Don't you know that you're my hero ...

Most Nu Zulundus have never heard of Jose Rizal.

To Filipinos, he is the quintesssential Filipino - "the pride of the Malay race".

The problem with the word "hero" is that it is thrown around with gay abandon these days. The result – any old celebrity can be referred to as a hero. So a football star becomes a sports hero. You get my drift.

Joseph Campbell, the great researcher into the place of myth in human culture and consciousness was a lot tougher with his conception of hero.

One writer suggests that according to Campbell, “a hero is any male or female who leaves the world of his or her everyday life to undergo a journey to a special world where challenges and fears are overcome in order to secure a reward (special knowledge, healing potion, etc.) which is then shared with other members of the hero’s community”.

Rizal fulfills this conception almost perfectly.

Born in 1863, Rizal recieved an excellent education in the Philippine captial, Manila. Reading Rizal's dairies, you get the sense of an intense, passionate and very emotional human being.

Apparently as a young kid he was inspired by the sight of a moth circling a candle flame and slowly and inexorably being drawn into its light and the death that awaited. It was a metaphor that remained with him through till his brief 35 years.

As a young man, Rizal, like many educated Filipinos, left Manila for further study in Spain.

He earned degrees and a doctorate in medicine - opthamology. He was a polyglot learning over ten languages including English. However, he was best known for his writing - and his two novels Noli me Tangere (the English version was originally called The Social Cancer) and El Filibusterismo. It is these novels that fundamentally make him a hero. In them, he took on the Spanish regime and in particular the corruption, despotism and vice that was rife among the Spanish frairs, priests and hierarchy in the Philippines.

And thus, when he eventually returned to the Philippines for second time, he knew what awaited him. A furious Spanish establishment had him first exiled, then jailed and finally executed by a firing squad on December 30, 1896.

But his books ignited in the Filipinos the desire for freedom and self goverment. The night before he died he wrote a poem dedicated to his beloved Philippines: Mi Ultimo Adios or my last farewell.

The opening lines begin:
Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost,
With gladness I give you my Life, sad and repressed;
And were it more brilliant, more fresh and at its best,
I would still give it to you for your welfare at most.


A good website with resources on Jose Rizal

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