José Rizal A Man For All Generations

José Rizal: A Man for All Generations
Author(s): Luis H. Francia

Source: The Antioch Review , Vol. 72, No. 1, Generations: Passing the Torch? (Winter 2014),
pp. 44-60
Published by: Antioch Review Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7723/antiochreview.72.1.0044
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José Rizal: A Man for
All Generations
BY LUIS H. FRANCIA
“Why independence if today’s slaves will be tomorrow’s tyrants? And

they will be, because without a doubt a person who submits to tyranny
loves it.” —José Rizal, El Filibusterismo
A s known to every Filipino as George Washington is to Ameri-

cans, his name and face are everywhere: on one-peso coins, match
books, sports arenas, universities, banks, insurance companies, even
hospitals and funeral parlors and, especially, in every town plaza and
city square throughout the Philippine archipelago, where a statue in
his likeness, portrayed in the European-style morning coat he wore to
his execution, forms the backdrop to street life. As Ambeth Ocampo,
the preeminent Filipino authority on José Rizal, points out, Rizal has
become “a brand name that covers you from cradle to grave. Imagine
being born in a hospital named in honor of Rizal and be[ing] handled
in death by Funeraria Rizal.”
In my education, however, he was a “nowhere man,” to quote the
Beatles, absent from the curriculum at the private schools I attended.
I have no recollection of any course that examined his life and works.
You would think that, at least on the university level—and I am a
graduate of the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, whose most
famous alumnus was this man—such a course would have been man-
datory. Indeed, in theory it was, since 1956, when Republic Act 1425
mandated that schools had to have copies of Rizal’s works in their
libraries and that these were to be “included in the list of approved
books for required reading in all public or private schools, colleges,
and universities.” But my college transcript, there in black and white,

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José Rizal: A Man for All Generations 45
says otherwise. Strange, to say the least. At the time, knowing next
to nothing about this late-nineteenth-century historical personage,
primus inter pares in the pantheon of Filipino heroes, I never really
questioned this lack, this absence that spoke eloquently about how
our own history was being misrepresented—an official history partly
determined by the fact that the schools we attended were conservative
Roman Catholic and this largely explained the disconnect between
Rizal and our lives. In a region dominated by Islam and Buddhism, the
Philippines is the only predominantly Roman Catholic nation, the most
enduring legacy of 333 years of Spanish colonial rule (1565–1898). Its
church hierarchy is one of the most conservative in the world and, to
paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins, meekly recks the Vatican’s rod.
In his writings, Rizal was a fierce and brilliant critic of clerical
authority, for which the unforgiving Spanish friars had him killed. His
novels were proscribed by the Catholic hierarchy through to the first
half of the twentieth century, the blink of an eye when considering
that the Vatican harbors resentments for ungodly periods of time—it
took four centuries before Rome acknowledged its error in condemn-
ing Galileo. And its right-wing practitioners still mutter that it was his
fellow Jews who killed Christ.
The dominant Catholic prelate in the country in the 1960s, when I
was in college, was Rufino Cardinal Santos, the Archbishop of Manila
and an ultra-conservative—he forbade, for instance, the mixing of the
sexes at the then all-male Ateneo. He opposed implementation of the
bill, as did the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP),
claiming that Rizal’s writings violated Canon Law 1339, which bans
works that attack church dogma or defend errors condemned by the
Holy See. A staunchly Catholic senator made the rather curious argu-
ment that Filipinos could venerate Rizal without having to read his
works. In the CBCP’s current objections to government-sponsored
family planning, finally made law in 2012 after previous attempts had
failed, I see the same insidious refusal to acknowledge the separation
of church and state.
But before detailing the precise history of Rizal’s nationalist anti-
clericalism and his impact on a country then still in the making, it is
essential to examine his life in the context of nineteenth-century fin de
siècle Philippines. In other words, who was José Rizal and why is he
so enshrined?
*

