Saturday, January 31, 2009

Isn’t that you, Pepe? An open letter to Dr. Jose Rizal

By Charlie Avila

How long ago was it when you were only 35 years old? At a much earlier age, were you not studying in various academies of Europe where the medium of instruction was Spanish, French, Latin or German – or a combination of some of these? Did you correspond in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, German and Dutch? Did you make translations from Arabic, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin and Sanskrit? Did you have some knowledge of Malay, Chavacano, Cebuano, Ilocano and Subanon besides your native Tagalog? You did? Then, aren’t you Pepe Rizal – Dr. Jose Protacio Mercado Rizal y Alonzo Realonda – born 19th June 1861, martyred 30th December 1896?

Weren’t you a poet, a polymath, an amateur architect, artist, educator, economist, ethnologist, scientific farmer, historian, inventor, journalist, mythologist, internationalist, naturalist, novelist, ophthalmologist, physician, propagandist, sculptor, martial artist, and sociologist? You were? Then, really, aren’t you Jose Rizal?

Moments before your execution by a firing squad, didn’t the Spanish surgeon general request to take your pulse - and found it normal? Aware of this, didn’t the Spanish sergeant in charge of the backup force hush his squad to silence when they began raising “vivas” with the partisan crowd? Didn’t your last words, ‘consummatum est’, Jesus’ own, prefigure in ways that you knew but could not exactly foresee, that your death would be the end of Spain in the Philippines, and the shot that the crowd heard that moment was the shot that brought Spanish Rule in the Philippines to an end, marking as well the beginning of the end of all colonialism in Asia? Such was recognized by Mohandas K. Gandhi who regarded you as a forerunner and as a martyr in the cause of freedom. Nehru, in his prison letters to his daughter Indira, acknowledged your significant contributions in the Asian freedom movement.

Coinciding fortuitously with the age of Tagore and Sun Yat Sen, were you not from an early age enunciating in poems, tracts and plays, ideas all your own of modern nationhood as a practical possibility in Asia? In the body of written works for the period nothing compares to the outright statement in the ‘Noli’ that if European civilization had nothing better to offer, colonialism in Asia was doomed.

You stand among a few who belong to no particular epoch, who belong to the world, and whose life has a universal20message. Although your field of action lay in politics, which you bore in the cause of duty–rendering you a rarity in human affairs, a leader without ambition and a revolutionary without hatred–your real interests lay in the arts and sciences, in literature and in your profession of medicine.

An American scholar and critic recently remarked that your Noli Me Tangere, published in Berlin in 1887 (when you were twenty-six) and El Filibusterismo, out in Ghent in 1891 (you were then thirty), were almost too astonishing, not only in their technical narrative mastery, complex development of characters and linguistic richness, but because they were among the very first novels ever written by a Southeast Asian.

They offer a huge contrast, in the view of Benedict Anderson of Cornell University, with the sometimes-charming amateurishness of the work of two generations of novelists in neighboring Indonesia (before the 1950 arrival on the literary scene of Pramoedya Ananta Toer)—more than half a century after your execution by the Spanish colonial government.

More than a hundred years after your martyrdom, Malaysia’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, often quoted this line from your dedication in the Noli: “In the history of human suffering is a cancer so malignant that20the least touch awakens such agonizing pains.” The dedication of the first Southeast Asian novel (according to Ibrahim) “stirred a critical awareness of the fundamental problems of colonial society. Its setting was the Spanish-ruled Philippines, but the book could have been about any nation in Asia. Rizal noted that healing must begin with honest diagnosis. ‘I will lift part of the veil that conceals the evil, sacrificing all to the truth, even my own pride, for, as your son, I also suffer from your defects and weaknesses.’”

Ibrahim continued: “In a closed society, lifting the veil would be taboo. Indeed, Rizal’s social diagnosis was tantamount to subversion. In his time, the closed society was identified with colonialism, but that was only a cloak that wrapped it for a time. A century since Rizal was executed, Asia has had five decades of modern nationhood. But the cloak of colonialism has been replaced by coverings of various fashions and thickness, including dictatorship…we must remove the veil hiding our shame. More than ever, we need courage of Rizalian proportions to be honest with ourselves”.

And still more from Anwar of the Malay race: “The Philippine revolution, the first of its kind in Asia, opened the floodgates of liberation against Western imperialism. More than physical bondage, it aimed to break the chains of mental captivity. In Rizal’s words: ‘We must win freedom by deserving it, by improving the mind and enhancing the dignity of the individual, loving what is just, good and great, to the point of dying for it. When a people reach these heights . . . the idols and tyrants fall like a house of cards and freedom shines in the first dawn.’”

