Define what is meant by the word "Radical"

Do you think Jose Rizal was radical? In what ways did he become radical?
Better yet, cite several factors that made him as such.

Introduction to Rizal: Toward

a Re-Interpretation
By E. San Juan, Jr.
This is the introduction to the book: RIZAL IN OUR
TIME, published 1997 by Anvil Publishing Inc.,
Pasig, Rizal, Philippines.

Rizal is the great "enigma," so goes the

official doxa and conventional wisdom.
Because of this indeterminacy, the ruling
elite and its state agencies are utilizing
everything in their power to make Rizal, his
life and writings, help to resolve its
legitimacy crisis. For the centennial of his
death in 1998, Rizal will again be invoked as
the one of the doctrinal foundations of the
neocolonial state, his teachings on the
importance of civic virtue and spiritual
reform rehashed while his critique of
injustice and inequality is kept safely in the
margins. To echo "the first Filipino," you get
the Rizal you deserve.

There have been many proponents and

advocates of the enigma syndrome since
Rizal's canonization by the U.S. colonial
administration. The most internationally
renowned is Miguel de Unamuno, the fierce
thinker of Spanish existentialism (in the
opinion of Julian Marias), who recorded his
reaction to Wenceslao Retana's Vida y
Escritos del Dr. Rizal. Unamuno agreed with
Retana's view of Rizal as the "Oriental Don
Quixote," basically a romantic personality;
but for Unamuno, Rizal was only a hero of
thought, in substance a Hamlet, "a fearless
dreamer," irresolute and weak for action and
for life. This malaise infects the Noli Me

Tangere. Unamuno delivers his judgment

(1968, 8-9):

Because Rizal himself is the spirit of

contradiction, a soul that dreads the
revolution, although deep within himself he
consummately desires it: he is a man who at
the same time both trusts and distrusts his
own countrymen and racial brothers; who
believes them to be the most capable and yet
the least capable - the most capable when he
looks at himself as one of their blood; the
most incapable when he looks at others.
Rizal is a man who constantly pivots
between fear and hope, between faith and
despair. All these contradictions are merged
together in that love, his dreamlike and
poetic love for his adored country, the
beloved region of the sun, pearl of the
Orient, his lost Eden.

In his prologue to a 1908 edition of El

Filibusterismo, Retana seems to reaffirm his
interpretation of Rizal as the Tagalog
Quixote, though now made more
multidimensional with the addition of
influences like Nietzsche, Leopardi, and
Alexander Herzon, the instigator of Russian
nihilism. This is suggestive; in general,
however, Retana's patronizing tone and his
anatomical determinism (influenced by the
notorious Cesar Lombroso) can only be
pathetic and risible from our vantage point.

Other commentators have pursued

Unamuno's line of typologizing. Nick
Joaquin, the vindicator of the populist wing
of the ilustrado tradition, presents his own
version of Rizal as the "anti-hero" by
marshalling and replaying the ideas of Ante
Radaic and Leon Maria Guerrero. Radaic's
psychoanalytic diagnosis of Rizal as a victim
of an inferiority complex, if taken as the
decisive key to his life, strikes many as
mechanical and even trivializing if not a

symptom of Radaic's own obsessions:

"Because of an excess of spirit, Rizal saw his
body as inadequate, and this, in turn,
influenced his complex psychological
structure." For Guerrero (1963), the causal
sequence has to do with the social and
economic context: Rizal's schizophrenic
temperament derives from his petty
bourgeois class background, even though
Rizal is credited with inventing the idea of a
Filipino nation. For Guerrero, Rizal's
development as a middle-class intellectual
explains "the puzzling absence of any real
social consciousness in [his] apostolate so
many years after Marx's Manifesto or, for
that matter, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum."

All these speculations on Rizal's

ambivalence culminate in the classic speech
of Claro Recto on "Rizal the Realist and
Bonifacio the Idealist" (reprinted in Rizal:
Contrary Essays, edited by Dolores Feria and
Petronilo Daroy). The speech was given at
the time when Recto, the most trenchant
critic of U.S. neocolonial intervention in the
Philippines, was beleaguered by the antiCommunism of the Magsaysay/Garcia
Establishment openly supported by the
United States Embassy and CIA operatives.
Recto's thesis that Rizal was revolutionary in
his poetry and rationalizations "but in the
face of reality, based on truth, he was the
inverse" and "realism won...when the
moment arrived for a final decision" was
plausible, given the evidence he adduced.
Bonifacio, meanwhile, proved to be a realist
in spite of his idealism, but Recto did not
really cite any substantial body of facts or
testimonies to this effect. The bulk of Recto's
rendering of "parallel lives" centered on
Rizal's ambiguities and paradoxes, the
dialogical method of his rhetoric and
thinking in his novels. Obviously Recto was
setting up a model of antithetical world
views or epistemes neither of which can be
distilled in complex personalities like Rizal

or Bonifacio. Whatever the merits of Recto's

analysis, I would like to record here how I
personally was present at that historic
occasion at the D & E Restaurant in Quezon
City when Recto delivered the speech in
1957, the spark that kindled the nationalist
"prairie fire" and "long march" of the sixties
climaxing in the First Quarter Storm of 1970.