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46 The Antioch Review
Born in 1861, the same year as Rabindranath Tagore, and the seventh
of eleven children, Rizal came from, according to Benedict Anderson,
“a cultivated Spanish-and-Tagalog-speaking family, of mixed ‘Malay,’
Spanish and Chinese descent.” His father, Francisco, was a prosper-
ous gentleman farmer, an inquilino—someone who didn’t own but
leased the land that his tenant farmers cultivated. The landowners in
this case were the local Dominicans, whose hacienda of over 35,000
acres in Calamba, Rizal’s hometown, was the largest in the colony.
His mother, Teodora Alonso, an upper-class woman who had gone to
college—unusual for those times—and whose father had once served
in the Spanish Cortes or Parliament, exerted a powerful influence on
his intellectual development. A precocious child, Rizal grew up to be
a polymath: botanist, ophthalmologist, fencer, essayist, and novelist,
among other things. And a polyglot as well, conversant in ten lan-
guages, correspondent in six.
Though short in stature (only five feet, three inches), he com-
manded attention everywhere he went, due to his prodigious intellect,
charisma, and a genuine and intense curiosity about how other people
lived. Being from a prosperous family, Rizal and other young men like
him were considered ilustrados, or enlightened ones, in the parlance
of the day. By the time he first left his homeland in 1882, at the age
of twenty-one, the Spanish empire—at one point, the world’s larg-
est—had long been in irreversible decline. The diminution of empire
meant a tighter hold on its remnants—the Philippines, the Marianas
(modern-day Guam), Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Spain had controlled the
Southeast Asian islands since 1565, except in 1762, when the British
seized Manila during the Seven Years War—a global conflict between
England and France, with Spain an ally of the latter. Spain would exit
these territories permanently when defeated by the United States in the
1898 Spanish-American War, enabling the latter to join in the grand
game of colonialism.
Educated at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila, where he graduated
in 1877 summa cum laude, and the Dominican University of Santo
Tomas in Manila—established in 1611, it is the oldest in Asia, older
than Harvard—where he studied land surveying and assessing, Rizal
went on to obtain a medical degree in Spain, specializing in ophthal-
mology, with further studies in Paris and Heidelberg. The young man
soaked in the ideas of the Enlightenment, finding in Europe a more
secular spirit than would have existed in the Manila of his time—the
ironic trajectory of the colonial moving to the metropolitan center and

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there finding the intellectual freedom to sharpen his anticolonial arse-

nal. His experience, the resentments brought about by colonial rule,
coupled with the systematic attempts of the state and the friars to keep
the indigenous population ignorant, made Rizal take up the pen. He
wrote his first novel, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), published in
1887, five years after leaving Manila, followed by El Filibusterismo
(The Subversive) in 1891.
Brilliant, anticolonial critiques at the same time that they offered
unforgettable portraits of nineteenth-century life, the books zeroed in
on the moral rot infecting colonial society, exemplified by state-spon-
sored cruelty, friar abuse, greed, and betrayal of their sacred vows. In
Noli the young protagonist, Crisostomo Ibarra, only son of a wealthy
Spanish mestizo landowner, has just returned from seven years of
study in Europe (paralleling the real-life situation of the author) full of
evangelical zeal to better the lot of his countrymen through education.
However, he learns to his shock that his father, Don Rafael, has died in
jail and, worse, his corpse was thrown into a nearby lake. Subsequent
events expose the corruption, venality, and vehement friar opposition
to any progressive ideas that might lessen the colonial stranglehold.
Set up by Padre Salvi, also a friar, he gets implicated as the master-
mind of a faux rebellion. The beautiful Maria Clara, his childhood
sweetheart, betrays him in order to protect her parents’ honor. She
winds up in a convent, he is imprisoned but manages to escape with
the help of the enigmatic Elías. Chased by the Guardia Civil, Ibarra is
presumed to have been shot dead.
In the much darker Filibusterismo, the narrative picks up thirteen
years later, when Ibarra’s naïve optimism is replaced by cynicism and
an implacable desire for vengeance—strikingly similar to that detailed
in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which Rizal had
read as a schoolboy. Long thought to be dead, Ibarra disguises him-
self as Simoun, a confidant of the governor general and a fabulously
wealthy jeweler who never takes off the dark blue glasses he wears in
public. Embittered by the events chronicled in Noli, he plots a coup
d’état, recruiting young men to his cause. The attempted coup fails,
however, and Simoun kills himself. The Fili only intensified friar ha-
tred directed at Rizal. His fate was sealed.
Rizal’s novels, along with his other writings—examples of the
empire writing back––had laid the groundwork of nationalist con-
sciousness. Manila was now much more cosmopolitan, an emerging
regional hub for international trade—the opening of the Suez Canal

