Mirrors June 22, 2006

I READ Amalia Cullarin Rosales’ essay on Jose Rizal last Monday, June 19, the national hero’s 145th birthday, and found the part where she talks about the reaction of her students to reading Rizal for the first time fascinating. Among them:

“The course opened my eyes to the greatness of Filipinos.”

“This course is for all time. Rizal’s writings are comparable to the Bible.”

“I discovered the defects of our people during Rizal’s time -- the same defects are still in existence until now.”

“The messages of Rizal are still very relevant today -- for the youth to love their country and defend it and their rights as a people against any foreigner.”

You get the drift.

It would help though to think of Rizal’s writings not as gospel truth but as great literature -- which the Bible also is. The teaching of Rizal has also suffered in the past from his works being turned into sacred text. In fact, it is full of wit and humor, Rizal being past master at satire. Some of his essays are utterly droll, as when he apologizes for the lowly Filipinos taking a bath every day as opposed to the aristocratic Spanish who regaled the world only with perfumed bodies.

As to our defending our rights against any foreigner, substitute the word “tyrant” for “foreigner,” and I’m with you wholeheartedly. Rizal wasn’t just a bitter critic of foreign rule, he was a bitter critic of tyranny in whatever way it showed itself. He excoriated the bad side of the indio as much as that of his ruler, and demanded that he live with pride and dignity. He would not have stood for a local tyranny any more than a foreign one.

But I do appreciate the things Rosales’ students have said for one reason. I too felt that way reading Philippine history for the first time -- in my case that was the product of becoming an activist more than attending class -- and Rizal’s works in particular. The “Noli” and “Fili” truly were eye-openers, turning Rizal from statue to flesh-and-blood, a singular Filipino who struggled to understand and articulate the vicissitudes of his time. Indeed, turning the past into a beacon for us who were floundering in the stormy seas of history to follow.
Rosales herself says Rizal’s characters continue to live among us. We still have Señor Pasta, who seeks only personal advancement; we still have Capitan Tiago, who is subservient to higher-ups; we still have Kabesang Tales, who is driven to rebellion by hardship and oppression; we still have Doña Victorina, who takes on the airs of the masters with buffoonish results. If I remember right, Doña Victorina, believed that the “de” after a surname guaranteed aristocracy, so she had not just one but two “de’s” after her name: Doña Victorina de de Espadaña. Rizal was funny, even if he was also deadly serious.

Well, Rizal did say one very important thing -- which is twin brother to Santayana’s famous aphorism -- that people who do not read their history are condemned to repeat it. Rizal said those who do not see where they came from will never get to where they are going. That has become a very prophetic warning for us.

If Rizal’s characters continue to live today, it is because we have failed to read history, or indeed read him. Our world today is not unlike the one he lived in, the superficial differences in technology aside. Rizal’s world was one where lies and hypocrisy held sway, upheld viciously by the liberal application of the sword. It was a world where spiritual and physical growth was stunted by a culture that militated against it. It was a world where the indios were reduced to despair and indifference, the intelligentsia opting to live abroad if not acquiescing to the tyranny at home. So it was then, so it is now.

Rizal’s writings truly have much to say to our own time. But more than his writings, his life itself has much to say to our time, and that is probably the greatest legacy he bequeathed to us. The guy was monumentally brilliant, a Renaissance man through and through. He was a poet, a novelist, a painter, a sculptor, an ophthalmologist, a botanist, and God knows what else. He even excelled in fencing and pistol shooting. He lived in many places in Europe and knew several Western languages, including a bit of English. By rights, he could have joined the ranks of the elite, the social circles in which they moved not being closed to him, notwithstanding that he came from modest origins.

Instead, he chose not to be oblivious to the plight of his land and people and brought it to light in novel and polemic and whatever else he did. Instead, he chose to come home despite having a reasonably good life as an exile abroad and despite the entreaties of his friends not to, because the Spanish authorities could not abide truth and criticism, which were often one and the same. Instead, he chose to rebel against the injustice and folly of his time -- however he remained of two minds till the end about the wisdom of an armed uprising -- trying to push back the limits of the possible with all the genius and generosity he could muster, embracing the fate that went along with it with grace and fortitude.

More than anything he wrote, it was what Rizal did that has much to teach us. His life was his greatest work, a story continues to unfold to this day but whose meaning continues to elude us. I can understand the blasts of illumination and bursts of admiration Rosales’ students have experienced and strain to express. I’ve felt them too, not the least at the realization we, too, have a man for all seasons, a Filipino we can be proud of and want to emulate.

Read history. You will find, as the most thrilling and frightening sensation of all, that you are not looking at the yellowed pages of a book, you are looking at a mirror.

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