José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda is arguably the most admired Filipino. For writer-statesman León María Guerrero III, he was nothing less than “the first Filipino,” the heroic genius behind the first anti-colonial struggle in Asia.
And yet, Rizal remains among the least understood figures in our history, notwithstanding the outpouring of hero worship and countless paeans to him throughout the past century.
Thanks to contemporary works such as Ambeth Ocampo’s refreshing “Rizal Without the Overcoat” (1990), we have come to see how national heroes are also, to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, “human, all too human.”
Perhaps, one can’t truly understand Rizal’s struggles, and the enormity of his personal courage, unless faced with crushing solitude and political despair. For many progressive intellectuals and activists, the past year was nothing short of a political catastrophe, as despots leveraged pandemic-era emergency measures to bludgeon freedom in the name of public safety. Some feckless autocrats even managed to also crush their countries’ economies with suffocating lockdowns.
Over the past months, I have heard a growing number of once-hopeful friends expressing the horror of hopelessness, with one lamenting, in utter exasperation, “I’m done with this place!”
But this is precisely when Rizal’s legacy is of greatest importance, namely embracing the burden of social responsibility and summoning courage in the face of generalized hopelessness.
Just consider Rizal’s circumstances in his halcyon youth. During his first direct encounter with the Old World in the grip of modernization, our young hero was mesmerized by Barcelona’s “wide, clean streets, macadamized as in Manila,” and yet he was simultaneously horrified by the utter anonymity of his homeland. Rizal ruefully lamented that Europeans started “call[ing] me Chinese, Japanese, American [i.e., Latin American], etc., but no one Filipino! Unfortunate country — no one knows a thing about you!”
As with Crisostomo Ibarra in “Noli Me Tangere,” and countless Filipinos who will seek greener pastures overseas in the next century, Rizal was soon confronted with “the specter of comparison” (el demonio de las comparaciones) between the wretched conditions at home and the dynamic march of history in the imperial heartland.
A renaissance man soon admired by the European elite and lovers the world over, Rizal couldn’t even hope to be a second-class citizen in his colonized home in the grip of a collapsing empire. And yet, he continued to struggle, at the expense of his own life, for the Philippines’ liberation.
More than a political figure, Rizal is also a moral compass, and there are three lessons from his courageous struggle.
The first thing Rizal teaches us is that you can’t turn your back on social injustice, since it’s a poison that will afflict the whole society sooner than later. The worst thing one can do is to take refuge in our privileges in the face of systematic injustice.
Though Rizal hailed from a relatively prosperous mestizo family, first his brave mother (Teodora), then his activist brother (Paciano), and later on his entire family, would suffer from the enveloping darkness of unchecked tyranny.
The second lesson one learns from Rizal is that greatness is a solitary road. As Nick Joaquin observed in his magisterial “A Question of Heroes” (1977), Rizal wasn’t only struggling against an empire but also had to grapple with envy, sloth, and betrayal among his supposed colleagues and followers. Upon the publication of “El Filibusterismo,” Rizal chose to return to almost certain demise back home partly to disprove accusations of cowardice by some fellow ilustrados, while his execution was partly because of a disciple who was too eager to implicate him in the Katipunan revolt.
But it was in that crushing dungeon of solitude that Rizal courageously bid his “Mi último adios” with stoic strength, knowing fully well that history was on his side.
Third, Rizal reminds us that we should never mistake moral conviction with political certainty. His novels reveal the depth and complexity of the competing ideals, impulses, and political advocacies in his soul.
Until the end, he embraced, under duress, the burden of responsibility, ruling out facile solutions and premature revolts to avoid unnecessary suffering. His was a life of courage and responsibility against hopelessness.