FILIPINO WRITERS IN THE U.S. & WAR MEMORIES

WAR IN THE FILIPINO IMAGINATION:
FILIPINO WRITERS IN THE UNITED STATES WRESTLING WITH THE MINOTAUR

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.


Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man,…continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
—THOMAS HOBBES

We must not belittle the saying in the book of Sun Wu Tzu, the great military expert of ancient China, “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.”
—MAO TSE-TUNG (Griffith 50)



Unless we subscribe to the Hobbesian world-view of war as given in any society, or to the Freudian optic of aggression as given in our psyche, it might be useful to follow the view that war is an organized armed struggle between states, classes, and groups to implement policies and beliefs. Carl von Clausewitz provided the standard definition of war or violence as the means used “to compel our opponent to fulfill our will” ((41). It is thus not an end in itself but an instrument or tool to advance ends associated with will, purposes, designs beyond individual passions or whims. In the literary archive, war manifests itself customarily in the conflict of individual wills or passions. But, in the process of unfolding, the human telos becomes perverted by the means, by its instrumentalization.
Simone Weil’s classic meditation argues the truth of that axiom: war, the quintessential expression of violence/force, “turns a human being into a thing while he is still alive” (6), ultimately reduces humans into objects. Not only the defeated or dead is crushed by it, but also the victor, the wielder of force, military or organized power. One powerful evidence is Michael Herr’s uncompromising reportage of the Vietnam War experience of ordinary soldiers; the truth of that war defies narration or description: “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history” (218). This secret history is what literary art seeks to disclose, adumbrate or approximate in diverse modalities of representation.

From Total War to Differential Engagements

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the period 1914-1945 the age of total war and massacres. In contrast to the generally postmodernist speculations of western academics on the rhetoric/tropology of war (see PMLA October 2009). Hobsbawm’s nuanced analysis of modern war as “waged for unlimited ends” allows us to distinguish the specific Filipino-American response to events such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the 9/11 sequence of “global wars on terrorism” (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, the anti-Abu Sayyaf campaign). That response is unique and singular for one reason: the Philippines being the only direct U.S. Asian colony, Filipinos straddled the two worlds of savage foes akin to American Indians requiring violent control, and of colonized subjects still to be “Orientalized” through disciplinary mechanisms. Suspect and inscrutable, the Filipino returned a mock-naive gaze eluding tutelage.
War came to twentieth-century Filipinos in the form of the 1896 revolution against Spanish power and resistance to the implacable onslaught of U.S. invasion. John Sayles’ recent film Amigo reminds us of the embryo of “total war” in the genocidal subjugation of Filipino revolutionaries between 1899 and 1913. U.S. “Manifest Destiny” and its “benevolent assimilation” policy begot schizoid subjects consenting to coercive domination (Hofstadter). Reflecting on the violence of that war, William T. Vollman noted how the Filipino revolutionaries “merely exchanged for Spanish masters American ones” (169). But the slaves did not remain passive, even when they were recruited by the Hawaiian sugar plantations in the first decade of U.S. rule. Filipino union activist Pedro Calosa was expelled from Hawaii only to lead the peasant revolt in Tayug, Pangasinan, in 1931 against the American-backed local landlords (Constantino 353-54). None of that pioneering horde of Filipino contract workers recorded their ordeals—it will take another ten to fifteen years for the first generation of Filipino writers in the United States to give intelligible pattern to their drifting, makeshift lives.
The socioeconomic crisis and depression of the Thirties reconfigured the shape of peasant resistance in the colony into proletarian rebellion in the metropole. Racism and ethnic prejudice articulated its sensible particulars in the contingent forms of Filipino oral and written expression. When Carlos Bulosan wrote America is in the Heart (hereafter AIH), his quasi-autobiographical chronicle of Filipino workers in 1943, he described the Colorum Party led by Calosa as “a fanatical organization of dispossessed peasants that terrorized Luzon. It professed to be semi-religious, but it was actually a vengeful sect of anarchistic men led by a college-bred peasant who had become embittered in the United States” (60). He was mistaken: the peasants were not anarchists, and one of their leaders was a worker educated by the collective discipline and resourcefulness of militant Japanese and Filipino strikes in the Hawaii plantations. He was already a graduate in the art of class warfare.

