Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia

Foreword

Foreword On the 150th birth anniversary of Rizal, the publication of this stringently researched study enables us to relate with more conviction our pride in having a novelist lay down the firmest and most durable foundation of the Filipino nation. With the journalist’s eagle eye, John Nery traces that influence which Rizal wields in Southeast Asia to this very day, when the enduring vestiges of colonialism are still so much a determinant of our future. Rizal did this with his pen as well as with his life; as the American literary scholar Roland Greene said, “he was the first post-colonial writer”. Nery’s search confirms the prescience, the brilliance and profundity of Rizal’s thinking as also expressed in his letters and articles. For instance, and this has not been clearly understood by many of those who studied his life, though seemingly opposed to revolution Rizal among the early Filipinos who railed against Spanish colonialism was in fact one of its first and staunchest believers. But it is his novels, his literary creations which gave Rizal his marmoreal reputation; it is to Rizal’s credit that he elected to use the literary art. He could just have published those manifestos, those inciting articles as did his colleagues in the Propaganda Movement. But he chose literature to magnify and broadcast his deepest feelings, his dreams for his unhappy country. He saw that literature — the noblest of the arts — would prevail long after the fact, that it is literature that renders history alive. So many scholars miss this significant distinction; like so many illiterate Filipino leaders,they do not regard novelists and their fictions as the truest building blocks in the foundation of a nation. All too often, when they exalt Rizal, they forget it is the committed writers who are his real heirs. Nery discusses yet another novelist who influenced Rizal. In 1860, Eduard Douwes Dekker (pen name: Multatuli), who had served in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), published Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, in Amsterdam. Rizal wrote to his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt how he envied Multatuli whose novel was “so viciously anti-colonial — but was so beautiful”.Two generations later,in that very same setting of Multatuli’s fiction,two Indonesians — the Founding Father of Indonesia,Sukarno, and that country’s foremost novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer — also read Rizal. All too often, writers are judged and admired only for their work. Their peccadilloes, their sins are glossed over by the very fact that their being writers can wipe away their moral lapses. This should not be; writers should also be judged by how they act out their values. If this measure were applied to Rizal, there is no doubt that his resonance and his glitter would even be wider and brighter. As a person, he brimmed with goodwill, compassion and virtue though he was always critical of the vices of his colleagues and countrymen. Unfortunately, such influence did not instruct his foremost Indonesian admirers. Sukarno and his ally Pramoedya oppressed their political critics when both were at the height of their power. Pramoedya burned the books of the writers he didn’t like and withheld jobs from them. Likewise, in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos and some of the writers who pandered to him extolled Rizal in their speeches but did not follow his humane example as they, too, oppressed writers who criticized them. Rizal envisioned a just society after the revolution — not the authoritarian regimes that followed, particularly in Southeast Asia. Understand this sequence after the upheaval — chaos first, then iron order, and the darkest night during which Rizal was martyred before that dawn. XII REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT The controversies surrounding Rizal’s last days in prison continue to this very day. Some think he turned his back on the very ideas he espoused. Nery repeats how Rizal wanted to go to Cuba to work, not on the side of the Cubans who were waging their revolution against Spain, but for the Spaniards. He also recounts Rizal’s least known evasions at his trial, the contrary manifesto which he wrote denying the revolution.Indeed,although his biographer Austin Coates said that Rizal did not retract Masonry as claimed by the Jesuits, I can even believe that he did. Poor man — he tried desperately to save himself. Remember, he returned to the Philippines to pursue the dreams he knew wouldn’t...