José Rizal: Writer, activist and national hero

DW (English)

Postage stamps, films, and books have been dedicated to him: José Rizal, Filipino author, doctor and revolutionary. He wrote powerfully against social injustice and Spanish colonial rule and remains a revered national hero to this day.

Transcript

00:00Have you heard of Jose Rizal?

00:02In the Philippines, he's a national hero.

00:04His face is on stamps and banknotes.

00:08And clothing.

00:11There are also action figures.

00:13He's the hero of a movie, and there's now a video game starring Jose Rizal as the savior of humanity.

00:20Even a warship has been named after him.

00:23At a very young age, I really got hooked or fascinated about Jose Rizal.

00:34He's also titled here in my armrest.

00:38Around the world, entire parks, statues, street, and square names commemorate Jose Rizal.

00:46In Seattle, a bridge is named after him.

00:49And yes, Jose Rizal was real.

00:51Every state guest to Manila visits his grave.

00:55Even today, more than 100 years after his death.

01:00He did a lot for our country, and he used his gift for rioting, which emancipated the Philippines.

01:07But who was Jose Rizal, whose story is now largely forgotten around the world?

01:12Why is he so revered in the Philippines?

01:14Jose Rizal is my inspiration because he's our national hero in the Philippines.

01:22Because he's been a part of the Philippines, to protect the Philippines from the Philippines.

01:31To understand who he was, we need to start with his end.

01:45It's 7 o'clock in the morning of December 30th, 1896.

01:49The man in the hat is Jose Rizal, 35 years old.

01:52In a few minutes, he will be executed by a Spanish firing squad.

01:57There are a lot of videos that depict precisely this scene, the moment Jose Rizal dies for freedom.

02:04Why must he die?

02:06Because of his rebellion against the Spanish colonial rulers, who had occupied the Philippines for more than 300 years.

02:13His death made Rizal a symbol of Philippine struggle for independence.

02:16His fate was by no means predestined.

02:21Rizal was born as the seventh of 11 children to a wealthy family in Calamba, just 54 kilometers from the capital, Manila.

02:32As a child, he showed many talents and great self-confidence.

02:36This, according to family legend, which we had confirmed by a direct relative of Jose Rizal.

02:42His great-grandniece lives in Barcelona.

02:44I don't know how old he was, but he was still very much, he had not yet gone to Manila to study.

02:52And he was forming with clay a sort of a head bust, you know.

02:57And they were teasing him, of course, his older siblings were teasing him, what are you doing?

03:02And then apparently he replied, one day, my effigy will be all over the Philippines.

03:10No one could have imagined back then that portraits of Rizal would one day be displayed throughout the country.

03:17In the National Museum, you can get an idea of how artistically gifted he was.

03:22Jose painted and drew and created sculptures.

03:27After his schooling, he studied philosophy and medicine and traveled the world,

03:32learning at least nine languages along the way, including English, German, French, and Japanese.

03:43During his studies and work abroad, Rizal also came into contact with critical voices,

03:49in particular the Philippine propaganda movement of Filipino students in Spain.

03:54Rizal did not actually want independence.

04:02He just wanted to be at the same level, on par, with Spaniards.

04:09Because when he transferred to Santo Tomas, the university,

04:14he noticed that his intellect was on par, or even superior, to the other students there.

04:21But the other students, if they had Spanish blood, were favored.

04:27During this time, Rizal began writing his first novel, Noli Me Tangere, in Spanish.

04:33He completed it during his training as an ophthalmologist in Berlin,

04:36and had it printed there at his own expense.

04:39The book was published in 1887, when Rizal was just 26.

04:45Noli Me Tangere is a society novel set in the upper echelons of Manila,

04:49full of wit and humor.

04:51But it was also critical of the Spanish colonial powers and the church,

04:55highlighting social injustice.

04:57So why did he write it in Spanish, the language of the colonial power he so strongly criticized?

05:03Spanish was the language in which everyone was understood.

05:07So like, when Rizal went to Manila, his classmates were from Cebu, from Iloilo, from all over.

05:15It's the Tower of Babel.

05:17You could not have understood each other, and their common language was either Latin or Spanish.

05:23And so when he wrote his book, he wrote it in Spanish.

05:27Under pressure from the Catholic Church, the authorities immediately banned the book,

05:31even though Rizal never called for violence or rebellion.

05:34He did, however, come into contact with rebels who planned an armed uprising.

05:38That would be his downfall.

05:42The Spanish threw him in prison and sentenced him to death by firing squad.

05:46In death, Rizal became an unintentional martyr.

05:50His execution has made him an icon of freedom.

05:52New depictions of the scene continue to be made.

06:01By shooting him, they actually made him more powerful than he actually was.

06:08It was his life and his death that became the inspiration to fight for freedom and nationhood and independence.

06:17The freedom fighters continued their struggle after Rizal's death,

06:21culminating on June 12, 1898, with their Declaration of Independence.

06:26That independence was initially short-lived, but we'll come back to that later.

06:30Today, the anniversary of Rizal's death is a national holiday,

06:34and his novel, Noli May Tangere, is required reading in schools.

06:37Jose Rizal is often referred to as the first Filipino.

06:50What does that mean?

06:52We met up with his biographer, who knows Rizal and his work like no other,

06:56at the National Library in Manila.

