An Honor to Play Rizal

A FEW WEEKS ago, I came to attend a meeting of representatives from various parts of the University of the Philippines system, upon an invitation from my friend, UP Manila Prof. Benjie Mangubat. I was asked to represent Kamalaysayan (Campaign Network for Sense of History) in providing some suggestions and views for their planned joint commemoration of the Jose Rizal martyrdom centennial. They were planning an artistic commemoration, a reenactment of the fateful December event in 1896, where Rizal was fetched from his cell in Fort Santiago in Intramuros and, with his hands tied at his back, was marched, with a procession of spectators, all the way to Bagumbayan (now Rizal Park) where he was publicly executed.

 Benjie’s script called for Rizal to recall important events in his life, and for those, students from various UP campuses were to present tableaus, combining drama, singing, dance and poetry reading. The Rizal character was to watch all these tableaus to unfold before his eyes. He was even supposed to see himself in those tableaus.

Nice plan, I said, adding specific comments here and there. However, the meeting sprung up a surprise on me.  Before it was over, I was cast in the role of the Rizal figure to witness all those tableaus and to be shot. I refused at first, saying I am not from the UP community, but they prevailed upon me to agree.

Costuming was a problem. I don’t wear a suit; I don’t have one. We had by then finished the taping of the episode on Rizal of the regular children-oriented historical TV show, titled Bayani, and I asked the ABS-CBN Foundation production people if I could borrow the costume used by actor Eric Quizon when he played Rizal. The costumes were all rented and had all been returned to their owners, except one piece – the round derby hat. I was glad to borrow that one, but I still needed a suit.

And so I asked around among friends who stand about the same height and with the same build as I and found no solution, except from Rod, a new friend, a doctor in our neighborhood who has been an ardent believer and preacher of Rizal’s teachings. He said his Kuya Anding Mira had many suits and would be glad to lend me one. 

After I had had my fitting for a pair of suit and vest, I was told that what I was wearing before the mirror had not been worn by anyone and would not be worn by anyone else after me. It was one of the sets of suit that their group was using on Rizal’s statue in the shrine at Fort Santiago in Intramuros.  Both Rizalistas later expressed surprise that the suit had fit me. My build, they said, was larger that the statue’s.  They added that it was not really that surprising that "Rizal allowed the suit to grow a little to fit (me)." Wow!

What was happening? I was being doubly honored. First, my UP friends chose me for the role of Rizal, and then, these Rizalistas, and according to them, even the hero himself, allowed me to use the suit they had been keeping in reserve for Rizal’s statue.  And my close friend Edessa Ramos of the National Centennial Commission volunteered to give me some pointers (the coaching was not related to the NCC job; it came from her background as an arnis player). She taught me how to "fall to death" safely after being "shot by the firing squad."   

Maybe, it did help that my hairdo and bigote made me somehow resemble this national hero. Or maybe they felt the degree of my veneration for both Rizal and Bonifacio, along with Jacinto and the others, as heroic founders of this nation.

The days rolled fast before and after it. The whole thing took four hours that sunny morning where I felt hot and thirsty and posture-weary with my hands tied behind my back. The following day, photos of the event, mostly colored, were frontpaged in quite a few large-circulation newspapers in Manila, Cebu and Baguio.   

I felt great and grateful. It really was an honor to play that role in commemorating the Rizal Martyrdom Centennial.

Our Own Trial of Rizal

JUSTICE DELAYED is justice denied, goes the dictum, but there is also such a thing as speedy injustice, one that is widely associated with military tribunals. Jose Rizal was not a victim of a footdragging judicial system. In fact he was charged, investigated, tried and executed in less than one month! In fact, what was passed off as his trial (the reading of prosecution and defense briefs sans any confrontation or examination of witnesses) and the promulgation of the guilty verdict by the panel of judges took less than a full working day!

These revelations come from Hon. Jose C. de la Rama, a retired Associate Justice of the Court of Appeals, who is now preparing to publish his extensive research on the details of Rizal’s trial in that cold December month exactly a century ago.

The Spanish authorities wanted Rizal dead and they wanted him dead immediately. It was a terror tactic designed to demoralize the Filipinos into abandoning the Revolution that bannered his teachings along with those of Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto. By that month, the Revolution that broke out in August and signalled the Birth of our Nation, had already spread as far as Cotabato and Sulu. That terror tactic failed miserably.

Justice De la Rama did a wonderful job of pointing out convincingly at the Rizal Martyrdom Centannial forum in Malolos, Bulacan recently, that it was a gross mistrial. Speaking at the same forum, I pointed out another trial of Rizal. This other trial of Rizal cannot be described as a speedy one.