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in 1869 had cut down travel time between Europe and the Philippines
from three to four months to approximately six weeks—with the Brit-
ish and the Americans, among other foreigners, opening up offices
in Manila. It is safe to assume that Rizal met some of these English-
speakers, with whom he could practice the language, one of the many
he had acquired some fluency in, and which would come in handy
when travelling to the United States and London.
Not long after Noli came out, Rizal returned to Manila in the latter
half of 1887. He had by then become something of a rock star, attract-
ing crowds every time he ventured from home—incensing the friars.
Fortunately for Rizal, Governor General Emilio Terrero resisted the
friars’ demand that Rizal be dealt with harshly and even provided him
with a bodyguard, a certain Lt. José Taviel de Andrade—though the
officer was there as much to keep an eye on Rizal as to protect him.
He and Andrade quickly became friends: Rizal had a knack of charm-
ing even those prepared to dislike him. His family, however, worried
that the friars, in their vindictiveness, would have him imprisoned or
worse, convinced him to return to Europe after only six months.
The friars were a far cry from those pioneers who had come in the
late sixteenth century, better-educated hardy souls who truly believed
in their evangelical mission and who sought to protect their converts
from the abuses of the civil state, reflecting their contemporary Fray
Bartolome de los Casas’s attempts to render colonial policy in Latin
America more humane. In contrast, these nineteenth-century friars
may have taken vows of chastity and poverty and preached about
the rewards of heaven for the virtuous, but they themselves were ar-
dent devotees of earthly pleasures, and often took advantage of native
women, which Rizal alludes to in characters such as Padre Damaso in
the Noli and Padre Camorra in El Fili. (There is, they say, a bit of friar
blood in every Filipino.)
Immensely rich, owning huge tracts of land and acting every bit as
feudal landlords, by the time Spanish rule ended in 1898, friars con-
trolled 400,000 acres, one-fifteenth of the country’s cultivated land.
Around Manila alone, they owned more than 110,000 acres. These
men of the cloth had a history of doing away with individuals whom
they saw as major threats to their wealth and power. In 1719, angered
at then Governor General Fernando Bustamante’s efforts to cut them
down to size, a mob of friars marched on his official residence, slew
Bustamante’s guards, his son, and the governor himself. There is no
record of the killers ever being brought to account.

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In 1762, capitalizing on the British seizure of Manila, Diego Si-

lang, a middle-class upstart Indio, and his followers succeeded in ex-
pelling the Spanish from Vigan, an important entrepot in the north,
and confiscating the wealth of the church. Encouraged by his success,
Silang—who declared Christ to be his Captain General, with him as
second-in-command—wrote to the British to propose an alliance. The
British, tongue firmly in cheek, responded by appointing him Sargente
Mayor, Alcalde Mayor, and Captain in the War for his British Majesty.
Alas, the alliance was not to be. A mestizo hit man by the name of
Miguel Vicos, blessed by the local bishop, assassinated Silang. The
rebellion, now headed by his widow, Gabriela, continued for another
four months but she and other leaders were caught in late 1763 and
hanged.
That friars wielded power beyond their parishes is evident in tes-
timony given at hearings held by the Philippine Commission in 1900,
when U.S. colonial occupation was a little more than a year old. Un-
der the Spanish the friar was school inspector, president of the health
board, the urban taxation board, and the board of statistics. He was the
go-to person when questions of a person’s civil status arose. A layman
testified that the local authorities “took no step, obeyed no superior
orders and did not perform the duties of their office without previous
advice, permission, or knowledge of the friar curate, since the protec-
tion of the latter sufficed at times to defy the anger of the governor of
the province and paralyze or evade the action of justice.”
The friar was, in short, in the historian Reynaldo Ileto’s estimation,
some kind of a god-king in a state that was essentially theocratic.
Rizal returned to Europe, via the Pacific, in early 1888. He chose the
longer, roundabout route, rather than via the Indian Ocean and the
Suez Canal, as he wished to visit Japan and the United States. He
stayed six weeks in Japan learning Nihongo in the company of Usui
Seiko, whom he called O Sei San and with whom he was having an
affair. In his diary, he apostrophizes her: “Sayonara, sayonara! You
will never come to know that I have thought of you again, or that your
image lives in my memory. . . . When will the sweet hours I spent with
you return?” In San Francisco, he boarded the train to New York City,
staying for three days. He found the Hudson River and its landscape
“beautiful” and comparable to “the best in Europe.”
He was impressed by the energy and zeal of Americans but was

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quick to note the racism directed at “Orientals.” In an essay “Filipinas

dentro Cien Años” (“The Philippines a Hundred Years from Now”),
he foresaw how, were the Philippines to throw off the Spanish yoke,
other foreign powers such as Germany and Japan would be tempted to
take over, though the most direct threat would come from the United
States, with its keen interest in the Pacific. The most interesting minor
character in El Fili, written after his trip to the U.S., is an Ameri-
can—there isn’t one in Noli—a Mr. Leeds, conjuror and ventriloquist
dressed in black with a booth at a city fair. He possesses a disembodied
head that acts as an oracle. Secretly arranged with Simoun, when Mr.
Leeds gets an audience that includes Padre Salvi, the friar who had set
up Ibarra, the head “speaks” and relates events in ancient Egypt eerily
similar to those that lead to Ibarra’s downfall. Salvi faints, stricken by
guilt. Simoun has, through Leeds, set the play wherein he catches the
conscience of the friar.
After sailing to London, Rizal lodged in rooms within walking
distance of the British Museum, where he painstakingly copied Anto-
nio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (History of the Philip-
pine Islands), written in 1609. Morga was then the Lieutenant Gover-
nor of the Philippines, and his account of colonial life, the first by one
who was non-religious, was quite comprehensive. Rizal annotated his
copy, not only to modify Morga’s observations but, more importantly,
to show that the Philippines had had a long history that predated the
Spaniards. It was printed in Paris in 1890. He then set to completing
El Filibusterismo, published in Ghent, in 1891.
From London on to Paris, where, with several other ilustrados,
he attended a Buffalo Bill Wild West show at the Paris Exposition in
1889. Impressed by the dignity and athleticism of the Native Ameri-
cans, the ilustrados started calling themselves Los Indios Bravos, or
Brave Indians, turning a label meant to put them in their place into a
badge they wore proudly.
Once back in Spain, Rizal became a leading light of the Propagan-
da Movement—funded by the Manila-based Comité de Propaganda.
Other leading lights were Marcelo H. Del Pilar and Graciano Lopez
Jaena, both of whom had written and published satires on friar behav-
ior in the Philippines and found themselves the objects of friar ire,
prompting an intense and sudden curiosity on their part about life in
Spain. Del Pilar had penned a parody of the Ten Commandments—his
First Commandment was “Worship the Friar Above All Else”—while
Lopez Jaena caricatured friar corpulence and avarice. The Propagan-

