General de la Matta goes on:
It must be kept in mind that ambition is wont to affect the Spanish people transplanted to these distant and hot climes; that arrogant presumption is their distinctive characteristic . . . The hot climate especially contributes to captiousness and the development of vehement passions.
Even including the unnecessary asides on Philippine weather, Raymundo Mata himself would not have described the captious Other more pungently [Spanish guardia or American colonel]—their greedy “ambitions,” their “arrogant presumption.”
Such descriptions of the enemy from the enemy himself are revelatory for all readers of Raymundo’s memoirs.
The words of General de la Matta, precursor of Raymundo Mata,31 32 33 allow us to see, once more, darkly, the reality of oppression and the justice of Raymundo Mata’s war.
Not much is known of Raymundo’s view of the American Phase of the Revolution, a.k.a. the Philippine-American War. Captured by Americans, Raymundo was in Bilibid jail until 1902, apparently collating these memoirs in between bouts of water torture.
I assume that the haphazard nature of their compilation, still to be fully comprehended, attests to the squalor and terror of his last days.
Did he die in jail?
No one knows.
One Francis Saint Clair Watson, or Clair Watson Saint Francis, a British journalist or American G.I., who cares, he’s racist, was the last to see Raymundo Mata alive.
An interesting footnote is that he was jailed not for sedition but theft, possibly a clerical error.
What Raymundo left behind are a bunch of papers, messy and a bit of a pain, a few cockpit debts, an empty leather medical bag, and books.
A distinctive quality of this war was its reliance on reading—literacy was the charming obsession of many a revolutionary.
Annoying foreign observers such as Saint Francis Clair Watson, or Francis Clair Saint Watson, said Americans came to “civilize” the “natives.” Of course, this is an irony not lost on a single Filipino forced to read all three hundred forty-two pages and nine hundred ninety-nine thousand words of Noli Me Tangere in high school! (And I had to read Rizal in translation, in Tagalog—but Warays will do anything for the nation.)
The American Revolution had farmers and dentists. The French Revolution had a mob of lawyers.
Our prime mover was a poet.34
The Philippines may be the only country whose war of independence began with a novel (and a first novel at that)—Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (“Touch-Me-Not”).
Our notion of freedom began with fiction, which may explain why it remains an illusion.
Rizal’s own modest reading of the aims of his novels at the time of his 1896 trial, in which he rejects the life of politics, must be completely ignored as the muted ravings of a rational guy who did not want to die.
The Supremo Andres Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan, the secret society, was a fan of Rizal, worse than a Noranian. It is now understood with some regret that Bonifacio’s raid on the Manila arsenal at the outbreak of war, which led to the Supremo’s hurried flight to Cavite—and sadly his death (damn damn damn the Caviteños)—may have been a literary allusion: inspired not by careful military planning but by the gunpowder plot in Rizal’s second novel, El Filibusterismo, or Sedition.
Hence, its doomed, though inspiring, failure.
By 1896 readers were risking their lives all over the place to smuggle pamphlets and decode anagrams of heroic names. Membership to the Katipunan rose dramatically with the publication of the first (and last) distributed issue of a newsletter, Kalayaan. Histories of the war refer constantly to memos to the warfront, distributed decalogues, intercepted letters, confiscated libraries.
It is said that unread peasants gained revolutionary passion via the recitation of pasyon, the holy narration of the death of Christ. The peasant katipuneros were vessels of material text as much as of their unworldly God.
Lastly, an argument in a printing press led prematurely to revolt.
It’s a truism that our revolution existed—and lives on—as text.
One revolutionary, Juan Maibay, relates reading aloud the published principles of the Katipunan to a bandit, Matandang Leon Matulis,35 36 in the middle of a jungle at the height of wartime before finally initiating the thief into the revolutionary society.
See Entry #42.
And of course many of the unfortunate mysteries and miserable lacunae in the war’s narrative occur because bibliokleptomaniacs abound, lurking in the stacks of dim libraries.
One notes below a passage from a text Raymundo admired as a boy:
There is between savage and civilized life an “irrepressible conflict.” Where the hum of human industry is heard, with villages, churches, schools and manufactories, there can be no forest left for buffaloes, bears, and deer. Civilization was rapidly supplanting barbarism, and the savages were alarmed.
Such anti-colonial, pro-environmental sentiment appears in Lives of the Presidents of the United States of America, a book read and re-read by Raymundo, also a fixture on the shelves of Andres Bonifacio, the Supremo and Great Plebeian; referred to in a letter by Jose Rizal, National Hero and Martyr of Bagumbayan; and even annotated by the brains of the revolution, Apolinario Mabini, the Sublime Paralytic; but not heard of at all by Miong, a.k.a. General Emilio Aguinaldo, later first president of the Republic—the Only Non-Reader of the Bunch!
And look where that got him—ambushed by the Americans!
Texts such as the above must have stoked the reader Raymundo Mata’s revolutionary hatred for “churches” and enflamed love for exotic wild animals, buffalo and deer (non-existent in Manila but que se joda). Raymundo could not help but side with the “alarmed savages” in the above book, with those victims of nineteen-year-old George Washington’s genocidal hunting rifle in 1748 (an English long-rifle used in the Americas’ wars against Indians, precursor of the Krag). Such identification with Native Americans, through texts, must have been a guiding light for our heroes—
Then why the hell they were so easily duped by Commodore George Dewey and the murderous Krags of the Philippine-American War of 1899 is what I want to know!37
27 The Spanish government’s indictment of Jose Rizal, dated December 26, 1896, is a curious type