Class War: Trope of Decolonization

That experience of class war migrating from Hawaiian factories in the fields was transcribed by Bulosan from a child’s point-of-view. He witnessed peasants shooting policemen after hand-to-hand fighting in front of the municipal hall, with his mother and sister fleeing from the scene of carnage. At the end, the youthful Bulosan would make up for the child’s ignorance by suturing that episode of peasant revolt in his narrative of Filipino migrants acquiring a sense of national consciousness just before the homeland was ravaged by the Japanese army. War catalyzed Filipino national-democratic solidarity under the aegis of the global fight against fascism and militarism.
Bulosan testified that “the revolt in Tayug made me aware of the circumscribed life of the peasants through my brother Luciano, who explained the significance to me….and if I were successful in escaping unscathed, I would go back someday to understand what it meant to be born of the peasantry. I would go back because I was a part of it, because I could not really escape from it no matter where I went or what became of me. I would go back to give significance to all that was starved and thwarted in my life” (62). Civil war in its anti-imperialist mode was the trauma that fertilized Bulosan’s imagination, making it a catalyzing agent for producing meaning and order out of the disintegrated and chaotic world known as Filipino “tutelage” under U.S. occupation. This war is continuing in the U.S. neocolony.
Unlike EuroAmerican citizens, Filipinos could not insulate themselves from worldwide emergencies. The Spanish Civil War generated a poignant resonance in the Philippines because of its Spanish inheritance: the Falangists of Generalissimo Franco operated through the feudal landlords and bureaucrat-capitalist oligarchs in the Commonwealth government. Bulosan was influenced by the anti-fascist stand of the Philippine Writers League some of whose officials attended the third American Writers Congress in June 1939 (Folsom 241). That Congress was initiated by Theodore Dreiser, Lincoln Steffens, James Farrell and Erskine Caldwell. Among the participants were John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes and Kenneth Burke whose paper, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” would provide the rationale for Bulosan’s united-front outlook evinced at the end of AIH and in his poems and public pronouncements.
Given the fragmentation, anomie, and alienation fostered by predatory capitalism, Bulosan’s conscientization (to use Paulo Freire’s term) could only lead to a populist—not sectarian workerist—mobilization that would transcend ethnic, racial, and class boundaries. As Michael Denning perspicuously argued in The Cultural Front, Bulosan’s “sentimental education”was not so much a celebration of populist Americanism as an attempt to resolve certain contradictions inherited from his kin-centered feudal-capitalist background into a transitional stage of awareness found in solidarity among multiethnic workers engaged in strikes and political agitation. Ultimately it was an attempt “to transcend a United States of violence,” to endow violence and blind rebellion with (in Bulosan’s words) a “broad social meaning” (Denning 274-75).

Strategy of the Popular Front

In the poems, fiction, and political discourses that Bulosan wrote between the Colorum uprising in 1931 and the outbreak of World War II, the solitary voice seeking an interlocutor predominates. In “Blood Music, 1939,” “Death and Transfiguration,” “Waking in the 20th Century,” and “Portrait with Cities Falling,” for example, the desolate urban environment frames the anguish of fugitive migrants: “And we hide in the cold room, silencing/All words of protest, praying for morning…while headlines are screaming war, squadrons/Of aeroplanes pouring liquid fire of destruction,/and bloody dictators flashing arms….” (On Becoming, 150). Death by bombs dropped from airplanes haunts the poet: “The night/Is like a trembling heart, beating louder and louder/to the distant murmur of planes and artilleries….” It was the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), especially the 1937 bombing of Guernica immortalized by Pablo Picasso, that fired Bulosan’s conscience, inducing prophetic visions:

And in the course of this my year, before the planes
sunk Spain under a sea of workers’ blood, swastikaed,
in the middle of my life a new discoverer came
and charted the island of my deams and nightmares….
(On Becoming 164)

In poems such as “Biography Between Wars” and “If You Want to Know What We Are,” as well as in essays such as “Freedom from Want,” “The Growth of Philippine Culture,” and “The Writer as Worker,” Bulosan affirmed the need to satisfy not only physical want but also intellectual and spiritual needs denied by a racist, class-divided order. War precipitated an epiphany already germinating in stories such as “Be American” and “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow,” an epiphany captured in this pivotal passage in “My Education”:

….But as we moved rapidly toward the war with Japan, I realized how foolish it was to believe then that I could define roots in terms of places and persons. I knew, then, that I would be as rootless in the Philippines as I was in America, because roots are not physical things, but the quality of faith deeply [ingrained] and clearly understood and integrated in one’s life. The roots I was looking for were not physical but intellectual and spiritual things. In fact, I was looking for a common faith to believe in and of which I could be a growing part (On Becoming 128-29).

