SISA’S VENGEANCE

A Radical Interpretation
of Jose Rizal
_____________________________________

E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Philippines Cultural Studies Center

Connecticut, USA
 Copyright © E. San Juan, Jr. 2014
All rights reserved

ISBN--13: 978-1499165180
ISBN--10: 1499165188

The chapter,“Sisa’s Vengeance,” was first presented as

a paper for the Rizal 150 International Conference, University
of the Philippines, June 2011; a version was published in
Kritika Kultura, August 2011; included here is the latest
revision. Reprinted 2014.

CONTACT: [email protected]
[email protected]

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*

CONTENTS

Foreword 4

I. Rizal and Revolution in the Age of

Imperial Terrorism 26

II. Sisa’s Vengeance:

Rizal & the “Woman Question 6 5
_______

Rizal the Feminist: A Review 116

by Francis C. Macansantos

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 FOREWORD

A specter is haunting las islas Filipinas—not just

the territory, but also the Filipino diaspora around the
world. Jose Rizal as ghost or the phantom in the
neocolonial opera stalks across islands and continents.
Rizal--the name is familiar, even a household word, like
Avenida Rizal, Rizal Coliseum, the “Rizal” brand attached
to all kinds of souvenirs, gewgaws, and collectibles. But
over the decades and centuries, after 150 years, somehow
the figure remains distant, alien, self-estranged. Rizal, the
national hero, is routinely celebrated by bureaucrats, cult-
followers, trendy pundits and inutile academics. But
among so many fetishized images, counterfeit icons, and
fabrications, who is the “real” and “true” Rizal? Such a
question is perhaps anachronistic, irrelevant, or foolish in
our postmodern age of simulacras, hybrid replicas, and
virtual dissimulations. Our task in such a bind is to
explore the nexus of duplicities and contradictions in our
vexed and vexatious question.
Rizal’s significance for us today remains
problematic, contentious, open-ended. His prestige is no
longer monolithic, unequivocal, standardized. Readers of
his works are now prone to extract multiple ambiguous
meanings. After Constantino’s signal interrogation of the
ascribed heroism of Rizal, we are left to puzzle out the gap
between public appearance and covert essence, between
the transparent integrity and the extravagant dissonance
of our subject. Unamuno’s impression of a quixotic,
Hamlet-like Rizal still appears warranted, despite the
efforts of Ambeth Ocampo, Malou Jacob, and others to
restore him to his all-too-human dimension. Nonetheless,
Rizal remains unique and extraordinary in his single-
minded commitment to his people’s liberation.
Deconstructing the Empire’s transcendental signified, he
had to construct the people/nation with a distinct
“personality,” a world-historic presence, one no longer
needing tutelage and capable of self-governance. This
was a collective project of contriving a social contract by
mobilizing potentia multitudine (Spinoza) in the process of
4
permanent revolution, activating popular memory to
midwife the future.
One of Rizal’s protagonists in the Fili posited the
rationale of his life-long endeavor (conatus): “A life not
consecrated to a great ideal is a useless one…
Redemption presumes virtue; virtue presumes sacrifice;
sacriffice presumes love.” The logic of such a syllogism
led to Rizal’s arrest, trial, and execution. He was lucky to
be able to chose the form of his death despite the peril of
misrecognitions and misrepresentations. As Fr. Miguel
Bernad (1998) has lucidly shown, Rizal’s trial was his
vindication; the Court’s judgment was already
presupposed in his being invidiously categorized as an
“Indio.” More scandalous was Rizal’s habit of identifying
himself with all the victims of colonialism, whether Indios,
Chinese, creoles, ethnic aborigines, or marginalized
Spanish peninsulars, thus articulating the syntagm of
particular grievances into a universal cry of revolt against
global injustice, a paradigmatic agenda of rectification and
settling of accounts. “Sisa’s vengeance” is the shibboleth
and trope of this agenda.
What above all distinguishes Rizal’s sensibility is
the habit of thinking dialectically, grasping the total flow
of experience in its manifold determinations. In his
critique of Morga’s chronicle, for instance, he charted a
mutable field of passions, affects, contingencies. Beyond
the empirical and the aesthetic realms, his concern was
always profoundly ethical and humanistic as he
negotiated the transition from feudal corporatism to the
possessive individualism of bourgeois/market capitalism.
In a letter to Mariano Ponce, he considered all the
persecutions, cruelties, abuses as necessary for Filipinos
to prove their fortitude and valor, so that “in spite of
everything and everybody, they will be worthy of
liberty….In every struggle there must be victims, and it is
the greatest of battles which are the most sanguinary.
What is imprisonment? What is death? An illness sends
us to bed at times and takes our life. The question is
whether this infirmity and this death will afterwards be
useless for those who survive” (Epistolario 2, 165-66).
This challenge to wager life, Rizal affirmed, will generate

5
the missing “personality” of the masses, a desideratum
for deserving freedom and independence.
On the Edge of Extra-territorial Musings
Disruptions, aporias, and detours accompanied
Rizal’s pedagogical and agit-prop vocation. Through his
own improvised “ruses of reason,” Rizal opposed not only
obscurantism and idolatry but also nihilist skepticism and
self-deluded egotism. He repeated to his sisters that his
motivation in his Enlightenment work was not meant to
cause “the stain of dishonor,” rather the opposite. His
attitude to Marcelo del Pilar and other expatriates in
Madrid demonstrated Rizal’s conscientious prudence (he
later denounced this exorbitant prudence as a native flaw
preventing initiatives) in putting honor, construed as the
fidelity to principles and national ideals, above mere
creature comforts and self-serving welfare: “My politics is
to become eclipsed….I wish to be sure that I may never be
regarded as a stumbling block to anybody, even though
this involves my own fall.” Representing himself (in the
name of others, justice, the emancipated future) entailed
self-erasure, temporizing, ultimately death.
Rizal’s sensitivity concerning his personal dignity
or honor may be deemed subtly narcissistic, even self-
ingratiating. On the other hand, it can also be assayed as
a symptom of inadequacy, a gnawing sense of lack, an
obsessive preoccupation with an unstable, precarious,
nascent selfhood—more precisely, a fallibilistic modality
of performing self-determination. That paradox sustained
him in straitened circumstances and at the same time
undermined his psychic equilibrium. Everything seems
pregnant with its contrary (to echo Marx’s quip of 1856).
Thus he had to laugh to salvage spoiled intentions and
damaged ideals. That gave him the formula for thought-
experiments, for savage allegory and satire. What is
certain is that we need to reject the methological
individualism of the liberal/official assessment of Rizal’s
significance that vitiates many research projects on Rizal
designed for advancing fundamentalist programs and/or
mercantile self-aggrandizement.
Uncannily, Rizal was a performance artist avant la
lettre, unwittingly, without premeditation. It was part of a

6
ritualized genre of caring for the soul, inflected from St.
Ignatius’ exercises and ritualized in the book Rizal had in
prison, Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ (see his
criticism of Barrantes on theater [1984, 116-24] ). Rizal
displayed this in countless letters where he dramatized
his own imagined part in the campaign for decolonization.
In a letter to del Pilar, Rizal exhorted his comrades to
inaugurate a more militant policy of courage and genuine
solidarity: “Our fellow counrymen, at seeing our valor, at
seeing that Rizal is not the exception but the general rule,
will also take new courage and lose their fear; there is
nothing like example…. God and Destiny are on our side
because we have justice and right and because we
struggle not for ourselves but for the sacred love we hold
for our country and for our fellow countrymen.” Earlier he
wrote Mariano Ponce to advise Graciano Lopez Jaena to
return to the Philippines (instead of going to Cuba, which
Rizal later chose to do in order to escape the desperate
vicissitudes of his banishment) “to allow himself to be lled
in defense of his ideals; we have only once to die, and if
we do not die well, we lose an opportunity which will not
again be presented to us.” He seized that opportunity, the
mise en scéne for conjuring his avatars and their vestal
consorts.
Every commentator shares the consensus that the
1872 martyrdom of Father Burgos, Gomez and Zamora
(just a year after the historic inauguration of the Paris
Commune) transformed Rizal into a filibustero, as he
confided to Blumentritt and Ponce. This is the “culprit”
who constructed the baroque worlds of the Noli and Fili;
the latter novel he dedicated to the three martyrs. Anxious
to prove himself a worthy heir to the model of his
predecessors, Rizal upheld the anagogic idea of
vengeance —Simoun/Ibarra’s justice cognized as a
collective mode of fulfilling a promise to ancestors to heal
the rupture of interrupted group exchanges--as the
legitimizing foundation of a nation-in-the-making. It is an
organic concept of the emergent nation instantiated, as
Rizal mindful of the Messiah once put it, wherever two
Filipinos are gathered in memory of their birthplace and
its common good. He declared: “At the sight of these
injustices and cruelties, even as a child my imagination

7
was awakened and I swore to dedicate my life to avenge
so many victims; and it is with this idea that I have been
studying. This may be seen in all my works and writings;
God give me the opportunity some day to carry out my
promise!” Here Rizal was enacting Simoun/Ibarra’s role,
remembering inter alia the blow he received from a
guardia civil in his youth, the brutal treatment of his
mother by the local authorities, and the harrowing mass
eviction of his family from their home in Calamba (the
details of the agony was conveyed to Rizal in a letter from
his sister Narcisa [Epistolario V, 167). Clearly, his
aspiration to collect what’s due, redress grievances, and
complete the exchange was nourished and cultivated
early on in the hero’s tortuous adventure.
Pathos of Incommensurable Desire
After demythologizing the icon, what remains? The
protocols for re-interrogating the Rizal cult/hero-worship
have been formulated by the recurrent themes and motifs
of the major biographies (Palma, Guerrero, Coates, Baron
Fernandez). Except for the retraction and the Josephine
Bracken episode, most events in Rizal’s life are no longer
controversial. I consider the Memorias, the canonical two
novels, certain letters, and the substantive essays central
to the understanding of Rizal’s import and serviceability
for the national-democratic struggle. Of vital importance
are those originally written in Tagalog as well as the
unfinished and fragmentary manuscripts.
A strategy to decenter the ilustrado reformist
assessment of Rizal should begin with the letter to the
Malolos women, the Liga Filipina, the letters to
Blumentritt, Ponce and other colleagues in La Solidaridad,
the unfinished novel on the Tagalog nobility, Makamisa,
and the two political testaments dated June 20, 1892,
entrusted to Dr. Lorenzo Marques for safekeeping. What is
confirmed is that Rizal’s December 15 manifesto, a
guileful recalcitrant document, was never made public.
Hidden transcripts and oracular scenarios characterize
the operations of the Rizal writing-machine. Between the
Memorias, the two novels, the commentary on Morga, the
major discourses on indolence and the future of the
country, his voluminous correspondence, poems such as
“Ultimo Adios” and “Mi Retiro,” the open letter to the
8
Malolos women, and the two testaments, etc.--this
constellation or network of representamens (to use C.S.
Peirce’s term for signifiers) delimiting the range of
subject-positions the Rizal persona or actant can perform
fixes the parameters of further speculation on his
usefulness in the task of constructing a popular-
democratic bloc, a grass-roots constituency, in the fight
for national-popular hegemony. We shift from archaelogy
to genealogy: the author dies to give way to a kindred
reader/interpreter born in the interstices of his texts and
acts, as well as in their rhizomatic ramifications.
There is no question that Rizal’s prodigious
commitment in trying to represent an emergent
nation/people is unprecedented in the annals of the “third
world.” His identity has been equated with the singular
dedication to the liberation of his country which
inexorably led to his persecution and martyrdom. On the
testimony of Andres Bonifacio and the1896 generation,
and of ilustrado politicians from Aguinaldo, Quezon,
Roxas, and biographers Wenceslao Retana, Rafael Palma,
Austin Craig, Carlos Quirino, Leon Ma. Guerrero, and
others, Rizal’s heroism is unparalleled in the annals of
Philippine history, and of Asia as well. His influence has
extended beyond Asia up to the Americas, Europe and
Africa. With the usual qualifications, he is now cited
together with Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Gandhi, Sun Yat-
Sen. Jose Marti, and other revolutionary nationalists of the
last century.
But aside from being a national-democratic
intellectual ahead of his time, Rizal and the narrative of his
labors constitute a difficult imaginary organon for
Filipinos. It is one that occupies a subterranean space
transcending historical determinations precisely because
of the specific circumstances that defined and
circumscribed his life. The saga of his words and deeds
symbolizes a specific Filipino modernity that breaks the
boundaries of the Enlightenment schematics of ascetic
virtue precisely because of its archaic and feudal, even
primitive, ingredients. The Rizal mind-body complex may
be conceived as the locus for the convergence of
heterogeneous socioeconomic formations that by their
mixture yields that configuration of an anti-hero first

9
glimpsed by Unamuno and observed by Teodoro
Agoncillo, Ante Radaic, Claro Recto, Dolores Feria, and
others. In my book Rizal in Our Time (Anvil, revised
edition 2011), I called attention to some discordant,
incongruous elements in the Rizal archive in the hope of
synthesizing them. In the two essays collected here, the
play of contradictions and seemingly irreconcilable
polarities is foregrounded and used as speculative points
of departure.
The Indio Witness Speaking Tongues
Rizal’s life registers both acquiescence to fate
(divine providence, “bathala na/bahala na” = let the
overarching plot unfold) and resistance to it. Destiny for
Rizal was a contrapuntal orchestration of fatalism and
voluntarism. resignation and the affirmation of will-to-
power. His project of shaping his life-world was premised
on the inertia of circumstances outside his control non-
synchronized with occasions for seizing opportunities.
His contacts with liberal European intellectuals were such
occasions; the other was his meeting with the “Irish half-
caste,” Josephine Bracken. Rizal’s life may be summed up
as one unrelenting endeavor to grasp and master,
unavailingly, the discourse of the Other. In the process,
the Other metamorphosed into multiple worldly others, the
sacred merging with the secular: his family, friends,
teachers, comrades in La Solidaridad, allies in the
international conversation (Blumentritt, Meyer, Virchow,
etc.). He disavowed this project of comprehending the
Other by the power of his sincerity and utter self-
abnegation. One proof may be found in his unprecedented
letters to the Jesuit “inquisitor” Fr. Pablo Pastells who
tried to re-convert him to the orthodox piety of his youth.
Rizal sums up his position: “My sole wish is to do what is
possible, what is in my hands, the most necessary” (11
November 1892). Despite being commonsensical, down-
to-earth and pragmatic, Rizal suffered numerous attacks
of depression, profound melancholy, even despair. His
diary and letters attest to this cycle of intense moods and
dispositions foreshadowing the “wild justice” (Francis
Bacon) symptomatic of the compulsion to resurrect the
past in order to redeem the present and the future.

10
 The Spanish doctor-biographer Baron Fernandez
has highlighted for us the occurrence of those moments.
The traces of their beginning can be discerned all
throughout the Memorias as silences, ellipses, absences
that punctuate his departures and returns: from his early
sojourn in Binan to the years in Ateneo and UST (1872-
1882) and to the first voyage to Europe (1882-1887), and
its aftermath. Even the brief interlude (1888) of his travel
across the United States—from the quarantine in San
Francisco to his comment on America as the land of
opportunity despite the lack of civil rights for African
Americans—betokened revealing lapses and
inconsistencies. Throughout his second foray into
Europe, the crisis of his family’s plight in Calamba
hounded him. Somehow filled with remorse, he blamed
himself for his family’s eviction from their farmland, the
chief source of their livelihood, by the Dominican order;
for the persecution and banishment of his relatives, and
the suffering of his parents and sisters. He too suffered,
feeling himself complicit in causing their misery. On one
day in Madrid, June 24, 1884, before the banquet at which
he delivered his famous speech honoring Juan Luna and
Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, the starving Rizal was on the
verge of delirium.
One contributing factor in Rizal’s saturnine if not
morbid outlook during that period is the illness brought
about by malnutrition, anguished work, and excessive
gymnastics, as diagnosed by his good friend Dr. Maximo
Viola. In 1886, Viola offered a symptomatology:
“Afternoon fevers preceded by chills, slight cough, feeling
of fatigue and haggardness” (Baron Fernandez 1980. 95).
Rizal took arsenic and discontinued his physical regimen.
While emphasizing the material determinants of the
psyche, we will not pursue a mechanistic Freudian
analysis such as Radaic’s , or the ludicruous Lombro-
esque portrayal of Rizal carried out by Retana (1979).
Rizal believed in every person’s capacity to learn
from mistakes and solve problems, developing in the
process an informed and intelligent will-power. Creative
human labor, the metabolism of social praxis, is the key to
the fashioning of culture; solidarity or cooperation is the
basis for the making of civilization. At the same time, Rizal
11
intuited Marx’s cardinal axiom that individuality (sensuous
praxis) is nothing but the totality of social relations at a
specific time and place of one’s existence. Human agency
becomes possible and materially efficacious only within
the limits established by the historical parameters of
possibility, which in turn is configured by the degree of
development of the productive forces, by the prevailing
division of social labor and its ideological legitimization
vis-à-vis the totality of social relations of production and
reproduction. The body, sexuality and difference, as well
as the registers of shifting identities, acquire their
meanings and resonance within this totality. This
hypothesis can be tested and judged in the crucible of
revolutionary social praxis.
The doctor we quoted earlier is the same Viola
who accompanied Rizal in a “grand tour” of Europe in
1887, up to the memorable visit to that Viennese
siren—one of the manggagaways that Rizal dared to
experiment with, prior to his Dapitan exile and the
confrontation with sorcery and/or psychosomatic illness.
He was immune to seduction because of wounds
sustained earlier; the scars of the Katigbak affair
(replicated in the Leonor Rivera showdown) were still raw.
Rizal’s act of memorializing in his journals those
temptations performed the rite of exorcism. The next
documented attack of depression occurred after his stay
in Biarritz, his refusal to accept Nelly Boustead’s
condition (excusing it with the phrase “we are all in the
hands of God” or Fate), the completion of El
Filibusterismo, aggravated by the schisms among his
friends in Madrid, and the news in 1891 that the Madrid
Supreme Court upheld the punishment suffered by the
people of Calamba. Before he left for Hong Kong, Rizal
was suicidal. He wrote to his friend Jose Ma. Basa: “…for I
may die, or something may happen to me, and I don’t want
you to lose anything in case I cannot embark. I fear that
something may happen and I may not go through with the
trip” (Baron Fernandez 1980, 195-96). Melancholia and
mourning for the lost “object”—the extra-territorial patria,
youth’s innocence--triggered shame that eventually
deteriorated into guilt and self-blame.

12
 Mapping Disenchantment and Epiphany
Such existential ordeals were not new for Rizal.
They accompanied the dissolution of the inherited
religious world-view, the traditional pietas of classical
antiquity, and its replacement by a secular, worldly
orientation. The therapeutic reflections on the dangers of
uprooting, nostalgic longing, confrontation with new
hostile environments, and the failure of vows and
promises, are poignantly recorded in the Memorias and
intimate letters to his family, friends, and collaborators.
His studies of physics and philosophy precipitated a
“polarization” that “plunged me into a world of miseries
from which I have not yet emerged.” In his youth he
endured the agony of his isolation in Binan and Manila.
But such traumatic paroxysms were nothing compared to
the lethal void sprung from the vertigo of amorous fantasy
catalyzed by the figure of Segunda Katigbak. Death and
the erotic constituted the hero’s passive/active,
oscillating, precariously balanced sensibility. The chapter
in Memorias between April to December 1877 constitutes
a signifying chain of tropes, images, and metaphoric
clusters that capture the destruction of the
phallogocentric subject (earlier fed by Ateneo medals and
his parents’ support) and the passage through a fleeting
jouissance in the moment of loss, speechlessness, and
motor paralysis. Rizal was devastated. Ironically,
representation (writing) equals loss of self-presence,
amnesia, a leap into the abyss. The subject becomes other
and drastically re-positioned through this break, this fade-
out and seizure—a bewitchment he would analyze during
his exile. This disintegration (ec-stasis) of the psyche
transpires in a fantasy game combining disavowal and
complicity, alternating ingenious retreats and
disingenuous advances.
We witness here the inscription of the psyche into
the tabooed space of mourning, frontier-crossing or
violations of borders, and the uncanny haunting of the
ruined home. The ruptured ego experiences the pleasure
of its vertigo as Rizal anticipates the final disappearance
of the beloved several days before the last meeting: “That
was the first night that I felt an anguish and inquietude
resembling love, if not jealousy, perhaps because I saw
13
that I was separating from her, perhaps because a million
obstacles would stand between us, so that my budding
love was increasing and seemed to be gaining vigor in the
flight” (Zaide and Zaide 1984, 314). The climactic
separation is rehearsed here as though it would relieve, if
not prevent, the advent of that catastrophic eventuality.
The lover’s mind is already crippled as he waited for the
appearance of the vehicle where the beloved’ s
handkerchief will appear as a premonitory sign: “I saw the
swift currents [of a nearby brook] carrying away branches
that they tore from the bushes and my thought, wandering
in other regions and having other subjects, paid no
attention to them.” Finally the moment arrives and the
erotic object enters the horizon of ethical decision—only
to find the agent-to-be immobilized, even castrated,
despite a histrionic stance and theatrical readiness:
…She bowed to me smiling and waving her handkerchief, I
just lifted up my head and said nothing. Alas! Such has
always happened to me in the most painful moments of
my life. My tongue, profuse talker, becomes dumb when
my heart is bursting with feelings. The vehicle passed like
a swift shadow, leaving no other trace but a horrible void
in the world of my affections…. [I]n the critical moments of
my life, I have always acted against my will, obeying
different purposes and mighty doubts. i goaded my horse
and took another road without having chosen it,
exclaiming: This is ended thus. Ah, how much truth, how
much meaning, these words then had! My youthful and
trusting love ended! The first hours of my first love
ended. My virgin heart will forever weep the risky step it
took in the abyss covered with flowers. My illusion will
return, indeed, but indifferent, incomprehensible,
preparing me for the first deception on the road of grief.
(Zaide and Zaide 1984, 317).
Subversive Metamorphosis
That experience would prove deracinating and
purgative for the adolescent Rizal. In order to cure
himself, more precisely rescue the mortified ego from
further “deception”, he tried to deflect the libidinal drive to
fix its cathexis on another woman, L, an older bachelor
girl, “fair with seductive and attractive eyes”; but his
thoughts and heart followed Segunda Katigbak “through
14
the night to her town.” This excursion to a substitute
failed to heal the wound, pushing him to the edge of
perverse self-immolation and necrophilia: “If the most
filthy corpse had told me that she too was thinking of me, I
would have kissed it out of gratitude.” Conversely, in the
last farewell, the dead lover would release the enslaved
mother(land) elegized in “Kundiman” and cohabit with her
in “enchanted terrain.” Rehearsing the agony of loss, the
prodigal son/lover would later on reflect on this episode in
order to equip himself for the ordeal of the last
destination.
Overall, the admonitory impact of this
experience—a recapitulation of abjecthood necessary for
acquiring a new subjectivity—should not be
overestimated. I submit that the truly crippling trauma for
Rizal was his four-years deportation to Dapitan following
the blasting of his hope that Governor Despujol would
allow the settlement of his family to British North Borneo.
This was wholly unexpected, in spite of earlier events
such as the deportation of his relatives (in particular,
Manuel Hidalgo) and the painful uprooting of the Rizal
clan from Calamba and their temporary stay in Hong
Kong. Apart from this exile (1892-1896) culminating in his
arrest in the middle of his travel to Cuba, speedy trial and
execution, the other profound crisis in Rizal’s life (as
already mentioned) was the arrest and extremely cruel
treatment of his mother for alleged connivance with his
uncle Jose Alberto in trying to kill his delinquent wife.
This happened a year before the 1872 Cavite Mutiny and
the execution of the priests Burgos, Gomez and Zamora;
and the retreat of his brother Paciano Rizal from public
visibility. Rizal recounted this vicious treatment of his
mother in the third chapter of his Memorias, a primal
scene of horror—even though the vile torturer suffered
remorse.
The case lasted for two and a half years. The
thirteen-year old child identified with his mother, victim of
an iniquitous system resembling that suffered by the
protagonist of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte
Cristo that Rizal was reading then, together with
Chateaubriand’s melodramatic romances. Teodora
Alonzo’s brutalization and the murder of Father Burgos
15
coalesced to make Rizal a “filibustero.” In this context,
Rizal’s novels may be conceived as a sustained, elaborate
program of therapy to overcome the earlier traumas of
abjection and refusal. However, the Dapitan calamity
could not be resolved except by martyrdom which Rizal
welcomed, having anticipated that ending a long time ago
in his dreams and his counter-intuitive deciphering of the
maneuvers of the Jesuit priests and the Katipunan
messengers.
Burlesque Dance of the Enigma

Reviewing in 1901 the publication of Rizal’s Noli

translated into English, the “father” of American realism
William Dean Howells unreservedly praised its exquisite
artistry. It reminded him of the verbal economy of modern
Spanish novelists; indeed, Rizal “has gone beyond them
in a certain sparing touch, with which he presents
situation and character by mere statement of fact, without
explanation or comment” (1901, 805). Is Howells reading
the same artifact charged by many to be melodramatic,
weirdly baroque, sentimental, replete with prolix
moralizing, etc.? It seems that, for the Yankee reviewer,
this “little saffron man” succeeded in rendering types
“with unerring delicacy and distinctness.” We suspect that
Howell is compensating for the barbaric aggression of
Generals Otis and Arthur McArthur’s soldiers, climaxing in
the ferocious pacification campaign of Generals Bell and
Smith, during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902); this
genocidal horror was recently recalled to an American
public by John Sayles’ film, Amigo, without mention of 1.4
milion dead Filipinos. Rizal’s “unimpeachable veracity,”
for Howell, resides in “the self-control of the artistic spirit”
shown “even in the extreme of apparent caricature” (1901,
806).
We forego summarizing the two novels here.
Needless to say, a historical materialist perspective goes
beyond the mere inventory of facts and statistics,
requiring the deployment of situational frames and
intertextual contexts. Linkages and connections are
needed in order to grasp the totality of any phenomenon.
In addition to the empiricist gloss, we need a versatile
semiotic reading of the Rizal archive responsive to its
16
polysemous texture/structure. Rizal, however, would
surely repudiate the cosmopolitanesque, free-floating
notion of Filipino-as-Everyman, Patricia Evangelista’s
notorious denizen of a borderless world, the anonymous
balikbayan giving back to the country what she has
purchased/earned from servitude to the rich nation-states
of the Global North (Pinoy Abrod 2004). Rizal is much
more skeptical, less naïve, than our well-intentioned but
nonetheless naively cynical compatriots. This is in
keeping with his own self-reflexive hermeneutic, a
rigorous interrogation of the motives of his words and
actions and their resonance in varying constellations of
forces and events.
There is no questioning Rizal’s obsessive
engagement with constructing the Filipino as a nascent
collective agency, the foundation for a new polity based
on rational argumentation and civic virtues. He explored
the possibilities immanent in the immediate present,
invested with contradictory tendencies and implications.
As Rafael Palma and others have demonstrated, Rizal’s
singularity inheres in this intransigent focus on his
mission: “I prefer the death of the ant which bites even in
the moment of dying….I am going to prove to those who
deny patriotism to us that we know how to die for our duty
and our convictions” (Palma 1949, 340). Gladiator-like, he
challenged the Furies, staking everything, claiming the
righteous God on his side.
Rizal’s trenchant self-esteem, the antidote to pride,
was paradoxically a self-negating virtue. Sacrificing his
life, rejecting conservative prudence and welcoming death
in the arena, Rizal pursued his writerly task, his
shamanistic duty, to expose the cancerous bodies of the
afflicted on the steps of the temple so that
others—presumably the healthy, compassionate ones--
may offer a remedy. Rizal staged the illusion of this
spectacle in the narratives of his two novels, as well as in
various satirical pieces. They operated as prophylactic
devices of purgation, salutary vehicles of exorcism. The
“shock and awe” triggered by obscurantist terror was
rendered intelligible from the optic of a curative
agent/shaman, the culture-hero of folk memory and
autochtonous tradition. Rizal crafted the spectacle of this

17
crisis, with its catharsis involving both victimizers and
victims, under the sign of an avenging spirit that is the
mother of all revolts and transgressions:
Some people say: It is these imprisonments and
deaths that terrify and intimidate the rest!” If the country
lacks courage, if it is paralyzed by despair, infected, close
to disorganization, fire is precisely the remedy indicated.
Fire will awaken vitality, irritate the cells, cause the fluids
to circulate…And it is only dead if there exists no vitality
at all. Suppose we free it today from the tyranny of the
friars; tomorrow it will fall under the tyranny of their
employees (Epistolario 2, 166).

