Trickster Time

#187: Jose Rizal and the Trickster

Mar 31, 2025

THEN & NOW

The monkey trickster explains that, as he is “generous,” his victim can choose her form of death.

Trickster Time

I’ve had a busy week and weekend, so I’m skipping my parents’ letters and the Soundings sections (the latter is an especially tempting rabbit hole where I can get lost for hours). However, I did post about another “third place” (East Village Cafe) on A Crooked Mile. Writing about and visiting “third places” feels like what I need right now.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking back to my undergraduate days and my BA thesis. I wrote about satirical Philippine newspapers and their criticism of the Spanish colonial regime. Part of my thesis focused on the Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal—a scholar, ophthalmologist, novelist, and artist—who created a cartoon of the Philippine folktale “The Monkey and the Tortoise”1 in 1885. It was published in Trubner’s Oriental Record (London) in 1886 as part of “Specimens of Tagal Folklore.” Later it was published as a children’s book.

Here’s some excerpts from the summary I wrote in my thesis:

The story contains all the familiar trickster elements: a quick-witted but greedy monkey-trickster offers to help “Miss Tortoise” plant a banana stalk. When the stalk grows tall and bears fruit, the ‘malicious’ monkey climbs to the top of the tree and refuses to hand any fruit down, instead gorging himself on bananas before Miss Tortoise’s incredulous eyes.

After being fooled like this a few times,

The tortoise now becomes a trickster; she gets her revenge by hiding in half a coconut shell; when the monkey sits on the shell, the tortoise clamps her beak on monkey’s tail, making him howl with pain.
The monkey captures the slow-moving tortoise and decides to ‘punish’ her for her ‘wickedness’ by execution. Cruelly, he gives the tortoise her choice of death: to be pounded in a mortar, or drowned in the ocean. The tortoise chooses to be pounded in the mortar, knowing that the monkey will do the opposite. He throws her into the ocean: having outwitted the monkey, she swims away.

Scenes from “The Monkey and the Tortoise” by Jose Rizal. I had cut and pasted the xeroxed scenes into my original thesis—hey it was the early 1990s!

More scenes from the final pages of The Monkey and the Tortoise, where the monkey attempts to drown the tortoise—but it swims away, laughing.

Jose Rizal was executed by the Spanish colonial government on December 30, 1896.

His last years seemed dominated by his own subversive attempts to outwit the Spanish colonials and Europeans intellectually, as well as physically, by eluding the grasp of government agents.

Rizal’s books El Filibusterismo and Noli me Tángere provided fuel for the Philippine revolution at the end of the 19th century, though the outcomes were mixed, to say the least.

There are many ways to look at trickster mythology, which is present in many cultures—and not just in folktales. A few that stand out for me include: Anansi, the spider (Akan, Ghana); Coyote (indigenous North America); Pilanduk (mouse deer) and Monkey (Southeast Asia, Philippines, parts of India and Africa); Loki (Norse).

We see these mischievous figures often in comics, novels, art, and feature films. Satirical comics are a great place to find them. Over the centuries, these stories have been told for laughs, presented as creation myths, and as cautionary tales. The trickster never embodies just one thing; it can be a god, a human, and a monster; it can be a tiny, insignificant animal with a deadly sting. It is a complex character who can be cunning, cruel, and destructive, but sometimes also wise and generous—even vulnerable.

The coming of the trickster always seems to herald a time of disruption and transformation. It’s best not to take them for granted. There may still be lessons we can learn from them.

The cute little mouse-deer of Southeast Asia has fangs and a long tongue:

Eulipion Outpost

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