Overall, however, war’s pedagogical resonance proved ambiguous. In “The Soldier,” a moment of empathy between an American veteran of World War I and a Filipino soldier could not overcome years of racist ostracism. In “The End of the War,” a Filipino’s dream of the surrender of the Japanese and Germans becomes property shared by all:”It was a dream that belonged to no one now, yet it was a dream for every soldier” (On Becoming 104). What is learned is a sense of community, the virtue of disclaiming the right of private ownership of sentiments or hopes, that vanquishes solitude, shame and the feeling of guilt for a crime (as he confessed in a letter) of being a Filipino in America.
When the Cold War broke out after the end of World War II, Bulosan and his compatriots in the trade union movement were targeted by the McCarthyite witch-hunts. This persecution by fascist agencies hounded him until his untimely death in 1956. His sympathy for the Communist-led Huk rebellion and for activist intellectuals such as Amado V. Hernandez, Chris Mensalvas, and Ernesto Mangaong compelled him to complete his masterpiece, The Cry and the Dedication (not published until 1977 in Canada) while editing the 1952 ILWU Yearbook. What is notable about this novel is the use of the contingencies of guerilla warfare in rural Philippines as the stage or arena for re-enacting the vagaries of exile and deracination in the course of a risky quasi-pilgrimage, thus converting the picaresque structure of AIH into a charted itinerary with a telos or overarching purpose. But the telos—Dante’s attempt to fuse his two personalities (the injured American “self” and his residual Filipino identity)—is left unrealized. Instead of a Virgilian epic hero refounding his origin in a new society of rational order and harmonious pietas, Dante could not transcend nor sublimate his role as a fugitive-victim. Before he dies, his mind lingers on “the animal roar of the howling mob that had pursued him down the streets of San Diego, when vigilantes chased him out of town because of his organizational work” (291).
As I observed in a synoptic review of Bulosan’s achievement, The Cry refracts the leitmotif of homecoming that threads his fiction and poetry from 1930 to 1950. This novel of guerillas passing through their villages toward a final rendezvous “enacts the return: one traumatized character (Dante), already home from the US, awaits the coming of another one, the ‘wounded’ messenger (Felix Rivas) who never appears, suspending the denouement, converting this expectation of the advent of the legendary bearer of “Good News’ into a permanent condition” (San Juan, “Internationalizing” 139). Is this Bulosan’s metaphor for home, the “Not-Yet” future pregnant in the womb of the present, fulfilling if only vicariously his responsibility for caring for kins, neighbors, and anyone in need?

Inventory of the Bifurcated Psyche

One can now discern a ruptured core in the Filipino imagination about the US involvement in war, whether that of colonial occupation of the homeland or the Cold War between antagonistic ideological camps. Because of his specific history, the Filipino was always a profoundly colonized subaltern torn between the conqueror’s alleged democratic ideals and its sordid practice of racist oppression and exploitation. This is what distinguishes the Filipino worker-writer from his Chinese, Japanese, Korean counterparts before the Vietnam War and its aftermath. As colonial subjects, the first transplanted writers--chiefly Bulosan and Philip Vera Cruz-- acquired a united-front outlook toward war in the course of their participation in union organization and mobilization. In the war against monopoly capital, Bulosan explored in his art the dialectic of colonized subaltern and the united-front solidarity of peoples against fascist barbarism.
Vera Cruz started as a student in the Thirties but became involved in the National Farm Labor Union, AFL-CIO, in the Fifties. After thirty years, he summed up his life as “always just a matter of survival. It was always an emergency and I was never ready to go back” (Scharlin and Villanueva 30). Like Bulosan, Vera Cruz opposed the Vietnam War and US intervention in supporting the oligarchic despot in the Philippines as part of his daily struggles against corrupt, exploitative agribusiness in the West Coast and Hawaii. It was class war against corporate agribusiness during the historic Delano grape strike in 1965 and against Cesar Chavez’ support of the Marcos regime in the late Seventies. Both Bulosan and Vera Cruz became writers, used language as a weapon to forge anti-militarist and anti-warmongering politics in trade-union struggles.
After WWII, Filipino writers pursued the dialectics of an emergent collective organism (the neocolonized homeland) and the existential experience of commodified/racialized bodies in the United States. Conceptualizing war no longer as explicable in terms of innate belligerence, territorial instinct, honor/prestige, Vera Cruz reconstructed Filipino peasant militancy in his engagement in ethnic/class conflict. Its puzzling ambiguities would be transposed later on by the exiled veteran-writer N.V. M. Gonzales into fables of stoic peasants and moralistic anecdotes of the opportunist Filipino intelligentsia. The field of ideological confrontations then shifted from the farms into the global cities of the planet as the Filipino diaspora exploded from the ruins of the Marcos regime and the retooling of the Pentagon’s “low-intensity warfare” under the US-backed Corazon Aquino administration.
When the Philippine Commonwealth government went into exile, another group of Filipino writers emerged, among them Bienvenido Santos and Jose Garcia Villa, whose “take” on war reflected their more precarious, ever-shifting petty bourgeois milieu. This intermediate phase of colonial life witnessed the absorption of radical ideas into a more generalized liberal-democratic stance against fascist extremism. Aestheticist in orientation and temperament, Villa, though employed by the exiled government, declined to commit himself publicly—except for an anti-Hitler/Mussolini poem (201). Santos, however, felt himself thoroughly displaced, unable to fully adjust to the chaos of urban America. During the Korean and IndoChina wars, Santos re-membered or sutured into nostalgic patchwork the fragments of deracinated memory in The Scent of Apples and in novels such as What the Hell For You Left Your Heart in San Francisco.
War for this beleaguered cohort was either a catastrophic Minotaur that one can wrestle with, or a grotesque nightmare from which only laughter, verbal wit and rhetorical cunning can wake us. Bulosan and Vera Cruz grappled with the Minotaur with polemical analysis and humanistic critique. Santos could only respond to the Japanese destruction of his homeland with agonistic gestures and affects, a token of his vestigial pacifist inclination. The viscerally-felt brotherhood of victims afforded the luxury of stoic pride masking “the hurt men”: “Most of us boys kept a smarting hurt beneath our brown skin, a personal tragedy of the war zealously kept, as we walked the streets of the big cities of America, seemingly gay, and uncaring; eager for friendship, grateful for the kind word, the understanding look, the touch of love” (44).
Exiled from 1941 to 1946, Santos never directly elaborated on the horrors of war except through its impact on Filipino “old-timers” (the term used for sojourners who postponed their promised return). In “The March of Death,” Santos addressed his compatriot “brother” as they walked the “crowded streets of America,” with the poet evoking the Bataan “death march” as memory resisting dilution by visionary projections:


