Lolo Jose

SOMETIME ago my niece asked me to read her a story from a pile of illustrated books she had brought over from her home. We read one, then another, until we finished everything she had. I thought I had completed my duty as a doting uncle, until she asked that we go through the books a second, and later a third time. Naturally, I was getting restless and bored.

It was obvious that she had gone through the books before with other adults and yet the child listened and reacted as if she was hearing the story for the first time. Would there be no end to this storytelling session? Perhaps the magic was in each retelling because we would deviate from the text, look at the pictures in the book, and often I would add (or invent) little details that were not in the printed text.

In the course of each reading, questions were asked, reactions solicited and soon she was narrating her own version of the stories as well as giving her insights into each of the pictures and each of the characters.

The books used in that long Sunday afternoon were Walt Disney versions of "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Pocahontas," and last but not least, "Beauty and the Beast." While I may not have grown up on the same animated versions of these stories, these were still very much a part of my own childhood. Like my nieces I was taught and actually memorized nursery rhymes from Mother Goose instead of Philippine poems and proverbs. I was told tales straight out of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen even before I heard my first Philippine folk tale. As a child, I knew more about Greek and Roman mythology than Philippine myths and legends.

One difference between my nieces and me is that as a child learning to read, I found in my father's library an illustrated book, "Philippine Myths and Legends," as retold by Manuel and Lyd Arguilla. That started me on a long voyage of discovery. Later in the now extinct Ato bookshop on Session Road in Baguio, I found Maximo Ramos' "Creatures of Midnight," a book on "creatures of lower Philippine mythology" which I found very fascinating because it was an illustrated guide to aswang, tianak, and all the things that yaya told us came out at night to eat naughty children. The book helped me overcome fear because it suggested ways of dealing with the various aswang. These two simple books led me to discover the wealth of our own stories on my own.

Looking back on my childhood, now that I am old enough to have children and grandchildren of my own, I realize that my nieces, like many other Filipino children, are still raised on Western fairy tales despite a wealth of homegrown tales. I mask my guilt by saying that even Jose Rizal translated a handful of fairy tales from the original German into Tagalog and went one step further to illustrate these for his nephews and nieces.

It is unfortunate that the original manuscript, extant before the war, remains unlocated to this day. Asuncion Lopez Bantug, grandniece of Rizal, remembers that when they were children they were allowed to handle this work whenever they garnered honors or high grades in school. It is likely that the manuscript was destroyed during the war, one of the cultural casualties of the Battle for Manila in 1945. But I remain hopeful that this and other important manuscripts will surface from somebody's baul or aparador to enrich our history and culture.

While Rizal's translations of Andersen is little known, he popularized one particular folktale: that of the "Monkey and the Turtle." In 1889, Rizal wrote a learned article for Trubner's Record titled "Two Eastern Fables." Since the readers were ethnologists, he compared the familiar Philippine folktale "Ang Buhay ni Pagong at ni Matsing" with a similar Japanese tale about a monkey and a crab. The article, which is seldom read today, was used as the English text for a new edition of "The Monkey and the Turtle" (Tahanan Books, 2003) launched last Tuesday that reproduces Rizal's own illustrated version of this tale.

In Paris, some time in December 1885, Rizal dined in the home of Juliana Gorricho, mother of his friend Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, and was there presented with a scrapbook or guest book by Paz Pardo de Tavera (later the wife of Juan Luna). There were only a few pages left in the scrapbook and Paz requested Rizal to fill these up with his thoughts, poetry or doodles so that she could start a new one. Here Rizal drew, in comic book form, the tale of the monkey and the turtle which he entitled in French "Le Singe et la Tortue," but under the drawings he narrated the story in Spanish. Like the manuscript translation of Andersen's tales, this scrapbook also remains unlocated. What have been handed down to us are black and white reproductions in the 1913 biography, "Life, Lineage and Labors of Jose Rizal," by Austin Craig.

Tahanan Books is not only giving this delightful work by Rizal a new lease on life, but has gone one step further by adding color to the black-and-white line drawings. This latest edition, the third that I know of, should remind us not just to look into our own folk tales, myths and legends but more importantly, to see Rizal in a new light: not just as a national hero but as the father of Philippine children's literature, and as the doting father of the Filipino nation, someone all children should learn to affectionately call our Lolo Jose.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu