Understanding Rizal without
Veneration:
Quarantined Prophet and
Carnival Impresario
Rizal failed to draw the necessary lessons from his travels
in the
By
Bulatlat
“…but I rejoice more when I contemplate humanity in its immortal march,
always progressing in spite of its declines and falls, in spie
off its aberrations, because that demonstrates to me its glorious end and tells
me that it has been created for a better purpose than to be consumed by flames;
it fills me with trust in God, who will not let His work be ruined, in spite of
the devil and of all our follies.” Jose Rizal,
letter to Fr. Pablo Pastells,
|
“Ang sagot sa dahas ay dahas, kapag bingi sa
katuwiran.” Jose Rizal,
“Cuento Tendencioso” It seems fortuitous that Rizal’s birthday anniversary would fall just six days
after the celebration of Philippine Independence Day - the proclamation of
independence from Spanish rule by General Emilio Aguinaldo
in Kawit, Either ironical or
prescient, Aguinaldo’s proclamation contains the
kernel of the contradictions that have plagued the ruling elite’s claim to
political legitimacy: Aguinaldo unwittingly mortgaged
his leadership to the “protection of the Mighty and Humane North American
Nation.” Mighty, yes, but “humane”?
The And so, sotto voce: Long
live Filipino Independence Day! Let us not forget the
specific milieu we are inhabiting today: a barbaric
war waged by the |
Memorial to Dr. Jose Rizal in Photo from
myhistorylink.org |
This seems a banal truism. We
remain a neocolonial dependency of the
I.
It is not certain whether Rizal knew or met Aguinaldo - we
have no desire to implicate Rizal (as has been done
by those sectarians who blindly follow Renato Constantino - see my Rizal For Our Time, 1997) with those who betrayed Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, and others. After the polyphonic
novels toying with plural alternatives, Rizal decided
on one parth: the Liga
Filipina. Rizal of course met or was acquainted with Bonifacio and others in the Katipunan
who were involved earlier in the Liga. Despite his
exile to Dapitan, he was still playing with utopian
projects in British Borneo. Historians from Austin Craig to Rafael Palma,
Gregorio Zaide, Carlos Quirino,
and Austin Coates have already demonstrated that despite Rizal’s
reservations about the Katipunan uprising, his ideas
and example (all susceptible to a radical rearticulation)
had already won him moral and intellectual ascendancy - what Gramsci would call “hegemony”-- whatever differences in
political tactics might exist among partisans in the united front.
Pace Constantino,
we need understanding before we can have genuine if fallible appreciation. The mythification of Rizal in the
popular imagination, as discussed by Reynaldo Ileto
in his “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine
History,” need not contradict or lessen the secular, libertarian impact of Rizal’s writing and deeds on several generations of organic
intellectuals such as Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini, Isabelo de los Reyes, up to the
seditious playwrights in the vernaculars, the writer/activists such as Lope K.
Santos, Amado V. Hernandez, Salvador P. Lopez, and
nationalist intellectuals such as Ricardo Pascual, Claro Recto, Baking, Constantino,
and others. What is needed, above all, is a dialectical grasp of the complex
relations between the heterogeneous social classes and their varying political
consciousness—peasantry, workers, petty-bourgeois ilustrado,
artisans, etc.—and the struggle for an intelligent, popular leadership of a
truly anti-colonial, democratic, mass revolution.
A one-sided
focus on Rizal as a sublimation of Christ or Bernardo
Carpio, or Rizal as “the
First Filipino” (Leon Ma.
Guerrero, Nick Joaquin), fails to grasp the “unity of opposites” that
conceptually subtends the dynamic process of decolonization and class
emancipation traversing different modes of production in a sequence of diverse
social formation. We need a historical materialist method to grasp the concrete
totality in which the individual finds her/his effective place. After all, it
is not individuals or great heroes that shape history, but masses, social classes
and groups in conflict, that release the potential of humanity’s species-being
from myths, reified notions, and self-serving fantasies partly ascribable to
natural necessity and chiefly to history.