And we would walk those roads again one April morn,
Listen to the sound of working men
Dragging tree trunks from the forests,
Rebuilding homes—laughing again—
Sowing the fields with grain, fearless of death
From cloudless skies.

You would be silent, remembering
The many young bodies that lay mangled by the roadside;
The blood-soaked dust over the bloody rage of men;
The agony and the moaning and the silent tears;
The grin of yellow men, their blood-stained blades opaque in the sun;
The many months of hunger and torture, and waiting. (”March” 80)


When Santos was forced into exile again in 1972 with the censorship of his novel The Praying Man by the US-backed authoritarian behemoth, he returned to the metropole to chronicle “the smell of decay and death in the apartments of the old-timers,” their grins becoming “twisted in a grimace of pain close to tears” (xx).
Civil war in the Marcos “martial law” regime drove Santos’ psyche deeper into a search for the vanished idyllic past in images of “sweat and sun on brown skin or scent of calamondin fruit and fresh papaya blossoms” (xxi). In 1981, Santos addressed the second Asian Writers Conference held in Manila, Philippines, with his post-exilic reaffirmation of the writer’s task to expose human failings, “to titillate the conscience of mankind into awareness” and thus prove worthy of “the gift [also a curse] of vision to see the truth and say it well” (“Words” 11-13).