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dists published La Solidaridad (Solidarity), a fortnightly, from 1889

to 1895, which advocated various reforms such as the integration of
the Philippines as a province of Spain, representation in the Cortes,
the Filipinization of the clergy, and equality of Filipinos and Spaniards
before the law.
Deciding that the struggle for reforms was best carried on in the
islands, telling a friend that “the doctor must go to the patient,” Rizal
set sail for home in October of 1891—by then, El Fili had come out
and been distributed clandestinely in Manila—with a lay-over of sev-
eral months in Hong Kong. There, among Filipino expatriates, he
could better read the situation in Manila. His parents and some of his
siblings came to stay with him, Rizal supporting them through his
practice as an ophthalmologist. Probably at the urging of his family
who wanted him to stay away from Manila—they were convinced,
rightly so, that harm would come to him—he conceived the utopian
idea of establishing a settlers’ colony in Sandakan, in what was once
British North Borneo, the Malaysian state of Sabah today. It would be
a sanctuary for himself and his family, as well as the people of Calam-
ba, his hometown, who had in 1887 been dispossessed of their lands
by the Dominicans, in retaliation for a suit that Rizal’s family, at his
urging, had filed against them, questioning the increase in rents and
the imposition of other fees. The state unsurprisingly ruled in favor of
the friars—an experience Rizal would fictionalize in El Fili.
Though the British offered Rizal 5,000 acres of land, rent-free for
three years, the financial costs involved were huge. Besides, the pro-
posed settlement would be just 250 miles from the Sultanate of Sulu
in the southern Philippines, nominally under Spanish rule but whose
mostly Muslim population viewed the Spanish as interlopers and infi-
dels. To the Spanish, therefore, the putative colony would have meant
a base for rebellion, protected by the British lion. This doomed, as I
once wrote, “Rizal’s endeavor to have the country come to him rather
than he to the country.”
He left Hong Kong and set foot in Manila on June 26, 1892, his
family having preceded him. That same day, he met with Governor
General Eulogio Despujol, who received him four more times over
eleven days—a fact unsettling to the friars. Despujol had his reasons.
Primarily, he wished to stress his office’s independence from the cler-
ics when it came to state matters. Shortly after his arrival, Rizal formed
La Liga Filipina, or the Philippine League, reiterating the Propaganda
Movement’s peaceful advocacy of reformist goals. The League had

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grounds for hope: Puerto Rico already had some form of elections. As
for Cuba, Anderson points out that similar reforms had already been
instituted, where political parties “had been legalized (within definite
limits) and . . . a various and lively press had developed. If all this was
possible in Cuba, why not also in the Philippines?”
There was nothing radical in La Liga’s aims, and yet the friars
pounced, charging that the League really intended to provoke a pub-
lic uprising. They also claimed that anti-clerical pamphlets had been
found in Rizal’s baggage, two weeks after he had been cleared to land.
(In fact, these were planted, having been churned out by a press be-
longing to the Augustinians.) This time, Despujol had Rizal arrested
and exiled to the coastal town and Jesuit mission of Dapitan, on the
northwestern coast of Mindanao, the second-biggest island in the
country. He would spend four years there that in retrospect were four
quite peaceful, almost idyllic years.
Leon Maria Guerrero, his Filipino biographer, notes that Rizal, in
a letter to a friend, remarks with evident relief that there were no friars
in Dapitan, just the Jesuit parish priest. There, he founded a school
for boys and an eye clinic, where he treated town residents for free.
Aside from helping set up a water system, he constructed a still-extant
earthen relief map of Mindanao in the courtyard of the town church. It
was in Dapitan where he met the young Josephine Bracken, an Irish-
Chinese mestiza who had accompanied her nearly blind stepfather
from Hong Kong, so the latter could be operated on by Rizal, whose
fame as an ophthalmologist had spread beyond national boundaries.
Bracken would be his lover for the rest of his life. He refers to her,
and his family and friends, in the concluding couplet of “Mi Ultimo
Adios” (“My Last Farewell”), penned on the eve of his execution and
a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Spanish verse: “Adios, mi dulce
extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegria / Adios, queridos seres, morir es des-
cansar” (“Adieu, my sweet stranger, my friend, my happiness / Adieu,
my darlings, to die is to rest” [my translation]).
In the meantime, an ardent admirer of Rizal, Andrés Bonifacio, a
working-class firebrand and a member of La Liga, upon its effective
dissolution, had formed a secret revolutionary society, the Kataasta-
asan Kagalagalangan Katipunan ng Mga Anak ng Bayan (KKK, or the
Highest, Most Revered Society of the Nation’s Sons and Daughters),
referred to simply as Katipunan. The Katipuneros were mostly from
the proletariat, their aim independence from Spain by force of arms.
Many, if not most, had been inspired by Noli and El Fili. Bonifacio

