Rogelio Sicat (or Sikat), often referred to as “one of the greatest pioneers of Philippine fiction”, along other young writers in the 1960s, chose to write in Tagalog in deliberate reaction to the literature written in English during the American occupation. Sixty years after his Bleeding Sun was written, this translation by his daughter Maria Aurora is a step towards making Sicat’s work more accessible... not just beyond the archipelago but also within, where for three-quarters of the population (including me), Tagalog is not the mother tongue.
Bleeding Sun is the story of an illiterate rice farmer Tano and his son Simon. Simon’s mother dies at childbirth when Señor Borja, the only man who has a car in San Roque, refused to lend it for the emergency trip to hospital. When Tano, a tenant farmer, was getting old and became ill, his Spanish landlord Isauro Regente summarily dismisses him from the land he has tilled for forty years. The landlord also refuses his request to pass the tenancy to his son Simon. Arbitrary eviction of tenants was already illegal by then and a Court of Agrarian Relations had also been established to mediate disputes. But the illiterate Tano wouldn’t have known his rights. When his father dies, Simon had no choice but to leave San Roque to look for a job in Manila.
In the book’s introduction, Virgilio S Almario writes of Sicat’s desire to pen a Philippine epic. This novel is set against the tumultuous background of Philippine history: the ceding of the archipelago to the United States following three centuries of Spanish rule, Japanese occupation from 1941 and the guerilla resistance movement with the fierce battles between them, before finally independence in 1946. The scope is certainly epic. But at 122 pages, a quarter the length of José Rizal’s iconic Noli Me Tángere, the length is less so.
The parallels to Noli are numerous: both protagonists return home to establish a school, both find a parent’s grave desecrated, both love interests were unattainable women who were part of the elite they’re fighting and both protagonists were recruited by anti-establishment revolutionaries. Rizal’s famous last poem Mi último adiós is referenced at the end of the novel. It seems the title too (literally “blood at dawn”) is inspired from the third stanza of the poem –
I die as I see tints on the sky b’gin to show
And at last announce the day, after a gloomy night;
If you need a hue to dye your matutinal glow,
Pour my blood and at the right moment spread it so,
And gild it with a reflection of your nascent light.
Rizal, writing in Spanish, was notable in his use of realism in fiction as both a social and a political critique. (Spain’s military court in the Philippines found him guilty of “promoting or inducing to the commission of rebellion” with his two novels and sentenced him to the firing squad.) Lope K Santos and Amado V Hernandez, writing in Tagalog, follow in this use of realism and Sicat in turn after them. While Rizal’s focus was the Spanish friars, Sicat’s were the heirs and remnants of this Spanish rule—mestizos who remain today part of the powerful elite in the Philippines.
The novel’s main appeal today is in Sicat’s description of the rural life of tenant rice farmers. When they were not caught between battles of warring factions, they battled the elements: pests, monsoons, typhoons and drought. Particularly striking is Sicat’s use of metaphor: moonlight as “a long white rag” or “when the breeze combed through the stalks of grains, they slowly bent their heads” or the pithy “it seemed as if the typhoon only took a vacation to regain its strength”. When nature is spent, the farmers battled man: the elite rich with no notion of civic duty, the unjust landlords and the teachers who reward the less capable children of the elite over the clever poor.
Sicat’s pen is sharp, describing Isauro Regente as “a Spaniard who had arrived in the Philippines and claimed a high position he had probably been denied in his own country.” Or the farmers “given importance only during elections, when the electoral candidates would resort to all kinds of means and propaganda to win their votes.” Nor is religion spared. He writes that people put their “faith into religious statues and images” praying against the Japanese invasion or praying for rain. “It did not take long for their prayers to be answered thereafter, or perhaps, it was pure coincidence. At last, the rains started pouring.”
There are a few issues with a sixty-year-old novel which was likely published without a professional literary editor’s deft touch. There are repetitions, some parts are not fully-developed, the timeline is at times choppy and the historical background could have been better integrated (or consigned to a footnote.) In the absence of the usual translator’s note, one guesses that she remained faithful to the original text. These reservations don’t however cast any doubt on this novel’s rightful place in the Filipino literary canon. Ateneo de Manila Professor of Philosophy Manuel B Dy writes of Sicat’s “ability to articulate and project the hurts and hopes of the poor and the abandoned.”
Hope is where the novel ends: “Simon, my child, was a farmer who was able to change his destiny.”