Insurgency Without Guarantees

Slaves of today, the tyrants of tomorrow—are we
hearing echoes of the fugitive Ibarra? of the prophet-
demystifier Tasio? The self-embattled Rizal feared the
return of the repressed embodied, for instance, in Simoun,
the personification of the irrationality of the whole system.
So he speculated that this prophecy can be foiled by
critique, by vigilant self-scrutiny and anatomizing of the
body politic. In the process, Voltairean metaphysics
yielded to Dionysian actuality. This incarnation or
transubstantiation of ideas may have resulted only in
“Felipinas Caliban,” as Alma Jill Dizon argues in her
allegorical reading of the two female protagonists, Dona
Victorina and Dona Consolacion. Like Fr. John
Schumacher (1978), Dizon calls attention to Rizal’s
criticism of the corruption of complicitous subjects. But
such individual cases cannot be divorced from the
brutalized plight of the whole body politic.
Rizal was unsparing in applying self-disciplinary
measures. Based on his own experience, he reminded the
Malolos women how Filipina obsequiousness arose from
“the combined effect of their excessive kindness,
modesty, and perhaps ignorance.” As Rizal noted in
diagnosing subaltern indolence, the malaise resulted from
centuries of slave/master inter-dependency whose idealist
phenomenology Marx and Engels had stood on its head in
their critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1970) and
The Holy Family (1844;1975). Unfortunately, this one-sided
view of Rizal’s partisanship needs to be rectified by a
18
more nuanced, holistic appraisal of the multifaceted world
of both artifices in which all the characters are embedded.
Like Sisa, both women function as indices of a much
broader dynamic typicality, what Engels had in mind when
he theorized the concept of scrupulous realism in his
remarks on Balzac, Lasalle, Ibsen, and other works (1973).
Praised by Howells (as noted earlier), Rizal’s
critical realism was premised on an analysis of the total
situation embracing both colonized and colonizer.
Engaged in subverting delusions/illusions, he paid close
attention to the complicities of the colonized with her
subjection. Mapping the trajectory of decolonization (as
voiced in Tasio’s jeremiads, in Elias’ predicament, or in
the tragic ambiguities of Cabesang Tales and his clan),
Rizal sought to forge a national-popular will that would
interweave European ideas and the vernacular canon, folk
millenarian impulses and elite intellectual resources. We
can cite the hermeneutic insight of another scholar,
Eugenio Matibag, who examines in a more dialectical
manner the “play of an emancipatory desire” in Rizal’s
novels. While he remarks on the bifurcations and
antitheses of characters and motifs, Matibag asserts that
Rizal believed in a “unique Philippine culture…founded on
a Filipino creolism” (1995, 262). Hence Rizal “creolizes
Spanish language by including regionalisms, Tagalog
words and Philippine spellings in dialogue and narration.”
Indeed, the novels are genuinely intertextual and analogic,
eliciting a wide spectrum of responses and thus
anticipating the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and other postmodern fabulists. What I would propose,
however, is the application of the method of
metacommentary (exemplified in the works of Walter
Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Fredric Jameson) that combines
a critique of ideology with a heuristic exploration of
utopian, carnivalesque possibilities. After all, the
actualities of the future are present in the interregnum of
what exists but not-yet, in the pedagogical domain of
potentiality, as well as in the quotidian experience of our
shared, interactive lives.
Anti-Climactic Caesura: From Dapitan to Fort Santiago
When Rizal was accused during his trial of instigating
the Katipunan rebellion that prematurely exploded in
19
August 1896, he denied it and was compelled to issue the
December 15 manifesto. We take note of the
countervailing forces that bracket the sincerity of this
document. Constantino and other iconoclasts focus on
Rizal’s denunciation of the rebellion and his appeal for
reforms from above as proof of Rizal’s counter-
revolutionary if not assimilationist sentiment. This text,
plus his response to Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s visit to Dapitan
in July 1896, became self-incriminatory despite the
Katipunan’s extolling of Rizal as the charismatic
progenitor of the insurrection. Earlier Rizal confessed
that the Liga which he planned in 1892, four years before
his arrest, was “stillborn.” During his exile in Dapitan,
Rizal met Josephine Bracken via the visit of Hong Kong
citizen George Taufer. Eventually she became his
common-law wife despite the initial antipathy of his
mother and sisters. Bracken’s miscarriage and Rizal’s
burial of his unborn child Francisco (named after his
father) is interpreted by Austin Coates as symbolic of
Rizal’s life as “futureless as the child….For once he had
succumbed to his desires, and this was weakness, and he
knew it” (1992, 273; see Ofilada 2003, 46-48). A weakness
that Rizal acknowledged? Scarcely. In his letters pleading
that the Rizal clan show some kindness to Bracken, Rizal
wrote (to his sister Trinidad, 21 Nov. 1895): “I am
convinced that she [Josephine] is better than what they
say. What she does for me, how she obeys me and
attends to me, would not have been done to me by a
Filipina” (quoted in Ofilada 2003, 43; see also Rodolfo
1958). Physical coercion was futile without ideological
pressure. Given the surveillance, threat of assassination,
and unrelenting persuasive moves—symbolic violence
immanent in the carceral networks of biopower and the
despotic “distribution of the sensible” (to borrow Jacques
Ranciere’s phrase)--imposed on Rizal in Dapitan, the
refuge afforded by Bracken’s companionship could not be
ignored for reasons of delicadeza. In his “last farewell”
(first published in Antonio Luna’s revolutionary
newspaper La Independencia in 25 September 1898), the
pilgrim-voyager Rizal finally acknowledged the help of
dulce extranjera [Josephine Bracken]. bidding farewell to
“my joy,…the sweet friend that lightened my way.”

20
 As proposed in the essays that follow, a
revaluation of Rizal and a more all-encompassing
appraisal of his contribution to our national-democratic
revolution may be initated by using Rizal’s Dapitan exile
as its center of gravity, the site of interxtuality, dialogue,
and experimental inquiry. It might serve as the theoretical
crucible for decoding the themes of difference, sexuality,
and subjectivity along the signifying web of discursive
practices and institutions that make up our colonial and
neocolonial history. To be sure, the patriarch-oriented
Rizal was not a feminist or woman-liberationist. But he
protested against frailocracy as the epitome of the gender-
based authoritarian system, inspired by populist Jacobin
ideals, by the classic Roman virtues of Cicero and
republican thinkers (Spinoza, Schiller), and by the
naturalist, humanist secularism which he absorbed in his
European travels (Miguel Morayta once invited Rizal to a
celebration of Giordana Bruno in Madrid). His didactic-
polemical gloss on the Malolos women’s plan to open a
night-school is the crucial testimony to his egalitarian
conviction that in the process supported unleashing
women’s energies for a universal program of
emancipation traversing the domains of race, class,
gender, and nationality. The sixth precept distills that
provocative animus to level authoritarian hierarchies: “All
men are born equal, naked, without bonds.” The
paramount injunction is to use the faculty of critical
judgment to grasp what is reasonable and just and truthful
as we proceed through “the garden of learning,” thwarting
deceit and enjoying the fruits of mutual aid, convivial
reciprocity, in a life of freedom and enjoyment of each
other’s company.
A Message from the “Belly of the Beast”
Our national beginning may be said to enjoy a
permanently resourceful matrix in Rizal’s life-work
mediated by the 1896 revolution and the protracted
resistance to US occupation. We can discount or ignore
Rizal, but he will not ignore us. Death for Rizal was a
momentary catching of breath before renewed
mobilization: “To die is to rest….” Subjectivation followed
subjection, dissensus superseded consensus: the model
student became a pariah, exile, prisoner, and executed

21
filibustero. Rizal himself provides a fitting epilogue to his
life in the last paragraph of his homily to the Malolos
women. He evokes the utopian garden of delights, a
pastoral milieu of sensuous joy sprung from social labor
overcoming the alienation of urban civilization. He
conjures for us a vision of truth and rapture, rationality
fused with convivial pleasure emanating from solidarity
and communal sacrifice:

“Tubo ko’y dakila sa puhunang pagod” at

mamatamisin ang ano mang mangyari, ugaling upa sa
sino mang mangahas sa ating bayang magsabi ng tunay.
Matupad nawa and inyong nasang matuto at hari na ngang
sa halamanan ng karununga’y huwag makapitas ng
bungang bubut, kundi ang kikitli’y piliiin, pag-isipin muna,
lasapin bago lunukin, sapagkat sa balat ng lupa lahat ay
haluan, at di bihirang magtanim ang kaaway ng damong
pansira, kasama sa binhi sa gitna ng linang [“My profit
will be greater than the capital invested”; and I shall gladly
accept the usual reward of all who dare tell our people the
truth. May your desire to educate yourself be crowned
with success; may you in the garden of learning gather
not bitter, but choice fruit, looking well before you eat,
because on the surface of the globe all is deceit, and often
the enemy sows weeds in your seedling plot (1984, 332).

Written in 1889 two years after the publication of

the Noli (1887), while engaged in annotating Morga’s
Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609), the Malolos epistle
illustrates Rizal’s conviction that what is needed to
redeem the homeland was not a literary man but a good
citizen who would deploy heart and head, not yet the force
of arms. Before the frontal assault on the Spanish
behemoth, a war of maneuver is necessary. Employing
both head and heart, the resident of the polis would utilize
the pen as the principal instrument without preempting
the tactical use of other weapons. He reminds fellow
agitator Ponce (in a letter dated 27 June 1888) that “Now,
it does not seem to us that the instrument is the
primordial object. Sometimes with a poor one great works
can be produced; let the Philippine bolo speak.
Sometimes in poor literature great truths can be said”

22
(1999, 96). The allusion to the native “bolo” speaks
volumes in the context of pacific writing. It summons the
ghosts of women-warriors, from Gabriela Silang, Gregoria
de Jesus, Teresa Magbanua, Maria Lorena Barros, Maria
Theresa Dayrit, Luisa Dominado-Posa, and countless
others.
Without discriminating against other means,
Rizal’s strategy for the radical transformation of society
was neither puritanical nor adventurist. But political
agency implied sophistication in ideology-critique. For
him, it was not the quality of belle lettre, nor aesthetic
education alone, that would enable the masses to
discover truth and unleash the energies for deliverance. It
depended on a fortuitous conjuncture of circumstances,
of objective and subjective forces. It involved the
“ripeness of time,” for the people’s spirit blows where it
wills. By this time, Rizal was already a marked man. He
harbored the stigmata of the filibustero avenger, the
androgynous shaman haunting the threshold of the
temple. Meanwhile Rizal tried to recuperate the lesson of
Maria Makiling that he retold in 1890, working under the
intractable specters of Sisa, Juli, Dona Consolacion, Dona
Victorina, and the ill-fated Maria Clara. Approximating an
allegory of a Filipino Monte Cristo, El Filibusterismo was
published in 1891, shortly after the Boustead affair and his
withdrawal from active participation in reformist
propaganda in Madrid. In 1892, he was banished to
Dapitan. In less than four years, Rizal was dead.
What then is the point of this whole exercise in re-
interpreting Rizal in a time of globalized terror and the
“shock doctrine” of moribund finance-capitalism? What
are the stakes in re-reading Rizal?
A contemporary of Rizal, the American
“backwoodsman” Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the
inventor of pragmaticism and arguably the greatest
philosopher of modern times, may offer us a justification.
A close friend of Harvard sage William James, one of the
militant founders of the Anti-Imperialist League, Peirce
opposed in his quiet way the ruthless US subjugation of
the Philippines in the name of “Manifest Destiny” and a
white-supremacist “civilizing mission.” He was not as
vocal as his New England colleagues, nor as irrepressible
23
as the astute Mark Twain with his scathing diatribes
against the US empire (Zwick 1992). Nonetheless, Peirce
expressed his deeply felt sympathy for the beleaguered
revolutionaries in the course of his fourth Harvard Lecture
on “The Seven Systems of Metaphysics,” delivered on 16
April 1903. This was two years after the massacre of fifty-
nine American soldiers in Balangiga, Samar, Philippines;
and a year after the prolamation by Theodore Roosevelt
that the war in the Philippines was over (Miller 1982).
Peirce did not believe that the Filipinos had been
completely subdued. He believed in the legitimacy of the
Filipinos’ right to fight for self-determination, as witness
the Tagala on the shore appropriating a link, found by
accident and transmitted to others; this story alludes to an
informing telos in the chain of signifiers that when
translated by the community was bound to reinvigorate
the resistance against the imperial colossus. Signs
produce effects and actualize purposes. Peirce’s hidden
message of solidarity suddenly materializes in the middle
of a discourse on “Thirdness” and on the power of words
to generate incalculable effects, an integral part of
Peirce’s seminal theory of signs. Didn’t Rizal, the cunning
propagandist and polymath, cherish the belief that his
words were bound to produce disturbance and changes of
habits in whoever reads/hears them? That may explain for
us the rationale for what we have accomplished here,
whose value remains to be acknowledged, weighed and
tested in practice by the masses for it to become a
weapon in the struggle:
…Nobody can deny that words do produce such effects.
Take for example, that sentence of Patrick Henry which, at
the time of our revolution, was repeated by every man to
his neighbor: “Three millions of people, armed in the holy
cause of Liberty, and in such a country as we possess, are
invincible against any force that the enemy can bring
against us.”
Those words present this character of the
general law of nature, that they might have produced
effects indefinitely transcending any that circumstances
allowed them to produce. It might, for example. have
happened that some American schoolboy, sailing as a
passenger in the Pacific Ocean, should have idly written
24
down those words on a slip of paper. The paper might
have been tossed overboard and might have been picked
up by some Tagala on a beach of the island of Luzon; and
if he had them translated to him they might easily have
passed from mouth to mouth there as they did in this
country, and with similar effect.
Words then do produce physical effects. It is
madness to deny it. The very denial of it involves a belief
in it; and nobody can consistently fail to acknowledge it
until he sinks to a complete mental paresis (1998, 184).

25
RIZAL AND REVOLUTION IN THE AGE OF
IMPERIAL TERRORISM

Yo la tengo, y yo espero que ha de brillar un dia

en que venza la Idea a la fuerza brutal,
que despues de la lucha y la lenta agonia,
otra vzx mas sonora, mas feliz que la mi
sabra cantar entonces el cantico triunfal.

[I have the hope that the day will dawn/when the Idea will conquer brutal
force; that after the struggle and the lingering travail,/another voice, more
sonorous, happier than mine shall know then how to sing the triumphant
hymn.]

-- Jose Rizal, “Mi Retiro” (22 October 1895)

On June 19, 2011, we are celebrating 150 years of

Rizal’s achievement and its enduring significance in this
new millennium. It seems fortuitous that Rizal’s date of
birth 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, Cavite, in 1898. In 1962 then President
Diosdado Macapagal decreed the change of date from
July 4 to June 12 to reaffirm the primacy of the Filipinos’
right to national self-determination. After more than three
generations, we are a people still in quest of the right,
instruments, and opportunity to determine ourselves as
an autonomous, sovereign and singular nation-state.

Either ironical or prescient, Aguinaldo’s

proclamation (read in the context of US Special Forces
engaged today in fighting Filipino socialists and other
progressive elements) contains the kernel of the
contradictions that have plagued the ruling elite’s claim to
political legitimacy: he invoked the mythical benevolence
of the occupying power. Aguinaldo unwittingly mortgaged
his leadership to the “protection of the Mighty and
Humane North American Nation.” Mighty, yes, but
“humane”? The U.S. genocide of 1.4 million Filipinos is,
26
despite incontrovertible evidence, still disputed by
apologists of “Manifest Destiny.” But there is no doubt
that Aguinaldo’s gratitude to the Americans who brought
him back from exile after the Pact of Biak-na-Bato spelled
the doom of the ilustrado oligarchy which, despite the
demagogic ruses of Marcos and his successors, has
proved utterly bankrupt in its incorrigible corruption,
electoral cynicism, and para-military gangster violence.
Obedient to US dictates, the current regime appears to
follow its predecessors along the path of neocolonial
decadence and barbarism, further opening the country’s
dwindling resources to predatory transnational
corporations and their mercenaries. And so, sotto voce:
“Long live Filipino Independence Day!”
The 150th anniversary of Rizal’s birth affords us
the occasion to reassess his work, particularly in the
context of ongoing fierce class war between the exploited,
impoverished majority and the few privileged landlords,
bureaucrats and business moguls patronized by global
capital. This is taking place at a time when the Philippines
is being re-colonized by the United States, the world's
moribund hegemon, under the cover of the global war on
terrorism, also labeled Islamic “extremism.” The Abu
Sayyaf and the New People’s Army serve as pretexts for
perennial US military intervention. Would Rizal want the
country partitioned by greedy corporate speculators and
their agents in the ongoing genocidal war against peoples
of color?

Numerous biographies celebrate Rizal as “the first

Filipino” (Guerrero) “the pride of the Malay Race” (Palma},
even the antithetical American-made hero
(Constantino)—the canonical icon of the patriot-liberator
(Bonoan 1996) worshipped every June and December.
Unless we want to be pharisaical acolytes and
hagiographers, we need to renew our commitment to
Rizal’s ideas, not his image. The commentaries in my
previous book Rizal In Our Time (1977), as well as my
reflections on Rizal’s travels in the US (included in
Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (2008), seek to
provoke a re-thinking of what it means to be a Filipino
particularly at a time when the country is undergoing dire,
almost perpetual crisis. My essays use Rizal as a
27
catalyzing point of departure, especially in the light of its
citizens becoming an embattled diaspora--more than ten
million overseas Filipinos (migrants, expatriates) labor as
exploited domestics and contract workers scattered
around the planet, while their homeland’s natural
endowments, cultures and traditions are wasted by
foreign profiteers supported by comprador parasites who
claim to be the elected stewards of the land.
While visiting Cuba in the 1980s, I found millions
of Cubans spellbound by Rizal’s two novels—read in the
original Spanish by more people in Cuba than in the
Philippines, or elsewhere. While Rizal did not reach Cuba
as a volunteer doctor in 1896, his novels arrived there a
hundred years after, thanks to Fidel Castro’s and Che
Guevara’s anti-imperialist revolution (Martinez Ramirez
1961). Rizal as an exile within his own country and as a
scholar/traveler in the US and Europe may provide
lessons for us in our postmodern but neocolonial
deracination. It may yield clues and signposts useful for
re-discovering our rich historical tradition of resistance
against colonial domination, and our untapped resources
for renewing the revolutionary legacy and internationalist
solidarity that Rizal embodied in his life and works.
___________________________

Prologue to an Inquest

Ever since the Renaissance and the rise of the

European bourgeoisie, the focus of critical attention has
shifted from the cosmic totality to the individual. This
individualist metaphysic acquired logical form in
Descartes’ abolition of doubt by the ego-centered
consciousness. The solitary individual, Robinson Crusoe
as master-narrative hero, occupied center-stage in
mapping the heterogeneous process of worldwide social
development. Its culmination in Locke’s empiricism and
Hegel’s idealism reinforced the triumph of the property-
owner, the profit-obsessed slave-trader and manufacturer,
and eventually the broker-financier of empire. All events
and changes in society were ascribed to individual
thoughts and private decisions, marginalizing its larger
context in the changes in social relations locally and

28
globally, triggered by profound alterations in the mode of
production and reproduction of material life.
Historians followed suit in analyzing the turn of events in
their surroundings. By describing heroes and their lives,
thinkers believed that they have explained and charted the
vicissitudes of whole social domains—until Marx (in
“Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” and The
German Ideology) restored balance by re-locating
individual protagonists in the political economy they
inhabit.

In the “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx posited that

the “human essence is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the
social relations” (1975, 423). In the ultimate analysis, the
individual subject may be viewed as a microcosm of the
whole social fabric that generates his potential and his
actuality, without which this monadic figure has no
meaning or consequence. Reciprocally, the opaque
density of the social background is illumined and
concretely defined by individual acts of intervention, such
as Rizal’s novels, without which society and the physical
world remain indifferent. We need this dialectical
approach to comprehend in a more all-encompassing way
Rizal’s vexed and vexing situation, together with his
painstakingly calculated responses—all cunning ruses of
Reason in history (for Hegel). Such ruses actually register
the contradictions of social forces in real life, reflected in
the crises of lives in each generation.

The substantial biographies of Rizal--from Austin

Craig to Rafael Palma, Leon Maria Guerrero to Austin
Coates--all attempted to triangulate the ideas of the hero
with his varying positions in his family, in the circle of his
friends and colleagues in Europe, and in relation to the
colonial Establishment. Their main concern is to find out
the origin of the hero’s thoughts and their impact on the
local environment. But the twin errors of contemplative
objectivism and individualist bias persisted in vitiating
their accounts. They ignored the historical-materialist
axiom that the changing of circumstances and of personal
sensibility/minds, as Marx advised, “can be conceived and
rationally understood only as revolutionary
29
practice”—that is, sensuous collective praxis in material
life. In Palma’s biography, for example, the novelty of
Rizal’s project of the Liga Filipina became simply “a
means to defray the expenses of the colonization of
Borneo” (1949, 202; see Zaide and Zaide 1984). In reality,
the Liga is the chief emblematic index of that
transformative praxis fusing personal experience and
objective circumstances. It is the crucible marking the
failure of La Solidaridad reformism and the transition to
the stage of popular mobilization mediated by the rising
organic intellectuals of the dispossessed, in particular
Andres Bonifacio, Jacinto, and others. Rizal’s radicalizing
agenda was already distilled in his bold testimony of
communicative action, the eloquent “Letter to the Women
of Malolos” (more later), and articulated in the two letters
dated June 20, 1892, letters whose resonance and value
can perhaps be compared only to St. Paul’s epistles to the
early converts of the faith.

By all accounts, the formation of the Liga is the

key event marking Rizal’s leap from intellectual
gradualism to collective separatism. Before his exile to
Dapitan in 1892, Rizal met with members of the Masonic
Balagtas Lodge in the home of Doroteo Onjungco,
including Ambrosio Salvador, Timoteo Paez, Pedro
Serrano, Domingo Franco, and, last but not least, Andres
Bonifacio, who was then not distinguishable from the
crowd of about thirty individuals. After Governor Despujol
decreed Rizal’s banishment, the Liga members met
secretly in the Azcarraga apartment of Deodato Arellano,
among them Andres Bonifacio and Gregorio Del Pilar, who
later died fighting American troops pursuing the fleeing
Aguinaldo headed for Palanan (Palma 1949, 225). That
historic gathering of seven persons signaled the
launching of the Katipunan, the organization of “sons of
the people” committed to overthrowing Spanish colonial
tyranny.