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sent an emissary, a certain Dr. Pio Valenzuela, to Dapitan, to ask Rizal

what he thought of an armed uprising, hoping, of course, that the great
man would approve. Anticipating Gandhi, Rizal strongly disapproved
of violence, stating that he would disavow any revolution, as it would
cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people. In his unpublished
“Manifesto to Certain Filipinos,” he characterized such an uprising as
“disastrous” and “worse than absurd.”
Bonifacio was furious over this refusal but such was Rizal’s stat-
ure that nevertheless the Katipunan used his name as one of their pass-
words—which the authorities would later cite as proof of Rizal’s in-
volvement in the revolution that began in late August of 1896, the first
in Asia against a Western colonial power. Prior to that August, in 1895,
under the leadership of José Marti, the Cubans had started their own
revolution—the excuse for the United States (remember the Maine?)
to leap into the fray, ostensibly to aid the Cubans but in reality to
jumpstart their beginnings as a colonial power by taking advantage of
Spain’s doddering status as an empire. Rizal volunteered to serve as a
doctor with the Spanish forces attempting to quell the Cuban revolu-
tion, to show his loyalty to Mother Spain, most likely on the advice
of Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, an Austrian and Filipinist whom he had
befriended and grown close to while living in Europe. Besides, Rizal
the altruist was also someone who needed a bigger stage.
His proposal was accepted the next year, 1896. He set sail for Bar-
celona on September 3rd, barely a week after the revolution had broken
out, still viewed by the authorities as of little consequence. Once it be-
came clear that this was in fact not just of great consequence, but also
radically different from previous uprisings that were regional rather
than national in scope, Rizal was ordered arrested once he landed in
Barcelona. He was held at Montjuich Prison overnight, then sent back
to Manila the next day. Imprisoned at Fort Santiago in early Novem-
ber, he was subjected to a mock trial for his alleged role in the revolu-
tion. Even though he had a lawyer, Luis Taviel de Andrade, the brother
of the military officer assigned to him in 1887, who managed to mount
a credible defense—nothing linked Rizal directly to the revolution ex-
cept the use of his name as a password—the verdict was, as we say in
Manila, lutong Macao (literally, Macao cooking), i.e., the fix was in.
Judged guilty of treason, on December 30, 1896, his elbows bound
behind his back, he was marched to the Luneta, a public park fac-
ing Manila Bay and just outside the thick hoary walls of Intramuros,
the fortified citadel the Spanish erected in 1572 and designated as the

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capital of Las Islas Filipinas. He was to be executed by a firing squad

made up of his countrymen, Spanish riflemen at their backs, ready to
shoot should the natives hesitate to pull their triggers.
Just before the command to fire was given, Rizal uttered the words
the crucified Christ did before he gave up the ghost: Consummatum
est. (It is finished.) Struck by the fusillade, Rizal somehow managed
to twist his body around and fall facing the sky. The Spanish who
had jeered him as he walked to his death now cheered at the sight of
the fallen man. It is said, however, that the few Indios present broke
through the cordon and rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in Rizal’s
blood—as though this were the blood of a martyr. Learning of his
death, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno characterized
Rizal as “the Tagalog Christ.”
If the Spanish thought that his death would bank the fires of the revo-
lution, they were wrong. Rizal’s martyrdom only intensified the ul-
timately successful fight for independence from Spain, but one that
was betrayed in 1899 by a United States government intent on taking
on, after the title of Rudyard Kipling’s fervent colonialist poem, “The
White Man’s Burden” (the poem’s subtitle is “The United States and
the Philippine Islands”). Kipling’s view of Filipinos as “new caught
sullen peoples / half devil and half child” was in keeping with the rac-
ist ideologies of the time. Less poetic was President William McKin-
ley’s justification for annexing the Philippines: “. . . there was nothing
left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and
uplift and civilize and Christianize them,” forgetting conveniently that
the islands had been a bastion of Roman Catholicism for more than
three hundred years. Thus began the policy of Benevolent Assimila-
tion, by which Little Brown Brother could become a symbol of Via
Americana’s transformative powers.
The 1899 Philippine-American War was longer and more brutal
than the brief Spanish-American War, the hostilities lasting for at least
a decade, with more than 4,000 American lives lost and anywhere from
a quarter million to a million Filipino, mostly civilian, casualties. The
war set a familiar pattern for U.S. intervention and later conflicts, in
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
There was widespread opposition to the war of annexation in the
United States, with the Boston-based Anti-Imperialist League in the
forefront. William James and the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie

