Growing up, I often found myself wondering why we needed to study the life and works of Jose Rizal. What was the point, I asked, of learning that he could speak more than twenty languages, or that he studied medicine so he could treat his mother’s eye, or that he once scolded a friend for borrowing from tomorrow’s biscuits? When I got to high school, I challenged teachers to explain to me why we needed to study the Noli and the Fili. How were the lives of these fictional characters any more relevant to me than the nightly slaughters in Hrothgar’s Heorot? After all, I’d never heard of people being refused burial in a cemetery simply because they didn’t believe in God. And seriously, a priest with a daughter? Ooh. Big surprise.
Even worse, when I got to college, I had to go through all that again. It didn’t help that my Rizal teacher deconstructed the tinola story by saying that the friar who got wings and chicken feet in his bowl was being subtly told that if he didn’t “fly away” immediately, he would be “strangled.”
However, as I was forced by course work to go further into the life of Rizal, I realized that the deeper I went, the less external compulsion I felt. Somewhere between sneering at the stupidity of a girl going into a nunnery to escape the friar who had the run of the nunnery and attempting to translate the Mi Ultimo Adios to Hiligaynon, I stopped and began to understand exactly why we needed to learn about the man.
My mistake, I realized, was in looking at Rizal’s life as a narrative of events, when I should have been seeing it as a kind of allegory.
Jose Rizal speaking 22 foreign languages ceased to be just a factoid for me, and transformed into a revelation that being a Filipino didn’t mean having to be provincial. The world is a huge place and, while there might be some charm to leading a bucolic existence unto death, it would be a terrible waste of life if we were not to at least strive to understand the different peoples of that world on their own terms.
I understood too that education cannot and should not be pursued simply for the sake of acquiring it. There are few forms of selfishness, I learned, more despicable than amassing knowledge without any intention of using it for some greater good. We can’t all be doctors healing our mothers, but all of us can – and should – use whatever we know for the betterment of those around us.
And let’s not forget those biscuits. Nowadays, people are likely to call that delayed gratification, as though all that mattered was the heightening of the satisfaction you deliberately denied yourself. Thankfully, I learned to call it discipline.
Beyond just learning from the events of Jose Rizal’s life, it also dawned on me that Rizal wasn’t writing to entertain but to dissect. That I came to this realization rather late in life – I was already a freshman in college for fq’s sake – will probably be an eternal source of mortification.
The Noli and the Fili, which I had panned as being so-so examples of story-telling (before you hate, remember that Rizal himself was disappointed with the Fili. Look it up.), became more accessible to me in light of my changing views of the author. Instead of approaching the works from a strictly literary point-of-view, I started to empathize with the characters and when I did that, some parts became almost too painful to read. Which was the probably the point. I imagine Rizal wanted all of his contemporaries to see through Ibarra’s eyes – eyes that had been opened by the world, only to see the cesspool his homeland had become. And he had that because even now, centuries later, those of us living in painful circumstances still eventually learn to be content with the constant ache simply because confronting the reality of what causes our hurt scares the shit out of us.
The ignoble end of Maria Clara became particularly poignant for me. It is truly the height of stupidity to seek shelter in the very house of the abuser you crave protection from, but what choice did Maria Clara have? She was the colony, conditioned into thinking irrationally, and locked into an abusive relationship with a rapacious master that, ironically, held the very key to what she felt was her salvation. “Salvame,” you can imagine her crying into the unresponsive darkness, clutching her beads, only to have the door to her cell opened by Salvi.
Reading the Noli and the Fili opened my eyes to the power of fictionized accounts – as opposed to straight fiction – as a means of addressing subjects that are too awkward to approach directly, and that realization has been of much use to me as a communicator. If there were no other reasons available, that epiphany alone would justify my admiration for Rizal.
Well, that and his way with the ladies.