Coincidentally, then, the banishment of Rizal to the

southern outpost of Dapitan occurred with the
implementation of decisions to liberate the country from
the stranglehold of the “mother country,” Spain. That
sequence of events at this conjuncture of Rizal’s life, as
30
Floro Quibuyen (1999) and others have shown, epitomizes
the translation of ideas into organized mass activism, a
description of the political shift that is less problematic
than the reappropriation of the pasyon by popular
consciousness (Ileto 1998). Spontaneous mass strikes
and actions are blind, ineffectual and self-defeating
without the mediation of organic intellectuals and
organized leadership, as Rizal’s contemporaries Bakunin
and Kropotkin (Laqueur 1978; Guerin 1970) have argued.
Rizal’s Fili is a cogent demonstration of that truth.

Critique of the Orthodox Canon

So far we have sketched in this book a historical-

materialist approach to Rizal’s thought and career. Its
foundational premise is that Rizal is a social and historical
product of his time, actor and acted upon in specific
historical circumstances. We know that Rizal blamed fate
on the eve of his execution, but he did not disavow
responsibility for acts that led to that denouement. He
was not a tragic hero, simply a combatant spokesman of
all the subjugated in the anti-colonial war. He incarnated
the critical universality of the Philippine revolution. While
Rizal was formed by his sociopolitical milieu, he
interacted with specific actors/players and tried to
synthesize the disparate forces and convergent
tendencies in his unique situation. To separate the
psyche from the historical situation would result in the
flamboyant psychologizing of Ante Radaic and other
postmodernist gurus; conversely, to ignore Rizal’s
concrete life-situation is to simplify and reify the
pressures of his dynamic milieu.

One would expect Leon Maria Guerrero to be more

nuanced and circumspect. In his magisterial biography,
however, the endeavor to explain Rizal as a phenomenon
of his time dissolves into untenable speculations.
Following Cesar Majul’s reading of Rizal’s concept of a
Filipino national community supplanting the traditional
assemblage of creoles and subaltern natives under the
Spanish Crown and the Roman Catholic Church, Guerrero
jumps to the conclusion that the Liga presumed the unity
of all classes, entirely unlike Bonifacio’s Katipunan.
31
Consequently, opposed to Rizal’s dialectical synthesis of
thought and action in oppositional praxis, Guerrero
continues the mechanical disjunction of unity, and then
prosperity for all natives first before independence, a
proposition he attributes to Rizal (1969, 429). Guerrero
reads the exchanges between Ibarra and Elias in the Noli
with the same moralizing drive, while the dialogue
between Simoun and Basilio in the Fili is interpreted as a
symptom of Rizal’s disillusionment with Spain. But
Simoun’s plan of exacerbating abuses, sowing mayhen,
inciting crowds to revolt—the telltale anarchist syndrome-
-is rejected in Father Florentino’s sermon. The priest avers
that “the sword no longer wields much influence on the
destinies of our age” and that “our sufferings are our own
fault.” Guerrero congeals the tension of clashing beliefs,
making Rizal a partisan of the evolutionist party rather
than grasping the dynamic realism (immanent in the
Ibarra/Simoun double) of calculating ends and means in
accordance with the volatile, ceaselessly mutating level of
the spontaneous political impulse of the masses and the
initiatives of their organic leaders. The Rizal
problematique escapes such a paralyzing maneuver.

Arguing the thesis that Rizal is a reluctant

revolutionary, Guerrero cannot avoid a dualistic, either/or
viewpoint which privileges selected episodes/ideas of the
hero’s career. He contends that the Liga was designed
only for recruiting rich progressives and liberal
intellectuals—we saw Bonifacio and other plebeian
activists present during its inaugural moments--while the
Katipunan was intended mainly to attract the proletarian
horde. Guerrero’s static and economistic prejudice infects
his whole biography, as obvious in the prolix sophistry of
his discourse so reminiscent of Cold War polemics in the
aftermath of World War II. Here is a specimen of
Guerrero’s pontifications:

But any difference in their social objectives was undefined

and unspoken; Rizal read Voltaire and Bonifacio read
Carlyle and the “Lives of the American Presidents”;
neither seems to have read Marx or Bakunin or Proudhon.
Both the Liga and the Katipunan, therefore, were based on
the comfortable theory of the social compact: unity,
32
mutual protection and mutual help. But neither was aware
of the issue that was already tearing western civilization
apart: the choice between liberty and equality (1969, 431).

Can anyone take seriously this tendentious disjunction

between liberty and equality as anything but a disguised
re-statement of the ideological conflict between the
pseudo-liberty of capitalist business society and the
postulated equality of atheistic communism? Liberty of
an exclusive few without equality is what Rizal
condemned and struggled against, precisely that ruthless
autocratic behemoth (Spain’s decadent empire) to which
Elias’ ancestors, Sisa’s children, and Cabesang Tales’
family were sacrificed. In a world of widespread poverty,
official criminality, and imperial wars in the 1950s and
1960s, especially the brutal campaign against the Huks,
liberty for whom? Liberty for what?

Of course, one cannot fault Guerrero for being a

product of his own milieu. Just as one cannot criticize
Nick Joaquin for being a diehard apologist for the
ilustrado generation of surviving creoles (from Fr. Jose
Burgos to Trinidad Pardo de Tavera) and their
descendants whose passing he laments. Joaquin’s total
oeuvre is a melodramatic elegy to its demise. In his two
essays on Rizal in A Question of Heroes, Joaquin
compares and contrasts Guerrero and Radaic’s portraits
of Rizal. He praises Guerrero’s crafted narrative of Rizal’s
career as a kind of “anti-hero.” Guerrero argues that the
1896 revolution was hatched in Spain by the propertied
bourgeoisie to which Rizal and the propagandistas
belonged. Guerrero believes that Rizal’s retraction (his
disavowal of Masonic and rationalist errors) was
authentic; that Rizal’s apostolate did not give him real
social consciousness and so he remained a member of
the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia. Rizal’s nationalism was
“essentially rationalist,” anti-clerical and anti-racist,
political rather than social or economic. In short, Rizal was
the typical Victorian sage who believed in the dogma of
reason, inevitable progress through science and
commerce, and the efficacy of parliamentary
representation, even up to the last moments of his life.

33
Rizal was an evolutionist or eventualist politician, not a
revolutionary intellectual.

Lest he be accused of partiality, Guerrero

acknowledges the ambivalences in Rizal’s writings, if not
in his varying standpoints at different stages of his life.
Cognizant of his privileged background, Rizal
sympathized with the oppressed and exploited, with Sisa’s
family and Cabesang Tales’ clan. We recall how his family
and relatives suffered enormously when they were ejected
from their homes by the Dominican friars in October-
November 1981. But, according to Guerrero, Rizal was
afraid of the “bloody apparitions” of violence, the
excesses of “premature conspiracies,” especially those
committed by the mobs of yesterday’s slaves become
today’s tyrants—to echo Father Florentino’s glib dismissal
of filibusteros. Guerrero could not disregard this, so he
begrudgingly calls Rizal a “reluctant revolutionary” who
condemned the means used by Bonifacio but not the aim
of overthrowing the colonial power. Rizal suffered from a
Hamlet-like schizophrenia, his will to act paralyzed by
scruples and reservations—a trait acutely observed by
Miguel de Unamuno, but blown to disproportionate
importance by Radaic in his psychoanalytic diagnosis of
Rizal as a “delicate human problem.” Rizal may have
united both subversive and progressive elements, but he
did not create the idea of the nation on his own and so
became the “first Filipino,” as Joaquin notes in his
chronicling of the irreconcilable hostility between the
creoles and the peninsulares.

Purging the Sins of the Fathers

Both Guerrero and Joaquin seem to share the

notion that before Spain’s arrival, the Philippines was
comprised of separate, disjoined, non-communicating
primitive tribes. At best, the numerous revolts of Dagohoy,
Malong, Almazen, Hermano Pule, and others later called
“cultural minorities” signified mere ethnic group
demands, parochial and detached from each other. For
Joaquin, it was Spain and Christianity that molded the
diverse tribes into one. Joaquin declares that Spanish
colonial rule served as the matrix or womb that enabled
34
Rizal and other creole ilustrados to envision a compact
and homogeneous society based on common interests
and mutual protection rather than allegiance to Spain and
the Catholic Church. At the same time, however, it could
not escape the notice of our two apologists that all those
revolts, removed from each other in time and space, in
one degree or another share an origin in common
grievances and fate: the abuses of the institutional power
of Church and State. It was this oppressive
feudal/tributary relation of production, founded on the
monopoly of productive means by the colonizing power,
which generated collective protests and insurrections
periodically, throughout the islands. Meanwhile, the
Igorots, Moros and other pagan communities resisted and
could not be subdued by Spanish might, utilizing various
native groups conscripted into the military apparatus.
They are lumped together with bandits, outlaws, and
pariahs as inhuman “others” close to the animal kingdom
and so could be destroyed any time with impunity.

Owing to various changes in the mode of

production from Legaspi’s time to the eighteenth century,
a small merchant-farming class of creoles arose in the
nineteenth century from which Rizal and other ilustrados
emerged. It was not a bourgeoisie according to the
European model, but a petty bourgeoisie of
creoles/mestizos (Spanish, Chinese, Indios intermarrying)
composed of small farmers, merchants, artisans, and their
educated children that sprang from the interstices of the
colonial structure. Through the institutions of highly
regulated schools, printing press, and secular business,
this group flourished intermittently until it came into direct
conflict with Spanish civil and religious authority that then
gradually lost its legitimacy in failing to take into account
the growing material wealth and power of this new group
of principales. In time, the ideology and principles of this
emergent sector constituted a counterhegemonic bloc
that Rizal allied himself with.

The secularization movement among the clergy

initially spearheaded by creoles (witness the martyred
priests Jose Burgos, Mariano Gomez, and Jacinto
Zamora) was the culmination of the upheaval in the
35
economic and political infrastructures. Its impact can be
discerned both in the ilustrado demand for reforms and in
the hardening reactionary defensiveness of the religious
orders and the weak or indifferent Spanish officials
representing the Madrid government. Obscurantist
dogmatism and feudal authoritarian practices, from 1972
to the outbreak of the 1896 insurrection, could no longer
plausibly claim to represent the talent, money, aspirations
and other interests of the creoles. Joaquin argues that
from the 1820 Novales revolt to the 1840 Palmares
conspiracy, up to the secularizing agitation led by Father
Pelaez in the 1850-60s, this creole movement paralleled
the mobilization of its Latin American counterparts
Bolivar, San Martin, and others, which eventually liberated
the continent from Spanish control. This is the reason
Rizal’s hero, Juan Crisostomo Ibarra, was a creole
descended from Basque ancestors, gentlemen
landowners, who had become naturalized, as it were, in
the colony. Like Rizal (though more Chinese than
Spanish), Ibarra was thus a “translated Filipino,” not a
primordial Indio or Malay indigene.

From this historical vantage point, Joaquin

belabors his argument to dovetail with Guerrero’s opinion
that Rizal was “the first Filipino.” He was “first” only in the
sense that Rizal vigorously articulated in his essays,
particularly in his annotations on Morga’s chronicle and in
“The Philippines A Century Hence,” the imperative of
solidarity among the aboriginal ethnolinguistic groups
inhabiting the islands in the face of an illegitimate
occupying power. It is not clear if Rizal would include the
Moros and other Lumads into this assemblage of rational
literate constituencies. In any case, it goes against the
grain of facts and public consensus to insist that
th
Hispanization in the 19 century was proceeding well after
the victories against competing European powers that
finally broke the siege mentality of Intramuros. And it is
rather special pleading to argue that despite the abuses of
the friars and corrupt officials, the centuries-long
resistance to Dutch and British invaders (with their
schismatic Protestantism) involving creoles and native
soldiers from Pampanga, Ilocos and the Tagalog regions
who allegedly were not mercenaries, can be considered
36
the narrative of the making of the Filipino nation.
Whatever the subtle discriminations in their discourse, for
Joaquin and Guerrero, the Spanish-descended creoles
and their Indio subalterns constituted the Filipino nation
long before the rise of the Katipunan and the
establishment of the short-lived Malolos Republic. And so
the millions of Indios who were forced to work in the
mines, build the galleons, and sacrifice their lives in the
military campaigns to suppress the local revolts were all
complicit in the genesis of the Filipino as a distinct
national formation. Would Rizal’s eventualism and even
self-righteous horror at the “highly absurd” Katipunan
uprising support such a genealogical hypothesis? Could
this lesson in nation-making be part of the Malolos
women’s curriculum and self-administered tutelage?

Joaquin finally argues that the Rizal phenomenon

encapsulates the vicissitudes of the creole anti-Spanish
insurrection from the 1870s (the Cavite Mutiny and
execution of the three priests) to the 1890s (the
termination of La Solidaridad and the abortive founding of
the Liga Filipina). As Rizal himself said, he became a
radical because of the failure of Pelaez-Burgos’ peaceful
secularization campaign. This is the logic behind the
transition from the naïve reformism of the Noli to the
proto-anarchist, more precisely adventurist, play of ideas
and character dispositions in the Fili. While the Noli ‘s
outlook is assimilationist in the mode of the liberalizing
(not yet libertarian) creoles Rizal admired, the Fili’s stance
is separatist, following the anti-obscurantist Marcelo del
Pilar and the Americanizing T. H. Pardo de Tavera. Rizal’s
trajectory also mirrors the transition from preoccupation
with Morga’s records of the past and with “On the
Indolence of Filipinos,” to the prophetic deliberations of
“The Philippines a Century Hence.” Time conquers
space; history overcomes the fetish of the transcendent.
And Aguinaldo trumps Bonifacio, Luna and Mabini.

Anatomy of the Hero’s Soul

Readers generally want happy endings. The

scholastic prejudice is that Rizal summarized his whole
life in the sermon of Padre Florentino at the end of the Fili,
37
particularly in the now worn-out slogan: “To suffer and to
work!” But this is precisely what Cabesang Tales, Basilio,
Isagani, and others did, all to no avail. Evil was not
diminished, much less extinguished; God remained
hidden, eclipsed, “disappeared, “ and finally neutralized,
with the victims dismissed as “collateral damage” (to use
the Pentagon parlance). Justice delays, procrastinates,
malingers somewhere. On the other hand, we should not
ignore the ambiguity of the priest’s counsel, which implies
that work—collective praxis engaged by the bondsmen
and colonized subalterns—transforms character and
collective destiny. After alleging that force no longer plays
a role in the shaping of modern polities, Padre Florentino
continues: “…yes, but we must win it [freedom] ,
deserving it, raising the intelligence and the dignity of the
individual, loving the just, the good, the great, even dying
for it, and when a people reach that height, God provides
the weapon, and the idols fall, the tyrants fall like a house
of cards and liberty shines with the first dawn” (2004, 410).

From Rizal’s deistic optic, “God” here is a

shorthand term for “history” epitomized in the
eschatological turn of events. God’s presence is
ascertainable from the classic saying: “vox populi vox
dei.” Padre Florentino does not hedge his bets in the
agnostic, millenarian wager: both passive empiricism
(suffer) and active engagement (work) constitute the
unfolding of human capabilities in the development of
human knowledge and scientific control and manipulation
of nature’s forces. Rizal’s faith in rational self-regulation
and technological progress may be perceived even in
Padre Florentino’s belief that time and nature are on the
side of the just; after throwing Simoun’s wealth to the
ocean, he exclaims: “May Nature guard you in her deep
abysses among the corals and pearls of her eternal
seas!…When for a holy and sublime end men should need
you, God will draw you from the breast of the waves…” (
2004, 413). Human necessity becomes God’s accomplice;
fatalism is thus circumvented. But we know that it is
merely a token gesture, for the social wealth that
unequally circulates in the world continues to distort right
and foment avarice, contrary to the cleric’s fanciful wish-

38
fulfillment. Subjective will power cannot transcend by its
own efforts the limitations of objective social reality.

This is the ambition of psychologically-oriented

critics such as Ante Radaic (1999) and other biographers
concentrating on idiosyncratic aspects of Rizal’s
personality. From the Victorian anti-hero of Guerrero, we
move to the psychoanalytic case study of Radaic, the
modern man afflicted with existential anguish. Radaic’s
theory of Rizal’s character is simple: Rizal’s physical
inadequacies—short height, frail or puny body,
etc.—produced an inferiority complex that drove him to
compensate by cultivating his intellectual resources and
sharpening his skills in artistic endeavors (writing,
musical and theatrical performances, amorous games,
etc.). Rizal’s physical defects, heightened by an
introjected ideal image of the body, the ideal “I” or ego,
generated a discordance or imbalance that needed
correction. According to Radaic, the symptom for this
unresolved predicament may be seen in a spiritual excess
that manifested itself in extreme scrupulosity,
indecisiveness, melancholy, and terror of certain unknown
forces outside the tranquility of home in Calamba and the
protection of his mother and father. In other words, the
diminutive size of Rizal’s body explains both positive and
negative aspects of his life: his omnivorous capacity in
learning languages, his inexhaustible intellectual
curiosity, his prolific writing, restless amorous
engagements, and so on. But did Rizal’s activities resolve
the contradiction between appearance and reality, reason
and irrationality?

So we confront a “deep and delicate human

problem” personified by Rizal. His exile and travels
symbolize this problem of discrepancy between the
interior and exterior, between his ideals and his
constrained situation. The result is recorded in a
nostalgia-laden confession found in Memorias de Un
Estudiante to which we have already alluded in previous
chapters: “At the critical moments of my life I have
always acted against my will, obeying other ends and
powerful duties.” Unamuno, Retana and others have
commented on this typical dilemma: the bold dreamer
39
with a weak will, irresolute in action, withdrawing and
delaying (“filibustering” may be the appropriate epithet,
though the Spanish “filibusterismo” has more subversive,
sinister connotations), terrified by the “bloody
apparitions” of political turbulence. This has also
engendered the thought of a “multitudinous”Rizal, a
character with miraculous protean qualities, easily
switching positions—from reformist to revolutionary, and
back—difficult to pin down. He also tended to view sexual
love as a “yoke” that can imprison, a constricting burden.
Radaic thinks this is a symptom of sexual inadequacy,
whether real or imagined, as shown in his attitude toward
Segunda Katigbak. Rizal’s pathogenic and neurotic
personality harbors wounds that refuse to heal, driving
him to compensate by channeling frustrated energies to
other activities, sublimating libidinal impulses by other
means. In other words, his whole life may be seen as an
attempt to ascend from his self-perceived physical
deformity to superior heights.

Surely there were millions suffering from those

defects in the nineteenth century, but none of them
approximates the historical figure of Rizal. Sartre once
said that Paul Valery is a bourgeois poet, but not all
members of the bourgeois class can be considered
Valery. In short, determing the class identity and
clan/racial lineage of an individual, much less his physical
dimensions, does not provide any clue toward adequately
explaining the historically specific social phenomenon
called “Rizal.” The same applies to Radaic’s version of
the Rizal complex: not only is it reductive and distorting, it
also endorses a toxic ideology of individualism that Rizal
himself repudiated at various crises of his life. His
monumental sacrifices to complete his novels, as well as
his efforts to rescue his family from privations, and other
acts of sympathy and solidarity with others, are
incontestable proofs. Moreover, the putative
th
“individualism” of colonial subjects in 19 -century
Philippines is a peculiar morbidity that cannot be
mistaken for the neurotic individualism of modern
industrial society.

40
 Alienation in an obsolescent Spanish colony
cannot be equated to anomie and reification in twentieth-
century Europe or North America. Since others have spent
time and energy demonstrating the limits of the
doctrinaire psychoanalytic treatment applied to Rizal, I
would suggest to adventurous inquirers to re-appraise
Rizal’s life from a historical-materialist standpoint. They
should foreground those writings in which he disavowed
this fallacy of self-serving, mendacious individualism as a
method of understanding the complexity of the human
condition traversed and contoured by diverse historical
contingencies.

Either/Or: Hermeneutics of Suspects

The debate on Rizal’s contemporary significance

pivots around the issue of whether Rizal was an authentic
revolutionary, or a mere American idol foisted on naïve
subalterns. To put it in Renato Constantino’s
dichotomizing option, the choice is whether we should
follow Rizal or Bonifacio as the modern national hero
(1970, 125-46; see Ocampo 1998). It’s a wager for high
stakes. On occasion, Rizal himself entertained a moralistic
dualism when he asserts in “Cuento Tendencioso,” for
instance: “Ang sagot sa dahas ay dahas, kapag bingi sa
katuwiran” {The response to force is force, if the other is
deaf to reason]. To be sure, Rizal parodied the moralizing
opportunism of his contemporaries in satires such as “By
Telephone,” “The Vision of Fr. Rodriguez,” and
“Reflections of a Filipino” (1974). Antinomies of thought
cannot be solved by abstract casuistry, divorced from the
concrete historical specificities, the determinant limits and
possibilities of each situation.

No doubt Rizal wanted a total reconstruction of

society, a wide-ranging and thoroughgoing
transformation. But how? By whom? With what? While
the genealogy of Rizal’s concept of the nation—the core of
Rizal’s moral realism that postcolonial critics reject as
monistic, totalizing, linear, homogenizing, etc.—in
Enlightenment humanism and universal altruism is no
longer a point of controversy, the question of Rizal’s
praxis remains highly contentious. That praxis, based on
41
popular education and the exercise of civic virtues, is
premised on the self-development of an inborn potential,
the species being of homo sapiens (for the American
canonization of Rizal, see Kramer 2006; one anti-
imperialist eulogy is exemplified by Bigelow 1899).
Nonetheless, the bureaucrats continue to sanctify the
conventional iconic Rizal, ignoring the Rizal of the 1892
letters, the letter to the Malolos women, among other
writings, and the aborted project of the Liga and its call to
Filipinos to assume responsibility—that is, to exercise
their freedom by criticizing and subverting the oppressive,
irrational order.

Rizal is the prophet of an Enlightenment philosophy

founded on the imperative of humans overthrowing the
gods and claiming their worldly freedom. This Promethean
vocation is still formulated in scholastic terms. Four years
before his death, he wrote to Father Pastells while in exile
in Dapitan: “…but I rejoice more when I contemplate
humanity in its immortal march, always progressing in
spite of its declines and falls, in spite of 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” (dated Nov. 11, 1892). But this
evolutionist creed was counterpointed by chiliastic
interruptions and millenarian impulses, as evinced not
only in the novels but also in his letters and essays.
However, the metaphysical disposition of idealizing
thought separate from social practice persists. Skeptical
individualism intrudes in the guise of a salvific messiah.
This is why we choose to highlight and valorize aspects of
Rizal’s highly adaptive, versatile, conjunctural thinking
relative to our own purposes regardless of their
determinant contexts and their entanglement in particular
circumstances. In short, we fashion the Rizal we want to
revere, disregarding the totality of his life and the milieu
that circumscribe the serviceability and pragmatic import
of his ideas. We invent our own Rizal, afraid to confront
the challenge of self-contradictory reality and act on it.

42
 But before this program of re-invention becomes
exorbitant and self-serving, let us for a moment reflect on
what inspires it. In the light of Benedict Anderson’s
fascinating book Under Three Flags (2005), which deals
more with the influence of anarchism in Europe, Asia and
Latin America rather than with Rizal or Filipino
nationalism per se, it would be timely to re-open the issue
of Rizal’s equivocations. I fully agree with Jim
Richardson’s (2006) shrewd and incisive comments on
Anderson’s errors and limitations. One notable failure of
intelligence is Anderson’s judgment that Rizal was really
not “a political thinker,” but merely a moralist and
novelist. Anderson set out to chart the gravitational force
of selected anarchist ideas—not so much the classic
versions of Proudhon and Bakunin but of the
propagandist of deeds (bomb throwing, assassinations,
terror) extolled by Errico Malatesta, Sergey Nechayev,
Fernando Tarrida del Marmol, and others. In the process
of deploying montage, serialized and episodic narration
spiced with a gratuituous sprinkling of Eurocentric
hauteur, Anderson only achieves what Richardson calls
an “illusion of interconnectedness.” Anderson’s “political
astronomy” could not identify correctly the shifting
valence and the gravitational force of the myriad
constellations in the galaxy of traveling anarchism. For
example, Anderson considers the Fili incoherent, acerbic
toward liberals but lax toward the lecherous friars,
“largely oblivious or indifferent to the social misery in
Europe itself” (2005, 108), and its hero Simoun nothing but
a “cynical nihilist conspirator.” Simoun’s malady is
traced to ”an unscrupulous and cruel Basque
grandfather” and the failed conspiracy a poor imitation of
European ones, such as the 1892 Jerez uprising and those
of the assassins Ravachol and Auguste Vaillant.

Anderson’s treatise strives to delineate the

anarchisant, not anarchist, temper of Rizal’s Fili. The
presumably cynical, nihilist Simoun had no solid plan
after the success of his revenge, only a dream of a
formless, utopian liberty, hence its failure. Anderson’s
conclusion recapitulates his thematic intent of classifying
Rizal as a minor constellation in the galaxy of global
anarchism:
43
It is exactly here that Rizal marked the crisscrossing of
anticolonial nationalism and “propaganda by the deed,”
with its planless utopianism and its taste for self-
immolation. From my deed and death something will come
which will be better than the unlivable present…. [Simoun]
is a sort of espectro mundial come to haunt the
Philippines, mirroring what Izquierdo had once fantasized
as the invisible machiavellian network of he International.
Not there yet in reality, but, since already imagined, just
like his nation, on the way…. …Europe itself, Rizal
thought, was menaced by a vast conflagration among its
warring powers, but also by violent movement from below
(2005, 121).