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were among its well-known stalwarts, but its most celebrated mem-
ber was Mark Twain. Twain initially supported U.S. intervention but
once it became clear that his government had imperialist designs on
the islands, he became one of its most outspoken critics. In his clas-
sic essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” he wrote, “The Person
Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: ‘There is something curious
about this—curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas:
one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new
freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing
to found it on; then kills him to get his land.’” Twain also deplored
the use of the water cure (the precursor of waterboarding), where a
prisoner was force-fed water until he was bloated, then pummeled and
jumped on, forcing the water to be expelled through his orifices, some-
times causing death.
Because of his role in shaping his country’s destiny, José Rizal is
often described as the “First Filipino” and/or “The Great Malayan.”
Rizal has since served as an inspiration to countless nationalists, intel-
lectuals, and artists, not just in the Philippines but in countries such as
Indonesia where, for instance, the characters in the great Indonesian
novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet are aware of Rizal
and the 1896 Revolution.
Many, however, qualify their admiration for him by citing the be-
lief that Rizal’s iconic stature was partly due to the need of the U.S.
colonizers, who had just defeated a fledgling Philippine government,
for a hero in whom nationalist aspirations could lodge, without any
cry to arms. They point to Andres Bonifacio, who did ignite the 1896
Revolution and whom the Americans ignored. It is true that Rizal’s
pacifist stance suited American purposes, but General Emilio Agui-
naldo, president of the revolutionary government prior to the U.S.
takeover, had, already in 1898, proclaimed a day of commemoration
for Rizal. And, Guerrero points out, “Filipinos had chosen Rizal even
before he died, and his final martyrdom was only the confirmation of
a spiritual dominion that even the Katipunan acknowledged by rising
in his name.” In short, Yankee endorsement simply publicized his ac-
ceptance by the Filipino public. It was never the cause.
Rizal’s popularity grew to be such that Artemio Ricarte, a gen-
eral in the Philippine revolutionary army, once proposed renaming
the country after him, so that Filipinos would henceforth be known
as Rizalinos. Ricarte was living in exile in Japan, a devoted anti-co-
lonialist who refused to pledge allegiance to the United States that

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had emerged triumphant after the 1899 Philippine-American War.

According to Nick Joaquin’s excellent A Question of Heroes, Ricarte
proposed the establishment of the Rizaline Republic, which, “when
established, would ‘recompense’ all those who had joined the ‘Liber-
ating Army’ to ‘overthrow quickly and by whatever means the present
foreign government.’ Cried Ricarte to his people: ‘I shall not consent
that you remain under a foreign government and, fully decided, I shall
cross the seas to seek you.’”
The proposed change, had it taken place, would have made it even
more difficult to learn about the man behind the legend. As it is, the
distance between the outsized stature (and statues) of the man and the
man himself is formidable. As the historian Ambeth Ocampo states,
we need to see him “without his overcoat” so he can regain his human-
ity, warts and all.
There are many, however, who refuse to do so.
A two-hour drive south of Manila lies Banahaw, a mountain con-
sidered sacred by a great number of people. At 7,000 feet, the rugged
mountain attracts New Agers, who swear to UFO sightings there and
claim to commune with diwatas, or magical spirits; the Maoist New
People’s Army guerrillas; and homegrown religious sects, for whom
Rizal is a revered figure, a saint, even a demigod. Sects such as Tres
Personas, Solo Dios (Three Persons, One God) and Ciudad Mistica del
Dios (the Mystical City of God) regard the mountain as their New Je-
rusalem, far from Sodom-and-Gomorrah Manila. To them, Rizal sym-
bolizes an indigenous identity grounded in a nationalism inseparable
from genuine spirituality. Having spent time with these sects, what I
find particularly striking about them is the fact that they are female-
headed, linking them to a precolonial matriarchy and specifically to
the babaylan (loosely translated as shaman), the traditional spiritual
center cum healer, usually a woman, though there was the occasional
cross-dressing male babaylan.
Banahaw has long had a history as a refuge, a hideout, from co-
lonial restrictions. It was where, chafing under Spanish repression
and getting back on their horses, remontados (a Spanish word mean-
ing those who remount) moved to. There the church and civil state
had little claim. They would no longer be “abajo de las campanas”
(“under the bells,” referring to the policy of resettling Indios in Span-
ish-designated towns). In 1839 the mountain served as a base for an
Indio, Apolinario de la Cruz (Apolinario of the Cross), who believed
he had a calling to serve God, but being an Indio, had been rejected by

