Finding Pepe

by Junette Soriano-Bax

            Once upon a time, a young man went to Europe to get higher education. Liberte’ was the air of the times. In this atmosphere of free self-expression, he wrote 2 novels about the social condition in his country, titled Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. As the cliché’ goes:”The rest is history.”

       Jose Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda was a certified polymath exhibiting degrees of proficiency in various fields including architecture, anthropology, sociology, ethnology, economics, cartography, dramatics, fencing, pistol shooting and martial arts.

                    At age 25, Rizal had obtained his degree in Medicine from the Universidad Central de Madrid, with a second doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. He was a polyglot, conversant in at least ten languages. He was a poet, essayist, novelist, sculptor, farmer, historian, playwright and journalist. 

        Anecdotes of his vivacity survived. Evidence of his skill as cartographer crossed continents. His voluminous correspondence was a boggle.  The impression he left on friends, colleagues, lovers and acquaintances baffle the historian. 

        To describe him as a genius is to miss the man.

        Honored as the Greatest Man of the Brown Race, the singularity of Jose Rizal as Asia’s L’uomo universali remains unchallenged to this day. 

        Arguably, Rizal is simply archival. To the IT generation, he could well be redundant.

         In the aftermath of the Japan’s nuclear leak or in the face of Filipino diaspora, Jose Rizal is half-remembered, at best. His life and achievements, memorialized in many parts of the world, are, nowadays, learned by rote to pass the subject as mandated in the Philippine educational curriculum.

        Over the last century, this great man who travelled to many distant lands in search of higher knowledge, slipped, sliding away from collective familiarity to cloudy memory.

         Jose Rizal is neither celebrity nor contemporary notable - until a Filipino finds him in a foreign land, honored alongside other towering figures in history.

         Standing before a Jose Rizal memorial, therefore, near Sydney Central Bus Station, is a delightful surprise. The plaque reads:

DR. JOSE PROTACIO RIZAL

(1861 – 1896)

Born on June 19, 1861 at Calamba, Laguna

and died as a martyr on 30 December 1896

Dr. Rizal was the first to inspire Filipinos

to regard themselves as a nation and to

cherish the Philippines as their fatherland.

He wrote two inspiring novels.

Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

        This tribute was commissioned by the John Holland Co. in the Philippines to sculptor Holdane Sinclair Lewis (Order of the Australian Medal) and was presented as a gift to the City of Sydney. It was unveiled at the Ibero-Americana Plaza by President Fidel Ramos in 1995. 

        There are other monuments around the world where Jose Rizal is honored. Shrines, too, memorialize his persona. On the one hand, it brings home the reality of the changing times, when OFW is bagong bayani (new heroes) instead of brain drain; at the other, as a reminder of the cosmopolitan aspirations of many Filipinos, past and present.

        To the many homesick souls in distant shores, his monument is a morale boost.

        Indeed, finding Pepe in Australia is a gentle embrace of home, and homecoming is NEVER archival or redundant.

*****

Published  at the Philippine PANORAMA

June 19, 2011