Makamisa

Also known as: Rizal's third novel — the standing designation in Philippine literary historiography · Borrador del Noli me Tángere — the National Library catalogue label under which the papers long hid · Makamisa: The Search for Rizal's Third Novel — the title of Ambeth Ocampo's 1992 Anvil edition · Etikang Tagalog: Ang Ikatlong Nobela ni Rizal — the title of Nilo S. Ocampo's 1997 Filipino translation

Society

Definition

Makamisa (“after Mass”) is the heading of the unfinished third novel of José Rizal — a work he began in Tagalog while living in Hong Kong, where he had settled with members of his family in late 1891 and kept residence at No. 2 Rednaxela Terrace from December 1891 to June 1892, in the months after the Ghent publication of El filibusterismo (1891) — and which he then restarted in Spanish, leaving drafts written in both languages in 1891–1892, neither version completed. (Wikipedia, Wikipedia — José Rizal) Rizal told Ferdinand Blumentritt that he had abandoned the plan to write the novel in Tagalog and was continuing it in Spanish; he described the project as a more literary, less political work devoted to Tagalog customs, virtues, and faults, with only two Spaniards among the principal characters — the parish priest and the Civil Guard lieutenant. (Wikipedia) The extant fragment survives among a 245-page group of Rizal papers at the National Library of the Philippines that had been catalogued as the Borrador del Noli me Tángere (“Draft of the Noli Me Tángere“), and it was only in 1987 that the historian Ambeth Ocampo identified the drafts as material of the third novel rather than of the first — the rediscovery on which the work’s modern identity rests. (Wikipedia)

The word Makamisa, strictly speaking, “was the heading of the opening Tagalog chapter rather than a title definitively assigned by Rizal to the entire work,” although it has become the accepted name of the book. (Wikipedia) The fragment’s action opens immediately after a religious service: Padre Agatón, a powerful parish priest, is seized by a sudden anger that alarms the town, and the plot turns on the townspeople’s comic attempts to discover what has offended him and to regain his favor — a satire of religious authority and local officialdom continuous with the two finished novels. (Wikipedia) Ocampo’s reconstruction, transcriptions of the Tagalog and Spanish texts, and study were published by Anvil Publishing in 1992 as Makamisa: The Search for Rizal’s Third Novel, the edition through which the fragment is now read; library records confirm the 1992 Anvil original and a later Anvil reissue (recorded as 2008 in the Library of Congress catalogue and 2009 in Open Library). (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Library)

Identities

Authority	Value
Wikipedia	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makamisa
Wikidata	Q6738669
DBpedia	https://dbpedia.org/page/Makamisa
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings	N/A (catalogued at the Library of Congress as a work-level hub under “Rizal, Jose, 1861-1896. Makamisa” — a bibliographic hub, not a subject heading)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Makamisa+Rizal
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Rizal’s third novel — the standing designation in Philippine literary historiography
Borrador del Noli me Tángere — the National Library catalogue label under which the papers long hid
Makamisa: The Search for Rizal’s Third Novel — the title of Ambeth Ocampo’s 1992 Anvil edition
Etikang Tagalog: Ang Ikatlong Nobela ni Rizal — the title of Nilo S. Ocampo’s 1997 Filipino translation

Examples and Analogies

A novel begun twice, finished never: Rizal wrote an opening in Tagalog, set it aside, and began again in Spanish — so the “third novel” is really two fragments in two languages, dated 1891–1892, of a single unwritten book. (Wikipedia)
The manuscript hidden by its label: because the papers were catalogued as a draft of the Noli Me Tángere, the third novel sat in the National Library unrecognized for decades — misfiling, not loss, is what concealed it until 1987. (Wikipedia)
The chapter that named the book: as with novels known by their incipits, the fragment is called by the heading of its first chapter — “after Mass” — since Rizal never fixed a title for the whole work. (Wikipedia)
A gallery in miniature: the fragment already assembles a cast in the Rizal manner — Padre Agatón the formidable curate, and in the Tagalog chapter the town of Tulig with Kapitan Lucas, Aleng Anday, and Marcela, while the Spanish drafts move the story to Pili with Capitán Panchong, Capitana Barang, and Cecilia — officials, matrons, and townsfolk orbiting a priest’s temper. (Wikipedia)
Verified textual record:
Drafted: in Tagalog and Spanish, 1891–1892, in Hong Kong (Rizal in residence December 1891–June 1892)
Surviving papers: part of a 245-page group of Rizal papers at the National Library of the Philippines, catalogued as the Borrador del Noli me Tángere
Identification: by Ambeth Ocampo, 1987
Setting: opens after Mass, in the church and around the municipal tribunal and the gobernadorcillo’s residence; Tagalog fragment set in Tulig, Spanish drafts set in Pili
Modern edition: Anvil Publishing, 1992, with transcriptions of Rizal’s Tagalog and Spanish texts; later Anvil reissue; 1997 Filipino translation by Nilo S. Ocampo