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the friar orders. Not to be denied, Apolinario set up his own religious
group, the Cofradia de San Jose, or Confraternity of St. Joseph, which
attracted quite a following, worrying both the religious and secular
authorities who suspected that the fraternity was a cover-up for mal-
contents. De la Cruz was hailed as the “King of the Tagalogs,” echoing
the reference to Jesus as the King of the Jews. He refused membership
to anyone but full-blooded natives—a clear dig at the Spanish and the
creoles.
The authorities sent troops to suppress what was now viewed as
an insurgent movement. Though initially successful in repelling the
attacks, De la Cruz and his followers were defeated. At the age of
twenty-seven, the would-be friar and his aide, called Purgatorio, were
executed, along with about 200 confraternity members. De la Cruz
was beheaded, his head stuck on a pole and placed by the roadside for
all to see. This barbaric act only reinforced the image of de la Cruz as
a martyr, yet another example of the failed proto-revolutionary.
Spanish Philippines being a theocratic state, any move to Filipin-
ize the clergy was quashed. In 1872, the workers at a Cavite arsenal
across the bay from Intramuros mutinied to protest the abolition of
their exemption from tribute and corvée. The mini-revolt was quickly
suppressed, but the mutiny was seen as a golden opportunity to get rid
of Indio secular priests who had championed the Filipinization of the
clergy, the incipient demand of de la Cruz, and one that implied both a
burgeoning sense of nationalism and a diminution of friar power. The
friars never forgot that it was a mestizo priest who helped spark the
Mexican war of independence.
Those thought to hold liberal, therefore subversive, views were
rounded up, including three priests seen, according to John Schum-
acher, as “leaders in the campaign for the secularization of the par-
ishes,” causing both the civil authorities and the friars to grow “more
suspicious than ever of Filipino priests and of Filipino ilustrados as
well.” The three were Mariano Gomez, Jacinto Zamora, and José Bur-
gos. A curate at the prestigious Manila Cathedral and the mestizo son
of a Spanish military officer, Burgos was the most well-known pro-
ponent of Filipinizing the clergy. He was an intellectual and doctor
of canon law and theology—and a fencer and boxer, to boot. Two de-
cades before Rizal, Burgos criticized the friars for their worldly riches
and huge landed estates and for deliberately keeping the Indios in a
state of ignorance, by refusing, in spite of an 1863 royal decree, to
teach them Spanish. The friars, Burgos wrote, were “sand in the cog

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wheels of the country’s civilization.” The priests were garroted at the

Luneta, the same greensward where Rizal would be shot in 1896. The
last to be killed, Burgos shouted that he was innocent. A friar replied,
“So was Jesus.” Burgos was thirty-five years old, as Rizal would be
at his death.
Paciano Mercado, José’s older brother and a protégé of Burgos,
had witnessed the grisly garroting. Fearing arrest, the twenty-one-year-
old Paciano returned to Calamba, their hometown, and his account of
the horrific event made an indelible impression on the eleven-year-old
José. The young José, when sent to enroll at the Ateneo de Manila,
used the surname “Rizal” rather than the patronymic Mercado, to fore-
stall any suspicions toward anyone with that surname. For Rizal and
his generation, the fate of the three priests provided both inspiration
and a cautionary tale. It is to these three priests that Rizal dedicated El
Filibusterismo. Looking back, Rizal would write, referring to himself
in the third person, “Without 1872, Rizal would have been a Jesuit and
instead of writing the Noli Me Tangere, would instead have written
something entirely different.”
The Rizal Monument is the focal point of the Manila park that is
named in his honor, and isn’t far from the spot where he was shot. The
monument is also ground zero for measuring distances throughout the
archipelago’s more than 7,000 islands. Statues and plaques honoring
the man can be found in other countries as well, including Canada,
the U.S., Spain, Germany, Peru, Mexico, Hong Kong, Singapore,
and Australia. My wife and I have come across testimonials to him
serendipitously. In Barcelona’s El Barrio Chino, the working-class
neighborhood that flanks the Ramblas, we saw a plaque outside an
Art Noveau hotel, stating that José Rizal had lodged there. We would
have booked a room, but alas, the place was full. In Madrid we hap-
pened to choose a hostel not far from Plaza Mayor that turned out to
have been a meeting place for Rizal and his fellow ilustrados, with a
plaque indicating this. And in Montreal, walking from the metro to
the Jewish museum, we noticed a statue in a park that bore a familiar
resemblance. Going up to it, we confirmed that it was indeed a statue
of José Rizal, paid for by the local community of Filipinos.
Had Rizal stayed on in Europe he might have lived to a ripe old
age, and never wound up in the pantheon of Filipino heroes. But his
novels alone guarantee his place not just in Philippine but also in

