DON’T LOOK now, but three weeks from now we’ll be celebrating Jose Rizal’s 150th birthday. Well, you won’t see much even if you do look. Though some groups have been busily trying to notify the country of the event, and though posters of Rizal 150 adorn some walls and pennants of it hang down on some of the city’s streets, there’s little there to suggest the big deal that it is.
Rizal’s memory seems more remembered in the breach than in the observance. Of course he has more streets named after him than any other hero, he is the centerpiece of legal tender, he has organizations like the Knights of Rizal expressly devoted to keeping his memory alive. He even has cults worshipping him as savior or demigod—one of these has him fathering Adolf Hitler—in Banahaw and elsewhere.
But I don’t know that he has seeped that deeply into the culture or the national consciousness. He is quoted now and then, three of his most famous aphorisms being, “The youth is the hope of the fatherland,” “Those who can’t see where they came from won’t get to where they are going,” and “Those who do not have a language of their own smell worse than rotten fish.” The last appears plentifully during Linggo ng Wika.
But I don’t know that he looms large in the everyday life of the nation in the way that, say, the Founding Founders loom large in the everyday life of America. I don’t know that his exploits are well known to the people in the way that, say, Gandhi or Mao’s exploits are well known to their people. I don’t even know that most Filipinos have read “Noli” and “Fili,” or know how they go, even if they have heard about them.
A pity because, however trite it sounds, the guy truly has much to say to us today. Not least by way of example. He is the very hero to inspire the youth, never mind the non-youth most of whom have already grown up with the wrong values.
He is heroic first of all in the scale of his striving. To appreciate the depth of Rizal’s achievement, you have to see it in the context of his times. Those times were not conducive to any striving, overarching or otherwise, for Filipinos then—or indios since there were no Filipinos yet then, Rizal would be the first. These were times when the colonial masters systematically subjugated their subjects’ minds as ferociously as they did their bodies. The entire ideology, culture, way of life—call it what you will—was devoted to making the indio feel inferior, no, utterly insignificant, a beast of burden, an insect, the better for him to be easily exploited.
Rizal’s greatest act of subversion was not something that he said or did. It was what he was. They probably would have executed him anyway even if he had not written savage satires of the friars and their brethren in government. His very existence was seditious.
He was brilliant. That was the most seditious thing of all.
You have a rule dedicated to reducing the ruled to nothingness—a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings who owed the Spaniards a favor for ruling them—and then suddenly one of them shows himself not just to be perfectly capable but to be exceptional so. You have a rule dedicated to making the ruled believe you were the font of wisdom—the indios were a bunch of sheep who would be lost without you—and then suddenly one of them shows himself not just to be your equal but to be better than you. You would be pissed off too. You would want to get rid of the impertinent creature too.
For that was what Rizal was. He wasn’t just a glimmer in the dark pit of colonial rule, he was a veritable torchlight. He wasn’t just an intelligent indio amid a mass of bovine fools groping in the dark, he was an absolute renaissance man. Who among the Spaniards could boast about having become, at such young age, a writer, historian, sculptor, painter, doctor, ophthalmologist, marksman, lover? Who did these things marvelously well to boot? Well, maybe they had lovers in court—or abusers in the pulpit—but nothing close to the despicable indio.
If for that alone, Rizal should have something to say to today’s youth about how the worst of times may not be an impediment to striving for excellence, to aspiring after genius, to reaching out for things seemingly beyond grasp.
But he has more to say to the youth about heroism. Much much more. Chief among them is that that striving becomes all the more luminous when done in the service of one’s own people, one’s own country. This country has not lacked for brilliant people who have shown world-class talent in various fields. In the arts particularly, we are especially gifted in that respect. But few, if any, have rivaled Rizal in scale of talent. Even fewer, if any, have rivaled Rizal in possessing so epic a scale of talent and been willing to lay it down at the feet of Inang Bayan. Still even fewer, if any, have been blessed with genius and been willing to die for principle—there was no Philippines then, there was just the glimmer of it.
His last thoughts? Read “Ultimo Adios.” It’s still about country.
In a day and age especially where we see the best and the brightest leaving the country for a crack at a future abroad, when we see the not-so-best-and-brightest devoting their waking hours in public service to screwing the public—some discovering the infinite wonders and pleasures of ill-gotten wealth in old age, when they should be discovering those very properties in simplicity—it’s good to remember we had a Rizal. A Rizal who could have gained unparalleled honor and renown in his time, all he had to do was turn his back on his life to go on living, no one would even blame him if he did, but who chose instead in the prime of his life and in the fullness of his abilities to embrace life by dying for his beliefs.
Heroes don’t come any more heroic.