The revolutionary Rizal in Southeast Asia

I confess to an appreciative bias for John Nery, author of this impeccable study on the influence of our National Hero in Southeast Asia. On occasion, I read his column and assumed that by his name alone, he must be a Caucasian expat attuned to the mess in our country, not the brown Indio that he is.

On this, the 150th birth anniversary of Rizal, the publication of this stringently researched study enables us to relate with more conviction and pride in having a novelist lay down the firmest and most durable foundation of the Filipino nation. With the journalist’s eagle eye, John Nery traced with unfailing perseverance that influence which Rizal wielded over Southeast Asia to this very day when the enduring vestiges of colonialism are still so much a determinant in our future. Rizal did this with his pen as well as with his life; as the American literary scholar Roland Greene said, “He was the first post colonial writer.”

John Nery’s search for the scattered threads of Rizal’s work in Southeast Asia is exhausting. In the process, he found so many errors made by earlier writers including those who were familiar or related to the Rizal family. Some are glaringly obvious and would have been avoided if the writers just bothered to double-check their dates and facts. On the whole, however, the core narrative is neither altered nor tarnished. What results is a confirmation of the prescience, the brilliance and profundity of Rizal’s thinking as also expressed in his letters and articles. For instance, this has not been clearly understood by many of those who studied his life — that though seemingly opposed to revolution, among the early Filipinos who riled against Spanish colonialism, he was, in fact one of its first and staunchest believers.

I honor Nery not so much because of his perspicacity but because without putting it explicitly, he is illustrating the vast outreach of Rizal not as a political reformer. It is his novels, his literary creations which gave him his marmoreal reputation; it is to Rizal’s credit that he elected to use the literary art. He could just have published those manifestoes, those inciting articles as did his colleagues in the Propaganda Movement. But he chose literature to magnify and broadcast his deepest feelings, his dreams for his unhappy country. He saw that literature — the noblest of the arts — would prevail long after the fact, that it is literature that renders history alive.

So many scholars miss this significant distinction; like so many illiterate Filipino leaders, they do not regard novelists and their fictions as the truest building blocks in the foundation of a nation. All too often, when they exalt Rizal, they forget it is the committed writers who are his real heirs.

In his research, John Nery reveals yet another novelist who influenced Rizal. Of this particular intellectual osmosis we know next to nothing. It is a given among those who write that such artistic transfers are taken for granted.

In 1860, Edward Doues Dekker — (pen name — Multatuli) — who had served in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) published his novel, Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, in Amsterdam. Rizal wrote to his friend, Ferdinand Blumentritt how he envied Dekker whose novel was “so viciously anti-colonial — but was so beautiful.”

Two generations later in that very same setting of Dekker’s fiction, two Indonesians — the Founding Father of Indonesia, Sukarno and that country’s foremost novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, also read Rizal. John Nery recounts how they were inspired by Rizal. Not just Sukarno and Toer, but scores of Indonesians who read his poem, Mi Ultimo Adios as translated by the Indonesian journalist Rosihan Anwar. Much of the material gleaned from Indonesia is attributed to Anwar by the author.

All too often, writers are judged and admired only for their work. Their peccadilloes, their sins are glossed over by the very fact that by their being writers can wipe away their moral lapses. This should not be — writers should also be judged by how they act out their values.

If this measure were applied to Rizal, there is no doubt that his resonance and his glitter would even be wider and brighter. As a person, he brimmed with goodwill, compassion and virtue though he was always critical of the vices of his colleagues and countrymen.

Unfortunately, such influence did not instruct his foremost Indonesian admirers. President Sukarno and his ally, Pramoedya oppressed their political critics when both were at the height of their power. Pramoedya burned the books of the writers he didn’t like and withheld jobs from them.

Likewise, in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos and some of the writers who pandered to him extolled Rizal in their speeches but did not follow his humane example as they, too, oppressed writers who criticized them.

Rizal envisioned a just society after the revolution — not the authoritarian regimes that followed most of it, particularly in Southeast Asia. Understand this sequence after the upheaval — chaos first, then iron order, and the darkest night during which Rizal was martyred before that dawn.

The controversies surrounding Rizal’s last days in prison continue to this very day. Some think he turned his back to the very ideas he espoused. John Nery repeats how Rizal wanted to go to Cuba to work, not on the side of the Cubans who were waging their revolution against Spain but for the Spaniards. He also recounts Rizal’s least known evasions at his trial, the contrary manifesto which he wrote denying the revolution. Indeed, although his biographer, Austin Coates said that Rizal did not retract Masonry as claimed by the Jesuits, I can even believe that he did. Poor man — he tried desperately to save himself.

Remember, he returned to the Philippines to pursue the dreams he knew wouldn’t be realized if he lingered in Europe. He could have stayed there and would have fared handsomely because he was a doctor and already had an excellent practice when he was in Hong Kong.

But patriotism is selfless; no patriot is ever safe or comfortable — he transcends the ego, he gives himself freely, affectionately to the earth — the nation — which sustains him. Rizal couldn’t undo his own heroism; by writing those two novels wherein he expressed his truest feelings, he sealed his fate.

Rizal is read not just in Southeast Asia but I am sure, more widely in Spanish South America. His Last Farewell is included in so many anthologies of Spanish poetry, it is memorized by so many.

In his own country, he should have the most and lasting impact. Every town plaza is adorned by his monument, each main street bears his name. And the Rizal industry continues to thrive, churning out so many books and a myriad forms of hossanah. But like the rice we eat, we Filipinos have made him a mundane décor and habit.

Sure, Rizal is one Indio who is now read universally, translated as he is in so many languages. This knowledge is comforting to us Filipinos, a form of national narcotic even. Let us now instead nurture in our very bones the sterling fundamentals of the belief that Rizal — the Malay paragon — lived and died for.