I didn’t learn this in history class
When I was in school ages ago, Philippine history was a boring subject where we memorized dates and places and the names of our national heroes who were all noble, brave, courageous and true. They were depicted in postage stamps and statues in plazas, and their names were on street signs all over the country. And every school kid could identify their images on sight.
Rizal had the wave on his forehead and his hand in his breast pocket. Aguinaldo had a military haircut and steely eyes. Mabini was the pale phlegmatic paralytic on a wheelchair. Andres Bonifacio was the rebolusyonaryo who wore a camiso chino and red pants and wielded a machete. Antonio Luna was the swashbuckling general with a thick moustache that curled up at the ends. Marcelo H. del Pilar also wore a moustache and he looked ike a judge. Gregorio del Pilar was the clean cut young man in a general’s uniform. Gabriela Silang looked magnificent on horseback. And so on.
But we got to know them as stick figures with one or two heroic deeds to their name. But who were they really? What made them happy, angry, sad or afraid? What made them heroes?
Early on, we got to know Jose Rizal a little bit better than the others because, being the national hero, there were a lot more stories about him as a bright child who learned his lessons at his mother’s knee, won all the academic honors in school, and excelled in everything he did. We learned about his trips abroad, the books he wrote, his exile in Dapitan and his heroic death in Bagumbayan Field. But even then, Rizal as we knew him, was idealized and antiseptic, sanitized by our historians and teachers to be a role model for the youth.
It was later, thanks mainly to the activist community, that we got to know other heroes, like Andres Bonifacio, better. He was a warrior who led the Katipunan in the revolution against Spain, but he was also an educated man who read widely and wrote graceful poetry in Tagalog. And Aguinaldo was not quite the hero that history books made him out to be. In fact, he was an arrogant leader who ordered the murder of his perceived enemy, Bonifacio, and sold his country to America. And Rizal and Bonifacio were on different sides of the debate on how to win our freedom from Spain: reform vs. revolution, the educated elite vs. the masses. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I didn’t learn that in history class.
Recently, two movies about our heroes have given us a lot more information that we didn’t learn in school. For the first time, we see figures in Philippine history as flesh and blood individuals, fully human, warts and all. And what a difference it has made in my appreciation of our past, and my understanding of why our present is what it is today.
Andres Bonifacio, the leader of the Katipunan, was a proud warrior who was cheated out of the presidency of the revolutionary government and given the minor post of secretary of the interior. Angry and hurt, he did what honorable men of his time did when faced with insult. He drew a gun on the person who insulted him. For his adamant refusal to recognize the Aguinaldo government, President Aguinaldo ordered Bonifacio arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to death by firing squad.
In the movie Heneral Luna, Antonio Luna, the commander of the armed forces in the war against the Americans, detested politicians, especially those who would enter into a compromise with the American colonial power rather than continue the armed struggle for freedom, as he was fully prepared to do. President Aguinaldo said over and over that Luna was the most brilliant officer he had. But Luna was brash, harsh and difficult to control. He was not a team player in a cabinet dominated by the elite who played transactional politics that he despised as wimpy, if not traitorous.
Whether he was dealing with his peers in the Cabinet or with lazy and undisciplined officers and soldiers in the battlefield, he didn’t hold back his sharp tongue and violent temper. In the end, like Bonifacio, Luna was shot and hacked to death on orders of Aguinaldo. But unlike Bonifacio whose remains were never recovered, in a final act of hypocrisy, Aguinaldo gave Luna a hero’s funeral.
His disappointment in the Filipino intelligentsia, the educated and self-interested elite, made Antonio Luna declare that the Filipino people had a worst enemy than the Americano, and it was — and still is — ourselves.
This was what made Jerrold Tarog’s masterpiece on the death of Antonio Luna so disturbing and so painful to watch. The betrayal continues to this day; our dream of a prosperous nation united, sovereign and free continues to be compromised. The film holds a mirror to our faces and shows us how generations of leaders have failed our country, our people, ourselves.
This is why it is important that the youth are exposed to the true narratives in our history through films like Bonifacio and Heneral Luna. Unlike us is the older generations who grew up with false romantic notions about our past and have therefore repeated “the sins of our fathers,” they have every opportunity to learn from our history and bring the Filipino nation to a better course.
Heneral Luna is an excellent movie. Catch it before the theaters replace it with mindless foreign and local entertainment.