Can this explain the
limitations of Rizal’s thinking at various
conjunctures of his life? Numerous biographies of Rizal
and countless scholarly treatises on his thought have been written to clarify
or explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions of his ideas, attitudes,
and choices. The Yugoslavian Ante Radaic is famous
for a simplistic Adlerian diagnosis of Rizal based on his physical attributes. This at least is a
new angle, a relief from the exhibitionist posturing of Guerrero and the Creolist obsessions of Nick Joaquin. Radaic,
however, failed to honor somehow Rizal’s own
psychoanalytic foray into the phenomena of the manggagaway, aswang, and kulam, and other subterranean forms of
resistance. How can a person be afflicted with an inferiority complex when he
can write (to Blumentritt) a few hours before his
death: “When you have received his letter, I am already dead”?
The Spanish philosopher
Miguel de Unamuno and the American realist William
Dean Howells have recognized Rizal’s subtle analysis
of human character and totalizing social critique. For his part, Jose Baron Fernandez’s Jose Rizal: Filipino Doctor and Patriot provides us
an updated scenario of late nineteenth-century
Rizal was a product of his place and time, as everyone will
concur. But due to desperate conditions,
others credit Rizal with superfluous charismatic
powers that he himself will be the first to disavow. We do not need the pasyon or folk
religion to illuminate this mixed feudal-bourgeois habitus
(to borrow Bourdieu’s term). We are predisposed by social habit to focus
on the role of the individual and individual psychology so as to assign moral
blame or praise. This is the self-privileging ideology of entrepreneurial neoliberalism. But there is an alternative few have
entertained.
As I have tried to argue in
previous essays, Rizal displayed an astute
dialectical materialist sensibility. One revealing example of concrete
geopolitical analysis is the short piece on
“It is very possible that there are causes
better than those I have embraced, but my cause is good and that is enough for
me. Other causes will undoubtedly bring more profit, more renown, more honors,
more glories, but the bamboo, in growing on this soil, comes to sustain nipa huts and not the heavy weights of European edifices….
“As to honor, fame, or profit
that I might have reaped, I agree that all of this is tempting, especially to a
young man of flesh and bone like myself, with so many weaknesses like anybody
else. But, as nobody chooses the nationality nor the race to which he is born,
and as at birth the privileges or the disadvantages inherent in both are found
already created, I accept the cause of my country in the confidence that He who
has made me a Filipino will forgive the mistakes I may commit in view of our
difficult situation and the defective education that we receive from the time
we are born. Besides, I do not aspire to
eternal fame or renown; I do not aspire to equal others whose conditions,
faculties, and circumstances may be and are in reality different from mine; my
only desire is to do what is possible, what is within my power, what is most
necessary. I have glimpsed a little light, and I believe I ought to show it to
my countrymen.
“…. Without liberty, an idea
that is somewhat independent might be provocative and another that is
affectionate might be considered as baseness or flattery, and I can neither be
provocative, nor base, nor a flatterer.
In order to speak luminously of politics and produce results, it is
necessary in my opinion to have ample liberty.”
A dialectical process
underlies the link between subjective desire and objective
necessity/possibility traced in this revealing passage. Its working can be
discerned in most of Rizal’s historical and political
discourses. They are all discourses on the permanent crisis in the condition of
the colonial subject, a crisis articulating danger with opportunity. The virtue
of Rizal’s consciousness of his limitations inheres
in its efficacy of opening up the horizon of opportunities—what he calls
“liberty”-- contingent on the grasp and exploitation of those same limits of
his class/national position in society and history. In short, the value and
function of human agency can only be calculated within the concrete limits of a
determinate, specific social location in history, within the totality of social
relations in history.
II.
