Jose Rizal as Asian hero

A friend from schooldays asked me to comment on an article that appeared in the other newspaper recently: “If Rizal were alive, he’d visit his old Jesuit mentors here”. It was a categorical statement and did not reflect the controversy on his alleged retraction and how a former Jesuit teacher played an important part in persuading him to do so.

It is said that this former Jesuit teacher had come carrying a statue of the Sacred Heart that was supposedly carved by Jose Rizal while a student at the Ateneo. The Jesuit, at least through some stories tried to refresh his memories on his education at the Ateneo and why what he learned there should matter to him now that he was near death.

I wrote my friend he had asked the wrong person. Even if it were proven that he did retract, I would still be interested to know the intent of the Jesuits in trying to elicit a retraction.

I would have rephrased the title, in keeping with the controversy about the retraction, into a question: “If Rizal were alive today, would he have visited his old Jesuit mentors here?” It might be more polemical but it would bring out nuances that influenced the making of the Philippine nation. Since no such national debate took place, Filipinos were not able to benefit from the lessons they might have learned if it had taken place. For one, they would have confronted the role Jesuits played, for good or ill, in building up our nation.

Up to this day, the received wisdom is that he had retracted and the many objections to it have been forgotten through the years. Rizal’s alleged retraction became just another controversy and his heroism diminished under a cloud.

I believe that had there been no controversy about what Rizal did before his execution, Filipinos would have taken a different intellectual direction. The effect of the legacy of a hero defiant until death for what he believed in would have been electrifying. It would be clear in the minds of Filipinos then and Filipinos generations after, that Jose Rizal was faithful to his defense of his countrymen up to the last moments of his life. That symbol cannot be made up, much less killed and would have strengthened the Filipino resolve in other matters of principle.

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I mean no disrespect towards Rizal’s Jesuit teachers who undoubtedly gave him a good Christian education. Indeed it may have been the excellence of that education that pushed him to seek more than what an Ateneo school could offer.

He found that intellectual freedom in Europe where enlightenment and reformation (what we now refer as thinking out of the box) had taken hold of what was once a strictly Christian Europe. His attempt to question despotic religion, his pursuit of liberal ideas and defiance of the Spanish friar colonization imbued in him a reformist spirit that led to his execution. This intellectual search led him to study what the Philippines was about before the Spanish conquest. Where we just a people colonized without any culture and identity of our own?

The result of this search led him to the British Museum where he wrote annotations on Antonio de Morga’s “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas” published in 1609 to emphasize his country’s identity before the arrival of Christian Spanish colonizers.

But to go back to his execution and retraction controversy. If we were to follow the sequence of events on the day of execution on December 30, 1896, common sense would lead us to conclude he did not retract.

During the negotiations for his retraction, it was said that his Spanish jailers offered two concessions if he did. One, he would have a Catholic burial and second he would be allowed to marry Josephine Bracken in Catholic rites before his execution. In fact there is no evidence that both concessions were given which leads us to the conclusion that he did not retract. But if the defenders of retraction must insist then we can only conclude Spanish colonial perfidy: they offered conditions only to renege on their part of the bargain when it had been done.

After his execution in Bagumbayan, he was secretly buried in Paco Cemetery in Manila in an unmarked grave. It was his sister, Narcisa who had to search far and low to find where the body of her dear brother was buried. It was also to her that he entrusted the lamp that hid his Mi Ultimo Adios. She eventually found it with the help of informants who pointed to a plot with freshly turned earth in the cemetery that was under guard. The clues were enough to convince her to make a judgment that therein lay her brother. She paid a small sum to a caretaker to mark it “RPJ” his name in reverse. These events do not support that a bargain had been struck between our national hero and his jailers.

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Most of the articles in support of Jose Rizal’s retraction were written years after his execution and gives enough reason to suspect its motive.

I believe the purpose was to frighten Filipinos against fighting colonial authority. Rizal’s fate, regardless of whether he retracted or not, was made into an example of what awaits future reformists.

Therefore his greatest gift to this country was to resist this last minute attempt to degrade his heroism.

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Filipinos can revive that greatness. We might not have the GDP to rival the great countries of the region but we have the history comparable to any as far as dying for one’s country is concerned.

Indeed not enough is being said or written about the role of Rizal’s peaceful advocacy for institutional reforms in Asia. Other Asian countries recognize that role. It was Rizal who set the fashion as it were for peaceful resistance without precluding violence. That violence he said will come from the colonial authorities themselves if they refuse the pleas of a martyred people.

Jose Rizal is in the same league of Asia’s greats like Gandhi, Tagore and Sun Yat Sen, all of whom set the pattern of decolonization throughout the region. Together, in their separate countries, they championed freedom and democracy when the West came to conquer. We should teach our children that a Filipino has the distinction of being the first Asian hero.

Let us remember this when we commemorate, indeed celebrate Rizal’s execution in Bagumbayan now known as Rizal Park on Wednesday, December 30, 2009. Go there to remember what he died for. Go there and give the lie that it was the West who taught us about freedom and democratic government because we were too backward to understand.