07:01Rizal is our national hero because he imagined a nation before it was born.

07:06Rizal never saw the Philippines as it is, but he imagined it.

07:13And it is that imagination that fuels and makes us what we are today.

07:18Until the 16th century, what is now the territory of the Philippines was a group of more than 7,600 islands

07:25on which well over 100 languages were spoken, ruled by tribal leaders and sultans.

07:31In 1521, the explorer Ferdinand Magellan was the first European to land on the archipelago in the western Pacific.

07:39The fact that he claimed them for Spain did not sit well with the people there.

07:44Magellan paid for his attempt to conquer the island of Mactan with his life.

07:48It was not until 44 years later, in 1565, that Spanish colonization officially began.

07:54The Philippines actually got their name from the Spanish king, Philip II.

07:59It's the Spanish that actually gave us the whole idea of what the Philippines is, what Filipinas is.

08:05And I always tell my students that although we are against and we don't look back at the Spanish colonial period with affection,

08:15we must accept that the Philippines was born out of a colonial experience.

08:20The Spanish conquerors brought something else with them.

08:24The Catholic Church came to Southeast Asia.

08:27To this day, more than 80% of Filipinos are Catholic.

08:30Rizal's criticism of the church hierarchy was a major factor that led to the banning of Noli Me Tangeri,

08:36a ban that was only lifted at the end of Spanish colonial rule.

08:39The Philippines achieved independence and lost it again two months later.

08:53At first, the U.S. supported the rebels in their fight against the Spanish,

08:57but then they took control of the country and its inhabitants themselves.

09:01Not only in the Philippines, but also in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam in the Western Pacific.

09:07How did the U.S. stop the rebels from continuing their fight for independence?

09:13They co-opted José Rizal as a national hero,

09:16saying that his ideas of a more just world were identical to American ideals.

09:22It worked, even if there were some critical voices.

09:25In the 1960s, there was a historian who said that Rizal shouldn't be our national hero

09:35because he claimed that the Americans made him, declared him our national hero

09:41in order to remove from the picture another hero called Andres Bonifacio

09:47who fought the Spaniards and led the Philippine Revolution.

09:51So he says that the Americans gave us Rizal so that we would be more accepting of American colonial rule.

09:58Many Filipinos still regard him as a model in our being Filipino.

10:08Well, they say he's American-sponsored, they say he's pro-colonizers and all.

10:16You know, the enigma of Rizal is that we have a lot of things to say about him.

10:28Christian Sendon Condero lives in Bicol, where he runs a bookstore and adjoining gallery.

10:33He says that most Filipinos today do not read Rizal in the original Spanish, but in English translation.

10:40He's translating Noli Me Tangere into Bicol, the language of his home region,

10:45which is spoken by two to three million people.

10:47So my idea in translating this works to a local language is to push forward the power of our local languages

11:06in capturing such a powerful narrative.

11:11You see, we've been championing, we've been trying to put regional literature at the front.

11:16In 1946, the U.S. finally granted the Philippines independence.

11:22What has become of Rizal's ideas, his questions about origin and identity?

11:27Does anyone still care about them today?

11:30Paolo Jerez says yes.

11:31He has a comic book publishing company and a bookstore in Manila.

11:35He's also an author.

11:37Strange Natives, a graphic novel, was his breakthrough.

11:41It's a fantastical story about how we remember the past

11:44and what that means for the identity of Filipinos.

11:48I wrote Strange Natives because it was basically how I felt like.

11:54I felt like I was a stranger in my own native land.

11:58I started to realize that I had to slowly peel away the colonial trappings of our history, our culture.

12:12And that's basically what Strange Natives is all about.

12:15These characters are actually either pre-colonial gods and goddesses.

12:20And all of them are like strangers in their own native land.

12:24Gracia, the heroine of the book, loses herself in memories.

12:29Memories not only of her family, but also of her country's history.

12:33The end of Spanish colonial rule and the rise to power of new forces.

12:38Strange Natives is a story about the search for identity

12:41and about the need to connect the past with the present.

12:44A lot of our historical documents were erased by the colonizers.

12:51They were burned.

12:53We're an oral culture, so sometimes it's not documented in writing.

12:58So there is that challenge of remembering our past, our identity, our culture, our own people.

13:11That is precisely what Jose Rizal called for.

13:15That the people of the Philippines, with their different cultures and languages,

13:18should confidently preserve their identity.

13:22There is one phrase which was also a Rizal motto.

13:27Do not forget your origins.

13:29And there is so much more.

13:32Rizal's biographer, Ambeto Campo, urges us all to discover Rizal.

13:36I've been studying him for 40 years.

13:40And people keep saying, don't you get tired?

13:43I said, because there's always something to find.

13:47I said, by the way, there's always something to find.

13:51I said, I could find the re-assist olives.

13:52I said, by the way, there are only two issues to find.

13:55I said, do not보다active to find.

13:57I said, but I don't have to carry them straight away.

13:59I said, I feel bad.

14:02I feel bad, by the way, you get tired.

14:04What isboy Costa Ricaeur?

14:05I mean, I do not care what I have learned

14:07about this semester, I said there are the failures of colleges.

14:09I have two days about the same questions.

14:13So let's encourage you to see,

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