Granted Rizal’s
strategic wisdom, how can we explain Rizal’s failure
to predict the role of the
“If the
There is a curious breakdown
of dialectics, if not knowledge of history, here. How could Rizal
be so blind? Maybe blindness is a function of insight, as American
deconstructionists conjecture. It may be that Rizal
had been reading too many eulogistic accounts of the United States circulated
in Britain, France, Germany—too much de Tocqueville, perhaps? Rizal’s prophetic stance allows him to moralize on the
“strongest vices” of “covetousness and ambition,” but somehow his vision can
not permit the “traditions” of the “
What happened to this universalist historian and
globalizing polymath? Was Rizal a victim of temporary
amnesia in discounting his memorable passage through the
It is indeed difficult to
understand how Rizal failed to draw the necessary
lessons from his travels in the
“I visited the largest cities of
“They placed us under
quarantine, in spite of the clearance given by the American Consul, of not having had a
single case of illness aboard, and of the telegram of the governor of
“We were quarantined because
there were on board 800 Chinese and, as elections were being held in
“Thus we were quarantined for
about thirteen days. Afterwards,
passengers of the first class were allowed to land; the Japanese and Chinese in
the 2nd and 3rd classes remained in quarantine for an indefinite period. It is
thus in that way, they got rid of about Chinese, letting them gradually off
board.”
Evidence by this and other
works, Rizal definitely understood racism in theory
and practice. But it is not clear to what extent he recognized how the absence
of “real civil liberty” extends beyond the everyday life of African Americans,
beyond the Asians—it is not even clear whether he considered himself Asian,
though in his reflections on how Europeans treated him, he referred to himself
as “dark skinned,” a person of color, especially in relation to European women.
Rizal never forgot that in spite of being a
relatively privileged Chinese mestizo, the Spaniards
uniformly considered him an “
Was Rizal
so magnanimous or charitable that he expunged the ordeal of being quarantined
soon after? Not at
all. In his travel diary concerning a train ride from
“I was beginning to be
annoyed by the fury of the traveler and I was going to join the conversation to
tell him what I have seen and endured in America, in New York itself [Rizal doesn’t disclose what he “endured” in New York], how
many troubles and what torture the customs [and immigration] in the United
States made us suffer, the demands of drivers, barbers, etc., people who, as in
many other places, lived on travelers….I was tempted to believe that my man’s
verbosity, being a good Yankee, came from the steam of a boiler inside his
body, and I even imagined seeing in him a robot created and hurled to the world
by the Americans, a robot with a perfect engine inside to discredit Europe….” (Quoted in Ambeth Ocampo,
Rizal Without the Overcoat, 1990; see also
Gregorio Zaide and Sonia Zaide,
Jose Rizal,
1984).
What can we infer from this
hiatus between Rizal’s anger in being quarantined and
his belief that the “great
What is the historic context
surrounding Rizal’s tour of the
Rizal seemed not to have followed
III.
We can understand this
omission of the
Based on an inspection of Rizal’s library in Calamba and
citations in the Epistolario, Benedict Anderson
concludes that Rizal had no interest, or awareness,
of socialist currents except those filtered through Joris
Karl Huysmans. Rizal’s
singular modernity, in my view, cannot be so easily Orientalized
by U.S. experts like Anderson, Karnow, Glenn May, and
their ilk. On the other hand, Anderson’s presumptuous reference to the “narrow nativism” and “narrow obsession with America” of Filipino
intellectuals will surely delight the Westernized Makati
enclave and his acolytes in Diliman and Loyola
Heights. Or even those speculating on Rizal’s
homosexual tendencies despite his insouciant flirtations with las palomas de baja vuela (as attested to by
close companions Valentin Ventura and Maximo Viola).
