After more than three generations, we are a people still in quest of the right, instruments, and opportunity to determine ourselves as an autonomous, sovereign and singular nation-state. Either ironical or prescient, Aguinaldo’s proclamation (read in the context of US Special Forces engaged today in fighting Filipino socialists and other progressive elements) contains the kernel of the contradictions that have plagued the ruling elite’s claim to political legitimacy: he invoked the mythical benevolence of the occupying power. Aguinaldo unwittingly mortgaged his leadership to the “protection of the Mighty and Humane North American Nation. Mighty, yes, but “humane”? The U. S. genocide of 1. 4 million Filipinos is, despite incontrovertible San Juan / Afterword 2 evidence, still disputed by apologists of “Manifest Destiny. ” But there is no doubt that Aguinaldo’s gratitude to the Americans who brought him back from exile after the Pact of Biakna-Bato spelled the doom of the ilustrado oligarchy which, despite the demagogic ruses of Marcos and his successors, has proved utterly bankrupt in its incorrigible corruption, electoral cynicism, and para-military gangster violence.
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Obedient to US dictates, the current regime appears to follow its predecessors along the path of neocolonial decadence and barbarism, further opening the country’s dwindling resources to predatory transnational corporations and their mercenaries. And so, sotto voce: “Long live Filipino Independence Day! ” The 150th anniversary of Rizal’s birth affords us the occasion to reassess his work, particularly in the context of ongoing fierce class war between the exploited, impoverished majority and the few privileged landlords, bureaucrats and business moguls patronized by global capital.
This is taking place at a time when the Philippines is being re-colonized by the United States, the world’s moribund hegemon, under the cover of the global war on terrorism, also labeled Islamic “extremism. ” The Abu Sayyaf and the New People’s Army serve as pretexts for perennial US military intervention. Would Rizal want the country partitioned by greedy corporate speculators and their agents in the ongoing genocidal war against peoples of color?
Numerous biographies celebrate Rizal as “the first Filipino” (Guerrero) “the pride of the Malay Race” (Palma}, even the antithetical American-made hero (Constantino)—the canonical icon of the patriot-liberator (Bonoan 1996) worshipped every June and December. Unless we want to be pharisaical acolytes and hagiographers, we need to renew our commitment to Rizal’s ideas, not his image. The commentaries in my previous book Rizal In Our Time (1977), as well as my reflections on Rizal’s travels in the US (included in Balikbayang Sinta: An E.
San Juan Reader (2008), seek to provoke a re-thinking of what it means to be a Filipino particularly at a time when the country is undergoing dire, almost perpetual crisis. My essays use Rizal as a catalyzing point of departure, especially in the light of its citizens becoming an embattled diaspora–more than ten million overseas Filipinos (migrants, expatriates) labor as exploited domestics and contract workers scattered around the planet, while their homeland’s natural endowments, cultures and traditions are wasted by foreign profiteers supported by comprador parasites who claim o be the elected stewards of the land. While visiting Cuba in the 1980s, I found millions of Cubans spellbound by Rizal’s two novels—read in the original Spanish by San Juan / Afterword 3 more people in Cuba than in the Philippines, or elsewhere. While Rizal did not reach Cuba as a volunteer doctor in 1896, his novels arrived there a hundred years after, thanks to Fidel Castro’s and Che Guevara’s anti-imperialist revolution (Martinez Ramirez 1961). Rizal as an exile within his own country and as a scholar/traveler in the US and Europe may provide lessons for us in our postmodern but neocolonial deracination.
But can justice, revenge as payment for debts incurred, an eye for an eye as the fit compensation, be achieved by reviving mother-right (as Bachofen and Briffault once speculated [Hays 1958])? Let us turn to a classical template that Rizal surely studied. In Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, the Erinyes or Furies that pursued Orestes for slaying his mother Clytemnestra represent the rule of tribal society; his matricide is settled by the Areopagus, the newly established court in the patriarchal city of Athens where Athena (sprung fully armed from Zeus’s head), frees Orestes of his guilt and terminates the curse. The mandate of heaven is realized. The avenging Furies are propitiated by being made the city’s protectors.
Meanwhile, Zeus’ appointment of Athena and Apollo may be construed as the supremacy of justice (moral retribution) and compassion. But instead of reinstating mother-right or equality of men and women, what supervenes is the rule of the landed aristocracy which, as the historian George Thomson points out, occupies an intermediate position between the primitive tribe and the democratic city-state. The court was still dominated by the old patriarchal nobility exercising the duty of purification assigned by the Delphic oracle. However, the oath administered in the Areopagus invokes the Semnai, a trinity of female divinities, the presiding deities descended from the Erinyes (Thomson 1968, 272).
These female spirits are subsumed in the figure of Spartan mothers whom Rizal summons and propitiates, not mother Spain, as muses of the project of national redemption (in 1896, Spanish women cheered Rizal’s death; see Craig 1913, 145). This somewhat neglected masterpiece of communicative action in the Rizal San Juan / Afterword 33 archive, if read contextually, can sharpen our appreciation of Rizal’s materialist dialectics in practice. It demonstrates Rizal’s sensitively calibrated merging of flexible tactics and principled strategy in liberating the colony from feudal barbarism and the trauma of religious servitude. It compels us to reorient our thinking so as to give priority to the agenda of gender equality, of combating sexism and female subordination, as the keystone of any emancipatory program of the progressive bloc.
It combines Rizal’s intransigent critical sensibility with the emancipatory drive that, in its allegorical dynamism, informs (among other projects) his recreation of the folkloric spirit of the nature goddess Maria Makiling (La Solidaridad, Dec. 31, 1890). The goddess Maria Makiling personifies the once fabled harmony of humans and their natural habitat in a utopian golden age, the cooperative alliance of a still unspoiled nature and the tribal grassroot practices sketched by Rizal in his unfinished novel “The Ancient Tagalog Nobility. ” Spurned by a human lover escaping military conscription, this bountiful virgin of the mountain and forest disappears from sight; the alienation dividing nature and the world of the fathers afflicts everyone, rendering normal life arid, hollow, hopeless.
Maria’s Eden is lost, become mythical or utopian for the “unhappy consciousness” of modernity (for a contemporary report on the Rizal-Makiling connection, see Lahiri 1999). She bids farewell to her human lover: “Inasmuch as you have had no courage either to face a hard lot to defend your liberty and make yourself independent in the bosom of these mountains; inasmuch as you have had no trust in me, …I deliver you to your fate, live and struggle alone; live as you can” (1962, 109). This curse/fate of abandonment by a mother-deity, evoking the image of Rizal’s mother thrown in jail or his family driven out of their Calamba homes, is the object of Rizal’s revenge, the pretext for Simoun’s chiliastic fervor and eschatological musings.