It is easy to reduce any person's life to

certain character traits or recurrent habits and
customary practices, following the orthodox
ideological reflex of focusing on the
psychology of individuals to explain
complex events in which s/he participates.
This may have some pedagogical value, but
it is entirely misleading, of course, since
individuality can only be understood within
the milieu of the totality of social relations at
any given time and place. What is crucial is
the complex interaction of multiple forces of
which the individual (who becomes
historically significant only when s/he
represents a collective or group or sector) is
only one element. Manifold structures and a
nexus of factors overdetermine every other
element in any concrete situation. Provided
we take into account the entire trajectory of
Rizal's life, the preponderant influence of
certain events (like the 1872 Cavite Mutiny
and the execution of Burgos, Gomez and
Zamora, the Dominican order's harassment
and eviction of Rizal's family and others in
Calamba in 1887, 1889, 1891, and so on) and
figures in his life, it is a useful shorthand
device to concentrate on certain tropes and
themes in Rizal's writings to highlight
hitherto neglected aspects, especially those
regarded as subversive, oppositional, and
revolutionary, that have been obscured or
downplayed to promote the interests and
reproduction of the status quo. This is the
primary intent of the essays in this volume. I
assume that most readers would consult the
most available biographical works to provide
the historical and social contexts of Rizal's

writings: for example, Rafael Palma's The

Pride of the Malay Race, Austin Coates'
Rizal, Leon Maria Guerrero's The First
Filipino, and others.

Writing in Harper's Monthly Magazine of

April 1901, the distinguished American
realist writer William Dean Howells praised
Rizal's Noli for its artistry and its "sense of
unimpeachable veracity." Although he was
active in the Anti-Imperialist Movement at
that time (Mark Twain and Williams James
were two of the most articulate members),
Howells was not fully cognizant of the
atrocities being committed by his
countrymen in the suppression of the
Philippine Republic led by Emilio
Aguinaldo. Howell's editorial remark
betokens his generous spirit (1979, 27-28):
"The many different types and characters are
rendered with unerring delicacy and
distinctness and the effect of all those strange
conditions is given so fully by the spare
means that while you read you are yourself
one of them, and feel their hopeless wieght
and immeasurable pathos, with something of
the sad patience which pervades all.... Even
in the extreme of apparent caricature you feel
the self-control of the artistic spirit which
will not wreak itself either in tears or
laughter" (for a perceptive commentary on
the dialogic techniques of Rizal's novels, see
Matibag 1995). The last sentence reminds us
of Rizal's well-known "Laughter and Tears,"
a masterpiece of ironic satire in which one
can apprehend dissonant and rebellious notes
amid the burlesque and scandalizing
mimicry:

It was a world which granted privileges to

some and imposed prohibitions on others
without regard to one's merit or to one's
capacity.... Endowed with strength and eager
to learn, one had to drag oneself in a narrow
prison cell when one could see an open field,

a vast horizon in the distance; when one

hears from above the flapping of wings;
when one could feel the beatings of a heart;
and when one believed oneself entitled to
enjoy the beauty of a dream (1979: 32).

In March 1887, Rizal (1979, 142)

commented on the Noli (which to Retana
combined the wit of Voltaire and the
carnivalesque daring of Rabelais): "Where I
have found virtue, I said so emphatically in
order to render homage to it; and if I have
not wept in speaking of our misfortunes, I
have laughed at them for no one would like
to weep with me at the misfortunes of our
country and to laugh is always good in order
to hide one's sorrow." Rizal writes in his
"dedication" of the Noli: "I shall lift a corner
of the veil which shrouds the disease,
sacrificing to the truth everything, even selflove...." He wrote to Father Federico Faura:
"I want to awaken my countrymen from their
profound lethargy, and one who wishes to do
that does not use soft and gentle sounds, but
detonations, blows, etc." Given the
repressive climate of the colony, Rizal's
disingenousness can be considered a product
of his strategic genius at dissembling,
simulating, awakening, unveiling and
unmasking (both Noli and Fili were designed
to expose the "cancer" of the body politic on
the steps of the temple so that a cure may be
offered). Rizal, indeed, was speaking truth to
power.