The Beat Generation and After

With the new generation maturing in the Sixties, WWII became simply a yellowed Hollywood film clip starring Robert Taylor and John Wayne. War against “third world” communist partisans in IndoChina, Latin America and Africa was the overriding mass-media preoccupation. It was the renewed guerilla warfare led by the re-founded New People’s Army in 1969 (sprung from the rubble of the Magsaysay counter-insurgency campaigns) accompanying the worldwide demonstrations against the Indochina wars that over-determined the cultural climate for Jessica Hagedorn, Ninotchka Rosca, Gina Apostol, and others. Influenced by the Asian American protests to the Vietnam war and its aftermath, Hagedorn and Rosca tried to reconstitute the damaged sensibilities of new migrants fleeing the Marcos dictatorship and the fierce resistance mounted by the impoverished majority.
For this post-Civil Rights era group, civil war appeared as a tragic-comic, often farcical, sequence of events that could only provide materials for postmodern pastiche made up of exoticized landscapes and transmogrified characters. For Hagedorn, the neocolonial setting and atmosphere of the Marcos regime’s “New Society” can only be satirized and burlesqued in Dog-Eaters, or rendered into operatic escapades and melodramatic montage in the virtuouso performance of Dream Jungle. In Dogeaters, Hagedorn tries to make sense of counter-insurgency warfare through a medley of diverse styles, clichés, rhetorical registers, and hyperreal hallucinations. This parodic bricolage of Western high postmodernism, however, “blunts whatever satire or criticism is embedded in her character portrayals and authorial intrusions” (San Juan, After 128). Counter-insurgency warfare is grist to the mill of the asute impresario of sardonic performances for the sophisticated metropolitan audience consuming Village Voice and off-Broadway shows.
Refining her experimental techniques and edgy playfulness, Hagedorn’s third novel, Dream Jungle, returns to the theme and topos of Dogeater. This time she deploys a schizophrenic mode of fabulation to weave Spanish, aboriginal and Anglo-Saxon cultural motifs in an effort to rehearse the sordid circumstances surrounding the filming of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. In the novel, the American director Peirce reveals his fascination for what’s going on in the Philippines: “The Vietnam War makes us uneasy. It’s a dirty little war, full of dirty little secrets….[In contrast] this particular war is not heroic, not simple, and that’s why I’m obsessed by it” (215). His script of the Marcos interlude deals with “drugs, rock and roll, the unknown.” Civil war in a neocolony, with its moral-ideological burden, is reduced to a matter of character idiosyncrasies and gratuitous turn of events. What results is a virtuouso performance demonstrating the stylistic mannerisms typical of high modernist art, an expedient vogue whose import resides in somehow communicating to us “the ideological aura of finance capital in the age of globalization” (San Juan, Interventions 209).
A product of her activist experience and exile during the Marcos dictatorship, Rosca’s State of War attempts a panoramic depiction of the various cultural strands constituting the fabric of Philippine history. The tragicomic atmosphere of personal dilemmas in the Seventies is juxtaposed to the chaotic years before and after the Japanese Occupation only to end up in gratuitous schemes of reconciliation: the Philippines, Rosca reminds us, is the country of beginnings, and morning lasts a long time. Is this an apologia for the neocolony’s backwardness? The attempt to elaborate a genealogy of clans as the key to the nation’s predicament seems to founder in a cynical game of reducing politics into a matter of family squabbles (even though clans may be read as indices of class and ethnic disparities), filtered through magical-realist landscapes and carnivalesque happenstance episodes.
Rosca wants to make sense of history’s carnage (inflicted by the Spaniards, Americans, Japanese, and their collaborators) by locating its meaning in individual psyches with their obsessions and quirks. The calculus of good and evil, and its balancing of reason and disorderly passion (the Virgilian ratio of humanitas/reason bracketing savage violence/hubris), is supposed to be read from the kaleidoscope of private fantasies, unfathomable motives, and intuitions. But the scheme breaks down into hackneyed melodrama and a formulaic juxtaposition of familiar tropes, motifs, images. The major characters seem overwhelmed by the brutality they are made to witness, as shown in Luis Carlos’ attitude to the U.S.-directed massacre of peasant guerillas who fought the Japanese: “Shivering, not knowing what this new war was all about, he wondered if he had known any of the dying and the dead down there—a good two hundred men, still sunburnt and brawny from the four-year War of Resistance against the Japanese, spilling blood, urine, and vomit on the golden dust” (313). Rosca’s novel ends with an anticlimactic denouement, with the insurgent’s bombing of the concluding festival rite and Ana Villaverde’s pregnancy meant to reconcile the plebeian and oligarchic classes in a mythical celebration of Woman harmonizing with unspoiled Nature. This poetic emblem is supposed to resolve all the political-ideological contradictions of the neocolony.
Exoticism and fetishism are old colonizing tactics. There is a sense in which both Hagedorn and Rosca unwittingly fall under the influence of the Eurocentric habit of surrounding their women characters with the aura of the sacred, as the Chinese interlocutor confesses to his Western friend in Andre Malraux’s The Temptation of the West: “Europe was for me the only place in the world where Woman existed” (10). On the other hand, a poet such as Nick Carbo can always maintain an ironic, bemused stance, using the schematic frames and methodology of Eurocentrism to expose the reflexive nature of the colonial gaze: “I’ve always wanted to play the part of that puckish pubescent Filipino boy/in those John Wayne Pacific-War movies….” (49). As Sayles acutely observed as his reason for making Amigo, previous Hollywood films devoted to the Philippines have all distorted, caricatured, and inferiorized the Filipino in the service of a stigmatizing “Manifest Destiny” that claimed to redeem the natives through enlightened, even cathartic, violence (“Director’s Statement”). War, for the self-appointed civilizing missionaries, has so far been not only just but also charitable, peace-oriented, and liberating.

