The Academy of Spanish
The novel’s student movement wants what looks like pure progress: a modest academy where Filipinos can learn Castilian. Rizal, himself a virtuoso of Spanish, understands the aspiration from inside. But he puts in Simoun’s mouth the counter-argument that would echo through every decolonization movement of the next century.
One and all you forget that while a people preserves its language, it preserves the marks of its liberty, as a man preserves his independence while he holds to his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of the peoples.
Thought Wears a Tongue
Simoun’s premise is philosophical: conceptions of the brain and feelings of the heart cannot be expressed in a borrowed language, because each people thinks in its own. To adopt the master’s tongue is not to acquire his power but to subordinate one’s thought to his categories — to become, in Simoun’s brutal phrase, renegades to one’s country who kill their own originality.
Rizal’s Double Position
The irony is deliberate: the argument against Spanish is delivered in Spanish, in a novel written to be read in Madrid as well as Manila, by a provocateur whose motives are poisoned. Rizal does not simply endorse Simoun — the students are sympathetic, and their academy is strangled by the friars, not by linguistics. But the speech stands as the book’s deepest question about assimilation: whether a people can borrow the instruments of its emancipation without borrowing its master’s mind.
Simoun’s speech to Basilio is in Chapter VII; the fate of the academy project unfolds through Chapters X–XXXII.
Related Concepts