Overall, the Fili then is not so much a realistic

depiction of events in the Philippines but a premonitory if
not prophetic unfolding of what’s to come. It functions as
a seismograph of the tremulous, convulsive,
phantasmagoric future looming on the horizon—the revolt
of the Katipunan’s unwashed masses, and soon after the
invasion of the Yankee troops complete with their
sophisticated “water cure,” scorched-earth hamletting,
and summary executions of village folk. Gramsci’s insight
fits nicely this anticipated in-between, transitional phase:
“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this
interregnum there arises a great variety of morbid
symptoms.” Isagani’s enigmatic smile and regret at
having averted the cataclysm may be diagnosed as one of
these multifarious symptoms, and Padre Florentino’s
work-and-suffer nostrum as another.

An Inventory of Symptoms

There seems to be no clear proof that Rizal

sympathized with or held anarchist convictions. But it is
impossible to believe that throughout his sojourn in
Europe he was insulated from the ideas of Proudhon,
Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others. It was part of the cultural
climate, the atmosphere of intellectual conversations. He
was probably acquainted with the socialist inclination of
his contemporaries Juan Luna, Mariano Ponce, Teodoro
Sandiko, and others. Rizal might not have conversed with
44
the two Russian nihilists in the drawing room of his friend
Pardo de Tavera in Paris in the 1880s, he was probably
aware of reports about Russian scientific and cultural
developments. As a revealing clue to Rizal’s wide
internationalist contacts in Madrid alone, not to mention
during his travels, note the roster of distinguished guests
at the 1884 banquet in honor of Juan Luna and Felix
Resurrecion Hidalgo at which Rizal was the main speaker
(Baron-Fernandez 1980, 74-76)—a landmark even for the
propagandistas.
But never mind, Richardson counsels us, the
rhizomal network of anarchism might have penetrated into
the interstices of Rizal’s psyche, as suggested by certain
leitmotifs caught in discourse, grammatology, and the
ambiguities of language. While Rizal affirmed the dignity
of the autonomous individual, this did not imply a
glorification of self-serving deeds nor an unqualified
endorsement of the authority of abstract principles,
contrary to what Anderson says of Rizal’s intention in
founding the Liga. The Constitution of the Liga by itself is
not a self-evident performative text detached from the
field-force of collective action and institutional practice.

One example of the pomodernist hubris of

textualizing everything may be found in the reading of the
Fili as a parable of the filibustero as epitome of Otherness,
the phantom alien body that discombobulates all static,
definitive meanings. This anti-authoritarian figure
unsettles hierarchy, all fixed and stable identities. It
signifies a power of translation or transmission that
crosses boundaries and mixes everything. Vicente Rafael
postulates that the slippery role of this outsider/foreigner
may be taken as the key to grasping the edgy, nervous,
embryonic kind of nationalism:

We can think of the Fili as the site within which

[Rizal] rehearsed this ambivalence at the foundation of
nationalist sentiments. The novel is a record of the
hesitations and anxieties raised by the failure of
assimilation, giving rise to the specters of separation. The
figure of the filibustero was its medium for tracking and
trafficking in the emergence, spread, and containment of
such anxieties. It is this fundamentally unsettling nature
45
of the filibustero as both medium and message that
infests, as it were, both the author and his characters
(2003, 170-71).

In a letter to the Austrian scientist Ferdinand

Blumentritt, Rizal confessed that he heard the word
“filibustero” for the first time in 1872 when the “tragic
executions” of Burgos, Gomez and Zamora occurred: “It
does not have the meaning of ‘pirate’; it means rather a
dangerous patriot who will soon be on the gallows, or else
a conceited fellow” (Guerrero 1969, 271). But the novel
focuses on the activity or movement of “filibusterism,” not
on single dissidents such as Simoun or Cabesang Tales.
Protagonists are meaningless removed from the
constituting narrative structure. Further, the failure of
Macaraig and other reformers (assimilationists) does not
automatically give rise to Simoun’s apocalyptic vision of a
whole society’s death and renewal. The task of
deconstructing an elite-sponsored nationalism, however
treacherous and tyrannical, cannot be assigned to the
trope of the filibustero precisely because the nascent elite
then was suppressed before it could flourish; hence Padre
Florentino’s extreme unction/consoling speech falls on
the defunct ears of the dying subversive.

The Fili was dedicated to the memory of the three

priests-martyrs who were implicated, without admissible
evidence, with the 1872 Cavite Mutiny. Rizal accused the
government of shrouding the martyrs’ cause “with
mystery and obscurities.” Accordingly, his aim in writing
the novel is to demystify and expose, as elaborated in his
address “to the Filipino People and their Government”:
“Setting aside, therefore, the old custom of respecting
myths in order not to encounter the dreaded reality, we
look at it face to face instead of fleeing, and with assertive
though inexpert hand, we raise the shroud in order to
uncover before the multitude the structure of the
skeleton.” More exactly, Rizal wanted to display to the
multitude the rotting cadaver of colonial society, the
repulsive decay of the corporeal scaffold of its skeleton.
Unlike the magician Dr. Leeds, Rizal the novelist
seeks to dissolve magical secrets, hypocrisies, abusive
practices using sacred trappings and taboos. In the Noli
46
likewise, Rizal aimed to expose the social cancer “on the
steps of the temple“ (that is, by publication of his truth-
bearing testimony) so that each one who would come to
invoke the Divine, would propose a cure, implicating
himself in this therapeutic scheme: “I will lift part of the
shroud that conceals your illness, sacrificing to the truth
everything, even my own self-respect, for, as your son, I
also suffer in your defects and failings.” In exploring the
variegated worldviews and mentalities of his characters
mapped in varying situations, Rizal engaged in the project
of radical social critique.

Indicting Maledictions

The power of Rizal’s critique cannot be over-

emphasized. One of its basic dimensions consists of
exploding the illusion of the inevitability of events by
showing that the aura of fatality surrounding them is due
to how we conceive them, due to our own frame of mind,
attitudes, dispositions (to paraphrase Buck-Morrs [2003,
42]. Rizal’s critique of colonial ideology via mimesis and
symbolism involves the act of disrupting the colonial-
theocratic apparatus of mystification that surrounds the
“moment of truth” found in every effort of understanding
life and social experience; in turn, this moment of
discovery is then subsumed or superseded within a more
comprehensive theory of explaining the contradictions
between belief and reality, truth and appearance, that
bedevils all interpellated subjects in society (for dialectical
theory, see Howard 1977).

Inscribed within the general contradiction between

colonized exploited native bodies and universal religion
preaching the transcendent community of all souls, we
find the particular contradiction between the social
classes, genders, ethnicities and nationalities in the
colony. For Rizal, the species-being, what is potentially
human but repressed in Filipinos, is in conflict with the
prevailing institutional structures and norms. In this light,
Simoun (as well as Tasio and Padre Florentino) refract in
themselves not only as individuals but also as members
of a community (potential or real), the particular plight of
the filibustero, which is a pivotal moment in the dynamic
47
unfolding of self-contradictory social processes in which
everyone is embedded. Filibusterismo is the name of this
interlinked acts of refraction, suturing and
demystification.

Rizal’s position then cannot be reduced to that of

one character’s conduct and pronouncements. His project
is exploratory, heuristic, and experimental. An illustration
of his heteroglotic or carnivalesque (to borrow Bakhtin’s
terms) mode of critique—the negative-positive movement
of supersession performed by articulating the voices of
his characters with their intersecting fates--may be found
in the confrontation between Ibarra and Tasio in the Noli.
We know that Tasio prefigures many other characters in
the novel whose ambitions are foiled and hopes thwarted;
he remains unreconciled to what exists, on the level of
thought and behavior. What is striking is not his
nonconformist attitudes but his rebellious prophetic
stance. He anticipates Simoun when he responds to
Ibarra’s declaration of trust in religion and state authority.
He also foreshadows Ibarra’s fall as he proceeds to
acquire and disseminate knowledge of the truth of what’s
going on:

The people do not complain because they have no

voice, do not move because they are lethargic, and you
say that they do not suffer, because you have not seen
their hearts bleed. But one day you will see and you will
hear, and ah! woe unto them that build their strength on
ignorance or in fanaticism; woe unto them who are
engaged in deception and work in darkness, believing that
all are asleep! When the light of day illuminates the
monster of the shadows, the terrible reaction will come:
so much strength bottled up over centuries; so much
venom distilled drop by drop; so much lament suppressed
will come out and explode… Who then will square those
accounts which the peoples of the world present from
time to time and which history preserves for us, etched on
bloody pages? (Noli 2004, 226).

Note the thematic synapse comprised of the

imagery and rhetoric of concealment, unveiling, the shift
from darkness to light, discovery as an explosion, release,
48
and the shock of recognition in receiving the message
written on “bloody pages.” All these presage the itinerary
of events in both novels, particularly Simoun’s
machination in stirring up the monsters in the shadows,
with the bottled wrath boiling over and blasting that scene
of reconciliation: the wedding of Paulita Gomez and
Juanito Pelaez in Chapter 14 of the Fili. The otherwise
radical Isagani, with his ideals projected onto the beloved,
refuses to abandon the siren of dreams and thus aborts
Simoun’s plot: the unleashing of reality’s
contradictions—the positive submerged in the
negative—only to succumb to the narcotic inertia of the
status quo. In the dialectical spin of events, unmasking
fails and succeeds at the same time.

The theme of curing a diseased body politic leads

to some surprising twists. If knowledge of truth cannot
remedy the split between the universal (God) and the local
(suffering, injustice, evil), what can? In my gloss on
Rizal’s novels, I applied a structuralist frame of analysis
revolving around the syntagmatic axis of history
articulated with the paradigmatic vector of nature.
Somehow, a fatality approximating the natural (Sisa’s
misfortunes) deflects the trajectory of linear progress.
Rizal/Ibarra, our Enlightenment hero, still clings to the
hope that God’s eclipse, his hidden presence, would end,
and that divine intervention would bring back the golden
age of justice, equality, the happy reunion of loved ones,
prosperity, peace. Like his literary analogue, Alexandre
Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Simoun, evoking
Karamazov’s and Job’s existential anguish, seeks to
resurrect the dead God (before Nietzsche’s proclamation)
and fulfill the promise of redemption. Critique,
pedagogical reconstruction , is Ibarra’s way of satisfying
that promise. Critique may be also be discerned in Tasio’s
universalist thinking, which is supplanted in the Fili by
Padre Florentino’s exorcism of Simoun, an attempt to heal
the rupture between the profane and sacred by converting
Nature/Culture to become the servant of the divine will. All
schemes of exchange, transmission and circulation of
signs—the signifiers of the past, customs, blood
kinship—are displaced by the characteristic move in Rizal
to remind us that his allegory speaks to the real and
49
addresses living bodies in the hope of generating changes
in actuality. The ripeness of filibusterismo is all:
resistance, dissidence, revolution

Rizal’s moral realism understands the limits and

shortcomings of fallible human agency. But it does not
give up the vocation of changing society because it is
founded on the gap between what exists and what is
desired. We have seen the ethico-political motivation of
allegorical realism dramatized at the end of Chapter 10 of
the Fili. After Cabesang Tales stole Simoun’s revolver and
killed his oppressors, leaving his name “Tales” beside the
mutilated body of the usurper’s wife, Rizal launches into
the famous cry for revenge, for Spain to render justice to
the victims: “Do not be alarmed, peaceful citizens of
Calamba. Not one of you is called Tales, not one of you
has committed the crime….You have served Spain and the
King and when in their names you asked for justice and
you were exiled without due process of law, you were
snatched away from the arms of your spouses, from the
kisses of your children….” (Fili 97). His appeal is still
directed to the authorities, not to the toilers and pariahs.
Lest we forget about Sisa’s sufferings, Rizal replicates her
misfortune in Juli’s plight. Meanwhile, we know that
Simoun/Ibarra, like the magician/deity operating behind
the scenes, no longer believes that “generous Spain” will
heed the prayer of the novelist, nor heed the conscience
of Padre Florentino. In a world without god (the colonizing
leviathan), it is necessary for humans to assume
responsibility and decide collectively, in solidarity, their
common fate. The theory and practice of freedom by the
insurgent people is the essence of moral realism.

Both novels employ the method of allegorical

realism to test the hypothesis of human freedom born
from insurgent practice, replacing a transcendent
power/demiurge as the shaper and arbiter of history.
Realism, the style and technique of reproducing the
thickness of quotidian life, is harnessed for the purpose of
critique. But critique has a double function: to negate but
also to salvage what is valuable and reappropriate it into a
new enlarged, richer frame of rationality. This integration
in Rizal often takes the form of a fantasy sequence that, as
50
soon as summoned and allowed to dance, is mocked. One
sequence evaporates only to be immediately
supplemented by a new massing of events, raw sensory
materials. This process leads to another accumulation of
grotesque shapes, excessive rites, contrivances and
commodities become fetish confounding the sacred with
the profane, magical paraphernalia (as in Dr. Leeds’ show
in the Quiapo Fair reinforced by other indices such as the
crocodile in the lake; the ghost in the roof of the Santa
Clara Convent, Simoun’s jewelry, and so on). Juxtaposed
to the fantastic sequence is the utopian segment often
accompanied by the melodramatic atmosphere of scenes
and settings haunted by intersecting characters:
filibusteros, bandits, the dislocated and ostracized, and
other stigmatized groups hovering at the margins of the
decaying body politic.

We witness the staging of the classic existential

predicament. If god or sovereign authority is absent, what
indeed will transpire as the human will begins to control
the affairs of daily life? An obsession to take charge of
both negative and positive forces in his narrative, of both
what’s required and what’s accidental, the necessary and
the contingent, preoccupies the author. We see this
combination of the utopian and the infernal first in the
panorama of chaos envisioned by Simoun as he gazed at
Intramuros from his surveillance outpost across the
Pasig, the river symbolizing motion versus the immobility
of the petrified urban surrounding:

“Within a few days,” he murmured, “when from her four

sides flames burn that wicked city, den of presumptuous
nothingness and the impious exploitation of the ignorant
and the unfortunate; when tumult breaks out in the
suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets my
avenging hordes, engendered by rapacity and
wrongdoing, then I will shatter the walls of your prison; I
will snatch you from the clutches of fanaticism; white
dove, you will be the phoenix that will be reborn from the
glowing ashes….! A revolution plotted by men in
obscurity tore me from your side. Another revolution will
bring me to your arms, will revive me and that moon,

51
before reaching the apogee of its splendor, will light the
Philippines, cleaned of her repugnant refuse!” (Fili 207).

This hope of retribution (the body cure) through the

amalgamation of terror, punishment of evil, restoration of
justice, purification of the polluted body, and catharsis, is
rendered poignantly in the images of the burning of
Sodom, destruction of prisons, and the rebirth of the
phoenix-like corpus of the community. In a world bereft of
gods or any transcendent cosmic power, healing ensues
after purgation of the toxic element and the salvation of
the body through the collective sacrifice of humans
making their own history. Such is the passage of the
avenging angels of “the wretched of the earth” (to use
Fanon’s epithet for the colonized masses during the Cold
War), the peasants and proletariat of “the third world,” the
majority of the planet’s residents.

Paradigm Metamorphosis

At this juncture, I propose a decentering of Rizal’s

two novels by shifting our attention from Padre
Florentino’s sermon to Rizal’s prayer and apostrophe to
his country at the end of Chapter 23, “A Corpse.” Chased
and shot by the guardia civil, Ibarra’s body disappears in
the lake; but here, the corpus delicti surfaces to disturb
the peace. Several chapters later, just before the planned
“apocalypse” at the wedding feast takes place, news of
Maria Clara’s death is conveyed to Simoun by Basilio, the
youthful student who represents the victims of the guilt-
stricken system and the hope of the salvation of the
motherland. Reminiscent of the vision of a liberated,
prosperous homeland at the end of “The Philippines a
Century Hence,” Rizal takes hold of the floating signifier
of Ibarra/Simoun, the duplicitous mediator of past and
present, to interrupt the flow of the narrative. Here Rizal,
through the critical musings of young Basilio, expresses
with disarming intensity the task of the organic intellectual
of the colonized, the mission of the critical intelligence: to
remember the ordeals and sacrifices of the past
generations in order to heal the break between nature and
culture, the wound disjoining psyche and history. This
moving farewell to Rizal’s youthful past, to Leonor Rivera,
52
all the victims of Calamba and other places. incorporating
the fantasized advent of a paradisal future, calls for
meditation with reference to the ultimate agenda of
socialist revolution in the decades to come:

And forgetting his studies, with his look wandering in

space, he thought of the fate of those two beings: he,
young, rich, lettered, free, master of his destiny, with a
brilliant future ahead of him, and she, beautiful like a
dream, pure, full of faith and innocence, cradled among
loves and smiles, destined for a happy life, to be adored in
the family and respected in the world, and yet,
nevertheless, those two beings, full of love, of dreams and
hopes; by a fatal destiny, he wandered around the world,
dragged without respite by a whirlpool of blood and tears,
sowing bad instead of doing good, dismantling virtue and
fomenting vice, while she was dying in the mysterious
shadows of the cloister where she had sought peace and
may perhaps have encountered sufferings, where she had
entered pure and without stain and expired like a crushed
flower!

Sleep in peace, unhappy child of my unfortunate

motherland! Bury in your grave the enchantments of your
childhood, withered in their vitality! When a people
cannot offer its virgins a peaceful home, the shelter of
sacred liberty; when a man can only bequeath dubious
words to his widow, tears to his mother and slavery to his
children, you do well to condemn yourselves to perpetual
chastity, choking within your breasts the seed of a cursed
future generation!

Ah, you have done well, not to have to tremble in

your grave hearing the cries of those who agonize in the
shadows, of those who feel themselves with wings and yet
are fettered, of those who choke themselves for lack of
liberty! Go, go with the dreams of the poet to the region of
the infinite, vestige of woman glimpsed in a beam of
moonlight, whispered by the supple stalks of the cane-
breaks…. Happy she who dies wept for, she who leaves in
the heart of those who love her, a pure vision, a sacred
memory, not stained by common passions which ferment
with the years!
53
 Go, we will remember you! In the pristine air of
our motherland, under her blue sky, over the waves of the
lake which imprison mountains of sapphire and shores of
emerald, in her crystalline streams which the bamboo-
canes overshadow, the flowers border, and dragonflies
and butterflies enliven with their uncertain and capricious
flight as if playing with the wind, in the silence of our
forests, in the singing of our creeks, in the diamond
cascades of our waterfalls, in the resplendent light of our
moon, in the sighs of our evening breeze, and all that in
the end evoke the image of the beloved, we will see you
eternally as we have dreamed about you: lovely, beautiful,
smiling like hope, pure like the light and, nevertheless,
sad and melancholy contemplating our miseries! (Fili 261-
63).

Incarnated in the lost object of the beloved, the

vision of a redeemed future blends with the image of
antediluvian nature, the landscape of Rizal’s youth in
Laguna, the scene of his sensuous joy absorbing the
fetishized jewelry (history and alienated labor congealed
in commodities) peddled by Simoun, the spontaneous
impulses of a childhood seeking to resuscitate the corpse
of Maria Clara, embodiment of virtue, purity and
jouissance. Allegorical realism, critique, and dialectical
reason coalesce here in Rizal’s aesthetic-political project
of bringing out the submerged possibilities immanent in
the self-contradictory reality of his society, of showing
what the force-field of conflict harbors by way of
transformative resources and hitherto undiscovered
species reserves.

At the heart of this critique of colonial reality, Rizal

wrestled with the question of justice, punishment,
retribution. The moral predicament of how to restore order
and harmony in his life by way of superseding
ressentiment, revenge and remorse, obsessed him. There
is no question about the goal, but the means and method
are uncertain, contingent on unpredictable circumstances.
How can the natural virtues of pre-Spanish society
(inferred from his gloss on Morga) be restored? How can
the suffering of innocent children, women, and other
victims of theocratic greed and irrational authority be
54
prevented? In the context of the novels and Rizal’s life,
how can the honor of Ibarra’s family (condensed in the
humiliation and torture of his father), the eviction of his
family and other Calambans from their homes, and the
ravishing of all that the clan holds sacred (Maria Clara,
Juli, Sisa, women in general), be redeemed? After critique,
judgment awaits the guilty in the name of all the innocent
victims.

We face the central problem of our time. Can we

still invoke “divine violence” or the intervention of
providence and its surrogates in history in the form of
explosions of popular resentment, as in the recent
terrorism of extremists and the equally violent reaction of
NATO and the U.S. quasi-fascist state? The recent
phenomenon of flag-waving crowds cheering the
execution of Osama Bin Laden by US military troops
violating Pakistan’s sovereignty stands as an exemplum.
Observers have noted how the trauma of Sepember 11,
2001, demands this sequence of happenings. We return to
an archaic regime of original sin, inquisition, exorcism,
penitence, self-flagellation, catharsis.

Slavoj Zizek tries to rehabilitate the notion of

resentment by quoting W.G. Sebald:
“Resentment…[according to Jean Amery] ‘nails everyone
of us unto the cross of his ruined past.’ Absurdly, it
demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the
event [Nazi Holocaust] be undone.’ The issue then is not
to resolve but to reveal the conflict” (2008, 189). Precisely
what Rizal did by exposing the social cancer corrupting
everyone, the evils of Spanish colonialism. Thus he
affirms the right to resentment in a programmatic strategy
of sensitizing the conscience of the multitude (ilustrados
as well as plebeians, workers, peasants) and its future-
oriented will to remember and settle accounts with their
oppressors.
Following a counterhegemonic intuition, Zizek
stresses the need to carry out the logic of justice by not
usurping the role of God to forgive and forget. Revenge
has a function in the political economy of humans
exercising their freedom to reorganize a world gone awry
and arrange things in a more humane and caring
55
ecumene. He calls for revaluing a form of heroic
resentment that refuses to compromise and accede to the
conciliatory blandishments of any official “Truth
Commission.” Zizek elaborates:

When a subject is hurt in such a devastating way that the

very idea of revenge according to jus talionis is no less
ridiculous than the promise of the reconciliation with the
perpetrator after the perpetrator’s atonement, the only
thing that remains is to persist in the “unremitting
denunciation of injustice.” …Resentment has nothing to
do with the slave morality [Nietzsche condemned]….It
stands rather for a refusal to ‘normalize’ the crime, to
make it part of the ordinary/explicable/accountable flow of
things, to integrate it into a consistent and meaningful life-
narrative; after all possible explanations, it returns with its
question: “Yes, I got all this, but nevertheless, how could
you have done it? Your story about it doesn’t make
sense!” (2008, 189-90).

Paradoxically, the enigmatic figure of Simoun

doesn’t make sense—in general, he is mysterious,
sinister, the filibuster with a thousand disguises (like the
Edmond Dantes in Dumas’ novel) who disrupts routine by
mere circulation, surprising us with the multiple,
alternating masks of disingenuous personae. But for
Basilio and others, Simoun as the
metamorphosed/transvalued Ibarra makes uncanny sense.
His cunning subterfuge, his calculus of revenge, is foiled
not by its betrayal and accidental discovery (like the
Katipunan), but by the report of the death of Maria Clara,
the symbol of the purity, honor, and communal joy of the
past. That vanished ideal can no longer be recovered, as
Rizal intimates when he eliminates the selfless
protagonist Elias in the Noli, frustrates both Ibarra’s and
the students’ liberal schemes, depicts the tragic killing of
Tandang Selo by his grandson Carolino (Cabesang Tales’
son), and finally leads Simoun to submit to Padre
Florentino’s ministry before committing suicide.

Such astute contrivance of narrative twists and the

manipulation of coincidences may not all be
happenstance. After all, they triggered the rise of the
56
Katipunan and the 1896 insurrection, discharging the
animus of vengeance into an organized collective effort,
even though punctuated and threaded through with
spontaneous anarchic outbursts replete with other
adventurist, putschist gestures. That whole landscape of
the interregnum crisis reflects the vacillations and
opportunism of the ilustrado and other elements of the
middle stratum caught in multilayered antagonisms.
Rizal’s plot of settling accounts succeeds as critique,
prying open the bowels of self-contradictory reality, and
unleashing those dammed-up forces that will renew life
and the inexhaustible potentiality of the human species at
the turn of the century.

In Quest of Maria Makiling

We cannot pursue here the theme of emancipatory

violence and its legitimation (as Zizek does in his treatise)
within the complex problematic of means and ends, ethics
and teleology, immanence and transcendence. The
universal issues of justice, revenge, retribution and social
harmony require a protracted investigation due to
historical contingencies and human errors. Suffice it to
conclude by moving the discourse to the terrain of the
unsaid or unspeakable in contemporary exchanges, “the
woman question.”

Earlier we noted that Anderson, either ignorant or

wrongheaded, stated that Rizal’s main source of
motivation and background for his novels derived from
European incidents and intellectual debates. This is
entirely false, as Richardson has shown with respect to
the militant nationalism of the movimiento insurreccional
led by Adriano Novicio in Pangasinan and Nueva Ecija in
1884 twelve years before Bonifacio’s uprising. Between
the Cavite mutiny and the Katipunan insurrection, at least
one important sequence of incidents should be given
priority.

On December 12, 1988, twenty young women of

Malolos petitioned Governor General Weyler—the
notorious terror of Calamba, later Cuba’s “butcher”—for
permission to establish a “night school” so that they
57
might study Spanish under Teodoro Sandiko whose
socialist background has been mentioned earlier. When a
Spanish priest objected, Weyler junked the petition. But
the women defied the friar’s prohibition and mounted a
courageous agitation, something completely new in the
Philippine scene. Eventually they obtained government
approval on condition that instead of Sandiko, their
teacher would be Señorita Guadalupe Reyes. This incident
stirred up local passions that reverberated up to Spain.
Writing from Barcelona on Feb. 17, 1889, Marcelo del Pilar,
the editor of La Solidaridad, asked Rizal to send a letter
supporting the fearless women of Malolos. Although busy
with annotating Morga’s book in the British Museum in
London, Rizal agreed and composed his famous letter in
Tagalog, sending it to Del Pilar on Feb. 22, 1889. Apart
from the proleptic “el ultimo adios” poem, this letter sums
up the itinerary of Rizal’s intellectual adventure. This
filibustero did not delay or filibuster, as it were, converting
this occasion as another mode of “revenge.” It can be
construed as an act of demystifying ressentiment by a
critique of hypocrisy, idolatry, and religious bigotry, in
defense of critical reason and militant humanism which
recalls Spinoza and Erasmus, even Bartolome de las
Casas.