From Peasant Naivete to Narcissistic Cunning

Meanwhile, N.V.M. Gonzales, a late exile from the decadent phase of the Marcos dictatorship, discovered Fanon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his comfortable retreats in California. The scope of his journalistic career spans the period from the Commonwealth years of the anti-fascist Philipppine Writers League to the anti-Huk campaigns of the first years of the Philippine Republic. His testimony of the horrors of WWII and the anti-Huk campaigns is submerged in the pathos of mediocre village lives, with the most sensitive among them acquiring a moment of wisdom that compels resignation, as in the father’s epiphany in “On the Ferry”: “You could fashion make-believe to order; but, oh, not life, complete with its mystery and loneliness” (“Ferry” 109).
During his exile in the Seventies and Eighties, Gonzalez read Achebe, Edward Said, and D. H. Lawrence’s comments on Multatuli’s [Edward Douwes Dekker]novel Max Havelaar. Gonzalez compared the Dutch’s exposure of colonial excesses to Rizal’s demystifying satires. He concluded that “colonization lulls the writer into accepting the status quo, and attributing to the human condition the travails of his or her people” (253). But Gonzalez could not escape the Western hubris of exalting art as bearer of universal truth, beauty and goodness far above the nasty tumult of class/race conflicts. Gonzalez might be the only one among the older Filipino writers in English who fully understood that there is no alternative to using the indigenous vernacular to negotiate the quest for recognition as a unique people in a world torn by ethnic dissensions, even by a ruthless “clash of civilizations,” a quest that Gonzalez located in the tension between creativity in response to inspiration and expediency in response to situation (“Between” 176).
Only perhaps in Apostol’s Gun-Dealer’s Daughter and the Mayi Theater’s plays (collected in Savage Stage) do we encounter a less exhibitionistic and more ethically committed grappling with the moral and political issues of colonial war and its offshoot in civil war in the neocolony. The reason for this is the rampant neoconservatism of the Reagan-Thatcher period that followed the end of the Vietnam War. This was worsened by the ruthless repression of mass movements in Chile, Argentina, and Central America; capitalist restoration in China; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the genocidal devastation of the Middle East beginning with the first Gulf War.
In Apostol’s novel, the killing of the American Colonel Grier testifies to the rearticulation of war as a deadly game conforming to Clausewitz’s instrumentalist view. In 1981, a CIA officer advising the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) was killed by urban guerillas; while earlier, in 1974, three US Navy officers were gunned down in Subic Naval Base by suspected leftists (Jones 247). However, the theme of revenge and its ambiguous repercussions in Apostol’s fiction complicates the picture. Whose will is being imposed on whom, remains blurred since the enormity of destruction resulting from secret government maneuvers eludes the traumatized psyche of the central protagonist, the mentally unhinged narrator of the novel:

…a list of the colonel’s talents was alleged in the press. “Sponsored low-intensity conflicts…an instructor at the School of the Assassins in Fort Benning…projects sowing confusion and conflict in rebel-taken areas…CAFGU was his brain child…proposed and trained head-hunting vigilantes…Alsa Masa, Bantay Bayan…troops that gouged the eyes of children after they were killed…littered he countryside with Garands and carbines…dead women…dead children, their severed heads….” (227).

Before 11 September 2001, the futurologist Alvin Toffler expatiated on the preponderant role of “Force: The Yakuza Component” in twenty-first century global affairs. With knowledge linked to wealth and violence, Toffler anticipated an impending, decisive powershift in which “global gladiators” will cross nation-state boundaries in pursuit of hegemony. War becomes permanent, “an inescapable social fact” (468). No longer can we afford relishing the nostalgic refrains in Bulosan, Vera Cruz, and Santos, nor the metaphoric/symbolic pyrotechnics in Hagedorn and Rosca. War has become a permanent feature of everyday life, particularly after 9/11, the catastrophic slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya—the intractable vicissitudes of the “global war on terrorism” overloading the human sensorium and imploding the limits of quotidian reality.

Spectacle of a “Howling Wilderness”

The consensus among Asian historians is that the Filipino-American War (from 1899 to 1913) in which 1.4 million Filipinos and several thousand American soldiers died anticipated the brutal record of the IndoChina wars. In 1980 Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States recalled this almost forgotten episode in the Spanish-American War at the turn of the nineteenth century; and Stuart Creighton Miller elaborated on the personages and policy debates surrounding the horrors of the battlefield. Only when the legality of torture, especially “waterboarding” in the Iraq War, hit the headlines was its progenitor, the “water cure” administered by Americans on Filipino prisoners, recognized as a moral and political problem (Kramer; Leopold; Warrick)
Just a year earlier, however, the “water cure” and other war crimes received artistic treatment in the Ma-yi Theater’s presentation of “Project: Balangiga” (hereafter “Project”) in August 2002, at the height of the bloody skirmishes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The play utilized a combination of techniques from Brecht’s epic theater, Noh scenario methods, and ritualized courtroom/forum dramaturgy. The play sought pedagogical and sensational effects. Rehearsing the facts of the Balangiga episode in the Philippine-American War where 59 American soldiers were ambushed by Filipino insurgents (Miller 199-204), “Project” focused on the imprisonment and torture of Filipino prisoners.
Narration and spectacle alternated in this revisit of a painful past. In the interrogation of suspects captured during the war, the American troops employed the “water cure” described in quotes from eyewitnesses and re-enacted in the play:

(A man is administered the water cure. A prisoner lies on the table, held down by two men. Another holds up a jug from which a rubber hose extends.)

