Rizal, exile, and lockdown

Last week I was with GMA-7’s Howie Severino on a webinar panel where he talked about his experiences as a COVID-19 patient. He said that the most difficult part of living with COVID-19 was the loneliness, because once you’re confined in the hospital, absolutely no visitors are allowed, not even from the closest relatives.

The lockdown in general has separated families. I have not seen my children for three months now, having driven them to Laguna the day before the lockdown, feeling they would be safer there with more open spaces and less congestion of houses and people.

Little did I know that our lockdown would become the longest in the world. I did warn, in an article that appeared on Day 1 of the lockdown, of the danger of communities locking out each other, which has happened with barangays and subdivisions. I know a UP Los Baños professor whose grandchildren are only a few kilometers away but the subdivision won’t let her in to visit, a situation similar to my own.

Of course, a UP professor’s separation from loved ones is nothing compared to the plight of many Filipinos caught away from home by lockdowns, here and abroad. We’ve had two reports of overseas workers committing suicide from the despair of not being able to return home, while many more try to cope not just with being stranded but also with their loss of jobs. The bayanihan spirit emerges strongest among them, like the Filipino woman and her husband preparing some 200 free meals each day for jobless migrant workers of whatever nationality, not just Filipinos.

Listening to Howie, I thought about another webinar that I was preparing for—Ateneo’s eTuro series. I would be talking about “Sex and Gender in COVID-19 times,” and by coincidence, the organizers set the webinar for June 19, today, which is Rizal’s birthday. Howie’s references to loneliness made me think of Rizal’s exile in Dapitan, and how in many ways, the lockdown has made us all exiles, ironically in our own hometowns and homes.

Rizal was, of course, very productive while in Dapitan, his genius brought out in the ways he took on work as an educator, an agriculturist, an engineer, an anthropologist, a biologist, a community organizer, and as a physician. (I could actually further expand that list.)

But it must have been a very lonely time as well for Rizal, as captured in his poem “Mi Retiro”—best read if you ever visit Dapitan. The poem is poignant and powerful, one of yearning yet also of almost passive acceptance of a life in exile.

It is hard now to imagine what Rizal’s life would have been if he had not been with Josephine Bracken, a young Irish woman from Hong Kong who had accompanied her foster father to seek Rizal’s services as an ophthalmologist.

Rizal and Bracken fell in love and she eventually agreed to settle down with Rizal in Dapitan. It’s the stuff for a novel or multi-season teleseries complete with intrigues, Rizal’s siblings suspecting she was a spy, and Rizal trying to arrange, unsuccessfully, for a wedding. Under Spain, only church weddings were allowed, and the priests did not look kindly on Rizal. Bracken got pregnant, but the child was born premature and died. He was given a name, Francisco. The child was buried near a hut, which Rizal burned down shortly before he left Dapitan.

In our own COVID-19 exiles, we may well learn from Rizal to make good use of our time. And if we sometimes seem weak and in despair, let’s not forget Rizal, too, often plunged into the depths of despair but kept going, sustained in large part by the love of Josephine Bracken. One wonders what he would have been like if his son had survived. Rizal’s birthday falls close to Father’s Day, which we celebrate this year on June 21.

Things to do today and the weekend:

Today at 12 noon, I have the webinar talk about what we pretend we’re not thinking of: sex and gender. You have to register first: bit.ly/June19eTURO

Do read Nick Joaquin’s translation of Rizal’s “Mi Retiro”: https://allpoetry.com/My-Retreat

Watch Howie Severino’s auto-documentary, “Ako si Patient 2828,” on YouTube.

Finally, read infectious disease specialist Dr. Angeles T. Alora’s piece on life with COVID-19 and how we might move from the fear to learning and growth: https://arete.ateneo.edu/connect/after-lockdown-perspectives-from-the-medical-field

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