Written three years before Rizal’s return home and

the founding of the Liga, this letter may be considered a
benchmark document of the Filipino revolutionary archive.
It distills the entire labor of his studies since his arrival in
Spain in 1882, occurring two years after the printing of the
Noli and two years before the completion of the Fili. In this
act of communication, Rizal plays the spiritual mentor,
fraternal counselor, and tribal sage all at once. It
recapitulates ideas expressed in the Morga annotations, in
the Noli and “The Indolence of the Filipinos,” and
presages the clash between the standpoints of Simoun
and Basilio/Padre Florentino and their surrogates.

Central to the letter is the call to bravely assert

collective autonomy and rational judgment, and use
rational judgment and good will. Rizal advises them to
follow what is reasonable and just, and carry out the prime
duties of teaching honor to their children, loving one’s
58
fellow citizens and the native land. In that way, rid of
ignorance and abject fear, one asserts one’s dignity,
courage, responsibility and honor. Tyranny and servitude
are thereby prevented by the prudent cultivation of “the
light of reason which God has mercifully endowed us.”
Sandwiched between the precepts specifically addressed
to the maternal role of women and the maxim of
neighborly love is Rizal’s biting comments on avaricious
friars and malicious Spaniards who mock native women
who have shown hospitality and deference. It is this
traduced and vilified honor of Filipina women that Rizal
cannot let go, not because he aspires to be the model
defender of women, a proto-feminist vanguard-party
spokesman, but because he identifies the honor of
Filipinas with the substance of the nascent patria,
including that of the Malay race (Zaide 1984, 157). It is an
identification enabled by the sensibility of the romantic
idealist shaped by folk Catholicism, the archaic babaylan
tradition, the deism of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the
democratic-populist trends drawn from the Protestant
Reformation and the Jacobin revolution in France.

What precipitated Rizal’s exaltation of Spartan

women as his paragon for his compatriots? In his letters
and in the Memorias, we saw overwhelming proof of
Rizal’s passionate attachment to his mother. Such
unusually intense mother-love engenders the negative:
his recognition that women are victimized by the
patriarchal order, in particular by the mercenary,
hypocritical frailocracy. He himself was aware of his
chauvinism, his occupying a problematic position, as
shown in his over-scrupulous conduct toward a series of
paramours up to Josephine Bracken (for the latter as
Rizal’s alter ego, see the intriguing essay of Dolores Feria
[1968]). In several letters to his brother Paciano in 1883,
Rizal displayed a more than superficial knowledge of
prostitution and women’s subordination in Spain and
other European countries: “Women abound even more
(here in Madrid) and it is, indeed, shocking that in many
places they intercept men and they are not the ugly ones
either” (1993, 89). Experience served as the great teacher
of metropolitan truth for the erstwhile benighted colonial
subject.
59
 Ambeth Ocampo may have been unjustly criticized
for his demythologizing brief that Rizal was acquainted
with brothels. He cites Rizal’s observation: “With respect
to morality there are some who are models of virtue and
innocence, and others who have nothing womanly about
them except their dress or at most their sex. Rightly it has
been said that the women in the South of Europe have fire
in their veins. However, here prostitution is a little more
concealed than at Barcelona, though no less
unrestrained” (Rizal 1993, 89-90). When he traveled with
his friend Dr. Maximo Viola, Rizal displayed eagerness to
learn about the condition of these “casas de palomas de
bajo vuelo” so as to combat the vice, “unnatural and anti-
psychological” (to use the terms attributed to Rizal). Dr.
Viola added that Rizal hinted to him that “he had never
been in favor of obeying blindly the whims of nature when
their call was not duly justified by a natural and
spontaneous impulse.” When the two friends arrived in
Vienna in the course of their six-month travels, two years
before the Malolos epistle, Dr. Viola confessed the hero’s
“slip”: Rizal “encountered the figure of a temptress in the
form of a Viennese woman, of the family of the Camellias
or hetaeras of extraordinary beauty and irresistible
attraction” (Ocampo 1990).

Rizal’s concern is not so much with female virtue

as with the maternal function/role and its incalculable
effects. His stress on individual reason and autonomous
will, equality and respect for each other, was needed to
remove women from the influence of the religious orders;
he invokes God’s gift of natural reason to ward off the
despotic authority of the friars and correct servile habits.
Rizal then concentrates on the function of the mother as
progenitor and educator/nurturer: “What offspring will be
that of a woman whose kindness of character is
expressed by mumbled prayers… It is the mothers who
are responsible for the present servitude of our
compatriots, owing to the unlimited trustfulness of their
loving hearts, to their ardent desire to elevate their sons.”

Deploying throughout organic metaphors of

growth and fruition, Rizal emphasizes the mother’s crucial
60
role in shaping the infant: “The mother who can only
teach her child how to kneel and kiss hands must not
expect sons with blood other than that of vile slaves.”
Because mothers are “the first to influence the
consciousness of man,” Rizal exhorts them to “awaken
and prepare the will of our children towards all that is
honorable, judged by proper standards, to all that is
sincere and firm of purpose, clear judgment, clear
procedure; honesty in act and deed, love for the
fellowmen and respect for God.” That is a desideratum
because the whole community cannot expect honor and
prosperity “so long as the woman who guides the child in
his steps is slavish and ignorant.” Despite their strength
and good judgment, however, the Filipina mother has
become a slave, hoodwinked and tied, rendered
pussilanimous. In a sudden leap, Rizal ventures a
generalization: “The cause of the backwardness of Asia
lies in the fact that there the woman are ignorant, are
slaves; while Europe and America are powerful because
there the women are free and well-educated and endowed
with lucid intellect and a strong will.” This explains his
subsequent invocation of Spartan women as the models
to imitate, notwithstanding his knowledge that their
position is underwritten by an iniquitous slave system
prevailing in classical antiquity.

The Mother of All Insurgencies

A suspicion disturbs the epistolary self-assurance.

Rizal feels that the Malolos women will not listen to him
because of his youth, so he submits seven instructions
for their evaluation, repeating what he has already stated
about the need for dignity, knowledge, independence and
altruism. His fifth and sixth advice, however, sounds an
alarming note of a fear of betrayal, together with hostility
to the superstitious machinations of a “grossly
mercenary” priesthood. The fifth proposition seems a
warning: “If the Filipina will not change her mode of being,
let her rear no more children, let her merely give birth to
them. She must cease to be the mistress of the home,
otherwise she will unconsciously betray husband, child,
native land, and all.” Apprehensively, however, Rizal
withdraws his animus and insists on everyone’s equality
61
in enjoying the divine gifts of intelligence and rational
judgment.

Rizal’s final words may be interpreted as a

cautionary reminder for those cast out of the aboriginal
garden: “May your desire to educate yourself be crowned
with success; may you in the garden of learning gather
not bitter, but choice fruit, looking well before you eat
because on the surface of the globe all is deceit, and the
enemy sows seeds in your seedling plot” (1984, 332).
Didactic teleology here blends moral realism with satire,
impugning the “fathers” and appealing to a future regime
of stalwart mothers as the supreme tribunal of national
vindication.

We pose here an impertinent question: If the

mothers—Sisa, Maria Clara’s mother, and potential
mothers like Juli, Salome, Paulita Gomez—fulfilled their
role and the patriarchal order is reconfigured or entirely
vanquished, would Ibarra/Simoun be conceivable in such
a world? If not, then we return to the mirrored reality
where the patriarchs exploited and oppressed everyone,
making rational motherhood difficult if not dangerous and
thus proscribed. But can justice, revenge as payment for
debts incurred, an eye for an eye as the fit compensation,
be achieved by reviving mother-right (as Bachofen and
Briffault once speculated [Hays 1958])?

Let us turn to a classical template that Rizal surely

studied. In Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, the Erinyes or
Furies that pursued Orestes for slaying his mother
Clytemnestra represent the rule of tribal society; his
matricide is settled by the Areopagus, the newly
established court in the patriarchal city of Athens where
Athena (sprung fully armed from Zeus’s head), frees
Orestes of his guilt and terminates the curse. The mandate
of heaven is realized. The avenging Furies are propitiated
by being made the city’s protectors. Meanwhile, Zeus’
appointment of Athena and Apollo may be construed as
the supremacy of justice (moral retribution) and
compassion. But instead of reinstating mother-right or
equality of men and women, what supervenes is the rule
of the landed aristocracy which, as the historian George
62
Thomson points out, occupies an intermediate position
between the primitive tribe and the democratic city-state.
The court was still dominated by the old patriarchal
nobility exercising the duty of purification assigned by the
Delphic oracle. However, the oath administered in the
Areopagus invokes the Semnai, a trinity of female
divinities, the presiding deities descended from the
Erinyes (Thomson 1968, 272). These female spirits are
subsumed in the figure of Spartan mothers whom Rizal
summons and propitiates, not mother Spain, as muses of
the project of national redemption (in 1896, Spanish
women cheered Rizal’s death; see Craig 1913, 145).

This somewhat neglected masterpiece of

communicative action in the Rizal archive, if read
contextually, can sharpen our appreciation of Rizal’s
materialist dialectics in practice. It demonstrates Rizal’s
sensitively calibrated merging of flexible tactics and
principled strategy in liberating the colony from feudal
barbarism and the trauma of religious servitude. It
compels us to reorient our thinking so as to give priority
to the agenda of gender equality, of combating sexism
and female subordination, as the keystone of any
emancipatory program of the progressive bloc. It
combines Rizal’s intransigent critical sensibility with the
emancipatory drive that, in its allegorical dynamism,
informs (among other projects) his recreation of the
folkloric spirit of the nature goddess Maria Makiling (La
Solidaridad, Dec. 31, 1890).

The goddess Maria Makiling personifies the once

fabled harmony of humans and their natural habitat in a
utopian golden age, the cooperative alliance of a still
unspoiled nature and the tribal grassroot practices
sketched by Rizal in his unfinished novel “The Ancient
Tagalog Nobility.” Spurned by a human lover escaping
military conscription, this bountiful virgin of the mountain
and forest disappears from sight; the alienation dividing
nature and the world of the fathers afflicts everyone,
rendering normal life arid, hollow, hopeless. Maria’s Eden
is lost, become mythical or utopian for the “unhappy
consciousness” of modernity (for a contemporary report
on the Rizal-Makiling connection, see Lahiri 1999). She
63
bids farewell to her human lover: “Inasmuch as you have
had no courage either to face a hard lot to defend your
liberty and make yourself independent in the bosom of
these mountains; inasmuch as you have had no trust in
me, …I deliver you to your fate, live and struggle alone;
live as you can” (1962, 109). This curse/fate of
abandonment by a mother-deity, evoking the image of
Rizal’s mother thrown in jail or his family driven out of
their Calamba homes, is the object of Rizal’s revenge, the
pretext for Simoun’s chiliastic fervor and eschatological
musings.

Ultimately the dream of return to the legendary

past of the mothers and the retribution for the crimes of
the fathers may illuminate Apolinario Mabini’s insight into
the felicitous wedding of necessity and freedom, history
and will, in our hero’s incommensurable odyssey of exile
and homecoming. Uncannily, death and eros converge in
this suturing of patria and memory-fleshed place, as it did
throughout the lover’s elegiac call for embraces and
kisses from Filipinas in his last farewell. Here is Mabini’s
tribute to Rizal: “In truth the merit of Rizal’s sacrifice
consists precisely in that it was voluntary and conscious.
From the day Rizal understood the misfortunes of his
native land and decided to work to redress them, his vivid
imagination never ceased to picture to him at every
moment of his life the terrors of the death that awaited
him” (quoted in Quibuyen 1999, 62-63). From his vantage
point of exile in Guam because of refusing allegiance to
the American colonizers, Mabini urged his countrymen to
imitate Rizal’s virtues, just as Rizal, in his temporary
refuge in Madrid, encouraged the women of Malolos to
acquire those virtues of courage, rationality, compassion
and perseverance without which a life of human dignity
and freedom is not possible on earth.

64
 SISA’S VENGEANCE:
RIZAL & THE “WOMAN QUESTION”

Liberty is a woman who grants her favors only to the brave. Enslaved
peoples have to suffer much to win her, and those who abuse her lose
her….Les femmes de mon pays me plaisent beaucoup, je ne m’en sois la
cause, mais je trouve chez-elles un je ne sois quoi qui me charme et me fait
rever [The women of my country please me very much. I do not know why,
but I find in them I know not what charms me and makes me dream.]

--Jose Rizal, Epistolario Rizalino; Diary, Madrid, 31 March 1884

Religious misery is at once the expression of real misery and a protest

against that real misery. Religion is the sign of the hard-pressed creature,
the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the
opium of the people…. After the earthly family is discovered to be the
secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticized in theory
and revolutionized in practice.

–Karl Marx,” Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of

Right” (1843) and “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)

More than his persona as the astute and

circumspect dissident, Jose Rizal as lover, romantic
protagonist, and simpatico confidant of women of various
nationalities, has preoccupied many scholars to the point
of suspecting that there was something anomalous
somewhere. Was Rizal manic-depressive, or simply
neurotic? Few would accuse him of being an
unscrupulous and promiscuous Casanova, much less a
cynical Don Juan. In fact, Rizal was courtly, thoughtful,
even fearful and wary toward the opposite sex—except his
mother. What did he think of his friend Juan Luna’s killing
of his wife and mother-in-law? We do not really know, we
can only speculate. The inamorata Leonor Rivera exposed
the Rizal phallus as a “semblance” (to use the Lacanian
rubric) while Josephine Bracken restored it to its
decorous size. Only one other woman challenged him:
Nelly Boustead, while the Japanese Seiko Usui/O-Sei-San
confirmed his virility, sacrificing herself (in his judgment)
65
without demanding any reciprocity nor due recognition of
her gift/service.

Entangled in this seductive chronicle of amorous

affairs, we take a moment to interpose mindful distance
and ask: what is Rizal’s ultimate assessment of women’s
actual virtue and potential? None of his biographers has
contributed anything substantial on this, perhaps
intimidated that if they venture to engage with “the woman
question,” they would provoke a Pandora’s box of
adversarial criticism that might expose vulnerable biases
and unconscionable presumptions.

We dare to cross the threshold of forbidden and

dangerous territory at this historic conjuncture of
manifold crises in our homeland. The principles of
feminism and women’s liberation have rooted themselves
firmly in civil society since the Sixties, emblematized by
organizations such as Gabriela and its party-list, among
others. And so we can carry on a discourse on gender
equality, patriarchy, and sexual difference without
recapitulating foundationalist origins (Aguilar 1988; Chant
and McIlwaine 1995). Arguments about women’s position
in the social division of labor have progressed to the point
where Maria Mies (1986) posits women’s role in the
production and reproduction of life as relatively
independent from the production of goods, wages, profit,
thus requiring a materialist analysis of its own. Frigga
Haug (1999) reminds us that the feminist standpoint is
both unscathing critique of ideology and utopian
celebration of sensuous bodily joy, universalist solidarity,
and collective self-determination, after the abolition of
genders and the humanization of nature. Meanwhile, ludic
or supremacist feminists (Ebert 1996; Hogan 2000) have
valorized the “feminine” as a subversive sign of “desire”
interrogating patriarchy, foregrounding in the process
women’s desiring-production as the singular agent of
transforming society and emancipating humanity.

Framing the Question

It would be disingenuous not to recognize outright

Rizal’s limits as symptomatic determinations imposed by
66
the subaltern, creole society and culture of his time. But,
alternatively, one may hypothesize that Rizal was perhaps
the first Filipino nationalist to have appropriated, if not
resurrected, the body and its constellation of desires as a
vehicle for grasping our collective “being-in-situation,”
simultaneously object and subject of thought. The
colonized native was both active and passive,
interpellated by conflicting discourses and practices;
hence the dialogic and heteroglossic discourse of Rizal’s
satires, essays, narratives (in particular, Makamisa),
together with the play of memory, perceptions, and
fantasies in his letters and memoirs. He wove in his
discourse elements of the sentient flesh, speaking
subjects sutured in the diverse field of modalities of
overlapping life-forms. He succeeded in capturing the
truly overdetermined social formation of the Philippines
constituted by antagonistic, residual and emergent modes
of production.

From the perspective of object-relations

psychoanalysis, Rizal’s Oedipal complex quickly
evaporated after his first romance, opening up for
intervention the maternal/libidinal realm of invention,
accident, and experimentation. Before the Dapitan exile,
he was willing to explore the possibility of recreating
Calamba in Sandakan, the British-controlled territory of
Borneo, formerly owned and governed by the Muslim
Sultanate of Sulu. He was both realistic and adventurous,
critical and hospitable to the strange, enigmatic, and alien.
Phallogocentric and moribund frailocracy, however, foiled
all his schemes.

Colonial-theocratic sovereignty fixated Filipino

women (the template of Rizal’s dreams) in the patriarchal
household economy. It compelled Rizal to wrestle with the
challenge of discovering ways of altering their subaltern
marginalization and subordination. He tried to usher his
sisters and other female compatriots into the
political/public sphere (for example, schooling, shared
conversations in civic gatherings, and other modes of
communal praxis) to thwart the oppressive privatization of
their bodies and psyches. The Liga was his aborted
project. Thus, instead of placing the erotic/libidinal in
67
quarantine, Rizal reinscribes their subversive impulses
into the terrain of political discourse where they mix and
explode in the people’s unceasing struggle for hegemony
(moral leadership, intellectual authority) and institutional
power. Women’s madness and excesses represented in
Rizal’s novels symbolize and herald this eventuality.
Without the affiliation and participation of women in the
Filipino liberation struggle, the nation-in-the-making
would simply reproduce gender and class inequality as
well as racialist/imperialist domination.

Partly freed from the stranglehold of Rousseau

and Enlightenment dogmas, Rizal reworked instinctively
the utopian-socialist tendencies found in Olympe de
Gouges, Fourier, Wollstonecraft, Marx and Engels (Macey
2000). They forecast the emergence of such exemplary
figures as Teresa Magbanua, Gregoria de Jesus, Melchora
Aquino, Trinidad Tecson, Salud Algabre, and others. But
before we move on to Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa
Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Angela
Davis and other theoreticians of feminist
identity/difference, we need to situate Rizal in the concrete
social formation of colonial Philippines and define the
conceptual framework in which Rizal’s attitude and ideas
on women’s position can be judged for its prescience and
synergetic potential. Thus we go back to Marx and Engels
and the historical-materialist orientation in which the
politics of Eros can be intelligibly understood in its
totality, singular potency, and practical efficacy.

In the now classic treatise, The Origin of the Family,

Private Property and the State (1844; 1891), Frederick
Engels formulated the cardinal insight that the inequality
of the sexes coincided with the rise of class society: “The
overthrow of mother right was the world-historical defeat
of the female sex” (1972, 120). Within the patriarchal
monogamous family based on private property (land,
domesticated animals, slaves), Engels added, “the woman
was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the
slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production
of children.” Women were relegated to the private sphere
of the kitchen and boudoir under male authority.
Historically, the form of patriarchal supremacy is a result
68
of the class contradictions prevailing at a particular stage
of social development, from savagery to slave, feudal and
capitalist stages.

The anthropologist Robert Briffault noted that with

the institutionalization of monogamous marriage and the
nuclear family as the basic economic unit, the supremacy
of the male became normative; the male head of
household production with property-holding rights and
the privilege of disposing surplus wealth displaced the
mother. Structural coercion based on the male’s
inalienable right to property defined women’s differential
access to resources and their unequal life-chances.
Integrally central in maintaining early tribal communal
relationships, women lost their equal share in productive
tasks and with it that acephalous solidarity gutted by “the
rise of competitive interests,” by commodity fetishism and
the cash-nexus (Hays 1958, 179-80; Caudwell 1971). With
the onset of capitalism, males became the bourgeois
masters, women the proletarian class within the family.

Revisiting the Matrix

In pre-Hispanic Philippines, residual mother-right

flourished within extended kinship groups (gens or clans)
engaged in hunting, fishing, and subsistence farming in
communally managed territory. Production was chiefly
for use, not for exchange. In those self-provisioning
communities, there was no substantial surplus; women
inherited property and exercised a large degree of
autonomy. Women’s productive function in gathering
food, fishing, planting/harvesting. domestic and artisanal
crafts (weaving, pottery, etc.) gave them economic
independence and parity with men. In reviewing the status
of native women before and after the conquest, Elizabeth
Eviota observes that women producers controlled their
own labor and its fruits, while “unmarried women
exercised their sexuality freely…Women were the valued
people exchanged in the marriage transaction” supervised
by kins and the whole community (1992, 35-36). Women’s
active role in production and reproduction allowed them
to be relatively sovereign thinking, enjoying subjects

69
endowed like men with the human-species potential
actualizable through cooperative sensuous praxis.

Spanish colonialism destroyed that egalitarian

communal setup. It ushered a thoroughgoing gender
differentiation with the institutionalization of private
property, monogamy, and the patriarchal authority of
fathers within the family. The cloistering of women within
the male-dominated household limited them mainly to
accomplishing religious and household duties. Onerous
tribute of unpaid labor reduced the natives to debt
peonage, the root of the iniquituous patron-client tie-up
that legitimizes inequality across race, class, and gender.
With the church regulating women’s bodies/sexuality and
imposing a regime of chastity, women displaced from
work and driven to prostitution or vagrancy were confined
to convents and public jails, or deported to Palawan.

Rizal depicted the methodical surveillance of

women (chiefly via the confession as the disciplinary,
therapeutic technique) in the plight of Dona Victorina,
Dona Consolacion, Maria Clara, Sisa, Juli, Paulita Gomez,
among others. Eviota concludes: “Centuries of economic,
political and religious imposition had transformed the
lively sexual assertiveness of Filipino women into a more
prudish, cautious image of womanhood” (1992, 61). The
church-sanctioned institutions of monogamous marriage
and the colonial State’s routinization of charisma
(Gurvitch 1971) sealed the final demise of “mother-right,”
with the babaylans reduced to witches or malignant
brujas. The fate of Maria Clara encapsulates the loss of
status of women of the emerging principalia, and of the
more intense pacification of her lesser sisters in the
symbolic-ideological template of a racialized patriarchal
society. Nonetheless, those who refused marriage or
violated/resisted the despotic family—Ibarra, Elias,
Salome, Basilio, Tasio, Cabesang Tales, and
others—presaged a salvific and reconciling utopian future
for all since the social contract depended on unchallenged
male ascendancy.

Within this historical-materialist framework, we

can properly appreciate Rizal’s works as articulations of a
70
synthesizing theoretical inquiry in which the form of
universality springs from the concrete singularity of
particular life-worlds (Oizerman 1981). Social totality
acquires concrete dynamics in the lived experience of
sensuous reflective subjects. Aesthetically, they render
typical what are specific and individual. The predicament
of Maria Clara, Sisa, Salome, Juli, Dona Consolacion and
other characters in Rizal’s novels becomes emblematic of
the decaying colonial order of nineteenth-century
Philippines. In depicting the physiognomies and
symptomatic acts of his female protagonists, Rizal also
presented a lucid anatomy of the body politic, the
diseased corpus for which he was imploring his audience
to suggest a cure. In short, the key to understanding
Rizal’s revolutionary critique of colonial society may be
found in his realistic-allegorical delineation of women in
his fiction and discourse. By symbolic extrapolation, Rizal
shows how patriarchal supremacy founded on the control
of women’s bodies and their productivity becomes the
ultimate “weak link” in the colonial class/race hierarchy
the toxic vestiges of which still afflict us today (epitomized
among others by the Catholic Bishops’ opposition to the
Comprehensive Reproductive Rights Bill [HB 4244] being
proposed in the Philippine Congress).

Orthodox/Heterodox Enunciations

In a much anthologized essay “The Filipino

Woman” (1952) written at the height of the Cold War,
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil elaborated a notion of the Filipino
woman as a heterogeneous, multifaceted, amphibious
creature that seems to inhabit not those tropical islands in
Southeast Asia but some kaleidoscopic realm of fantasy.
Not that she defied history or geography; in fact, she
dared to encompass both by presenting a hybrid,
polychromatic portrait. It is a sophisticated attempt to
capture the variegated position of Filipino women in
history, offering us a pretext to explore Rizal’s thinking
about women, sexuality, gender, and everyday life in the
context of anticolonial resistance. If prisons, for
Dostoevsky, index the truthful condition of any society,
then the situation of women may be considered the

71
revealing symptom of the health or malaise of their
habitat, both its sociohistorical and psychic configuration.

Nakpil is a liberal but dilettantish observer of

Filipino manners and mentalities. She is careful to
discriminate fact from fiction: “Although, historically, it
would be inaccurate to go so far as to maintain, as many
writers like Rizal and Craig have, that amazonian
princesses like Urduja and autocratic matriarchs like Sima
once ruled over Filipinos…, [what] these pretty tales of
displaced queens seek to symbolize was nonetheless
solid and substantial reality.” The truth, however,
involved a more elaborate, complex interweaving of
hierarchical gender-differentiated and autonomous
spheres (Eviota 1992). After the Spaniards converted the
indigenous barangays and made the Filipina “preoccupied
with fig leaves,” Rizal and his nineteenth century
contemporaries had to go to Europe “to get a good look at
women.”