“The prisoner was tied and placed on his back under a water tank holding probably one hundred gallons.”

(The torturer takes the end of the hose and lets the water dribble into the nose of the prisoner, who thrashes in agony.) (340)

The play quotes more graphic descriptions of the torture, interrupted by the interpolation of parallel events dealing with football games in Boston, King C. Gillette’s factory of shaving razors, and the sentencing of Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist murderer of President McKinley. The bulk of the play narrates in vivid scenes the Filipino ambush, the disguises used by the natives to carry out the attack, the futile resistance of the soldiers, the tally of the dead, followed by the merciless retaliation ordered by General Jacob Smith and Major Littleton Waller. Smith ordered that no prisoners be taken, to burn villages, and to kill anyone over the age of ten capable of bearing arms against the United States. Such a reprisal was the performance of justice and pedagogical example.

Unleashing the Furies

What stands out from the barbarity of the war, as theatricalized here, is the racist logic subtending the occupation and subjugation of about ten million inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. This is evidenced in the background of the military officials in the brutal pacification of the American Indians, and in Major Waller’s linking the Chinese and Filipino as targeted enemies: “In eleven days, my men have burned 255 dwellings, slaughtered 13 carabaos and killed 39 insurgents. We have also to avenge our late comrades in North China, the murdered men of the Ninth US Infantry. The Chinese and the Filipinos are of the same stock and nature. There’s no difference between these Asiatics” (347). Waller was court-martialled for executing 11 native guides he hired; he was subsequently acquitted. No American official was sentenced to jail or discharged from service for war crimes in the conquest of the islands—except for about a dozen African-American soldiers who joined the Filipino resistance against the Yankee invaders (San Juan. “African American”).
Up to now, no investigation of the Balangiga event has ever been conducted by the US government; only individual accounts exist. So that, even after a century of total and partial wars, this incident in the fraught relations of the imperial master and the neocolonized subject remains unresolved, with its ethical and moral resonance suspended in several mutating versions and interpretations. The play explores the polarized opinions of the time, extrapolating them into the contemporary attitudes toward the 9/11 disasters and the debate on the use of torture as a method of fighting Islamic extremists and other “terrorists” labeled by the US State Department and Homeland Security agencies. In short, Balangiga becomes the “primal scenario” for the wars afflicting our world today.
It is against this 9/11 background that the play recalls the Balangiga “massacre” and its aftermath. The initial trigger was the 1998 centennial celebration of Philippine independence against Spain and the request of the Philippine government for the return of three bells of the Balangiga Church captured by the US army and kept in the Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming. The US government refused to heed the Filipino request.
To appease all partisans of this volatile issue, the playwrights stage a forum or panel discussion consisting of an Asian American Studies professor, a literary deconstructionist, a retired US officer, and a writer. No professional historian participates in the exchange. Verbal scuffles and comic insinuations follow. What ultimately results seems to me to contradict the polemical-didactic thrust of the first half, since the exchanges divide into equally plausible or at least ethically viable positions: the patriotic versus the aggrieved, the value of a Filipino life weighed against that of an American. In short, the lesson of the Balangiga incident in the horrendous panorama of the Filipino-American War becomes a conundrum. Perhaps this was not anticipated by the whole ensemble. In any case, distance/detachment becomes salient when the tombstone of a single Filipino victim is dissolved into larger concentric circles of generality until, from a cosmic point of view of “the planet earth,” the specific moral gravity of that war is nullified, negated, volatilized. Sub species aeternitatis, everything becomes trivial or laughable.

Taming the Minotaur?