In fact it is yet unfinished up to now, a full century after the first. Moreover, the ones sitting in judgement are not hanging judges out to eliminate a "dangerous man" but dozens of millions of confused Filipinos. Yes, even as almost all Filipinos honor Rizal for one reason and to one degree or another, we, as a nation, have not arrived at a unified verdict on him.

Speakers at that forum reflected to a certain extent the discrepancy of views. One was saying Rizal helped the Americans more than the Philippine cause (he later agreed to a response that Rizal was used by the Americans but he did not help the latter). Another speaker berated a journalist for coming out with information about Rizal’s weaknesses, including allegedly having gotten low grades in some subjects in school. Actually, the view of some Rizalista groups that Rizal was (or is) the "Filipino Christ" was not even expressed at all in that forum.

The trial continues while the 64 million members of the jury try to make up their minds. The verdict, as it shapes up, is not merely what we all say about the man. It’s more how we shape our lives in accordance with or in contrast to his teachings.

Why Compare Our Heroes?

AS A RESEARCHER on Andres Bonifacio, this writer is often confronted with statements or earnest questions that would compare Bonifacio to Jose Rizal, especially when it pertains to the matter of which of these two should be our national hero.

          The simplest available answer to this specific point is to inform the people, bringing up that in fact the Philippine state officially recognizes not one but two national heroes, covered by official proclamations.

          The one proclaiming Rizal as national hero was promulgated by Emilio Aguinaldo and later on supported vigorously by the American occupation force (ironically, the American people do not honor only a single national hero).   Bonifacio was proclaimed national hero by the Philippine Assembly in the late 1920s in a resolution that caused the building of Guillermo Tolentino’s Bonifacio Monument at Grace Park, Caloocan City.

          Moreover, only these two have national legal holidays to their own respective and respectable names: Rizal’s on December 30, marking his execution, and Bonifacio’s on November 30, marking his birthday.

          But such an answer begs the question or the intent of the question. Those who ask me really want to hear from me an echo of their own respective sentiments. The Rizalists want me to concede that Bonifacio was runner-up to Rizal; the Bonifacio fans want me to support their protest against the overprotection of Rizal as the national hero of the Philippines. (Come to think of it, who among our students, nay teachers, know that officially we have not one but two?)

          Which brings me to my main point in this column item. I would rather not compare heroes at all. (Neither would I want to compare a hero and a usurper, but that’s another story.)

          Rizal and Bonifacio shone and led in different periods of our history. Each one of them responded to a specific set of socio-political circumstances that differed from that addressed by the other. And the response of one in his own time and circumstance cannot be fairly compared to the response of the other to the latter’s own challenging circumstance.

          Rizal took on from the period of Gom-Bur-Za when there was nascent collective consciousness of our distinction from and basic equality to the colonizers. There was need to amplify this further, and this could best be projected in political debate and other forms of competition with the colonizers in their own games and in their own country. Rizal led in this Propaganda Movement along with Marcelo H. del Pilar and Graciano Lopez Jaena, and, in their own distinct way, Juan Luna and Felix Hidalgo.

          They were also able to learn and show from their own experience the futility of any further expatriate struggle for reform. Rizal persisted in the struggle for reform, but brought it home. He founded the La Liga Filipina, and his experience of being arrested and exiled to Dapitan showed that even this was no longer workable. (Rizal came out with a statement in December 1896 condemning the Revolution, but I understand it to have been made under duress — he was a prisoner in anticipation an execution, and, contrary to popular belief, he was not perfect.)

          Bonifacio learned a lot from the writings of Rizal and Plaridel, but integrated them appropriately and creatively with his own studies of indigenous pre-Spanish philosophies and of the beliefs of protonationalist protest Christianity in the great tradition of Herman Pule’s Confradia. Contrary to popular belief that he was semi- illiterate, Bonifacio was a philosopher and a brilliant literary writer whose statesmanship was superior to most others.

          He was in a good position to lead in the birthing of this nation and he did not balk at this time. He formed the Katipunan, led it in a moral and ethical education campaign and organizing work for four long years, before finally presiding over a state assembly in Pasig that decided to start the Revolution. He led in planning and undertaking the brilliant military scheme for a Katipunan victory in August 29-30, 1896, which could have succeeded if only the Katipunan contingents from Cavite had shown up to perform their assigned role of capturing Intramuros.

          Bonifacio was responding well to challenges that had to be faced at his time in our history, quite different from the challenges that had to be faced by Rizal. So why compare them?

          I have also been confronted with statement and questions that would make me compare Bonifacio to Aguinaldo.  As I said earlier, I would not allow myself to make that kind of comparison, earlier.  I can explain why, but that would be another story.

(Kamalaysayan Media Service)

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