Rizal’s women were classified legally by the

Spanish regime together with infants and idiots, Nakpil
adds, “for she could neither enter into contracts without
her husband’s consent, if married, nor leave her home
without her parents’ consent before 25, if unmarried.” That
applies of course to upper-class women. She concludes
that the Filipino woman of the period just after World War
II is “a sort of compromise between the affected little
Christian idealist of the Spanish regime, the self-confident
go-getter of the American era, and the pagan naturalist of
her Asiatic ancestors” (1980, 14). From this mixture of
lifestyles and essentialized ingredients, Nakpil supposes
that in a few generations, the Filipino woman will iron out
her “mongrel contradictions” into a ‘thoroughbred
homogeneity” embodied in a “clear, pure, internally calm,
symmetrical personality.” But she resists such a
possibility. Why? Because then she “will have lost the
infinite unexpectedness, the abrupt contrariness, the
plural unpredictability which now make her both so
womanly and so Filipino” (1980,18). Ludic postmodernism
takes over empirical realism.

72
 We thus confront a creature both womanly and
Filipino despite circumstances and contingencies. But is
this gendered construct real or imagined? In the midst of
the rancorous debate over the Reproductive Health Bill,
we wonder whether Nakpil’s image of the polymorphously
perverse, composite Filipina body is causing all the furor
and controversy. Is this aleatory, contrarious,
unpredictable group the pretext, topic, occasion or effect
of what is happening? As the comparatist anthropologist
Jack Goody has demonstrated, the historical status of
women in any society depends on the nuanced
articulation of the family, cultural specifics, and the
politico-economic system, in which a degree of structural
autonomy may exist between production and
reproduction: patriarchal authority in politics, matrilineal
power in the domestic domain, and various permutations
of kinship and sexual division of labor (1998, 95).

An analogous controversy bedevils the position of

women in Rizal’s discourse that makes problematic their
catalyzing or counter-bewitching resonance in his life
(more on witches later). This is not virginal territory to
explore. All the Rizal biographies cannot avoid
mentioning, if not belaboring, the propaedeutic influence
of his mother Teodora Alonso, Leonor Rivera, and
Josephine Bracken, not to forget the shadowy Segunda
Katigbak and the vibrant Nelly Boustead hovering over the
margins of his memoirs. But from this distance in time
and space, it is self-indulgent to speculate on the erotic,
libidinal adventures of the hero—unless we intend to
package that aura of romantic melodrama for sale to the
profit-maximizing mass media. Are we not reeling from a
surfeit of these banalities and trivia?

For our purpose of doing an experiment in

thought/critique about the function of the female/feminine
in Rizal’s thought and its reverberations in ideological
struggle, this essay will be limited to a focus on one
question: Was Rizal (his life and works) a contributor to
the maintenance of the patriarchal order or a critic of the
effects of the social division of labor in class society,
which is the condition of possibility for male supremacy,
sexist chauvinism, and the exploitation and oppression of
73
women? Are characters such as Sisa, Maria Clara, Salome
and Juli significant for more than their technical efficacy
in the melodramatic twists of the narrative? What
ultimately is the role of Josephine Bracken in the
sequence of women-protagonists in Rizal’s life beginning
with, say, Segunda Katigbak? What follows are
speculative glosses and heuristic reflections, a cognitive
mapping of the subject-position of this “Other” whose
subliminal tracks were already outlined by Nakpil’s
versatile pen.

Syndrome of the Ideal

Most discussions of Rizal’s women usually start

with Maria Clara and her counterpart in real life, Leonor
Rivera. Let us not tarry with the first whose value as a
model was fully assayed first by Salvador P. Lopez in his
“Maria Clara—Paragon or Caricature?” in Literature and
Society (1940), and put to rest in the trenchant critical
inventory of Dolores Feria’s “The Insurrecta and the
Colegiala” (1968). Of the informed Rizal commentators,
only Nick Joaquin seems to be scandalous enough to
salvage Maria Clara from the Victorian cesspool. Joaquin
urges us to read again Chapter 7, “Idyll in an Azotea,” and
pay close attention to the eyes of Maria Clara and Juan
Crisostomo Ibarra, for “the question that love poses in a
bright or veiled glance cannot be answered by speech”
(1988, 11). But the encounter between the two lovers is not
just optical; it is noisy, as it were, counterpointed by a
plethora of ventriloquizing voices, not a conversation but
spliced whispers of two solitary persons communing with
conscience and gnomic spectral presences.

What is curious is that face to face with his

beloved, Ibarra invokes the organ of memory where Maria
Clara’s image blends with the landscape of his journeys in
Europe mixed with local scenery. Remembrance
resurrects the past: Your memory “has been my comfort
in the solitude of my soul in foreign countries; your
memory has negated the effect of the European lotus of
forgetfulness, which effaces from the remembrance of our
countrymen the hopes and the sorrows of the
Motherland.” For the traveling native, the beloved has
74
metamorphosed into “the nymph, the spirit, the poetic
incarnation of my country: lovely, simple, amiable, full of
candor, daughter of the Philippines, of this beautiful
country which unites with the great virtues of Mother
Spain the lovely qualities of a young nation” (2004, 58).
For the expatriate fabulist, the local muse Maria Makiling
is just around the corner.

Idealization sanitizes the submerged furies of envy

and jealousy. Amidst this elaborate rhetoric of denying
that Ibarra has forgotten her sweetheart, the past returns
in the farewell letter he wrote, which she reads to remind
him of “pleasant quibbles, alibis of a bad debtor.” The
demure, acquiescent paramour revives the admonishing
tone of Ibarra’s father, with a message recalling the
mother’s death and the father’s impending demise, and
the need to sacrifice the present for a “useful tomorrow
for you and your country.” This patriarchal command,
transmitted through the son’s fiancee, agitates Ibarra and
compels this retort: “You have made me forget that I have
my duties” to honor the dead. Agreed, Maria Clara was not
“a namby-pamby Manang,” as Joaquin chides us; and that
her confessor found her a problem girl. Nonetheless, she
is only a mediating instrument for Ibarra to satisfy the
traditional demands of filial piety and vindicate the honor
of the ancestral totems. In the end, she is used by Padre
Damaso (her biological father) to humiliate Ibarra by
forcing the cuckold Capitan Tiago to marry her to another
man, Linares.

Residual matrilineality soon asserts itself. When

Ibarra returns after his escape from the guardia civil to see
Maria Clara for the last time, he renews his vow by
figuratively restoring the power of mother-right: “By my
dead mother’s coffin, I swore to make you happy no
matter what happened to me. You could break your own
pledge, she was not your mother, but I who am her son, I
hold her memory sacred and despite a thousand perils, I
have come here to fulfill my pledge…” (2004, 532). For her
part, Maria Clara reveals the secret of her origin—the
friar’s violation of Capitan Tiago’s trust and her mother
Pia Alba, the break-up of the illusion of the Indio father’s
authority—and her promise not to forget her oath of
75
fidelity. The inscrutable becomes legible by oral
mediation. This scene follows Elias’ renunciation of the
patriarchal mandate to uphold the tarnished family honor
by refusing to take revenge on Ibarra and allow the unity
of all the victims seeking justice to supersede his clan’s
particularistic interest. Nonetheless, Maria Clara serves
throughout as the seductive screen of the fathers and the
dutiful sons.

Witness to Emergencies

By the time Rizal was born in 1861, the

predominantly feudal/tributary mode of production was
already moribund and an obstacle to further
socioeconomic development. Trade and commerce
expanded when the country was opened to foreign
shipping in 1834-1865, especially after the completion of
the Suez Canal in 1869 (Arcilla 1991). Vestiges of courtly
love and chivalric ways dissolved in the triumph of the
cash-nexus warranted by merchant and circulation capital,
further validating profitable marital exchanges to expand
or consolidate property. A national market arose. While
the islands for the most part remained tribal and rural
under the grip of the rent-collecting frailocracy and its
subaltern principalia, land-tilling families such as those of
Rizal flourished within the limits of the colonial order. The
family household organization enabled the socially
constructed gender asymmetry based on biological
difference to segregate daughters from sons (women
assigned to procreation and child nurturance, men to
public affairs) and adversely affect their potential to
develop as creative human beings and morally
responsible citizens.

Political power continued to be monopolized by

the peninsulars in the bureaucracy and military, together
with the religious orders. They controlled large estates
and appropriated the social wealth (surplus value or
profit) produced by the majority population of workers and
peasants most of whom were coerced under law (for
example, the polo servicios) and reduced to slavish
penury. Ruthless pauperization also doomed indigenous
folk deprived of access to public lands, animals, craft
76
tools, and so on. Only a tiny minority of creoles and
children of mixed marriages (mestizos of Chinese
descent) were allowed to prosper under precarious, serf-
like, and often humiliating conditions that eventually
drove them to covert or open rebellion. Rizal was one of
these children sprung from the conjuncture of
contradictory modes of production and reproduction of
social relations, a child responding to the sharpening
crisis of the moribund, decadent Spanish empire.

Rizal’s family belonged to the principalia, the town

aristocracy. His parents owned a large sumptuous stone
house and adjacent property; their wealth derived from
cultivating leased land owned by the Dominican Order
which later expelled them for refusal to accede to a rental
increase and other impositions. Rizal’s mother managed a
store and operated a flour-mill and ham press; the parents
traced their lineage to merchants and provincial officials
with affluent Chinese petty-bourgeois provenance (see
Chapters 2-4 in Craig 1913). With a private library of more
than 1,000 volumes (the largest in Calamba, Laguna), the
Rizals (of eleven children, nine were women) enjoyed a
relatively privileged rank among the native gentes or clan
establishment. Compared to his muted respect for his
father, Rizal esteemed his “clairvoyant” mother in a more
expressive and exuberant way: “My mother is a woman of
more than ordinary culture; she knows literature and
speaks Spanish better than I. She corrected my poems
and gave me good advice when I was studying rhetoric.
She is a mathematician and has read many books” (1938,
335). Intellectually more adept than her husband and
belonging to a more distinguished clan of professionals,
Teodora Alonso (Rizal complained in the same letter to
Blumentritt) “did not want that I should study more!”

Later on, in an 1884 letter copied by Leonor Rivera,

Rizal’s mother would advise him not to “meddle in things
that will distress me,” congratulating him on his
graduation: “”I’m thanking our Lord for having bestowed
on you an intelligence surpassing that of others” (1993,
159). But she wryly cautions him not to be too wise: “If he
gets to know more, the Spaniards will cut off his head.”
Confident and proud of his accomplishments at the
77
Ateneo and in Europe, Rizal set the warning aside. No
doubt Rizal worshipped his mother; consequently, when
she was subjected by Calamba’s gobernadorcillo and
guardia civiles to the cruel punishment of walking from
Calamba to Santa Cruz, a distance of 50 kilometers, on a
charge that was never substantiated, Rizal suffered an
incalculably profound trauma. It was a deeply painful
wound that disturbed him enough to motivate him to
condemn—to quote his rationale for writing his
novels—“our culpable and shameful complacence with
existing miseries,” and “to wake from slumber the spirit of
the Fatherland.” The mother’s ordeal served as the primal
scenario of violation, the initiation into the crucible of
Rizal’s life-pilgrimage. It also marked the defeat of the
Indio fathers—their virtual emasculation and
castration—and the return of the avenging Furies of
classical natural law.

Rizal was then only eleven years old when his

mother was arrested on that malicious charge. She and
her brother Jose Alberto, a rich Binan ilustrado, were
accused of trying to poison the latter’s wife who
abandoned his home and children when the husband was
on a business trip in Europe. It was Teodora Alonso who
persuaded the brother to forgive his wife’s infidelity, to no
avail; she connived with the Spanish lieutenant of the
Guardia Civil to file a case in court accusing her husband
and Dona Teodora of trying to kill her. Rizal’s recounting
of the disaster (in the Memorias entry from Jan. 1871 to
June 1872) does not wholly capture the devastating
impact of this disaster on the adolescent’s psyche: “The
mayor….treated my mother with contumely, not to say
brutality, afterward forcing her to admit what they wanted
her to admit, promising that she would be set free and re-
united with her children if she said what they wanted her
to say….My mother was like all mothers: deceived and
terrorized…” (1950, 30).

Rizal visited her in prison; she endured the unjust

imprisonment for two years and half. With his brother also
suspected of complicity with Father Jose Burgos,
executed with Fr. Gomez and Fr. Zamora for sedition, Rizal
summed up the effect of the two events: “From then on,
78
while still a child, I lost confidence in friendship and
mistrusted my fellowmen.” Leon Maria Guerrero rightly
appraised this unbearable tragedy of his mother as the
key pivotal experience that Rizal could not face except
through the anonymous student diary we quoted. He
grappled with it through the cathexis of a public
grievance, the 1872 martyrdom of the three secular priests
which tormented his brother Paciano, “not so agonizing or
so personal as his beloved mother’s shame,…shamefully
imprisoned, unfairly tried and unjustly condemned” (1969,
17; see Baron-Fernandez 1980, 19-20). Such injustice
implied the loss of an objective standard of morality; the
teleology of scholastic metaphysics gave way to the
contingency, relativism and perspectivism of the modern
world where force and material power settled disputes and
adjudicated antagonisms.

Deciphering Eve’s Stigmata

To resolve the trauma, Rizal invented female

characters whose struggles sublimated his mother’s
experience and its painful affects. Sisa’s plight may be
read as Rizal’s attempt to confront the violation of his
mother’s honor by indirection and to redress the
grievance. But one apprehends an excess in the narrative,
more obsessive than melodramatic, more exorbitant than
the rhetorical pity and fear evoked by Aristotelian tragedy.
In Chapter 21 of the Noli, the guardia civiles arrest Sisa as
the “mother of thieves,” blaming her for her children’s
actions. The mother is thus made answerable and
responsible for her sons, not the delinquent father. Sisa’s
walk to the barracks is Rizal’s re-enactment of his
mother’s torture, an unforgivable outrage. It was not just
an empathetic re-living of the mother’s agony but a
mimetic performance of the ordeal. This actualization may
be construed as a cathartic effort to assuage the
compulsion to repeat the past:

Seeing herself marching between the two, she felt

she could die of shame. It is true no one was in sight, but
what about the breeze and the light of day? True modesty
sees glances from all sides. She covered her face with her
handkerchief and thus, going on blindly, she wept bitterly
79
in humiliation. She was aware of her misery. She knew she
had been abandoned by all including her own husband,
but until now she had considered herself honorable and
respected; until now she had regarded with compassion
those women shockingly attired whom the town called the
soldiers’ concubines [Dona Consolacion, the alferez’s
wife, and Don Alberto’s deviant and vindictive wife would
represent this group]. Now it seemed to her that she had
descended one level lower than these in the social scale
(2004, 166).

Sisa’s intense shame attests to the power of

gendered socialization primarily mediated through the
family and the church apparatus, as Rizal would argue in
his letter to the Malolos women. But Sisa’s sense of honor
testifies to an inherent dignity, an impregnable self-
respect—qualities he recommends for Filipina women to
acquire—testifying to her goodness and decency despite
sordid appearances. Sisa’s torment accelerates when this
dweller on the fringes beyond the scope of the church
bells’ tolling (measuring the extent of Spanish power)
approaches the town: “she was seized with terror; she
looked in anguish around her: vast rice fields, a small
irrigation canal, thin trees—there was not a precipice or a
boulder in sight against which she could smash herself.”
Sisa then becomes suicidal as the urban space engulfs
her. Alienated from the urban circuit of money and
commodity exchange, she is terrified by the signs of
civilization. Inwardly she vows to her son that they will
withdraw farther into “the depths of the forest.” When she
reminds the soldiers that they have entered the town,
Rizal’s discourse becomes opaque, generalized, imposing
rhetorical distance: “Her tone could not be defined. It was
a lament, reproach, complaint: it was a prayer, pain and
grief, condensed into sounds” (167). Inside the barracks,
“she was convulsed with bitter sobbing—a dry sobbing
that was tearless and without words.” Literary artifice
becomes impotent here to transcribe maternal anguish,
the dissonant music of the pre-Oedipal chora (Kristeva
1986).

Sisa now resembles an animal, sensuous practice

suspended in defensive pathos. Before she was released
80
by the alferez who was at loggerheads with the friars,
“Sisa passed two hours in a state of semi-imbecility,
huddled in a corner, head hidden between her hands, hair
disheveled and in disarray.” She was summarily thrown
out from the barracks, “almost forced out because she
was too stunned to move.” She is a non-entity to the
alferez, a sensuous psyche consigned to the domain of
inert objects and beasts, a figure caught in the antinomy
between the transcendent and the phenomenal
dimensions of human existence (Heller 1999, 229) .

Reincarnations

What happens subsequently is Sisa’s

transformation into the voice of Nature, the sentient
environment of rural Philippines. Conversely, it is the
humanization of the stigmatized territory customarily
identified with the autochtonous ambience of savagery
and barbarism, with bandits or tulisanes, with outlaws,
pagans and vagrant lunatics. With Sisa, however, Rizal
describes the process of dehumanization/naturalization,
beginning with her calling for her sons upon arrival at her
hut, searching her surroundings: “Her eyes wandered with
a sinister expression. They would brighten up now and
then with a strange light; then they would darken like the
skies during a stormy night. One can almost say that the
light of reason was ebbing close to extinction.” She
wandered “screaming or howling strange sounds. Her
voice had a strange quality unlike the sound produced by
human vocal chords.” Rizal deprives her of human
language and endows her with the more infinitely varied
sounds of the elements. The next day, defying the
narrator’s wish that “some kindly angel wing would blot
out from her features and memory the ravages of
suffering” and that Mother Providence would intervene
during her sleep, “Sisa wandered aimlessly, smiling,
singing or talking, communing with all of nature’s
creation,” except her fellow humans.

In Rizal’s poignant dramatization of this topos of

pieta (mother-child linkage), Sisa commands a reservoir of
psychic energy not found in the other female
protagonists. It is not found in Juli, Cabesang Tales’
81
daughter, whose labor-power had to be alienated when
her father joins the outlaws. As though re-living the
traumatic ordeal of Rizal’s mother, the narrative voice
describes Juli’s walk to the convent accompanied by
Sister Bali. “She thought the whole world was looking at
her and pointing a finger at her.” Overwhelmed with terror,
she resisted Sister Bali’s urging, “pale, her features
contorted. Her look seemed to say that she saw death
before her” (335). Frightened by the prospect of her lover
Basilio’s exile, with wrath and despair, Juli closed her
eyes so as not to see the abyss into which she was going
to hurl herself”—the desperate assertion of her freedom, a
stoic defiance of woman’s enslavement.

One can infer a general tendency from this

incident, a hypothetical line of argument. When the
family’s patriarch can no longer protect the household
with the separation of the worker from the means of
production/subsistence, the daughter becomes a prey for
the lecherous power lurking behind the institutional
enclaves and indoctrinated practices. Pushed to the
extreme, Juli preserves her dignity, her chastity, in her
lethal escape from that profanation emanating from the
house of God’s ministers. This anticipates Maria Clara’s
prison of Santa Clara in Intramuros at the close of the Noli
from which the only escape is madness or enigmatic
silence and disappearance enforced by the carceral
discipline of an obscurantist institution. Women’s
experience of self is thus structured in the tension
between the hegemonic ideological representations and
the unfulfilled needs of the sensuous, suffering body,
repressed but still animated with its genuine wants and
desires.

The Pathos of Excommunicating Truth

In contrast to Juli, Sisa is caught in a severe

contradiction: she cannot kill herself because her sons
need her. The maternal instinct compels communication
with other victims. In the latter part of the Noli, we
encounter Sisa again on the eve of the San Diego town
festival when Maria Clara and her relatives confront the
leper, a blind man “singing of the romance of the
82
fishes…” Art and reality collide. The blind singer allegedly
contracted leprosy by taking care of his mother. Rizal
dilates on this episode of the leper who, like Sisa, uttered
“strange incomprehensible sounds.” When Sisa
approached the leper sunk to his knees thanking Maria
Clara for the spontaneous gift of her locket, what Rizal
calls “a rare spectacle” dramatized here incorporates that
germ of a universal principle growing out of the
historically specific life-world of women in that reactionary
milieu. It is the negated principle of woman’s decisive
function in reproduction, nurturance, and production of
subsistence without which a regime of gender equality is
impossible (see Ebert (1996).

This particular scene speaks volumes on the

themes of justice, equality, egalitarian and participatory
democracy, ecumenical peace, and ecological survival
whose manifold ramifications we cannot spell out and
analyze here. Notice the multilayered implications of the
mad mother exhorting the blind leper to pray for the living
on the day of the dead, this gesture of reconciling
incompatibles deliberately punctuated by the clamor of
the normal spectators to separate the two victims:

As he felt her contact, the leper cried out and jumped up.
But the mad woman held on to his arm to the great horror
of the bystanders, and said to him: “Let us pray!…pray!
Today is the day of the dead! Those lights are the life of
men; let us pray for my sons!”

“Separate them, separate them! The mad woman

will get contaminated!” the crowd was shouting, but no
one dared to approach them.

“Do you see that light from the tower? That is my

son Basilio who comes down by a rope! Do you see that
one from the convent! That is my son Crispin, but I am not
going to see them because the priest is sick and has many
coins of gold and the coins got lost. Let us pray, let us
pray for the soul of the priest! I brought him amargoso
and zarzalidas; my garden was full of flowers, and I had
sons. I had a garden, I was taking care of flowers and I had
two sons!” (2004, 249-50).
83
 Of the various thematic strands and motifs woven
in this network, I will only underscore three: 1) the
horticultural stage of social production alluded to recalls
the stage of the matrilineal/matrilocal setup in primitive
society, a time when the communal household enabled
the reciprocal division of labor between the sexes—notice
the absence of Sisa’s husband, her sole supervision of the
household, and her subsistence obtained from working
the land (productive labor as one form of praxis); 2) the
parasitic excess of a mercantile economy (centered on
coinage extracted by friars, thus combining religious
ideology and trade/commerce) monopolized by a
theocratic state and a frailocracy whose mercenary use of
religion demystifies their legitimacy in purveying the
mystical and magical; and, finally, 3) the
contamination/contagion of an alienated society,
misrecognized but actually lived by the people who called
for the separation of the physically diseased and the
psychically abnormal, both appendages of a cancerous
body politic.

We cannot help but register the behavior of the

crowd as cynical, callous and hypocritical. The spectacle
manifests a further irony inscribed in the fact that the
living have mortgaged their destinies to the dead—indeed,
one can say that the dead fathers, tradition, fetishized
rituals, idolized metals and reifying commodities
(symbolized in the File by the hypnotic power of Simon’s
merchandise) have taken over. Aside from taxes and
governmental levies on ordinary citizens, the selling of
indulgences, and other ceremonial fees and tributes
collected by the church demonstrates systemic
corruption. In the last chapter taking place on Christmas
Eve, Basilio catches up with his deranged mother. Finally
she recognizes him and is briefly restored to normalcy,
only to die and be consumed in a funeral pyre together
with the fugitive Elias. Phoenix-like, Sisa’s motherhood is
affirmed only to be dialectically cancelled and preserved
or sublated into the predicament of other surrogates and
avatars—Melchora Aquino, Salud Algabre, Felipa Culala,
Maria Lorena Barros, Cherith Dayrit, Luisa Posa-
Dominado, Kemberley Jul Luna, and other militants in
today’s national-democratic insurgency. We still labor
84
under the sharpening crisis of the imperial fathers and
their native acolytes, alarmed by the resurgent
nationalism of fiery woman-warriors, mothers and
daughters of a long durable and sustainable revolutionary
tradition authentically of our own making (Aguilar 1998;
San Juan 1999).

Exorcising the “Two-faced Goliath”

We need not linger over the semantic and

philosophical complexities of other episodes where Sisa
intrudes. Suffice it to mention here the scene in Chapter
40 where Dona Consolacion, the alferez’s crazed wife
tortures Sisa; or in other episodes where Sisa’s seemingly
gratuitous appearances at the margin of festivities disrupt
the quotidian trappings and ceremonies of the respectable
citizens. As an antithesis to the maternal archetype
(instanced by the negative examples of Maria Clara’s
mother, Dona Victorina de Espadana, and others), Dona
Consolacion may be interpreted as the wicked half of the
ambiguous duality of the mythical pair
Demeter/Persephone, the Laura/Flerida duality in
Francisco Balagtas’ awit, or Kali, the Indian goddess of
fertility and destruction (Eliade 1958, 418-19). Alterity
operates within the gender dichotomy, as in all socially
constructed categories of subject-positions, of identities.
Dona Consolacion is a modified specimen of the genre.
Isolated and frustrated, forbidden from participating in the
festival (“she saturated herself in her own bile”) and ready
to unleash repressed energies on anyone in sight. We
confront again the archaic Furies hounding the
perpetrators and apologists of rape and matricide.

Rizal amplifies her Medusa-like malignance in a

way complementary to Sisa’s unnnatural look: “Her eyes
glittered like a serpent’s, caught and about to be crushed
underfoot
. They were cold, luminous, piercing, akin to something
slimy, filthy and cruel” (346). Is this the sensitive, devout
Rizal repulsed by the loathsome aspect of the sinful Eve,
the mesmerizing siren and wily temptress of myth and
fable? Her unrelenting brutality toward Sisa who was
reduced into an animal emitting “howling sounds” can
85
perhaps be understood as a release of dammed-up
resentment against her husband; but what enables her to
do this is her sharing the alferez’s status evident in her
taunt: “Cursed be the mother who gave you birth!” With
equal fury, Dona Consolacion attacks her husband,
blaming him for not allowing her “to fulfill my duties
toward God!” This episode is a hilarious vaudeville of
marital conflict and its reverberating tensions, as evinced
in the case of Uncle Alberto cited earlier. Rizal satirized
local mores and manners with gusto, somewhat diverting
us from the real target of the degradation of both sexes;
but the power of Rizal’s critique ultimately inhered in the
grasp of the totality of social relations, which subsumed
the economic structures that buttressed the racializing
ideology and institutional practices of Spanish colonial
might. What is true and real in the lived experiences of
Rizal’s characters (as well as his contemporaries) acquire
meaning and significance only within the context of the
historical totality, in the dynamic sequence of the past
moving to the present and future, in nineteenth-century
Philippines.

