Longfellow and Shakespeare, Keats and Lord Byron as well as the explosive books of Hegel, Marx and Engels, among others.

Santos became a militant journalist in Ang Kaliwanagan and Kapatid ng Bayan in 1902. He later edited Muling Pagsilang, the Tagalog newspaper of the El Renacimiento. Both the Tagalog and Spanish newspapers were fearless, until the Interior Secretary Dean C. Worcester brought a libel case against Fidel Reyes for his scathing editorial, “Aves de Rapina” (Birds of Prey). The American won the case. All the printing machines of the newspaper were confiscated to pay for damages and in exchange for freedom for the publisher and the staff.

Later, Santos edited the satirical newspaper Lipang Kalabaw, published by the then rising star in politics, Manuel Luis Quezon. He was persuaded to run for governor of Rizal, which he won. After serving as governor, he edited the newspaper of the Nacionalista Party, from which President Quezon plucked him to work as governor of Nueva Vizcaya. He later ran for senator of Mindanao and again, he won. Santos was well-admired as a governor and a senator: someone who never lined his pockets with stolen money, and someone who applied in the real world the words in his fiction. He later served as a director of the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa. He died on May 1, 1963, fittingly enough, on Labor Day.

Banaag at Sikat is considered as the fountainhead of social realism in the Tagalog novel. It mirrored the various forces clashing during the early days of American colonialism; in this guise, the novel could be seen as a social text.

Santos wrote the novel when he was only 25 years old. He was a voracious reader, and his great learning was shown in the authors and books cited in the novel. He also knew that he was standing on the shoulders of a literary tradition. His novel sprang directly from Ninay by Pedro Paterno and the Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo by Dr. Jose Rizal. The costumbrismo tradition, the novel as a document of mores and manners, customs and traditions that was shown in Ninay can also be found in some chapters in Banaag at Sikat, especially in the description of the luxuriant flora in the countryside as well as the wedding and funeral scenes. The embers of Rizal’s novels can be seen in the subject matter of Banaag at Sikat: like philosophy, it was written “to help change the world.”

Moreover, Banaag at Sikat was the child of the 19th-century didactic novel. This could be seen in the long passages where the characters debate on capital and labor, socialism and anarchy. Sometimes, Santos laid too heavy a hand and would veer a chapter toward another theoretical discussion on capitalism and its discontents, and why the Philippines should embrace socialism instead.

Banaag at Sikat, then, should be seen from the lens of its historical context: the 19th-century novel as a vessel of opinions and an instrument that could enlighten the readers on the burning issues of the  day. It will continue to generate new meanings, or regenerate old ones, through the passage of the years. I have translated it as Radiance and Sunrise to be published by Penguin Books. May it inspire new readers to take their individual and collective lives into their own hands, and shape it to “help change the world.”