Today we honor what would have been the 161st birth anniversary of José Rizal, if he himself had not seen that he would “have a short life,” as he said, snapping back at his sisters, who were teasing him for being such a small boy “eating as if every meal was for his entire lifetime.”
Never rooted in place, Rizal had had his imagination stirred since childhood by his mother’s after-supper biblical stories and his father’s retelling of the epics of Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander the Great.
If he was not in the past, buried in the books of Virgil and Cicero, Rizal was in the future or elsewhere. On the banks of Laguna de Bay, “gazing on the horizon,” as Nick Joaquin wrote in the biography Rizal in Saga, he “would wonder if the ‘countries’ on the other side of the lake were happier.”
Growing up in Calamba, he had a sense he was destined for greatness. When his sisters found him molding clay into a bust of Bonaparte in his likeness, they taunted him about his Napoleonic delusions.
He retorted, “Go on, laugh, but when I die, see if they don’t erect monuments in my honor!”
His death, Rizal also foretold in a nightmare while in Madrid. On Jan. 1, 1883, he wrote in his journal that he dreamed he died two days before, meaning on Dec. 30, the day he would be executed at Luneta 14 years later.
Versed in 22 languages, Rizal was bound by neither space nor time. Among the blooms of Intramuros, he might as well have been in the gardens of Europe, like Crisostomo Ibarra in Noli Me Tangere, whose experience of being in two places at once Rizal called el demonio de las comparaciones in the novel.
In 1888, when he found Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival in its Italian original in London, he entreated his friend Marcelo del Pilar to have the Filipinos in Spain translate it into Spanish or Tagalog, so “that it may be known how we were before 1521.”
Historians continue to argue among themselves whether Rizal sparked or opposed the Philippine Revolution of 1896-1898. Pio Valenzuela’s testimony before a military court in 1896 that Rizal was against the revolt is partly the reason, although 20 years later, Valenzuela clarified that his testimony, made under duress, was an attempt not to implicate Rizal in the uprising. Rizal did think that the revolution was ill-timed. His advice was to wait until the weapons were secured and that the rich and the intelligentsia were on board.
Rizal no doubt had the highest goals for the Philippines. In 1879, when he was 18, he wrote “Bella esperanza de la Patria mia (fair hope of my nation)” in his poem A la Juventud Filipina, which won him a silver as well as a scolding because for Filipinos in those days, “whether Spanish, Chinese, or indigene blood, there was only one nation: la Madre España.” In 1878, he also shared in his journal about the “great development in me of patriotic sentiments.”
Contrary to popular notion, Rizal is no national hero, but he is the most celebrated in the country and beyond. His legacy rests in his ideas about the riches of our pre-conquest past, the evils of colonial rule, and the possibilities unleashed by national consciousness.
Back when he was said to want the Philippines to be a province of Spain, José Rizal addressed Filipino expatriates in Europe and told them, “I have seen the future and it’s national.”