Usage Scenarios

1. Teaching Rizal’s Complete Œuvre

Under the Rizal Law tradition of studying the novels, Makamisa is the standard coda to the Noli–Fili pair — the fragment read in Ambeth Ocampo’s 1992 edition, which prints the Tagalog and Spanish transcriptions together, so students can see Rizal’s attempt to write fiction in his first language. (Wikipedia)

2. Textual Scholarship on Rizal

The work is a case study in reconstruction from disordered drafts: Resil Mojares dates the surviving material to 1891–1892 and notes that Rizal left “a substantially longer group of drafts but leaving these disordered and incomplete” — the condition that makes any edition of the third novel an act of scholarly assembly rather than simple reprinting. (Wikipedia)

3. Studying Language Choice in Philippine Literature

Rizal’s abandonment of Tagalog for Spanish, conveyed in his letter to Blumentritt, is cited in the history of Philippine writing as evidence of the colonial writer’s language dilemma — the propagandist who reached his public in Spanish, attempting a novel in Tagalog and turning back. (Wikipedia)

Strategies

Write where the censor could not reach: as with the two finished novels, the third was drafted in the diaspora — in the Hong Kong months between El filibusterismo and Rizal’s fateful 1892 return to Manila. (Wikipedia, Wikipedia — José Rizal)
Reconstruct, do not invent: Ocampo’s edition pairs transcriptions of the surviving texts with translation and study, and scholars keep the fragment’s limits in view — the heading Makamisa names a chapter, not a completed work. (Wikipedia)
Read the fragment as diagnosis: the post-Mass scene of a town frightened of its priest’s anger extends the anticlerical satire of the Noli into Tagalog, which is the fragment’s principal claim on the Rizal canon. (Wikipedia)
For researchers: work from the 1992 Anvil edition’s transcriptions; treat details of plot beyond the extant chapters — Tulig’s Kapitan Lucas and company, Pili’s Capitán Panchong and company — as the documented limit of what Rizal wrote. (Wikipedia)

Security and Safety Measures

The manuscript’s survival: the papers endured as part of the National Library’s Rizal holdings, reaching print only in 1992 — a century after their writing — through Ocampo’s identification and reconstruction. (Wikipedia)
Cataloguing as shield and obstacle: the Borrador del Noli me Tángere label preserved the drafts within an organized collection even as it concealed their true nature — the double face of archival description that this episode documents. (Wikipedia)
Attribution discipline: because the title was a chapter heading and the drafts are disordered and incomplete, responsible accounts of the third novel mark conjecture as conjecture — the practice this wiki follows by confining itself to the documented fragment. (Wikipedia)
For researchers: the later reception — Anril Pineda Tiatco’s play Cuaresma: Isang Dulang Ganap ang Haba (2013) and Khavn De La Cruz’s experimental film Rizal’s Makamisa: Phantasma ng Higanti, premiered at FIDMarseille in 2024 — is adaptation, not text; the 1992 edition remains the scholarly source. (Wikipedia)

Historical Context

Rizal settled in Hong Kong in late 1891, after the Ghent publication of El filibusterismo, and lived with his family at No. 2 Rednaxela Terrace from December 1891 to June 1892 while practicing ophthalmology — the months to which the third novel’s drafts belong. (Wikipedia — José Rizal) In June 1892 he left for Manila, where he founded the La Liga Filipina; he never returned to the novel, and went to the firing squad at Bagumbayan on December 30, 1896. (Wikipedia — José Rizal) The drafts passed into the National Library’s Rizal papers, where they were catalogued as Borrador del Noli me Tángere — a label that fixed them to the first novel until Ocampo’s 1987 identification. (Wikipedia)

Publication followed a generation later: Anvil issued Makamisa: The Search for Rizal’s Third Novel in 1992, reissued it in the 2000s (2008 in the Library of Congress record, 2009 in Open Library), and Nilo S. Ocampo’s Filipino translation appeared in 1997 as Etikang Tagalog: Ang Ikatlong Nobela ni Rizal — the fragment’s modest afterlife against the vast one of the two finished novels. (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Library)

Challenges and Controversies

Which Language — and Is It One Novel?

The Tagalog chapter and the Spanish drafts raise a structural question: is the third novel a single work written twice, or two abandoned beginnings? The scholarly record presents both versions as incomplete drafts of 1891–1892 and notes Rizal’s letter to Blumentritt on dropping the Tagalog plan — leaving the relation between the two texts a matter for each edition to reconstruct. (Wikipedia)

The Title Question

Calling the book Makamisa is a convention of convenience: the word was the heading of the opening Tagalog chapter, not a title Rizal fixed for the whole work, and accounts that present it as Rizal’s chosen title outrun the document. (Wikipedia)

The Missing Book Problem

What survives is a fragment — Padre Agatón’s post-Mass anger and the town’s reaction — while the longer body of drafts Rizal left is disordered and incomplete, so the third novel can be studied, staged, and filmed, but never read as Rizal wrote it whole. The honest limit of the record is itself part of the work’s meaning: the reformer’s last fiction breaks off at the very scene of clerical power his finished novels had made their subject. (Wikipedia)