Ibrahim’s understanding is that your program for liberation was for all Asia. Your articulation of the idealistic foundations of an independent nation - of liberty, human dignity and morality - was unprecedented. “These ideals of the Malayan revolutionaries,” said Anwar “resonate as powerfully as ever. Though free, Asian nations still suffer from intellectual dispossession and economic domination. …The only justification for national self-government is the restoration of the dignity of the people. But this ideal will continue to elude us as long as abject poverty, rampant corruption, oligarchs and encomenderos remain. These evils will not be defeated until we liberate ourselves from mental incarceration. Then we can recover our own virtues and be, in the words of José Rizal, ‘once more free, like the bird that leaves the cage, like the flower that opens to the air.’”

An Austrian, Ferdinand Blumentritt, whose mother was the daughter of Andreas Schneider, Imperial Treasurer at Vienna during your time became a close friend of yours and warned you that your books would lead to your prosecution as the inciter of revolution and, eventually, to a military trial and execution.

Soon after your execution, the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in an impassioned and unforgettable utterance, recognized you as one raised in the best traditions of his country, “…profoundly and intimately Spanish, far more Spanish than those wretched men–forgive them, Lord, for they knew not what they did–those wretches who, over his still warm body, hurled like an insult heavenward that blasphemous cry, ‘Viva Espana’.”

When, much later, the Philippine Organic Act was being debated in the U.S. Congress, doubts about the capacity of Filipinos for self-government were swept away by a passionate speech of Congressman Henry Cooper of Wisconsin in which he recited an English translation of your valedictory poem “Mi Ultimo Adios,” capped by a stirring peroration that underscored how a race that could produce a member of such talent and spirit had to be one most ready, indeed, for self-determination and self-governance.

Your life was all too brief in the space-time limits on the earth plane – so that going through the volumes written by you and about you one is struck by that quality so characteristic of you – indefatigability for the cause of your country. The debate between reform and revoluti on was, to you, a debate on means. More important to you was the goal, namely, the emergence of the Filipino nation with a glorious past that you had taken pains to point out in your annotations of Morga’s “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas.” We are still there, dear Gat Jose Rizal, in the task of building a strong nation, - to see from out of many islands of ethno linguistic and socio-cultural diversity a truly unified archipelago moving purposively from backwardness and poverty to modernity and progress.

If you were still physically around today, I am sure, you would still do what you did during your time, viz. go all over the world and touch base with all Filipinos to build them up as a people in addition to going all over the archipelago to each member of our race and reflecting back to them our dignity, the nature of the current challenges and our responsibilities. Isn’t this what you did for a very big portion of your short lifespan – from the age of 21 when you first left for Europe to the age of 35 when you bravely faced your martyrdom? What cities did you not visit and learn from and did some educating and organizing, and encouraging the formation of circulos Filipinos and eventually La Liga Filipina? We name it and immediately know that, yes – you were there: Singapore, Galle and Colombo, Naples, Marseilles, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Strasbourg, Heidelberg, Wilhemsfeld, Leipzig, Cologne, Frankfurt, Dresden, Berlin, Leitmeritz, Munich, Stuttgart, Basel, Geneva, Rome, Turin, Milan, Venice, Florence, Saigon, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Tokyo, San Francisco, Reno, Denver, Salt Lake City, Chicago, New York, London – the world.

Would you not have added to your many avocations that of “banker for national development and prosperity”? Would you not have continued to teach the working classes here and in Diaspora around the globe the virtues of saving for investments to build up a nation that would at last not lack the wherewithal for food, health and shelter and for structural modernization, as you did even in the exile time at Dapitan? One can just imagine your proverbial indefatigability in motivating all and sundry to wage the most serious war against poverty and ignorance and social injustice.

More than in the past, the banks today have become a veritable FORCE for change – for better or for worse. This is why one dedicated bank is named after you, dear patriotic Pepe. Yes, it is. Watch it clarify its vision and mission in the spirit of your passionate dedication to the creation of a new dispensation. Watch it and help it as it goes about the urgent tasks of organizing anew the projects that can build the Filipino people.

We are so proud of the statues and monuments of stone and marble built in your honored memory from France to Mexico, from Germany to the USA, from20Spain to Southeast Asia and in the center of a couple of thousand plazas that dot the whole Philippine archipelago.
I know, however, that what you would cherish most is the living image of you in our hearts that would inspire us all to foster the movement of capital and the movement of people into an irresistible force for change in our time.

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