Point Blank
The fossilization of our national hero in ubiquitous one-peso coins has led most Filipinos to an exceedingly dull acquaintance with Dr. Jose Rizal. Even so, the people he died for continue to find so many different occasions where they can brandish his name in memoriam. In fact, his name and picture have ended up in the most mundane of things: from sari-sari store signboards to faux hipster clothing, from the packaging of a brand of matches to the corporate name of a local banking heavyweight.
It seems that partaking in some sort of national commemoration of Rizal has never lost its vogue since that fateful night of December 30, 1896, and it’s been a good century or so of commemoration. We have the annual holiday, the occasional staging of his novels as plays or operas, and we even have the required Rizal course in college. In some instances, however, our commemoration of Rizal has begun to feel like a monotonous chore, a boring ritual.
That’s why I was surprised (and delighted) with the culminating cultural gala of the Ateneo’s months-long celebration of Rizal’s 150th birth anniversary. Held at the Henry Lee Irwin Theater last December 2, Brindis, as the event was called, did not feature the usual, dull and sanitized fodder on Rizal. The presentations did not just focus on the usual narrative of Rizal as the martyred writer, but also on Rizal as the globetrotter, Rizal as the polymath, Rizal as the fictionist who did not shy away from experimentation, Rizal as the litterateur-slash-fencer-slash-many-other-things, and—yes—Rizal as the original crush ang bayan. It was like taking Ambeth Ocampo all over again.
Indeed, the random Rizaliana interweaved into the daily grind of Filipino life robs the national memory of its otherwise strong feelings of goodwill and awe towards the national hero. Instead of serving as a constant inspiration, Rizal sometimes ends up becoming a lingering presence from the past—the reason of his continued persistence as a memory having no meaning for the present. But that’s only true so far as we don’t look at the Rizalista kitsch all around us as invitations to discover the Rizal still foreign to most of us.
“I have employed the energies of my youth serving my country, though my compatriots do not want to acknowledge it… If you come [here to Dapitan] and they grant me freedom to establish myself, we are going to revive our old town, without friars or civil guards, without bandits… If you want to come here, I will build a house where we can all live together until we die,” Rizal once wrote to his mother from exile. These are just a few lines from Rizal’s other writings that most of us are all too happy to ignore, but they show us that Rizal’s struggles—and even his political project—were all just as rooted in the same love for family that animates so many of us into inspired action. Rizal was only human—and so were his aspirations, his dreams, and his hopes for the country.
It’s inspiring to see this side of Rizal. We tend to think that by exalting Rizal as an unreachable, larger-than-life character, we do him great honor. We forget that it is in his very humanity that his heroism took root.
