Rethinking Rizal

I can vaguely recall the moment some 42 years ago when, as far as I was concerned, Jose Rizal’s mystique of heroism began its long slide towards sanctified irrelevance. The national hero was not exactly dislodged from his pedestal, but from that crucial moment he appeared to morph into a symbol of the distant and unlamented past.

The First Quarter Storm of 1970 had caught the nation by surprise, the vehemence of its rhetoric and fearlessness of its adherents shaking the very foundations of ilustrado nationalism, the established faith of the ruling order in the Philippines. I came of age during FQS and I know nothing has remained the same in the aftermath of this convulsion and the dictatorship that followed.

Raised in adoration of Rizal, I came to entertain second thoughts about the man. He was the quintessential ilustrado, the Filipino gentleman schooled in Europe who proved that the brown man was equal to the westerners; he became the pride of the Malay race and gave the emerging Filipino nation its first and most celebrated trophy hero. But that didn’t seem enough for my inquiring mind.

Although Rizal wrote of revolution and exposed injustice, I was disappointed to learn that he was ambivalent about rallying the people to overthrow Spanish rule. It was said that he feared chaos more than he hated oppression. He was for gradual change through education. Whenever the conditions for liberation ripen in the indeterminate future, he had preached, the necessary changes would come like “the first burst of dawn” — beautiful and unstoppable. Even for some of his contemporaries, this was nothing but romantic hogwash, the kind of weak-kneed advocacy that doomed Rizal in the eyes of more angry and unforgiving nationalists of my generation.

However, until the 1970 disturbances pushed the Philippines on the road to dictatorship, which came two years later, the very idea that Rizal would ever fall from grace was considered plain heresy.

To be sure, there had been no lack of anti-Rizal agitations, principally from the defeated Andres Bonifacio faction of the Katipunan.

Bonifacio’s ragtag supporters never gained headway because they were regarded as hotheads who were no match for the wily collaborators who struck a Faustian bargain with the Americans and ended up ruling the country on their selfish terms.

Not surprisingly, the Bonifacio clique made common cause with every socialist, proletarian or Marxist group that emerged over the years. These doctrinaire and fringe elements were regarded as born losers and only served to reinforce Rizal’s exalted position and the elite’s stranglehold on power.  

Coincidence or not, the hero’s prestige plummeted sharply under martial law, but not because Bonifacio had taken Rizal’s place. In fact, the Marcos regime stuck it out with both men as its official heroes. There were as many Rizalistas as Bonifacistas who supported the dictatorship.

What made Rizal and Bonifacio seem tarnished or passé, I believe, was the fact that the long-running debate of 1896, always too tendentious and forever unresolved, had finally run out of steam.

The Filipino generation after us, Gen X or Gen Y, rapidly lost interest and came to view the rival heroes as historical oddities, objects of ritual worship rather than role models of modern life. The two appeared dated and were of interest only to grandfathers and great-grandfathers who’ve passed away or who were awaiting boarding time in the departure lounges of life.  

 For my part, my childhood reverence for Rizal evolved into something more pragmatic and less dismissive. I developed a fascination with another Rizal — the historical figure, the Filipino intellectual of the 1880s and 1890s who tried to make sense of a world in which individuals like him were unfairly assigned a place of inferiority and powerlessness.

I saw Rizal not as a hero, but as a Filipino trying to make sense of his life in his own time. I could empathize with the man as I mapped out the choices that confronted my own generation.

This interest coincided with my own wanderlust that sent me on frequent and long trips to Europe over the last 15 years. Like Rizal, I felt at home in the old continent that nurtured his dreams and whose culture came to define him as a man.

The working journalist and aspiring historian in me combined to retrace Rizal’s footsteps in Spain, France, Germany, the United States and Hong Kong. I was not looking out for the cardboard hero on his restless foreign peregrinations, but for the thinking Filipino in quest of identity and fulfillment.

I boned up on the last two decades of the 19th century, the long period of peace in the continent that was marked by European expansion elsewhere in the world. This pivotal era lasted between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The French called it the Belle Epoque, the Epoch of Beauty. For the British it was the zenith of empire when the Union Jack flew over much of the planet on which the sun never set. The Germans under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns were fast catching up. Russia was hurtling into the modern age.

