Overcoats, bolos

A bill has been filed in Congress by Kabataan party-list Rep. Raymond Palatino, proposing a mandatory college course on “the life, work and ideals of Andres Bonifacio.”

The Kabataan representative explained the rationale for the bill: “Bonifacio, like many of the youths today, is from a poor working class family and had to work at an early age to support his siblings. Yet the circumstance did not hinder him from recognizing his historical part in the fight for social change. We are, in many respects, contemporaries of

Bonifacio.”

I sense that a reason for the bill goes deeper to a kind of rivalry between the admirers of Jose Rizal and Bonifacio. On one hand, there’s a college course, made mandatory in 1956, on Rizal, who many historians depict as upper-class and reformist. In contrast, there’s almost nothing on Bonifacio, projected as the working class revolutionary.

I admire both Rizal and Bonifacio but, precisely because of the experiences that have come out of the required Rizal college course, I fear it will be a disservice to Bonifacio to have another mandatory college subject about him.

Let me explain. Last week I had to speak about Rizal at his alma mater, the Ateneo de Manila. There were three discussants, from different generations. It was striking that two of them—former Health Secretary Alfredo Bengzon and an undergraduate health sciences student, John Xavier Valdez—admitted that Rizal, to them, was too distant. John Xavier was more specific in explaining how the required college Rizal course is making Rizal almost irrelevant.  Only the “middle generation” Atenista, medical student Harvy Joy Liwanag, spoke about Rizal with enthusiasm from beginning to end.

I admit that I wasn’t too impressed either with Rizal when I had to take the required Philippine Institutions 100 course about him at UP. My professor wasn’t exactly a Rizal fan and made us read Renato Constantino’s “Veneration Without Understanding,” which painted Rizal’s heroism as a creation of the Americans. It was only this year, with the Rizal birth sesquicentennial, that I began to rediscover him, with many pleasant surprises.

Rizal’s growing irrelevance comes from the way he was converted into an academic subject, with the paradoxes in the teaching. On one hand, there was an overdose of stuff to be memorized: names and dates and “Mi Ultimo Adios” (which, for older Filipinos like myself, we also got in our required Spanish courses). On the other hand, there was very little about Rizal the human being, without the overcoat, to borrow Ambeth Ocampo’s favorite metaphor of Rizal.

What we’ve seen then through the years is a Rizal course taught almost in the same boring way as the lives of saints in Catholic religion classes. There’s irony here, considering that Catholic conservatives fiercely opposed the Rizal bill in 1956, saying Rizal was anti-Catholic. The debates were heated, with bishops threatening excommunication like they’re doing now with the supporters of the Reproductive Health bill.

At least Filipinos still relate to the saints, mainly to intercede for their requests to the heavens. Rizal remains, for most Filipinos, that lonely man in an overcoat standing out in the town plaza. I say “most” because we do have Filipinos who believe Rizal is a saint. I’m suddenly remembering that the saving grace in UP’s PI 100 classes, then and now, were the field trips to Mt. Banahaw to visit the Rizalista cults, but the excursions only further exoticized Rizal.

Teaching history

I am more enthusiastic about a joint resolution in Congress, filed by Kabataan and Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT), to look into the teaching of history in our schools. I hope they’ll look into why there is so little of history being taught in our primary and secondary schools, and that the little that we have is taught so poorly.

I actually wouldn’t mind having the Rizal course scrapped to allow more time to Philippine history in general, with attention given to Rizal, Bonifacio and our other heroes. But to do that, we need to be prepared with teaching materials, not more dates and names to memorize, but more contextual information to help young people understand how heroes become heroes. We saw some of that this year with the sesquicentennial of Rizal’s birth forcing researchers to dig up the more interesting aspects of his  life. I’ve spoken and written about Rizal and his push for a Filipino spelling system, Rizal the natural scientist, Rizal the physician, Rizal the anthropologist, even Rizal the father.

Next month the University of the Philippines Diliman will be spearheading celebrations of the 200th birth anniversary of Tandang Sora, a time to emphasize our heroines. . . and senior citizen subversives. In two years, it will be Bonifacio’s birth sesquicentennial and, as one of his descendants, lawyer Gregorio Bonifacio, pointed out in a television interview, we should prepare for that anniversary by revisiting the myths around him that still need to be cleared, including his alleged “working class” origins (“more middle class,” Bonifacio argues).

Anti-hero

We will have many more anniversaries of our 19th-century heroes, yet so little is taught about that era, what the Spanish occupation meant, and how our heroes used the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” many times, in relation to freedom and progress. Last week in Ateneo I mentioned how slowly we’ve progressed, “liberal” today still having negative connotations in the Philippines, with the word being used to refer to political radicalism and moral laxity.

It’s also striking how we think of heroes only as men from the 19th century, when there were many more men and women who shined in the darkest days of our history, through the American occupation, World War II and into the post-war period, through martial law and up to the present.

We need heroes, but we need an anti-hero approach to make them real and relevant. The Ateneo medical school invites Ambeth Ocampo every year to talk about Rizal the physician, including a peek into his clinic notes and how Rizal might have treated some of Ambeth’s own ailments.

Similarly, I’m pushing for more discussion of Rizal in anthropology. Few people appreciate the fact that Rizal was an anthropologist. In my graduate class in anthropological theory, students are required to read and dissect Rizal’s “The Indolence of Filipinos” to see how Rizal the anthropologist challenged that stereotype. That essay from Rizal was one inspiration for Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas to write “The Myth of the Lazy Native” in 1966, now considered a classic among Asian social scientists.

I don’t want to see Bonifacio even more marginalized and isolated as an angry man with the bolo, which is what will happen if we require a course about him. We need him, and Rizal and Tandang Sora and hundreds of other Filipinos brought into our classrooms, discussed not just as dead people and monuments but as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, saints and sinners.

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