In our "postcolonial" and postmodern

e phenomenon of hybridity, syncretism, marginalization of

ople of color- the entire range of Orientalisms and perverse
erial/colonial domination so acutely examined by Edward
mmi, Paulo Freire, and others. Rizal's case falls into this
en (to recall Gramsci's famous observation) the old order is
yet fully emerged from the bloody womb, and all kinds of
er the aborted revolution of 1848 and the still undreamed-of
Marx mused in 1856: "In our days, everything seems
om this perspective, we can appreciate how Rizal's ordeal

els) condenses all the symptoms of anxiety, uncertainties,

d by all, subalterns and masters alike, generated by the
mstances of colonial society (see San Juan 1984).

Rizal's Memorias, an experiment in selfdetachment and performative risk-taking,

epitomizes the bewildering, even chaotic,
transitional stage found in all "third world"
peripheral or dependent formations. One can
discern the affliction of melancholia and the
arduous labor of mourning that shaped
Rizal's sensibility:

Whenever I thought that I must now leave

that peaceful retreat in which the eyes of my
intelligence had been opened to a degree,
and my heart had begun to learn nobler
feelings, I fell into a profound
despondency.... I had a cruel foreboding
which unfortunately came true.... I was
depressed, indifferent, brooding.... Tears
paid in token of farewell to the times gone
by, to a contentment that would not return, to
a tranquillity of spirit that was slipping out of
my grasp, leaving me bereft....

I formed the design of keeping silent and,

until seeing greater proofs of sympathy
between us [Rizal is referring to Segunda
Katigbak who "bewitched" him at a certain
point in his student life), neither subjecting
myself to her yoke nor declaring myself to
her....I felt anguish and inquietude
conforming with love, if not with jealousy,
perhaps because I saw that I was separating
from her, perhaps because a million
obstacles would rise between us, so that my
nascent love was increasing and seemed to
be gaining vigor in the struggle.... But in the
critical moments of my life always I have
acted against my disposition, obedient to
different purposes and to ponderous doubts. I
spurred my horse and took another road
without having chosen it, exclaiming: This is

ended thus (quoted in Guerrero 1963, 43).

The last statement encapsulates Rizal's

singular predilection for overcoming crisis:
an inclination to sacrifice, to deny the
seduction of what is forbidden (perhaps the
preOedipal mother), to seize the time for
pleasure, for the good death - as he wrote to
Mariano Ponce in 1890: "One only dies
once, and if one does not die well, a good
opportunity is lost and will not present itself
again."

There are many revealing episodes in Rizal's

adventure toward "martyrdom," an ending he
anticipated many times (see in particular the
two letters he left with his family in Hong
Kong dated June 20, 1892), but none more
intriguing and heuristic than his exile in
Dapitan. A short digression on this before I
conclude.

When Rizal was banished to Dapitan for

alleged filibusterismo in 1892, he seemed to
sense that it was an interlude or moment of
calm before the final storm. He assured his
family that "wherever I might go I should
always be in the hands of God who holds in
them the destinies of men." Despite this
resigned deistic attitude, Rizal was not to be
deterred: he applied himself to diverse tasks
and preoccupations, engaging in horticulture,
eye surgery, collecting butterflies and other
specimens, teaching, civic construction - his
signal achievement was the waterworks of
Dapitan, a community project of distributing
water to the town. It was a testimony to his
collectivist orientation, his scientific
creativity, his will to change and improve
things for a more just and humane order - an
authentic revolutionary stance. Rizal also
maintained a voluminous correspondence
with friends in Manila and in Europe. Amid
various scholarly pursuits, he was also
occupied in composing a massive dictionary

of all the languages and dialects of the

Philippines together with their equivalents in
Spanish, English, French, and German.
While the Spanish authorities were lenient
and tolerant, Rizal had no utopian illusions.
He confessed in a letter to a friend: "To live
is to be among men, and to be among men is
to struggle...It is a struggle with them but
also with one's self, with their passions, but
also with one's own, with errors and
anxieties." His versatile preoccupations and
worldly concerns awed everyone, but they
seemed to hide the more turbulent and
agonizing drama within.

The anguish of exile was modulated by the

presence of Josephine Bracken, an Irish
Catholic from Hong Kong, whom Rizal later
married a few hours before he was executed.
(Isabel Taylor Escoda [1996] has tried to
document what happened to her later on; she
died a pauper's death in Hong Kong and her
body was interred by the city's Sanitary
Department in an unknown grave.) Despite
such a distraction - he apparently did not lose
his mind over her, as he did with Segunda
Katigbak, Rizal could not "deny that his
being transported to an alien place" was
demoralizing. Terrified by the "uncertainty
of the future," he seized the opportunity to
volunteer his medical skills to the Spanish
military then engaged in suppressing the
revolution in Cuba. Amplifying distance and
strangeness, he could resign himself to the
demands of duty, the necessity of accepting
destiny in order "to make progress through
suffering." A certain amount of fatalism, plus
the compulsive sense of vocation or fetish of
duty, coalesced to shape the peculiar ethos of
this Filipino exile at the time of
revolutionary ferment.