As for Spain, it was at last coming to terms with the fact that its Golden Age was long over and its once-dominant empire had shrunk to distant Cuba and the Philippines. Ahead lay the Francoist nightmare of some four decades. A streak of German modernism, particularly in science and education, had infected Spanish intellectual life.

That said, it was clear to Rizal, who first set foot in Barcelona in 1881, that Spain had fallen far behind and the real spirit of enlightenment flourished beyond the Pyrenees in Paris. He did not waste time in Madrid before heading to the French capital and, from there, on relentless side trips to Belgium, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. This was on his first European sojourn, which lasted six years.

Briefly returning to the Philippines, Rizal went back to Europe the other way around by visiting Japan, the United States and England before going back to his old haunts in Paris and Madrid.

After two years, he left for Asia again and decided to set up an eye clinic in Hong Kong, a British trading port a few sailing days north of Manila. He did not stay long and decided to return home, only to become the focus of intrigues that led the authorities to banish him to Dapitan in Mindanao. There he ran a school for boys and basically kept out of politics.

Three years later in mid-1896, he volunteered to serve as army doctor in Cuba where a fresh round of revolution against Spain had broken out. He was arrested while on his way to the island nation via Spain, put on trial in Manila, found guilty of treason and executed on Dec. 30, 1896 at the Luneta.

This breathless rundown of a busy life that lasted only 35 years I tried to make sense of in the places Rizal went to or inhabited.

In Barcelona, just off the Ramblas, I went to the first inn he stayed in which he described as very dirty and noisy, prompting him to move in desperation to a Jesuit boarding house. The inn is now a respectable hotel that proudly proclaims he lived there but without mentioning his dim view of the old establishment.

I took walking tours in the old Madrid quarter where Rizal resided, particularly around Calle Echegaray and Plaza Sta. Cruz, just blocks away from Puerta del Sol, the historic center of the Spanish capital.

Basically unchanged in terms of architecture, the area of low-rise brick buildings and narrow streets, now turned into boutique hotels and restaurants, allows you to imagine Rizal haunting the cafes where artists and intellectuals congregated, a few of which survive, and the small pensions, some sporting commemorative plaques in his honor. Notable is the refurbished Hotel Ingles where he delivered a famous speech honoring the painter Juan Luna for winning accolades in an art exhibition.

The Prado nearby remains a great museum where Rizal, also an aspiring painter, soaked up inspiration from the masterpieces of Titian, Velasquez, El Greco and Goya.

In Paris, Rizal was a resident in the crowded foothills around Montmartre and near Gare St. Lazare and Gare de Lyon, in the same period that saw Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet and many impressionists running all over the place. I tracked down the Beaux Art mansion on Rue Cherche-Midi where he apprenticed in opthamology. It was a block or so from Bon Marche, the gigantic department store of which he wrote so effusively to his sisters in Calamba.

Rizal and a group of Filipinos were among the onlookers on the Champs du Mars as the President of France inaugurated the Eiffel Tower in 1889. A number of them like Rizal wrote about that memorable day in their diaries.

As for Germany, the then-Philippine ambassador, Ralph Gonzales, brought me to the Berlin hotel where Rizal finished Noli Me Tangere in Heidelberg, I traced his boarding houses and the hilly garden that inspired him to write a poem on the flowers of Heidelberg. I set out for nearby Wilhelmsfeldt, a quaint village where his memory is kept alive in a park named after him and with a larger-than-life bronze statue of a thinking Rizal beside a reflecting pond.

In London, I visited the house near Regent’s Park where he lived and the British Museum where he annotated Antonio Morga’s forgotten account of the 16th century Philippine conquest by Spain and viewed priceless Egyptian antiquities like the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in Athens.            

In New York, I went to the Fifth Avenue site of the vanished hotel where he stayed across from Madison Square. Like Rizal, I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, the new wonder of the world in 1888, on foot over the East River.

Nearer to Manila in Hong Kong, I saw that nothing remains of the apartment house where he set up an eye clinic in 1891 and where he successfully operated on his mother’s cataracts. The once-residential area just above Queen’s Road in Victoria has become a yuppie party scene with chic boutiques, nightclubs and cafes.

What did I get from my erratic travels following Rizal’s footsteps abroad? Nothing more than the gratifying sense, as I mentioned earlier, that I share the same infectious spirit of wanderlust with the man. He was a tireless and curious traveler. He was interested in people and drew inspiration from them. But unlike me, he was a gifted portraitist who put down his impressions in hundreds of sketches of people, places and things.