In his Solidaridad
period, Rizal was just beginning to learn the
fundamentals of geopolitics. The United States was out of the picture. It is
foolish to expect Rizal and his compatriots to know
more than what their circumstances and class orientation allowed. Scarcely
would Rizal have a clue then that the U.S. control of
Filipino sovereignty would continue through the IMF/WB stranglehold of the
Philippine economy for over 40 years after nominal independence in 1946, an
unprecedented case—the only country so administered for the longest period in
history! This can throw some light on the country’s chronic poverty,
technological backwardness, clientelist slavishness
to Washington, witnessed of late by the export of over 9 million contract
workers as “servants of globalization” and the dependence on the 8.5 billion
dollars worth of overseas annual remittances to service the humongous foreign
debt and the extravagant “indolence” of the few rich families and their politician
flunkeys. Rizal’s memory of his ordeal in San
Francisco, had he lived longer, might have resonated beyond his detention in
the prison-fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona (where Isabelo de los Reyes was also
confined) and influenced the ilustrado circle of
Trinidad Pardo de Tavera
and other supporters of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the early decades of the
last century.
Finally, we return to
confront once again Rizal’s “Manifesto” of 1896
written in his prison cell in
IV.
In the long run, the
criterion of solidarity with the masses imposes its critical verdict without
reprieve. Rizal struggled all his life against the
tendency toward individualism. He confided to Del Pilar:
“What I desire is that others appear…” To Padre Vicente Garcia: “A man in the
Would Rizal’s
stature be altered if he had completed this novel? Since this is not the
occasion to elaborate on the insurrectionary imagination of Rizal,
I can only highlight two aspects in Makamisa. First, the boisterous entrance
of the subaltern masses into historical time and space. In the two
novels, Elias, Sisa, Cabesang
Tales, and others interrupted the plot of individual disillusionment, but never
moved to the foreground of the stage. This new mise
en scene is rendered here by the demystification of religious ritual via the
physical/sensory motion of crowds, rumor, money talk, animal behavior, Anday’s seduction, and so on, escaping from the symbolic
Order (sacred space) represented by the Church, as dramatized in the multiaccentual speculations on why Padre Agaton disrupted his public performance. The play of heteroglossia, the intertextuality
of idioms (indices of social class and collective ethos), and the stress on the
heterogeneous texture of events, all point to the mocking subversive tradition
of the carnivalesque culture and Menippean
satire that Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his works on
Rabelais, Menippean satire, and Dostoevsky (see The
Dialogic Imagination). This is the root of the polyphonic modernist novel
constituted by distances, relationships, analogies, non-exclusive oppositions,
fantasies that challenge the status quo. Rizal could
have inaugurated the tradition of an antiheroic postmodernist vernacular
centered on the antagonism of ideological worlds.
Second, the tuktukan game
accompanying the Palm Sunday procession is Rizal’s
proof that folk/indigenous culture, a spectacle staged at the site of the monological discourse of the Church, transgresses
prohibitions and allows the body of the earth, its sensory process and
affective becoming, to manifest itself. We confront the unconscious of the
colonial structure in the essential motifs of carnivalesque
ribaldry and topsy-turvy outlawry: “the high and low, birth and agony, food and
excrement, praise and curses, laugher and tears “(in Julia Kristeva’s
gloss). Paradoxes, ambivalences,
Dionysian fantasies, odd mixtures of styles that violate orthodox decorums, and diverse expressions of ideological themes and
chronotopes - all these characterize the Menippean satirical discourse exemplified here as well as
in Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, De Sade, Lautreamont, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Joyce. (One wonders if Rizal read Dostoevsky or Gogol’s
Dead Souls?) According to Bakhtin,
we find in Rabelais’ work the dramatic conflict between the popular/plebeian
culture of the masses and the official medieval theology of hegemonic
Christianity.
Variants may be found in
postmodernist works of magical realism (Garcia Marquez, Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie). In brief, Makamisa
is the moment of Rabelaisian satire and carnival feast in Rizal’s
archive. It may be read as Rizal’s attempt to go
beyond the polyphonic relativizing of colonial
authority and Christian logic in the Noli and Fili toward a return to the body of the people, not just
folkways and customs but the praxis of physical labor, the material/social
processes of eating and excretion, sexual production and reproduction,
collective dreams and the political unconscious. It is the moment of unfinalizable becoming, the moment of the Katipunan revolution.
Once more, we encounter the spectre of Rizal at the
barricades, arming the spirit for storming the entrenched fortifications of
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