The patriarchal age might be coming to an end, as

Rizal once intoned; but its repressive legacy endured up
to his death, and after. Dona Consolacion and her benign
counterparts, such as Paulita Gomez and Dona Victorina,
may be Rizal’s strategy of thwarting feminist protest. After
all, not all women conform to the Maria Clara/Leonor
Rivera model. Early experiences involving Consuelo
Ortigas, Leonor Valenzuela, Segunda Katigbak, the
anonymous older L. of an adjacent village, not to mention
the unstinting solicitude of his mother and sisters
throughout his life, all offered Rizal comfort and
affirmation of his virility in one degree or another; none
threatened him or provoked an unconventional response.
So whence the need to invent a nasty violent female
protagonist, displaying her irrational fury and then
neutralizing her by parody and caricature so as to
guarantee our safety from her claims to rational
judgment? Why exhibit women’s aggressive capacity, her
destructive potential? Why the need to exorcise the
derelict, malevolent wife of uncle Alberto—if not to purge

86
the devastating trauma of her mother’s torture and
compensate for the male Indio’s powerlessness?

Unrequited love cannot justify any suspicion of

Rizal’s chauvinism. With Segunda Katigbak, it was Rizal’s
internal schism that paralyzed the adolescent male ego:
“But at the critical moments of my life I have always acted
against my heart’s desire, obeying contradictory purposes
and powerful doubts” (1950, 52). A schism of objective
and subjective determinants erupts, signaling the
subject’s forced initiation into secular modernity. That
crisis occurred in December 1881, six years before his
engagement with Leonor Rivera was annulled by her
parents who could dispose of their daughter’s body
without consulting her. Even though he enjoyed Nelly
Boustead’s company, among others, and succumbed to
the O-Sei-San’s insidious charm—addressing her in his
diary, Rizal wrote that “No woman, like you, has ever
loved me. No woman, like you, has ever sacrificed for
me,” not even his mother or his fiancee (Zaide 1984, 132),
Rizal confessed that he almost grew mad when he lost
Leonor. It was the “first sledgehammer blow” of the
railway construction that fell on him; the British engineer
Kipping was a free man, Rizal was not (1999, 113).

What was the lesson? What insight was Rizal

imparting when he thwarted self-pity by proclaiming that
he was not free? It was not just another male replacing
him, it was a burgher-citizen of the imperial metropole
trouncing the Indio subaltern from the contest for a
conjugal partner. It was the freedom of the modern citizen
able to alienate/dispose of his/her labor-power in the
anarchic market. It was ultimately industrial capitalism
blasting the ethnic, geopolitical walls of empire—only to
sustain the patriarchal domination of women’s bodies.

Leonor Rivera died on 28 August 1893. According

to his friend Galicano Apacible, Rizal was shattered, fell
into a somnambulistic trance (Rodolfo 1958, 451). While in
exile in Dapitan, Rizal met Josephine Bracken (a Eurasian
orphan from Hong Kong, Asia’s burgeoning commercial
center) in February 1895 with whom he fell in love. In
March 1895, he wrote his mother to extend hospitality to
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Josephine and treat her as a person “whom I hold in great
esteem and regard, and whom I should not like to see
exposed and abandoned” (Guerrero 1969, 363). This
“errant swallow” promised refuge from a hostile world,
reviving memories of the relatively free European women
whose bodies/minds incited his imagination and fed the
subterranean fountainhead of desire. She also functioned
as an opportunity to re-affirm his manhood years before
the time arrived when he could sacrifice his life to the
object of his life’s mission: decolonizing and liberating
patria.

The Shaman’s Strip-tease Agency

Accompanying the estranjera Bracken, the figure

of the vindictive wife (of Uncle Alberto and others) returns
to the life of the Dapitan exile in the shape of his research
into psychosomatic illness. On 15 November 1895, Rizal
wrote the “notes for the study of Philippine medicine”
entitled “The Treatment of the Bewitched” (the original
title is “La Curacion de los hechizados. Apuntes hechos
para el studio de la Medicina Filipina” [Rizal 1999, 138]),
ostensibly a scientific account of the etiology of a disease
not caused by the usual pathogenic factors.

What is striking is Rizal’s description of the female

witch, the manggagaway (the mangkukulam, the male
counterpart, seems relatively harmless in casting
enchantment), who inflicts a most mysterious, terrible
illness, “though fortunately rare.” The male mendicant
magician is but an “involuntarily malevolent fakir,”
whereas the female sorcerer bewitches by suggestion.
She applies “diabolical arts” the origin of which is really
the social milieu, the cultural prejudices, customs and
folkways of the time. Rizal diagnoses this type of sorcery
as a result of auto-suggestion accompanying delirium,
delirium defined by Rizal as “the lack of equilibrium
between the perceptions and the conscience, a civil war
inside the brain” (1964,180). This delirium is what afflicted
Sisa and Juli in one degree or another. This civil war
between what Freud would call the reality-principle and
the pleasure-principle, between the warring forces of eros
and thanatos in an Oedipalized system, acquires
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sociohistorical embodiment and performativity in
everyday life.
Employing an objectifying stance, Rizal informs us
that there are towns in Luzon where all the women enjoy
the ascriptive reputation of being a manggagaway—a
social phenomenon symptomatic of the entire colonial
formation and its psychosomatic dynamics. The cure is
immanent in its diagnosis. Here is Rizal with the
physician’s required detachment unable to escape
pronouncing judgment on the conduct and reflex behavior
of the whole society:

Although some deserve the name for their inexplicable

vainglory, for their prattling, for believing that thus they
make themselves terrible, nevertheless others are
absolutely innocent…A certain air, a behavior somewhat
reserved and mysterious, a certain way of looking,
infrequent attendance at religious services, and others,
are enough to win for an unfortunate woman the
reputation of manggagaway. She is the she-ass 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 (1964, 178).

The witch, more exactly the experience of

bewitchment or possession, condenses all the tensions
released from the pressures of overlapping conflicts and
contradictions of a transitional phase in society, that is, a
society undergoing transformative upheavals. Rizal
performs the rite of the exorcising, medical shaman.
Instead of inveighing and counter-cursing, Rizal’s tone is
elegiac, oracular, trying to discriminate and at the same
time refrain from distinguishing the guilty and the
innocent. Nonetheless, as a scientist-physician, he
laments the human infirmity of not using reason to
analyze and cure the psychic malady. Rizal anticipates
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Freud’s transvaluation of the soul into the body-phantom
registering the impingements of family/society. I submit
that this discourse and its context exemplifies a
memorable instance of Rizal’s historical-materialist
sensibility and his ethico-political vocation to bring about
a revolution in the national psyche.

Advent of the Babaylan

In the course of his annotating Morga’s chronicles,

Rizal surely encountered the early missionaries’ notes on
the babaylan. His letter to Blumentritt from Dapitan (dated
20 November 1895) stated that he was “on the way to
deciphering the meaning of babailan,” but nothing more.
What I would underscore here is a problematic silence,
perhaps a tactical deference on Rizal’s part (as
ethnologist and physician), not to interpolate in his
explanation the case of the babaylan or catalona
stigmatized by the Spanish missionaries into the perverse
rubric of the manggagaway.
Magic or the instrumentalization of
supernatural/psychic power acquires gender
differentiation in a colonially stratified milieu. Mostly
widows or elderly women, the babaylans were the
custodians of folk wisdom in the arts of healing, of
divining the future, and the performance of propitiatory
rituals. As medical practitioners, astronomers and
interpreters of culture, they exercised persuasive control
over matters of reproduction and health of the community.
They not only presided over the vital rituals of weddings,
births, funerals, hunts and war; they also advised the
datus and sultans on how to resolve political conflicts and
other problems in civic affairs.
With their prestige and their authority over health,
fertility and diseases, the babaylans exhibited “the pre-
condition to maximize [women’s] participation and remain
competitive with the men in the other spheres…even to
the extent of becoming socially equal, at times, even
superior to…the rest of society (Mangahas 1987, 13).
Because these religious intermediaries are not organized
into sects nor are they in permanent contact with the
supernatural realm except during trances or moments of

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possession, they are more precisely classified as
shamanesses (Infante 1975, 194-96).
For the historian Zeus Salazar, the babaylan
functioned as the third pillar of the economic unit of the
barangay, the basis for the bayan or aggregate of
communal settlements. after the datu, hari or lakan (the
political head) and the panday (blacksmith). In the process
of the military-evangelical conquest of the islands, the
babaylans were incorporated into church activities as
religious women in charge of processions or servants of
the convent. Those unable to assimilate, or who resisted
the syncreticizing strategy of the church, instigated and
supported rebellions such as that led by Sumoroy, by
Waray Tupung in Bohol, by the cofradias and various
messianic organizations including the Katipunan—the
formidable example of the revolutionary general Teresa
Magbanua easily comes to mind, overshadowing those of
Gabriela Silang or Princess Urduja (Salazar 1996). In
suppressing such revolts, the Spaniards demonized the
babaylans, the custodians of the indigenous cultures,
reconfiguring them as transgressive witches,
manggagaways or mangkukulams (designating men who
dare arrogate magical rights or privileges within the
animistic frame of tribal beliefs).

It is intriguing to speculate that if Rizal was able to

continue his third novel, Makamisa, or the narrative
entitled “The Ancient Tagalog Nobility,” we would
probably have for hermeneutic inspection a full-bodied
rendering of the babaylan in action. Was Teodora Alonso
not one avatar of this shadowy nemesis of the patriarchal
social contract? Meanwhile, we are left to ponder the
vestige of calculating missionary zeal. Behind that
prophylactic passage describing the female sorcerer, we
witness Sisa and Dona Consolacion distilled in one
phenomenal figure—the babaylan split into two
embodiments. What Rizal enunciates, in general, is a
symbolic complex of good and evil coexisting together,
what is heretical and impious coalescing in one subject-
position. Actually, it is a mirror-image of Rizal as the
recalcitrant and transgressive Indio, the unpatriotic
expatriate (for the friars) defying the Comision
permanente de censura by speaking of the true and the
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real. The witch is Rizal; but the curse is this counter-
statement, the doctor’s report. Alienated colonial society
ascribes the source of its vices, crimes and ignorance to a
fraction of the female sex and, in this collective process of
purification, acquits male authority of any wrongdoing.
Impartiality requires settling accounts with the patriarchs
in the church and the bureaucracy (for the European
record, see Figes 1970).

Certain sisters of Eve functioned as scapegoat-like

Christs, just as the penitent whore Magdalene came about
due to “the powerful undertow of misogyny in Christianity,
which associates women with the dangers and
degradation of the flesh” (Warner 1976, 225; for the
communist-oriented views of early Christians regarding
women and the family, see Kautsky 1925, 347-354), hence
the whore becomes a beloved saint. In Rizal’s polyvocal
discourse, the realms of the sacred and profane are two
halves of the same coin, one an inquiring mirror of the
other; hence, the term “divine” operates here as a
symptomatic rubric of the religious illusion, the
ideological narcotic, that the Enlightenment and the
bourgeois revolutions in Europe failed to uproot. It is now
Rizal’s turn to enlighten his women compatriots, in
particular, of the need to liberate themselves from what
William Blake called “mind-forged manacles” by their own
collective effort and initiative. It is time to re-instate the
primacy of personal autonomy and civic solidarity in the
arena of everyday life.

The Epistle to the Women of Malolos

Teaching and learning, for Rizal as scholar-

researcher in history and ethnology, are indivisibly fused
in his role as committed public intellectual (Baron-
Fernandez 1980; Ocampo 1998). Study, collective learning,
is part of emancipatory praxis that connects human
agency and the ecosystem, as Marx implied in his thesis
on Feuerbach: “The coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and of human activity can be conceived
and rationally understood only as revolutionizing
practice” (Tucker 1972, 145). His now famous letter to the
young women of Malolos, dated Feb. 22, 1889, was elicited
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by the tireless iconoclastic propagandist-rhetorician,
Marcelo H. Del Pilar, while Rizal was preoccupied with
annotating Morga’s chronicles in the British Museum in
London, and also answering the critics of the Noli
(Ocampo 1988). It was deliberately written in Tagalog at
the time when he was also preparing his first article for
the reformist journal La Solidaridad entitled “Los
Agricoltores Filipinos.” That intervention may be
compared to Karl Marx’s two contributions to the
Rheinische Zeitung on the law against thefts of timber and
on the destitution of the Moselle Wine Growers (McLellan
1970, 95-101).
In Rizal’s inquiry into the backward conditions of
the Filipino farmers, he deplored how the farmer capitalist
had to battle not only floods and locusts but also petty
tyrannical officials, the constable of the civil guards and
the bureaucrats of the court and the provincial
government. Already equipped with an astute
comprehension of the social relations of production, the
political economy of the Spanish colony, Rizal this time
focused his critique on the efficacy of the ideological
apparatus in sustaining the unrelieved subjugation of the
natives, in particular the disciplinary subalternization of
women, whom he considered crucial in the formation of
children’s personality and disposition. In re-visiting
Rizal’s militant advocacy of a historical-materialist critique
of society through his novels and various discourses,
contra Constantino (1970) and vulgar Marxists, we can
appreciate his singular contribution to humankind’s
libertarian archive, whatever his other limitations given
the circumstances and contingencies of his personal
situation and the state of the world in the latter part of the
nineteenth century.
The central burden of Rizal’s letter is the critique
of religion, more exactly, its practice of idolatry and
attendant fanaticism which violate “saintliness” defined
as obedience to “the dictates of reason.” Thus he bewails
servitude and “blind submission to any unjust order,”
since each person can use a god-given reason and will to
distinguish the just from the unjust. The role of the
dissenting, inquiring conscience becomes crucial for
fostering literacy and civic liberty. Positing the radical
premise of all humans being born free, with no right to
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subjugate the will and spirit of another, Rizal urges the
use of rational analysis and judgment in all activities—not
just in learning Spanish, which for the Malolos women
was really a pretext to have access to the mentoring
wisdom of Teodoro Sandiko, Rizal’s progressive
compatriot, whom they wanted as teacher (the petition
was eventually granted, but Sandiko was replaced by a
person approved by the church).
Rizal’s obsession with the need for activating the
rational critical faculty is not only a rejection of the
stereotypical attributes of modesty, passivity and docility
ascribed to women by custom and ecclesiastical
authority, but also an attempt to include women as
citizens fully qualified to participate in fashioning the
“General Will” (in Rousseau’s definition) of civil society.
While not explicitly mentioning Rousseau, Rizal invokes
reason as the primary requisite for self-mastery, for the
exercise of moral liberty, which is a precondition for
conceptualizing the universal interest of the whole society
(Lange 1979; Hendel 1934). Following the Renaissance
episteme (in Foucault’s construal) of human reason as a
reflection of God in the human soul, Rizal is moving to a
classic notion of representation being subsumed into an
emergent modernist teleology of self-discipline and
historical self-consciousness (Foucault 1970). Women
need to learn Spanish if only to become doubly visible to
the imperial panopticon’s surveillance. Rizal adhered to
the Socratic maxim, nosce te ipsum, as conducing to the
true concept of one’s self which motivates the dynamic
creativity of human intelligence and empowers national
progress (1999, 70). Opposing the confinement of women
to devalued and debilitating reproductive labor—the
expenditure of time and energy in providing nurture and
socialization for dependent offspring—Rizal seeks to
install women as citizens equal to men in exercising
personal autonomy and sympathetic concern for others.

Encountering the School of Life

Rizal’s judgment on colonial education in the

Philippines is condensed in one sentence in his famous
discourse on “the indolence of Filipinos”: “The education
of the Filipinos from birth until the grave is brutalizing,
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depressing, and anti-human” (1999, 35). Rizal’s studies in
Madrid and his friendship with liberal professionals in
France, Germany and England no doubt exposed him to
both Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) and Emile (1762).
The latter work, Emile ou de la education, especially its
fifth book, seems to be the source of general romantic
ideas (which Rizal absorbed) about childhood and the
importance of the constant care of the biological
mother—the example of the Spartan mother Rizal cites is
used by Rousseau in the first part of the book as a
negative example of the perversion of natural feeling
(1969, 8). That notion of course dovetailed with the
mother-child (Virgin Mary/Jesus) family paradigm in
Christian catechism. But in this context, motherhood, for
Rizal, was not just a natural attribute but an achieved or
acquired social role. Rizal contradicts Rousseau’s
dualistic belief in associating the female with
body/nature/family and the male with mind/citizen/public
life. His radical egalitarianism springs from his desire to
enroll Filipino women into the ranks of anti-Spanish
colonial partisans of the national struggle. Social
expectations, not just the family-imposed sexual division
of labor, defined the mother as a redemptive teacher.

What is lamentable, for Rizal, is the Filipino

woman’s failure to be good mothers due to their profligate
addiction to gambling, their subservience to the
mercenary friars, their zealotry in conforming to reified
rituals, and their complacent ignorance: “What sons will
she have but acolytes, priest’s servants, or cockfighters?”
Sisa’s gambling husband and her two sons in the convent
loom in the background. In suggesting that mothers
replace the friars as the fountainhead of moral guidance in
the family, Rizal valorizes the agency of mothers as
educative/formative forces primarily responsible for
shaping the character of their children: “…you are the first
to influence the consciousness of man…. Awaken and
prepare the will of our children towards all that is
honorable, judged by proper standards, to all that is
sincere and firm of purpose, clear judgment, clear
procedure, honesty in act and deed, love for the
fellowman and respect for God” (1984, 327).

95
 Lacking civic organizations outside the family, the
mother then becomes the only viable pedagogical
alternative to the convent and the church-regulated
schools. The native fathers are either conscripted by the
government for military service, for unpaid public labor, or
occupied in cultivating friar-owned lands. Rizal affirms his
faith in the power and good judgment of Filipino women.
He believes that Asia is backward because Asian women
are ignorant and slavish, whereas in Europe and America
“the women are free and well educated and endowed with
lucid intellect and a strong will” (128). We know that Rizal
admired German women who “are active and somewhat
masculine,” not afraid of men, “more concerned with the
substance than with appearances” (letter to Trinidad Rizal,
11 March 1886; 1993, 223). The figure of Teodora Alonso,
the moralizing mother-teacher, is not far behind.

Excursion to Sparta

It is therefore not surprising that Rizal would

invoke the civic conscience of Spartan mothers as
exemplary. We should first grasp the truth of our situation,
he reminds his Malolos audience, perhaps deducing
lessons from his own experience: young students lose
their reason when they fall in love, and so beware. The
passions mislead (to use Spinoza’s terms); adequate
knowledge of nature is needed to act wisely and
responsibly. Moreover, marriage makes shameless
cowards of the bravest youth. Rizal then advises women
who are married to “aid her husband, inspire him with
courage, share his perils, refrain from causing him worry
and sweeten his moments of affliction… Open your
children’s eyes so that they may jealously guard their
honor, love their fellowmen and their native land, and do
their duty,” like the women of Sparta (1984, 330). Rizal
extolled Spartan women for giving birth to men who would
willingly sacrifice their lives in defense of their homeland.

But Rizal did not mention how that practice was

possible because of the rigorous militaristic regimen
imposed on the training of Spartan youth, the rigorous
routine of the agelai or herds (described by Plutarch) in
disciplining youth solely for fighting. Ruled by an
96
exclusive ruling caste, Sparta suppressed their serfs
(helots) with a permanent military organization (a standing
army) and a tribal system of common ownership that
prevented the disruptive effects of commodity production,
industry and trade using coinage (Thomson 1955, 210-
211). The Spartan oligarchy administered the polity’s
settlement (family estates with serfs) as the prime
economic unit based on communal ownership of the soil
and local handicrafts. Spartan women were also trained in
the agelai but “they were free to go about in public;
adultery was not punishable or even discreditable; a
woman might have several husbands” (Thomson 1968,
190). We are still in a quasi-primitive communal society
(somewhat similar to pre-conquest Philippines) where
women’s work extended beyond the private household. In
supervising the production of subsistence and other use-
valued goods, women exercised a measure of power and
effective rights in the public sphere.

It is clear that Spartan mothers were not the

educators Rizal conceived them to be. They did not raise
their sons who, at the age of seven, were enrolled in the
agelai and transferred to the Men’s House at nineteen,
devoting themselves to military exercises. When married,
Spartan men did not live with their wives but visited them
clandestinely on occasions; the brides/wives lived with
their parents. Women obtained substantial dowries and
inherited two-fifths of the land in the absence of their
husbands; though excluded from political life, their
indispensable position as heiresses and managers of the
estates with their ubiquitous helot labor gave them so
great an influence that Aristotle spoke of Sparta as a
country “ruled by women” (Thomson 1968, 192). Because
of the division of labor between the sexes, all adult males
served in the standing army while the women
administered the family estates. This is what allowed
Spartan mothers to sternly judge the performance of their
soldier-sons, not their care or nurturance in the private
domain of the father-centered home, as Rizal seemed to
believe. Education was in the hands of the patriarchal
oligarchy of Sparta, not in those of mothers or daughters.
One would expect Rizal to be more
knowledgeable or informed, but surely a full substantial
97
description of Spartan society was not his intention. His
purpose was to praise Spartan unity—about 9,000 citizens
“economically self-sufficient and politically enfranchised”
(Anderson 1974, 35)--and their selfless devotion to the
defense of their homeland originally conquered from the
indigenous Messenians who became state helots. The
austere independence of Spartan women thrilled Rizal. In
his 1886 letter to his sister Trinidad, Rizal objected to the
Filipino women’s obsession with clothing and finery
attuned to the demands of the marriage market. His
instructions at the end reiterate the fundamental virtues of
courage, diligence, dignity, and personal autonomy
derived from acquiring knowledge (“ignorance is
servitude”) and the cultivation of intellect, as well as the
fulfillment of reciprocal obligations toward others. This
repeated exhortation to cooperation and mutual help, a
pre-requisite in forging national sentiment (Majul 1961, 73-
185), precedes the somewhat peremptory fifth injunction:
“If the Filipina will not change her mode of being, let her
rear no more children, let her merely give birth to them.
She must cease to be the mistress of the home, otherwise
she will unconsciously betray husband, child, native land,
and all.” Beware, parents of Leonor Rivera, Segunda
Katigbak, and their sisters—you may be nurturing
treacherous wives who pretend to be “mistress of the
home” while scheming to deliver husbands, children,
homeland, to the enemy. Rizal’s parting words seem even
more rebarbative: “...may you in the garden of learning
gather not bitter but choice fruit, looking well before you
eat because on the surface of the globe all is deceit and
the enemy sow seeds in your seedling plot.”

Experimental Realism

In spite of such shortcomings, the sixth

instruction in Rizal’s epistle sums up his pedagogical
creed: to value intelligence and reason as the enabling
principle of equality and solidarity with others. What is
reasonable and just is the aim of learning; “to make use of
reason in all things” entails the rejection of egotism and
the local barbarism of folklore, superstitions, fossilized
notions, and anachronistic habits that prevent Filipinos,
men and women, from reflecting on their common
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situation and critically analyzing the impact of movement
and change in their collective life. One can detect in
Rizal’s emphasis on using the “sieve of reason,” which is
mobilized to grasp “the truth of the situation,” an over-
anxious insistence in developing civic consciousness in
women, expressed here as praise for their “power and
good judgment,” “fortitude of mind and loftiness of
purpose,” and so on. Here Rizal departs from Rousseau’s
maxim of differential worth, as well as from the
commonsensical, biologistic, liberal notions of the sexes
complementing and/or supplementing each other, in
treating women as equal to men in being capable of
reflective self-development and civic agency in the public
sphere. Nonetheless, he subscribes to the French
revolution’s ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity
refracted through the prism of deistic Christianity,
“religion within the bounds of practical reason,” in Kant’s
phrase; and of communal honor, Rizal’s “self-esteem,” in
riposte to Fr. Pastell’s sardonic attitude (Palma 1949, 235-
47)).

Anxious to defend women’s honor maligned by

the friars and abusive Spanish visitors, Rizal can only
retort that Spanish women themselves are not all “cut
after the pattern of the Holy Virgin Mary.” Since the
Malolos women for the most part belonged to the
ilustrado/principalia class comprised of families with
bilateral extensions, Rizal can only abstractly valorize
rationality as crystallized in the concrete practice of
nurturing children. The household realm is open to
affinitive reconstruction. The everyday life becomes a
domain of paramount concern. In the process, he
appraises women’s work in the household as one
mediating the relations of the natural and social orders.
This domestic work generates what Antonio Gramsci calls
“the first elements of an intuition of the world free from all
magic and superstition”(1978, 52). Learning, education as
the internalized absorption of modalities of empirical
investigation and synthetic-analytic reflection, follows
Rizal’s insight (written from Barcelona circa 1881) that
“the knowledge of a thing prepares for its control.
Knowledge is power” (1999, 70).