Contrast this with the exile of another

austere and disciplined freedom-fighter of
the time, Apolinario Mabini. Mabini chose

exile to Guam instead of swearing allegiance

to the sovereign power of the enemy, the
United States, who wreaked havoc on the
country and killed a million Filipinos. The
"sublime paralytic" conceived the
deportation as a crucible of his
insurrectionary determination. His
intransigence became proverbial even after
he returned and made a sort of peace with the
conquerors. So far nobody has researched
what he did during those two years of exile.
One can only surmise that his shrewd and
proud spirit endured the time of banishment
because he was busy forging the "conscience
of his race" - his memoirs on the Philippine
Revolution. He employed his cunning, his
intelligence, his power of remembering to
bridge the distance between that godforsaken
island and the homeland he never abandoned
because, as in the labor of mourning, it was
introjected and preserved as an object of
adoration. One suspects that something like
this happened to Rizal except that for him,
the family and loyal friends constituted the
ground of hope for ultimate redemption.

Exile could not destroy Rizal's trust in the

emancipatory potential of the multitude. In
the "Letter to the Young Women of
Malolos," among others, he affirmed his
rationalist belief in the inalienability of
rights: "God gave each individual reason and
a will of his or her own to distinguish the just
from the unjust; all were born without
shackles and free, and nobody has a right to
subjugate the will and spirit of another."
Natural right is coextensive with each
individual's power. In this he approximated
Spinoza's radical view, elaborated in the
Treatise on Politics, that human rights cannot
be alienated by a social contract, or by the
system of representation in any society (see
Deleuze 1988). The third novel of Rizal that
was rescued by Ambeth Ocampo from
oblivion, Makamisa, is particularly
significant because in the description of the

violence of crowds, the physical massing of

bodies in the exodus from Church as well as
in the carnivalesque riot following this
(including the youthful game of tuktukan),
one can discern the constitutive power of the
masses, the productive dynamic of their
passions, needs, and desires that escape
codification by the colonial Leviathan. The
power of bodies, the logic of their affects,
and their potential for organizing and
transforming the immanent field of social
forces, may be intimated by a curious report
Rizal composed during his Dapitan exile. It
is entitled "The Treatment of the Bewitched"
(dated 15 November 1895) part of which I
quote here (1964, 178):

The witch [mangagaway] is the she-ass of

the burden of ignorance and popular
malevolence, the scapegoat of divine
chastisements, the salvation of the perplexed
quacks. Mankind also has divine defects
among its divine qualities. It likes to explain
everything and wash in another's blood its
own impurities. The woman manggagaway
is to the common man and the quack what
the resentment of the gods, the demon, the
pacts with the devil in the Medieval Age, the
plethora of blood, neuroses, and others were
to the different ages. She is the diagnosis of
inexplicable sufferings.

Could the last phrase not shed light on the

function of Sisa in the Noli, on the
participation of formidable women in our
struggles for national-democratic liberation
who were branded and stigmatized including the famous "la loba negra," the
protagonist in the narrative once ascribed to
Father Jose Burgos?

Finally, I want to emphasize this corporeal

logic/ethics of mass initiative and agency
that I have tried to locate in Rizal's texts by
citing Antonio Luna and Apolinario Mabini

on what kind of approach will be most

constructive in lieu of the ritualistic and
reactionary worship of an idol. It must be
remembered that Rizal's founding of the Liga
Filipina was the prime catalyst for the
mobilization of the Katipunan led by Andres
Bonifacio and other separatists (note that
Mabini was present when Rizal initiated the
Liga). And Antonio Luna, the brilliant
general of Aguinaldo's army of the first
Philippine Republic, was already in contact
with Rizal in Europe when Rizal was an
active collaborator of Marcelo del Pilar and
Graciano Lopez Jaena in La Solidaridad.
First Luna in 1884: "Assimilating his ideas,
pondering his concepts that readily aroused
our enthusiasm, we found an echo, though
timid, of his voice within ourselves." And
Mabini in 1899: "While we Filipinos living
today do not individually amount to as much
as Rizal, yet we can join together to get the
force necessary to the realization of the work
begun by him." I second Luna's
multiplication of Rizal's voice and Mabini's
motion of unifying and mobilizing our forces
for national-democratic self-determination.