I gained invaluable insights of how I could have lived in his century with its slower but distinctive state of technology and culture. It helped that despite the cruel ravages of time and war, much of Europe has stayed unchanged from the external point of view. You could think of yourself as Rizal taking a day off at the splendid Parque del Retiro in Madrid or poking into the severely spartan chambers of Philip II in the massive and gloomy palace of El Escorial in the city’s outskirts.   

A man of the world, Rizal was what in his day would be called a boulevardier or a dandy, properly dressed with top hat, gloves and walking stick. A favorite haunt of his day, the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris, retains the old spirit of leisure and intellect that I’ve also adapted for myself. But of course, without the top hat and dandy trappings.

In my mind, I see Rizal seated by the boat pond watching the children play or the way he would have strolled down the maple-shaded Boulevard St. Germain. The Seine is still the Seine and Rizal crossed those bridges countless times while looking up at the gray-white gothic spires of the Notre Dame and the aristocratic mansions beyond on the Ile St. Louis.

But more than the attraction of beautiful and historic places, it’s clear that Rizal was a serious man who devoured books and newspapers and was aware of the intellectual crosscurrents of the day.

He knew that Europe was at the cusp of earthly supremacy like Rome and that the competing imperial powers would sooner or later bring home the terrible wars that they had been waging in the distant colonial world. He was aware that America was a rising power that could eventually find its way in the Pacific and the Philippines. He was right on target because, just as he predicted in a famous essay, America did become an Asian power two years after his death, beginning with Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay.

Some Filipino writers have faulted Rizal for ignoring Marxism, anarchism and other ideologies that were already in vogue in the 1880s. He never met Lenin nor associated with the radical left. He was primarily attracted to men of moderation in the sciences and the arts. He was a romantic who pursued beautiful women, but could never get to the point of settling down until Josephine Bracken, another restless soul, came into his life when he was a lonely exile in a desolate corner of Mindanao.

My view of Rizal’s politics was that he was a product of his peculiar upbringing, mainly educated by the Jesuits and, like it or not, leaning towards the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. He did join a Masonic lodge and toyed with revolution but he reverted to bourgeois nationalism in the end. He feared the intolerance and chaos that could come out of revolution as it did in France. He was also critical of American democracy with its deep racial hatred for the blacks, the boundless greed of Wall Street, and military expansionism in Latin America and the Pacific.

It was understandable why he did not warm to the idea of a revolutionary movement, the Katipunan, which offered to make him its leader. He was only too aware of the pitfalls of youthful radicalism and how it could be quickly stumped out by an insecure and brutal colonial regime like that of Spain in the Philippines.

Rizal had championed La Liga Filipina, an idealistic movement for change that never took wing in the face of Spanish rightwing reaction and Bonifacio’s putschist inclinations. The one-sided, armed showdown between the two forces erupted not long after, providing, in hindsight, the vital opening for American penetration into Asia and, incidentally, the abrupt and lasting change in colonial rule in the Philippines from Spanish to American.

Rizal was dead accurate in his reading of the grim and fast-changing political situation. That’s why I think he could not be tempted to become the leader of a doomed revolution. He was in a bad fix. He was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. He chose what he thought was the more honorable option: to stand against tyranny but without having blood on his hands. He was no military leader and he could only fight with his pen.

Their lies the basic misunderstanding about Rizal. People wanted him to become what he was not and could not be. He did not wish to be a captive of the expectations of others, no matter how patriotic and grandiose the reasons.

By proclaiming Rizal our national hero we put him on a pedestal where he could not but fall short of the most unrealistic standards of leadership. He could not be — and never wished to be — a Washington, Napoleon, Lenin or Bolivar.

But then again, which of these famous heroes or those of anywhere else in this world were not flawed one way or another and could fully satisfy an ever more fickle and demanding constituency? Rizal was just being his sincere but complicated self. It’s the succeeding generation of Filipinos who’ve been shaping and reshaping his image to suit the political fashions of the day.

That Rizal could be faulted and reviled and still be spared dethronement from his lofty perch at the Luneta speaks volumes of his enduring appeal to the Filipino imagination. We produced a genius, a good writer with a conscience, an exemplar of the race and a decent man. To ask for more would be to call on Superman.