99
 Unlike Sisa, Juli, Salome and women of the
peasantry and village artisans, the Malolos
assemblage—Rizal surmises—is struggling to overcome
the bondage of limited schooling and constricted
participation in civic affairs due mainly to the consensual
routine of stultifying religious indoctrination. In addition,
one has to reckon with paternal surveillance and the long
tradition of the pasyon and its focus on the mystical
transcendence of human suffering. The petition submitted
to Gov. Valeriano Weyler to open a night school so that
young women might learn Spanish under the progressive
mentor Teodoro Sandiko served as the first step in
breaking down that bondage of silence and the customary
acceptance of women’s inferiorization. Their spontaneous
agitation may be conceived as their recognition of
“necessity” as freedom when they reached out to the
propagandists in Madrid and outside their province, a
strategic move embodying the radical principle of
socializing what was deemed natural and historicizing
what was deemed immutable, fated, or predestined.
Modernity’s historicizing drive has taken over Malolos and
the embryonic Filipino diaspora.

Ilustrado Hubris

In the letter, Rizal refined and complicated the

analysis of the political economy underlying Filipino
women’s circumscribed lot to a critique of the church-
induced habitus (Bourdieu 1977) of submission and self-
abnegation. The reason for this is that in the colonial
setup, the ideological propaganda apparatus of the church
and its capillary agencies predominated over any liberal
reformist tendencies of the arbitrary secular-civilian
administration. We can appreciate this better if we keep in
mind the ethos of unquestioning obedience and decorum
prescribed for women by normative codes and
institutional practices distilled, for example, in Lagda
(1734), a manual of exemplary Christian conduct, and in
the widely read text of Father Modesto de Castro, Urbana
at Felisa (1864), self-described as “an educational moral
novel” (Mojares 1983, 82).
The historian Maria Luisa Camagay remarks how
the frailocracy abused its authority by sexually exploiting
100
women workers, particularly those applying for the
position of maestra (teacher) and matrona (midwife): “The
friar proved to be a bane in the life of Filipino women in
th
the 19 century” (1995, 121). With the employment of more
women into the flourishing tobacco factories and in paid
domestic services, the power of the frailocracy was
gradually demarcated and focused on the women of the
principalia (e.g. Pia Alba, Maria Clara). It was inflicted on
the twenty-one Malolos women, entrepreneurs in farms
and urban businesses, who wanted to use part of their
free night-hours to develop their intellects and acquire
urbane skills.

Rizal was also aware of the enormous weight of

Spanish colonial laws—for example, the Spanish Marriage
Law of 1870—that subordinated women to the property-
owning husband. Applying the doctrine of Roman
jurisprudence concerning patria postestas with the male
paterfamilias as absolute ruler, this law together with
other Royal Decrees segregated women into colegios and
beaterios that prepared women either for motherhood or
the religious life (Feliciano 1996). Rizal’s anti-
authoritarianism targeted the gendering mechanism of
schools, court and bureaucracy, even though by 1781
women were being hired by government-owned tobacco
factories, and by 1894 they were being admitted to
teaching careers (Camagay 1989, 35). Such recruitment
into waged labor in fact simply substituted market
compulsion for paternal/church authority. Rizal’s praise of
prudent resistance to authority, balanced with his stress
on “justice [as] the foremost virtue of civilized nations” (in
“The Philippines a Century Hence”), distinguishes his
implied philosophy of education as part of his agonistic,
but also perspectival and thoroughly modern, view of life
conveyed to his nephew during his Dapitan exile:

To live is to be among humans and to be among humans

is to struggle. But this struggle is not a brutal and material
struggle with men alone; it is a struggle with them, with
one’s self, with their passions and one’s own, with errors
and preoccupations. It is an eternal struggle with a smile
on the lips and tears in the heart. On this battlefield man
has no better weapon than his intelligence, no other force
101
but his heart. Sharpen, perfect, polish then your mind and
fortify and educate your heart (1993, 375)

Self-discipline as Enlightenment desideratum was

also what he was trying to articulate in the letter, except
that he was more preoccupied with altering the
psychophysical disposition of women inured to passivity,
obedience and silence, which over-determined the fates of
Maria Clara, Juli and Sisa. This accounts for the emphasis
on a militarized sense of corporate honor, a warrior ethos
distinguished by an ascetic regimen in fulfilling duty and
obligations to the community, as if he was trying to
convert the feminine habitus to a more competitive,
adversarial mode (on the ethos of honor, see Ossowska
1970). It seems as though the entrepeneurial Rizal, who
engaged in the abaca trade, complained of not earning
enough as an eye-doctor, and gambled in the lottery, was
more preoccupied with inculcating the aristocratic virtues
of the feudal nobility than the bourgeois ethos of
regularity, thrift, and profit-motivated cunning. The
Spartan model haunts the margins of the epistolary script.
He was skipping the stage of hypocritical merchant
capitalism (identified with a mercenary priesthood and
parasitic native bureaucracy) in favor of a utopian
meritocratic arrangement allowing the intelligent an iota of
elite privilege while maintaining a semblance of
aristocratic decorum.

Although marginal to the plot of the Noli (in fact,

the whole chapter “Elias and Salome” was excised from
the final version), the character Salome displays more
affinities with her Malolos sisters, given her relative
control over her means of subsistence and her isolation.
She is the remaindered kin of the ostracized babaylans.
With Elias’ decision not to marry her in order to spare her
the misery of a wretched family life, she plans to move to
the frontier land of Mindoro and join her relatives. Living
happily in the wilderness, desiring nothing but health to
work and enjoy what is freely offered, not envying the rich
girls their wealth, Salome anticipates the nature deity
Maria Makiling of Rizal’s reconstituted folklore, the patria
of the exiled hero.

102
 Salome implores the fugitive Elias to use her
dwelling: “It will make you remember me…When my
thoughts go back to these shores, the memory of you and
that of my home will present themselves together. Sleep
here where I have slept and dreamed…it would be as if I
myself were living with you, as if I were at your side” (Noli
216-17). The narrative conjures their consensual
togetherness, their carnal liaisons, their mutual belonging,
in fantasy or compensatory wish-fulfillment that is
invariably women’s mode of transcending quotidian
misfortunes. What imbues space with charismatic import
and historic significance is women’s work, affection, care;
hence Rizal’s extreme anguish that mothers perform their
nurturing, child-rearing task well in fashioning
autonomous citizens. Natural law takes precedence over
positive man-made laws.

Envisioning the Totality

On December 31, 1891, shortly after completing

the Fili, Rizal wrote to Blumentritt that the reformist La
Solidaridad is no longer his chosen battlefield. With the
sharpening crisis of the Spanish empire, the arena had
shifted to the Philippines (Zaide 1984, 213). His family had
suffered an irreversible catastrophe when they were
evicted by the Dominican friars from the Calamba
hacienda the year before and his relatives persecuted. His
sojourn in Hong Kong marked his definitive turn to an
insurrectionary, separatist solution for the colony.

His two epistolary political testaments dated 20

June 1892, and his founding of the Liga Filipina on his
arrival in Manila in June-July 1892, herald the beginning of
Sisa’s and Juli’s “vengeance,” a recovery of the primal
outrage. Melancholia’s shroud may have fallen on Rizal in
Dapitan, but underneath it all the victims of colonial
tyranny are gathering for a coven/covenant to exorcise the
demonic plague. Rizal’s own view of the synoptic,
ruminatory years of his Dapitan exile may be discerned in
the “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977) behind his
statement to Fr. Pablo Pastells: “I am at present at the
enactment of my own work and taking part in it” (1930-38,
63). The present fuses the past and future in one intuitive
103
act of Rizal’s sensibility, his personal judgment of the
totality of his experience universalized by sharing its
moral import with others capable of empathy, reciprocity,
or vicarious identification with neighbors and fellow
protagonists. Modernity, characterized by the hegemony
of capitalist norms, revisits like a vampire the archaic
layers of the communal past since it cannot answer
objectively the inescapable ethico-political and essentially
moral questions of what is true justice, virtue, and the
good life from a global/cosmopolitan perspective
(Gramsci 1985).

A more historicized appraisal of Rizal in this age of

terrorism would thus move the center of inquiry to the
Dapitan years following the Hong Kong interlude, the
contacts with the plebeian/proletarian strata interested in
the Liga, and the Liga’s resonance (Olsen 2007). It is the
moment of timely reckoning. By exposing the limits of
Simon’s anarcho-utopian idealism and Padre Florentino’s
eschatological wish-fulfillment, Rizal moved to engage in
its existential ramifications the Sisa-Salome nexus
embedded in the carnivalesque world of colonial
Philippines deprived of any nomos or transcendental
authority. Rizal anticipates the postmodern predicament
of the dissolution of a meaningful world in vacuous
finance-capitalism.

Women’s vengeance against patriarchal nihilism

lies submerged in Rizal’s communicative gesture to the
Malolos contingent, potential cadres or partisans of the
nascent Katipunan-led revolution. This outreach mobilizes
emergent and residual historical forces in a dialectical
trajectory of canceling the negative (mystifying ideologies
and practices) and salvaging the mother’s body/place as
the site of the subject’s reconstitution. This itinerary of
changes in his thinking provides a seismographic
organon for comprehending Rizal’s radical critique, his
theory of transforming patria and the regenerative
delirium of its victims into a counterhegemonic historic
bloc (Quibuyen 1999), the matrix of all subversive
insurgencies. This will permanently nullify the common
prejudice that Rizal should be dismissed as an American-
installed icon and replaced by the action-driven Bonifacio,
104
thereby unwittingly admitting pragmatic expediency and a
cultic voluntarist spontaneism as the criteria of populist
hero-worship.

We can sidetrack Simon’s conspiracy in the Fili

and focus instead on a utopian moment in Rizal’s
narrative. By this I do not mean the utopian-socialist
trend of Saint Simoun, Fourier and Owen criticized by
Engels (1978) in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
(published in French 1880, with English translation in
1892). While Rizal may have absorbed ideas surrounding
the debates around both Engel’s polemic and the earlier
1848 Communist Manifesto, his general philosophical
outlook owes its bearings more to the classical Greek and
Roman tradition inflected by Cicero, Duns Scotus, and
Thomas Aquinas, then subsequently re-oriented by the
secularizing Renaissance and by the Enlightenment
(Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau); and radicalized later by
such mavericks as the Marquis de Condorcet, the
theoreticians of the Paris Commune of 1871, William
Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft—see, in particular, her A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman issued in 1792
(Mitchell 1984 68-72; Beauvoir 1952, 136-37).

In his commentary on Morga’s Sucesos, Rizal’s

vindication of Filipino women’s honor (reiterated in the
Malolos epistle) finds eloquent testimony. It is a return to
the past before mother-right was completely annulled,
when the self-sustaining security of the gens (clan) had
not completely yielded to the vulnerable, isolated nuclear
family dominated by the property-owning male. Women
still participated in socially necessary labor (Sisa’s
horticultural knowledge is a survival) in the domestication
of crops and household management, before the complete
dehumanization of mother-oriented communal ties in the
subjugated colony. Because Filipina women are not a
burden to the husband, Rizal argues, she does not carry a
dowry: “the husband does not take a heavy burden or the
matrimonial yoke, but a companion to help him and to
introduce thrift in the irregular life of a bachelor” (1999,
26). Even though the native woman before the Spanish
conquest “represents a value for whose loss the
possessor [parents] must be compensated, she was never
105
a burden on her parents or husband; European families,
however, seem to be in a hurry to get rid of their
marriageable daughters, with mothers frequently playing a
ridiculous role in the sale of her daughter.“ The sale and
purchase of Filipino women is not a custom in the past,
according to Rizal’s ethnological research (but there are
widespread exceptions, as documented by Teresita
Infante [1975]):

The Tagalog wife is free and respected, she manages and

contracts, almost always with the husband’s approval,
who consults her about all his acts. She is the keeper of
the money, she educates the children, half of whom
belongs to her. She is not a Chinese woman or a Muslim
slave who is bought sometimes from the parents,
sometimes at the bazaar, in order to lock her up for the
pleasure of the husband or master. She is not the
European woman who marries, purchases the husband’s
liberty, initiative, her true dominion being limited to reign
over the salon, to entertain guests, and to sit at the right
of her husband (1999, 26).

Allowing for a certain overstatement in the

position of women in pre-colonial times, it is accurate to
state that in the communal stage of the barangay, the
division of socially necessary labor and with it, the
specification of gender roles, had not yet been affected by
commodity production and the circulation of exchange
values. To the degree that women participate integrally in
productive work, as well as with the reproductive labor of
the household, they enjoy a measure of equality with men.
As soon as private property (land, labor, commodities)
becomes the dominant logic of the social order, male
supremacy and monogamy prevail, supplemented by
adultery and prostitution (Leacock 1972). When women
were excluded from productive work and confined to
kitchen and boudoir, their participation in political and
public affairs also ended. With the male partner absent or
emasculated, Sisa and Salome enjoyed a latitude of
activity, a degree of autonomy, not shared by Maria Clara,
Paulita Gomez, or Leonor Rivera.

106
 We may hypothesize that this is one of the reasons
why Rizal found Josephine Bracken, whom he celebrated
in his “ultimo adios” as “dulce extranjera,” a breath of
fresh air. It was a temporary respite from the surveillance
of the solicitous mother and his female siblings. Even
though she was obedient, meek, and did not answer back
when Rizal lectured, she belonged to the
European/Western “race” and was not averse to engaging
in manual labor in Dapitan. Clearly, Rizal was not
threatened by her, as he was by Nelly Boustead, Gertrude
Beckett or the business-minded Viennese temptress; she
was an orphan, with “nobody else in the world but me
[Rizal]” (1993, 417). Despite appearances, she harbored an
excess beyond his control. In the hours before his death,
Rizal wrote his family, asking forgiveness and requesting
them to “Have pity on poor Josephine” (1993, 439). After
her marriage to Rizal and his execution, Bracken actively
participated in the revolutionary war led by General Emilio
Aguinaldo (Ofilada 2003), perhaps realizing a fragment of
Rizal’s image of those formidable Spartan mothers he
invoked as guides to the promised land.

Intervention from the Mountain: A Millenarian Project?

Whatever impasse of contradictions undermined

his life, Rizal never gave up amor patria, the “most heroic
and most sublime human sentiment,” He celebrated this
obsessive nostalgia for the homeland in his first
propagandist contribution to Diariong Tagalog (20 August
1982) when he landed in Barcelona on his first sojourn in
Europe. Rizal is rhapsodic in proclaiming his adoration for
the Motherland which inheres in every human: “She has
been the universal cry of peace, of love, and of glory,
because she is in the hearts and minds of all men, and like
the light enclosed in limpid crystal, she goes forth in the
form of the most intense splendor” (1962, 15). She is
incarnate in fantasy, in the mythical figures associated
with the natural surroundings, with the soil and rivers of
the native land: “And how strange! The poorer and more
wretched she is, the more one is willing to suffer for her,
the more she is adored, the more one finds pleasure in
bearing up with her“ (1962, 16).

107
 Geographical space, the occupied territory,
becomes a concrete, lived place; it mutates into a
libidinally charged locus of pleasure and self-sacrifice.
When the motherland is in danger, the more intense the
desire to come to her aid; the motherland symbolizes all
those kin you have lost, the fountainhead of dreams, but
also where “true Christianity” abides. Rizal finally
identifies what he would later address, in his farewell
poem, “mi Patria idolatrada, dolor de mis dolores/Querida
Filipinas,” with Christ “on the night of his sorrow.” Our
sacrifices will revive the dying, suffering homeland (in the
martyr’s allegorical rendering), now taking the persona of
Josephine Bracken--“mi amiga, mi alegria”--now that of
Maria Makiling and her eternally recurrent metamorphosis.
This is the antithesis to the imperial masculinist high-
bourgeois nationalism of the oppressor metropoles so
lustily condemned by arrogant pundits and academic
stars of the global North, self-aggrandizing sophists so
proud of their erudition and their always infallible opinions
on what’s wrong with the world.

It is instructive that Rizal, instead of dwelling on

the didactic fable of Malakas and Maganda (coopted by
the hired publicists of the Marcos dictatorship 1972-1986)
born together as a sign of gender parity, calls our
attention to the legend of Maria Makiling. She
concentrates in her figure the diverse manifestations of
the nature-fertility goddess throughout the archipelago.
While inhabiting the borderline between nature and
civilization, she remained a virgin, “simple and mysterious
like the spirit of the mountain.” Initially, she favored
humans with her grace and bountiful beauty; but when
she was deceived by her earthly lover, she took revenge.
Rizal suggests that perhaps she was infuriated by the
attempt of the Dominican friars “to strip her of her
domains, appropriating half of the mountain” (1962, 107).
The goddess rebuked her human lover when he
took another bride: “inasmuch as you had not courage
either to face a hard lot to defend your liberty and make
yourself independent in the bosom of these mountains;
inasmuch as you have no confidence in me, I who would
have protected you and your parents, go; I deliver you to
your fate.” Since then, the goddess never again showed
108
herself to humans, no matter how hard they searched for
her “along the famous ascent that the friars called
filibustera,” according to Rizal. The original harmony of
humans and the ecosystem is sundered by predatory
acquisitiveness, by the exploitation of nature to yield
subsistence, so “neither the enchanted palace nor the
humble hut of Mariang Makiling could be glimpsed” again
(1962, 110).
And so did Salome abandon her home in the
forest, so did Sisa and Juli depart from the fallen world of
Padre Camorra, Padre Damaso and Padre Salvi, of Dona
Consolacion, the alferez and guardia civiles—the outposts
of the crumbling Spanish empire. In the 1892 Hong Kong
letter, he declared: “I desire, furthermore, to let those who
deny our patriotism see that we know how to die for our
duty and for our convictions. What matters death if one
dies for what is loved, for the country, and for the beings
that are adored?” (Palma 1949, 351).
Rizal is sacrificing himself on the temple steps, a
programmatic gesture inaugurated in the Noli’s preface.
Sisa’s vengeance arrives here with the martyr’s
apostrophe to the Motherland to pray for “our unhappy
mothers who in bitter sorrow cried,” rendering judgment
on those condemned to languish in a world where slaves
bow before the oppressor, where faith kills. At the end of
his 1884 eulogy to the painters Juan Luna and Felix
Resurrecion Hidalgo, Rizal offered a paean to Filipino
parents after delivering a challenge to their children: “The
furrow is ready and the ground is not sterile!” (quoted in
Zaide and Zaide 1984, 74).

What Is To Be Done?

It was in the same year, 1884, when Rizal became

involved in the university student insurrection in Madrid,
that Engel’s epoch-making book, The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State, was published. In mapping
the evolution of the family, Engels noted that Spartan
women occupied a much more honored position and
exercised greater sexual freedom than anywhere else in
antiquity during that period. This was because pairing
marriage, not monogamy, was still practised in Sparta;
private property of land and household goods was
109
unknown. Like Rizal, however, Marx and Engels to a lesser
degree were still deeply “imbued with the rationalist
tradtion of Plato and More to allow free play to all
psychosexual desires as authentic needs” in the way
Charles Fourier (or the Marquis de Sade) did in his utopia
of amorous “passionate refinement” (Manuel and Manuel
1979, 710). Before and during his first sojourn in Spain in
1882-85, Rizal had already digested Rousseau, Voltaire,
Schiller and Victor Hugo. but not Fourier. To be sure, he
knew the Russian Nihilist movement and probably
Proudhon and Bakunin, and indirectly Marx and Engels,
given the contentious ambience of anarchists,
syndicalists, and utopian socialists saturating Paris,
London, Brussels. Berlin, Vienna, and other cities he
visited from 1886 to 1887, and later from 1888 to 1892. In
this context, Rizal might plausibly be called the first
Filipino high modernist during the twilight of the Spanish
empire.

Four years before his death, Rizal responded to

his Jesuit “inquisitor” Fr. Pastells: “My sole wish is to do
what is possible, what is in my hands, the most
necessary. I have glimpsed a little light and I believe that it
is my duty to teach it to my countrymen” (1999, 93). In
being fully comprehended and assayed, the realm of
necessity, of fate, becomes the terrain of freedom; thus,
as he earlier observed in “The Philippines a Century
Hence,” “every country meets the fate that she deserves.”
Whether we deserve Rizal and the ideals he fought for, is a
question whose answer may already be immanent in the
ongoing struggles in the open green fields around us.
Uncannily serendipitous, inhabiting the borderland
between patriarchy and matrilineality, the surname “Rizal”
is not found in the clan genealogy. The patronymic “Rizal”
was given by an unnamed provincial governor to
distinguish the dangerous Mercados of Calamba, a
gratuitous addition that fulfilled in the ripeness of time its
prophetic signification in designating “a field where
wheat, cut while still green, sprouts again” (Guerrero
1969, 19).

110
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_________________________________

RIZAL THE FEMINIST

A Book Review of Sisa’s Vengeance
by Francis C. Macansantos

E. San Juan, Jr. was one illustrious young poet of the

sixties, showing mastery of the medium in both Filipino
and English. He has since reinvented himself as scholar of
literature and culture, in America where he is based. With
a Ph.D. from Harvard and professorships emeritus from
several universities in the U.S., he is deemed an intellect
of the first rank in literary and philosophical circles

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abroad. But just like Rizal, our first intellectual, San Juan
is an exile, opting though to return to his country in the
form of the books and articles he has written elsewhere,
scholarly vessels that contain riches of insight on his
motherland’s history, culture, and politics. Some who
admire his poetry would prefer verse, but from his
published offerings it seems as though he has hung up
his lyre.
In prose, however, the rapport he has kept up with
his motherland has been fervidly dynamic. Her freedom
from post-colonial chains is the constant poem in this
scholar’s heart. He reminds us of that other illustrious
viajero, the controversial novelist, Dr. Jose Rizal.
And it is obvious that like most Filipino intellectuals,
San Juan can never drop the subject of Rizal or his
continuing relevance to the idea of liberation. What he
does reject is the notion that we need to choose between
Bonifacio and Rizal, one against and excluding the other.
Indeed, he even sets aside discussion (postponed for
another book, perhaps?) on Rizal’s refusal to join the
revolution, preferring instead to emphasize the hero’s
achievement in conceptualizing an authentic ideological
guide to freedom.
In Sisa’s Vengeance, San Juan takes up and
evaluates the views of practically all the major Rizal
biographers and commentators, pointing out their
shortcomings. He takes special exception to Under Three
Flags by Benedict Anderson, whose assessment of Rizal
lowers his stature as political thinker to that of a “mere
moralist and novelist.” On good authority (of Jim
Richardson who exposes Anderson’s numerous errors) he
attacks Anderson’s “ignorance” and lack of conceptual
rigor.
But it is only towards the later chapters of Sisa’s
Vengeance that San Juan fully discloses his main theme
(and to most of his macho countrymen a startling one):
that the proof of his authenticity as revolutionary is his
principled belief in and his fervent advocacy of women’s
rights.
It comes to light in the book’s latter chapters that
for San Juan, the cause of women’s liberation is the sine
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qua non to any authentic movement for human liberation.
An authentic vision of social change requires a profound
understanding and staunch espousal of the cause for
women’s rights.
Media has tended to present Rizal as a fickle
playboy with a girl in every port. Such popular
representations flatter the self-image of Filipino machos.
But San Juan’s sensitively scrupulous view yields to us a
more respectful, even at times diffident man in love—often
a victim of heartbreak, all despite Maximo Viola’s account
of Rizal’s presumed encounter with a Viennese woman of
the streets.(Rizal, in fact, was actively involved in the
rehabilitation of sex workers.)
Rizal idolized his mother who was an exceptionally
gifted and cultured person, and he was made aware by his
studies in London of Morga’s Sucesos ,of the high social
status of women of the Philippine islands before the
Spanish conquest. It was in London in the midst of his
research on Morga that he wrote—upon the request of
M.H. del Pilar—his rightly famous letter (written in
Tagalog) to the women of Malolos proclaiming their right
to education and their duty transmit their learning to their
children.
Apart from these women, his mother, and those
whom he was linked with amorously, Rizal had
other—albeit imaginary—women: Maria Clara, Sisa, Juli,
Doña Consolacion, Salome, and others—the women of
his novels. Sisa, especially, is central to San Juan’s
meditation on Rizal’s character, as it is she who embodies
the victimization of women and of the motherland. After
establishing the necessary link between the patriarchal
system and all oppressive (because profit-oriented)
systems, San Juan adroitly transforms Rizal’s arguably
feminist position into a fulcrum to elevate and
authenticate his revolutionary status.
Indeed, San Juan’s readings of Rizal’s literary
works recommend themselves directly to students and
scholars of literature. Sisa’s Vengeance provides a
plethora of insights into Rizalian texts that are a fitting
reward for any reader who has plowed through the rather
difficult--often specialized—prose. Such oases, or

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epiphanies (pun intended) are surely traces of a poetic
sensibility.

[Francis C. Macansantos is a Baguio-based writer,who writes

poetry, essays and fiction in English and Chabacano, his native
language. He is a Palanca award winner and an NCCA Writers
Prize awardee. His latest book, Balsa: Poemas Chabacano, was
recently launched at Ateneo de Zamboanga, where he received
the Most Outstanding Alumnus of the Year award in December
2011.]

____________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. SAN JUAN, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Comparative

Literature, and Ethnic Studies from several U.S. universities. He
received his A.B. from the University of the Philippines and his
A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught at the
University of California; Brooklyn College of CUNY; University of
Connecticut; Trento University, Italy, Tamkang University,
Taiwan; and Washington State University. He was recently a
fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University;
Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University,
Belgium; and fellow of the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio,
Italy. Among his recent books are: Racism and Cultural Studies
(Duke UP), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP);
US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave); I n
the Wake of Terror (Lexington); Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San
Juan Reader (Ateneo U Press); From Globalization to National
Liberation (University of the Philippines Press); Critique and
Social Transformation (Edwin Mellen Press); Critical Interventions
(Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrucken, Germany); and
Rizal In Our Time (revised edition, Anvil Publishing).

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