Rizal, the hero

Jose Rizal is, in the annals of heroism, an anomaly. He was a man of science, a scholar and writer, and to many young Filipinos is idealized as a model son and something of a ladies’ man.

Unlike other national heroes, he did not bear arms or lead an army. Indeed, he preached against an armed rebellion, believing his countryfolk were yet unprepared for battle and so concluded that a revolution was bound to fail. But neither was he a milquetoast. While in Madrid, he challenged fellow propagandist Antonio Luna to a duel after Luna disparaged Nellie Boustead while in a drunken rage. Nellie apparently favored Rizal over Luna, and hearing the young lady maligned, Rizal challenged Luna to a gun duel. The gunfight did not proceed, fortunately, after Luna sobered up. Reports have it that, while a superior swordsman, Luna was not as good with a pistol as Rizal was.

Rizal also challenged to a duel Wenceslao Retana, a minor official in the Spanish colonial bureaucracy who became the foremost opponent of Filipino propagandists in Spain. In an article in an anti-Filipino newspaper in Madrid, Retana claimed that the reason Rizal’s family and friends were ejected from their Calamba properties was that they failed to pay rent. It was an injustice that rankled Rizal deeply, especially since stories reached him that his beloved mother was paraded before the townsfolk with her hands in shackles. It is believed to have sparked Rizal’s simmering anti-Spanish sentiment.

And so an incensed Rizal challenged the Spaniard to a duel, a challenge left unmet after Retana retracted his claims in a later article. The Spaniard would later become an ardent devotee, and after the hero’s death wrote the first book-length biography of Rizal.

Proud and quick to take offense, sensitive to slights and determined to prove by personal example the superiority or at least the equality of Filipinos to any other peoples on earth, Rizal was uniquely situated to take on the mantle of national hero.

Some have claimed that Rizal was nothing more than a “creation” of the American colonial powers who deemed the scholar-writer a safer and thus more palatable model of heroism than the more volatile Andres Bonifacio, whose enduring image is, despite contrary scholarship, the firebrand in peasant wear holding aloft a bolo and the Katipunan flag.

But this flies against accounts of how Rizal—and later, his surviving family—was beheld by his contemporaries. During his exile in Dapitan, Rizal was visited by an emissary of the Katipunan who sought to convince him to lend his person and reputation to the revolutionary cause. Rizal rebuffed him.

Historian and Inquirer columnist Ambeth Ocampo, in an account of Rizal’s execution, describes the scene as Rizal is led on foot from his cell in Fort Santiago to Bagumbayan: “The streets were lined with people who wanted to see the condemned man, since Rizal was many things to different people: ‘leader of the revolution,’ physician, novelist, poet, sculptor, heretic, subversive. Rizal was a person one could not be neutral about. Like him or hate him, he was a celebrity.”

In a time when it took at the very least some weeks for news to cross the ocean from Spain to these islands, Rizal and his fellow propagandists were virtually the sole voices of Filipino opposition to Spanish colonial policy. His novels articulated the inchoate anger of the people against the symbols of Spanish oppression: the military, the civil authorities, the clergy. At a time when armed conflict consisted of bolos and spears and a few rifles employed against a well-armed military force with long arms, cannons, swords and mounted troops, Rizal chose to fight with words—scathing, bitter, pained and pointed—and aimed these at the heart of the colonizer. He may have eschewed active, bloody battle, but he was no coward.

His words were missiles that covered a broad ground and outlasted his own brief life. And their enduring influence explains why he is a hero.