Whether war can really be represented except through individual pain and collective affliction, remains a moot question. Reflecting on Homer’s Iliad, Weil contends that war is what turns humans into things, both victor and victim in the fray. Since humanity cannot avoid war, Sun Tzu advises the scientific study of war as the quintessential embodiment of deception. Despite its apparent uniformity, Hobbes and other canonical texts warn us of the complex faces of war, its tricky ramifications and cunning metamorphosis.
Following the Enlightenment and the growth of a meliorist, progressive sensibility, the believers in a just war seem inspired by the Virgilian outlook that fate, as well as the violence and unspeakable (infandum) cruelties incarnate in war, can be transcended by the eventual triumph of reason, rational order, and peace, as Anchises described Rome’s future to his son Aeneas in the Aeneid: the rulers must remember “to impose the habit of peace, to be merciful to the vanquished, and to overcome the mighty” (Commager 8-9). In general, the Filipino writers I referred to above seems to have responded by saying that the colonizers have failed to enforce “the habit of peace,” nor have they really showed mercy and subdued the mighty who continue their ravenous exploitation of the laboring masses both in the imperial center and in the colonial hinterlands. Power remains loose, a wild dangerous beast overwhelming conscience, reason, and humane community.
Civil war between the New People’s Army and the Philippine government rages on with ferocious intensity. This time it is complicated by the more formidable Moro separatist rebellion led by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Thus, for Filipino writers in the diaspora, the unremitting war on terrorism (the last one being the NATO campaign against Libya’s Col. Qadaffy) offers challenges that supersede the “War or Peace” political binary. Not that the stakes are more enigmatic or aporia-ridden; in fact, the choice has become simplified into “socialism [people’s democracy] or [fascist] barbarism”—Rosa Luxemburg’s slogan of last century.
We are confronted daily with the drama of people’s war versus the corporate elite symbolized by “Wall Street.” We witness everyday images of police violence against peaceful members of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Nor are events happening thousands of miles away considered foreign, given the rapid transmission of information in cyberspace. When 19 soldiers of the neocolonial Philippine army were ambushed by Moro Islamic Liberation fighters in Basilan last October 18, there was an outcry for revenge in Washington. President Aquino ordered a retaliatory bombing uncannily reminiscent of the “total war” his mother pursued against communist insurgents in the Eighties and Nineties. Indiscriminate bombing by the Armed Forces of the Philippines immediately dislocated twenty thousand civilians and killed untold numbers (Salamat; Santolan). We are witness to the continuing struggle of the Moro peoples against colonial domination, dating back to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century up to the present (see San Juan, U.S. Imperialism) Except for scattered fiction and eyewitness testimonies, we still await a serious literary or artistic rendition of this tragic holocaust similar to what Bulosan attempted in The Cry and Dedication, and what Sayles’ tried to represent in Amigo.
We noted at the outset the challenge that the experience of war presents to its narrators and interpreters. This has become particularly acute with the wily prevarications of “the shock doctrine” (Klein) and the State use of drones and assassinations, together with the systematic use of legal pretexts to disguise U.S. aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other regions. It is more and more difficult to distinguish warlike deeds from pacifying actions.
Contrary to Jameson’s view that war, at least its total configuration, defies representation, Filipino artists today are discovering ingenious semiotic modes of articulating what C.S. Peirce calls the “logical interpretant”—the barbaric Others—whose signs of alterity and negativity exceed the referent or semantic objects of imperial torture, smart bombs, drones, and unlimited surveillance. Today, when nuclear war is bound to damage the whole ecosystem and guarantee the human species’ extinction, the question of “just war,” so eloquently argued by St. Thomas Aquinas and others, becomes untenable, even unconscionable. We need to discriminate again the complex interaction of means and ends when politics and morality become entangled in the ideology of technologism and scientism (Somerville). In short, the repertoire of mimetic and allegorical strategies invented by Filipino writers in the diaspora need to be reconfigured to interrogate more rigorously the Western metaphysics of war as a violent contestation of states, even as their ambitiously totalizing vision endeavors to articulate and prefigure the nascent, smoldering solidarity of the wounded, injured, and victimized arising from the rubble of Empire.




WORKS CITED

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[LECTURE PARTLY READ AT THE ACADEMIA SINICA CONFERENCE ON WAR MEMORIES, 10 December 2011)

Foreword to new book SISA'S VENGEANCE: : RIZAL/WOMAN/REVOLUTION by E. SAN JUAN, Jr. (Available from LuLu.com)

Foreword to SISA’S VENGEANCE: Rizal / Woman / Revolution

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.


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 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; sacrifice 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 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 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 killed 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 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 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 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.
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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 authors (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 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 on 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.”
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 intertextuality, 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 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” (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 Posa-Dominado, 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.

A Message from the Beast’s Belly

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 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 proclamation 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 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).

Foreword to new book: RIZAL WOMAN, REVOLUTION by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

FOREWORD to JOSE RIZAL, WOMAN, REVOLUTION

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.


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 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 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 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 killed 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 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 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 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.
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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”
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 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” (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.

A Message from the Beast’s Belly

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 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 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).