Sa Aking Mga Kabata: Don't believe everything you read
What is up with this poem? Did Rizal write it?
Sa Aking Mga Kabata
Kapagka ang baya’y sadyang umiibig
Sa langit salitang kaloob ng langit
Sanlang kalayaan nasa ring masapi
Katulad ng ibong nasa himpapawid
Pagka’t ang salita’y isang kahatulan
Sa bayan, sa nayo't mga kaharian
At ang isang tao’y katulad, kabagay
Ng alin mang likha noong kalayaan.
Ang hindi magmahal sa kanyang salita
Mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda
Kaya ang marapat pagyamanin kusa
Na tulad sa inang tunay na nagpala
Ang wikang Tagalog tulad din sa Latin,
Sa Ingles, Kastila, at salitang anghel,
Sapagkat ang Poong maalam tumingin
Ang siyang naggagawad, nagbibigay sa atin.
Ang salita nati’y tulad din sa iba
Na may alfabeto at sariling letra,
Na kaya nawala’y dinatnan ng sigwa
Ang lunday sa lawa noong dakong una.1
For the first actual literary post of this newsletter, I felt like we should tackle one of Rizal’s well-known poems, Sa Aking Mga Kabata (“To My Fellow Youths”). I’m pretty sure any Filipino who’s ever studied in the Philippines has heard of this poem, especially during August when Buwan ng Wika (“Month of Language”)2 celebrations are in full swing.
Personally, I’ve always despised this poem with a fury that can barely fit in my too short body. It isn’t that I hate the Filipino language (or languages, if we want to be very specific). It’s that I was a kid who could barely speak Tagalog for the life of me, and hearing that line “Ang hindi magmahal sa kanyang salita / Mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda” (“The one who does not love their own language / Is worse than an animal or a foul fish”)3 really hit too close to home. Why did eight-year old Rizal even write this, I wondered? Didn’t he have any classmates who couldn’t speak the language, like me? It really stirred me up.
And then I read articles that put doubt into my mind: did Rizal really write this poem at all?
In his August 22, 2011 Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper column,resident historian Ambeth Ocampo debated the traditional origin of the poem. He said that “Rizal spoke and wrote in Tagalog fluently, but he was unable to write a whole novel in his mother tongue.” The evidence given was that there is no original draft for the poem in Rizal’s hand, and neither did he assert authorship of the poem in his lifetime. Not to mention, the novel mentioned in the above quote, “Makamisa” (“After the Mass”), was never completed beyond a chapter.4 There is other particular evidence of the poem not being written by Rizal given by Ocampo, and Ocampo is not the only one to have his doubts about the authorship of the poem, but for brevity I will not list all of that here.
It makes one really think, though. If we lived in a world where no one believed that Rizal really wrote this poem, then would Filipinos have latched onto it as solidly as we do today? Would it lose its famous status? Would I have ever heard about it and believed that I was the “foul fish” mentioned in the lines?
There’s things that we really can’t change, however. This poem is still attributed to Rizal in many sources, and to some extent I believe I am the “foul fish”. But if we can learn anything from this insight into the poem, then it would be: don’t believe everything you read.
This is not to say that you should be overly paranoid that everything fed to you by Big Media is a lie. Of course not. One must simply always exercise critical thinking when it comes to these sorts of things, especially the history of literature. Always give everything a second thought, even if you’re absolutely sure. Get a second opinion. And perhaps most importantly, read beyond the clickbait and the punch line. There are wonderful things to be read beyond the lines.
The wonderful thing I found while reading beyond the lines, for example, is that even though eight-year old Jose Rizal might not have written “Sa Aking Mga Kabata” after all, calling someone a “foul fish” for not loving a certain language is kind of a childish insult. Therefore, I too shouldn’t always believe what I read.
“Jose Rizal [Poems]”, Jose Rizal.ph, accessed May 16, 2022, http://www.joserizal.ph/pm18.html
The translations of “Sa Aking Mga Kabata” and “Buwan ng Wika” are mine.
The translation of this line is also mine.
Ambeth R. Ocampo, “Did young Rizal really write poem for children?”, Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 22, 2011, accessed May 16, 2022, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/45479/did-young-rizal-really-write-poem-for-children