Rizal, ‘woke’ in his own time

The multifaceted life of National Hero José Rizal yields nuggets of wonder for the conscientious student, whether young or not, and continues to impress as the years wear on. We mark today the 124th year of his death in the hands of Spanish colonial authorities at what was then Bagumbayan — a killing that seemed preordained for a man who subverted the ruling order through an unerring purpose: to educate his fellow Filipinos on the constraints of their objective conditions, and thus empower them to ultimately break their chains.

Not that Rizal’s life and execution should be taken as a cautionary tale for young people who recognize injustice when they see it, and resolve to right it. There are crucial lessons to be learned from the plentiful accounts of his time on earth, no matter that, at 35 years, it was all too brief. Millennials cynically casing today’s political landscape for role models, and gagging at what they see, can do worse than get a bead on the life and works of the man named by the newspaperman and diplomat Leon Ma. Guerrero as the “First Filipino,” and marvel at his sheer genius. Although famous for his novels and essays that embodied his moral and political philosophy, he employed his other talents and skills to display the length and breadth of an extraordinary intellect.

There’s much to be gained in an earnest study of Rizal by young people bored out of their skull and with more time on their hands than they know what to do with. His exile in the sleepy town of Dapitan in Zamboanga del Norte in 1892-1896 is a sterling example of an interlude spent in routinary, but brilliant, vigorous and cheerful, industry.

From a summary of his activities during his banishment to Dapitan: Rizal practiced medicine, attending to patients from near and far, both wealthy and poor. An eye specialist, he also performed surgery on his mother’s right eye. He designed and built an aqueduct kilometers long, winding among the rocks, bearing water from a mountain stream in bamboo pipes. He put up a lighting system using P500 that a patient had paid him. He opened a school, beginning with three students and ending with 21. Of that number, 16 did not pay tuition; in return, they worked in his gardens and construction projects. He taught them reading, writing, Spanish and English, math, geometry, nature study, industrial work, morals, even gymnastics. He also trained them in the collection of specimens of plants and animals, which he sent to scientific institutions in Europe and for which he earned medical books and surgical instruments.

Still from that summary: Rizal discovered rare specimens of creatures—a small beetle, a flying dragon, and a rare frog that now bear his name. He collected 346 shells of 203 species. He learned the Bisayan, Subanun and Malay languages, so that he came to know a total of 22 languages, including Tagalog and other Philippine tongues, the colonizer’s Spanish, even Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. Still he made paintings, sketches, sculptures. He planted corn, hemp, sugarcane, cacao, coffee, coconut, and fruit trees. On top of everything else, he engaged in business ventures in fishing, copra and hemp, as well as lime manufacturing—and put up a cooperative of Dapitan farmers in a determined effort to break the Chinese monopoly.

Rizal was a renaissance man steeped in humanities and the arts, and at the same time a man of science. He was a realist and pragmatist who counseled that arms and funds first be collected and the people be made ready before the Philippine revolution against Spain could be launched. He was, as well, an astute analyst who, according to the late historian Cesar Adib Majul, “points out how many individual traits or idiosyncrasies”—for example, the purported indolence of the Filipino—“are not innate but are fostered by social institutions or the result of historical events.”

The teaching of Rizal’s life is mandated by Republic Act No. 1425, otherwise known as the Rizal law and enacted in 1956. The need for an intelligent teaching of Rizal cannot be overemphasized, given the current state of affairs that makes of many Filipinos prey to the tyranny of a few in their own land —distressingly similar to how it was when he wrote his “Noli” and “Fili.”

Today’s youth should learn from this man who was “woke” in his own time. Wrote Majul in 1999: “As long as there is exploitation and poverty in society, a lack of bravery in the struggle for the recognition and protection of human rights, selfish support for power-hungry or corrupt officials in order to partake of the crumbs from their tables, and an urgent need to bring about the best of the people’s creative energy, Rizal’s message for the people he so loved and others in a similar historical situation remains true in the next millennium.”