Pivotal role of Jose Rizal

Some time ago I visited Jose Rizal’s grandnieces, Tita Mameng, Tita Siony and Tita Naty at Tita Mameng’s house in the Lopez-Rizal compound in Lopez-Rizal street in Mandaluyong. (I call them Tita because I am related to Tita Mameng by marriage. My brother, Antonio, is married to her youngest daughter, Cecile). They are direct descendants of Narcisa Rizal, said to be the favorite sister of the hero. I wanted to find out just what they knew about December 30, 1898. I was optimistic I could coax memories from the three women and find out what the day had been like to Rizal’s family.

History books present the death as if Rizal was alone on the day of his execution with no mention of his family or his paramour, Josephine Bracken. Did he die alone? Did they not care enough for him to be in Bagumbayan when he died? The stories they recall come from family lore passed down by elders, particularly their grand-mothers, sisters of Jose Rizal. The women said that if it seemed Rizal was alone on that day, there was a reason. He was alone because no relative, no matter how close to him was allowed to be present at the execution. This was specially cruel to the family that had been singled out to serve as a lesson to renegades. The sisters’ memories also differed. Tita Mameng’s story that a Rizal sister did attempt to hide behind the crowds was ruled out by Tita Siony who said "it could not have happened because of the order". The family was too terrified to defy authority.

I did get in an hour-long interview a vague notion of the terror which fell on the family on that day. No matter how much loved their brother was, they were taught the lesson not to defy authority. Rizal’s death was a personal loss – of someone familiar in their lives who would soon not be among them. In time both the fear and sorrow faded as they picked up their lives without their brother.

There was the interesting point made that a sister, Trinidad, who was headstrong and blunt may have been displeased with what Rizal’s politics brought on the family. To Tita Mameng, she thinks it was in Trinidad’s character to have done so. "But it was she who kept some of the personal belongings of her brother (including the famous bowler that crumbled in time) until she died obscurely in Tondo." Tita Mameng adds. Here was a family so cruelly treated but who remained affectionate until the end. It was not the politics of his death that concerned them. They would rather have had him renounce his politics and stayed alive.

But we are not family. Our concern is the effect of Rizal’s execution long after the event of December 30, 1898. There are no longer abusive friars or colonial authorities but the ideas of that time affected the way we view ourselves profoundly. It is my opinion that our efforts are misplaced if we focus on the abuses of the colonial period as narrated in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. These may well have been intolerable but it does not explain the more fundamental source of the abuses and why it had culminated in Rizal’s execution in Bagumbayan. This was neither merely a family affair nor a colonial tragedy but the result of the conflict between ideas with political implications. It swept Europe at the offing of modern times. The ideas were free inquiry which taught that man could find salvation through himself on one hand and the older tradition that salvation was not possible except through revealed word which implied the necessity of mediation between an unreachable God and humanity. That mediation in the Philippine context was through Spanish friars.

In Manuel Sarkisyanz’s Rizal and Republican Spain, the Iranian author writes he was executed because he favored free inquiry in his search for truth. He learned this in Spain from Miguel Morayta Sagrario who taught Filipinos the models of Spanish revolutionaries. "When I was in Madrid, the Republicans told me that freedoms are not begged for on one’s knees but conquered. These ideas deposited in my soul have brought about my life’s work." Rizal wrote. These very words would later be used against him in the trial as "inciting to revolution". Morayta, a Spanish university lecturer taught that man by nature is perfectible and progress was the utopia of yesterday being the truth of today." When the Spanish Republic failed in 1875 he was charged for having said in a lecture that "the fathers of the Church with much authority had maintained that the devil shall die in order to remedy the harm that liberty has caused to teaching. It was necessary to give peace to disturbed or restless minds, the revolutionary turmoil having led to error in the name of unlimited and absolute freedom." That was what killed Jose Rizal. And that is also what condemns Filipinos to backwardness.

Filipino history under colonial Spain which does not touch on this aspect is flawed. This approach may be crucial to understanding the Filipino mind. Rizal’s execution had a pivotal role in shaping the Filipino nation but it had less to do with Spanish abuses than it has with fear of authority. After Rizal, the Filipino remains cowed, unable to defend himself or to develop initiative or embark on bold enterprises. I am not talking of individual initiatives which can happen even in the most oppressed societies. But the Filipino desire for free inquiry cultivated in Spanish universities as the driving force of life was successfully halted that December 30.

Sarkinsyanz believes that if the Philippines was the first in Asia to challenge colonialism it was because she was under Spain when the debate on free enquiry and dogmatic tradition was raging. Rizal was inspired by Spain’s democratic aspirations of 1813-1898. If Spain had brought monastic power and repression, she also taught Filipinos to aspire for democracy and civil liberties.Indeed it was the only colonial empire in the 19th century which proclaimed its native subjects citizens with equal civic rights. Spain in 1820 was the center of democratic constitutionalist revolution.

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