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world literature. Harold Augenbraum, Rizal’s American translator,

opines that Rizal “wrote two of the most influential works of colonial
or postcolonial fiction in the history of Spanish language literature.”
Anderson characterizes El Fili as “a kind of global novel,” the “first
incendiary anticolonial novel written by a colonial subject outside of
Europe,” an assessment that must necessarily be applied as well to
Noli. Both novels have been translated not just into English but also
into all the archipelago’s major regional languages as well as languag-
es as diverse as Chinese, German, French, Russian, and Japanese.
Rizal’s characters live on in Filipinos’ popular imagination, and
have come to represent certain types, the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom came to be synonymous with servile behavior, or Cer-
vantes’s Don Quixote with hopelessly idealistic aspirations. The prop-
er Maria Clara, for instance, represents the traditional demure Filipina
beauty, while Sisa, a mother deranged by grief over the loss of her two
sons, is often cast in plays and performances as a symbol of the op-
pressed motherland. Tasio the philosopher is simply the village wise
man writ larger. Elías and Ibarra have become the reference points
people use when making a case either for armed revolution (Elías) or
peaceful reform (Ibarra). Padre Damaso, the boorish Franciscan lech-
er, is a label applied to any priest thought to be licentious, particularly
relevant at a time of sordid revelations concerning sexual abuse within
church ranks.
It is in his comic depictions of both the Spanish and the Filipino,
and of various Catholic practices and beliefs, that I find these novels to
be truly remarkable. Above all they are brilliant satires. His portrait of
the wealthy, shrewish native Doña Victorina, for example, who looks
down on her fellow natives, is hilarious and perfectly encapsulates
the many Doña Victorinas, female and male, one meets in any post-
colonial society. She views her marriage to a Spaniard, even one as
hapless and indigent as Tiburcio de Espadaña, who makes a living as
a fake doctor, as proof of her elevated social status. Imagining she is
pregnant, she tells her friends,
“Next month I and de Espadaña will go to the Peninsula. I don’t want our child to
be born here and called a revolutionary.” She added a “de” to her husband’s name. The
“de” didn’t cost anything and gave a certain something to the name. When she signed
it, she put Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadaña. This “de” was a mania. Neither the
man who engraved her cards nor her husband could get the idea out of her head.
The author pokes fun at the practice of accumulating indulgences,

a kind of spiritual savings account meant to lessen any time spent

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in Purgatory—a belief that Martin Luther refused to endorse, and a

major reason for his break with the Vatican. In one scene, members
of a lay religious sorority discuss the proper way to say the required
prayers. One woman asks:
“Well, I want to know how to recite them: three Our Fathers in a row, the three
Ave Marias in a row, and then three Gloria Patri in a row, or three times one Our Fa-
ther, one Ave Maria, and one Gloria Patri?”
“Well, it’s like this: Our Father three times . . .”
“Excuse me, Sister Sipa,” Rufa interrupted. “You have to do it the other way. You
don’t mix males and females. The Our Fathers are male, the Ave Marias females, and
the Gloria are children.”
Scenes like this made the Spanish friars then, and the Philippine
church today, insist that Rizal retracted his anti-Catholic views on the
eve of his execution, when three Jesuits visited him precisely for that
purpose. The evidence is suspect. When his family asked to see the
retraction that he was alleged to have signed, no document was pro-
duced, though it turned up in 1939, apparently having been misplaced
in the Archbishop of Manila’s archives. Its authenticity has been ques-
tioned. And just as Ibarra’s father was denied a proper Christian burial,
so too was Rizal, whose corpse was dumped into an unmarked grave,
an eerie example of life imitating art. The debate over the alleged re-
traction continues, and will probably never be resolved—an indication
that, as is true of great works of literature, Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo continue to provoke, infuriate, and delight.

103.231.241.233 on Fri, 08 May 2020 18:00:07 UTC

José Rizal A Man For All Generations

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José Rizal A Man For All Generations

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José Rizal: A Man for All Generations

Author(s): Luis H. Francia

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“Why independence if today’s slaves will be tomorrow’s tyrants? And

A s known to every Filipino as George Washington is to Ameri-

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there finding the intellectual freedom to sharpen his anticolonial arse-

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In 1762, capitalizing on the British seizure of Manila, Diego Si-

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quick to note the racism directed at “Orientals.” In an essay “Filipinas

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dists published La Solidaridad (Solidarity), a fortnightly, from 1889

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sent an emissary, a certain Dr. Pio Valenzuela, to Dapitan, to ask Rizal

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capital of Las Islas Filipinas. He was to be executed by a firing squad

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had emerged triumphant after the 1899 Philippine-American War.

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wheels of the country’s civilization.” The priests were garroted at the

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world literature. Harold Augenbraum, Rizal’s American translator,

The author pokes fun at the practice of accumulating indulgences,

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in Purgatory—a belief that Martin Luther refused to endorse, and a

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