Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia

4. "Halfbloed"

“HALFBLOED” 103 4 “Halfbloed” I t is an intriguing possibility. On his first voyage to Europe, Rizal struck up a friendship onboard the French steamship Djemnah with two sets of Dutch sisters from the Netherlands Indies. After disembarking in Marseilles, he found to his great pleasure that the girls were staying at the same hotel, the Hotel Noailles. Once back in the hotel with my luggage, I looked for a companion, but all the Spaniards had gone out. I hear a young voice speaking Dutch and I go out and I meet Celiene Mulder going down the stairs. I greeted her affectionately, for our conversations did not go beyond that; she does not speak anything else but Dutch. She answered me in her charming and innocent manner, and how sorry I was to see her go down and disappear. When I raised my eyes I saw the two sisters, the friends of Mulder, and I talked with them. They were on the second floor. The older, Sientje, told me that they were leaving the following day for The Hague and would live with their grandmother, but they preferred Batavia, their native country. I replied: “I too love my native land and no matter how beautiful Europe may be, I like to return to the Philippines.” [Rizal 1953a] Rizal kept a diary, on and off, for many years. In each of his major trips, he used the diary (and several well-chosen letters) to document his impressions, to keep a record of the journey. His six-week voyage to Europe in 1882, the first time he travelled outside the Philippines, was particularly well-documented; to the boundless enthusiasm of 104 REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT the eager tourist was joined the pre-ironic introspection of the earnest student. The day after disembarking in Marseilles, he chanced upon the family of the younger Dutch girls preparing to leave the hotel. As he later noted in his diary, his emotional vulnerability made him hesitate. Upon our return [from lunch], I saw the preparations of the Dutch for their departure. I wished then to bid my little friends goodbye. I hesitated whether to see them or not, fearful that I might make a display of my emotions. But, at last, my affection prevailed and I waited for them in the corridor or vestibule. They came from the dining room, Mr Kolffne asked for the name and address of the Governor and he gave me his so that I could give them to Mr Salazar. My little friends bade me farewell repeatedly. I lost sight of them when their coach turned around the corner. One affection less and more pain. [Rizal 1953a] Rizal was almost 21, but both to the Dutch and in his own view he was less than fully adult; that in parting Mr Kolffne asked for the particulars of Mr Salazar, the elderly gentleman who had served as governor of Antique province in the Philippines and had travelled with them on the Djemnah, seems to me telling. But the possibility that he could have begun a correspondence with the girls, especially if they had somehow managed to return to Batavia (present-day Jakarta), is of more than passing albeit counterfactual interest. He was a dutiful correspondent; perhaps one of the Dutch girls would have turned out to be a Miriam de la Croix, Minke’s conscientious letter-writing friend in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet.1 If Rizal and the Kolffnes had kept in touch, perhaps Rizal would have taken a greater or earlier interest in the Dutch East Indies. It was not until six years later, when he was residing in London, all but chased out of the Philippines on account of the notoriety of the Noli, that he paid sustained attention, at least for a time, to his country’s southern neighbour. He had discovered Multatuli. Eduard Douwes Dekker had served in the Dutch East Indies civil service for 18 years, before resigning in 1856 on a matter of principle. “HALFBLOED” 105 In 1860, he published Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, in Amsterdam. The groundbreaking anti-colonial novel that exposed systematic Dutch injustice in Java caused a sensation; “It sent a shiver through the country,” a member of the Dutch parliament said shortly after it came out (Multatuli 1987: 12). Multatuli, Dekker’s pseudonym, was deliberately evocative of his travails in the colonial civil...