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Sisa is the character that is usually not found in book cover designs for Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere. However, Sisa and her son Basilio made an appearance in one of the best cover designs, which was published internationally.
This edition from the United Kingdom, published by Longmans, Green, and Co. Ltd in 1961, is set in a red field; two figures are drawn in frenetic lines as a chasm separates them. Basilio looks directly at Sisa as he reaches out his arm to her.
He leans over his crutch as a sprig grows by his feet. She ignores him as she seems to metamorphose into a jagged tree as if the jungle is swallowing her. Her arm seemingly blended into a tree branch as a snake slithered out of her wild hair. Unlike the other Noli covers, this was the scene at the end of the novel, which proves to be interesting because that encounter between the abused son and the distressed mother paints a metaphor for encountering a nation disheveled and crazed by the different stresses wrought upon her body.
Political cartoonists and Filipino painters have used the symbol of a woman in distress to indicate our nation is exploited in a rapacious embrace by the errant leaders and spurious events that pull down our country. Many literary critics have indicated Sisa as an apt metaphor for a troubled and oppressed people. Many Noli covers have the figure of Maria Clara, the romanticized figure of what a Filipino woman should be. However, people forget that Maria Clara eventually becomes a woman in distress at the tail end of the novel.
Maria Clara and Sisa are testaments of the ugly colonial engagements in our country. Yet, Maria Clara is immortalized as an elegant woman of the upper classes, while Sisa is that of the proletariat who undergoes even more inhumanity as she trudges on to her slow, mad, eventual death. This tragedy, as the cover for Noli, asks the reader how one will feel and react when one sees one’s mother riddled with madness before she dies. If Sisa represents nation and motherhood, her injured survivor son Basilio, seeing her dying moments, offers a powerful nationalist sentiment on witnessing the results of unchecked abuse and battery of those with no power in the system. Medalla invoking Sisa and Basilio indicates his activism, which covers much of his life and art.
Medalla was too ahead and too different for Manila of his time that he left the stringent, homophobic, limited, and suffocating art scene of the Philippines for more expansive horizons abroad. His works sought solidarity with marginalized and maligned people from different struggles for independence or economic and ecological justice. He flourished outside the Philippines, where he practiced his performance art, and his extensive interaction with found materials truly marks him as being beyond modern art but into the nascent emergence of contemporary scenes whose art still resonates these days.
As an intellectual and creative diasporic, Medalla is a cultural descendant of Jose Rizal, who found his voice and words while abroad that proved to be incendiary.
Medalla has an almost playful-like, fearless approach to his art. The frenzied illustration of Sisa and Basilia is evidence of this. Cold, calculated representation and mimicry are no longer the directives for art production for the likes of Medalla but that of emotional resonance of symbols.
Medalla’s cover is very 20th century to Rizal’s late 19th Century design of Noli. Rizal’s design is very much of its time, yet it did not become the cover itself. Rizal’s cover is Victorian in its use of flourishes of floral decoration.
The title’s typeface is the ornate designs of that time, indicative of the novel’s theme. Rizal’s title design is very barbed, much like the thorny stems of roses. The hairy pair of legs peeking at the lower part is that of the almost wolf-like depiction of the friars as Maria Clara’s cameo silhouette perched atop is facing the thorny bush with a hint of the crucifix.
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Rizal knew of the prevailing art movement in the 19th century, symbolism, in which artists used allegories and metaphors to depict strong emotions and riveting narratives. Symbolism implies that at the final stroke of his name, the letter “L” descends into a cluster of oppression materials: the Guardia Civil helmet, a bold chain, and a whip. Rizal lays out his very name atop these images of authoritarian violence. These are not happenstance but a decidedly visual declaration of a struggle against colonial dominance.
Rizal’s design happened a few years before the historic Philippine Revolution, whereas Medalla’s design emerged when the Philippines was still fumbling from independence and wartime just 15 years prior. Rizal’s cover was grappling with defiance and anger. Medalla’s Basilio and Sisa portrait was looking through the rubble of the emergence of a young republic, baffled and staggering.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social