José Rizal

Biography

The sheet of paper rolled up in the lamp was found only afterwards. On the eve of his execution Rizal handed his sisters a kerosene lamp and said in English: “There is something inside it.” Inside was the poem “Mi último adiós”, which the author had never given a title.

He was born on 19 June 1861 in Calamba, in Laguna province, the seventh child in a family of tenants who farmed rice on land belonging to the Dominican Order. His father’s ancestors had come from China’s Fujian province at the end of the seventeenth century; on his mother’s side the family included Tagalogs, Chinese mestizos and Spaniards. The family took the surname Rizal in 1849, when the authorities ordered Filipinos to choose surnames from an official list. His mother taught him the alphabet at the age of three, and by five he could read and write. He remembered his first lessons in Biñan without pleasure, calling the town “large and rich, but ugly and dismal.”

In Manila he studied at the Ateneo, graduated in March 1877 with a Bachelor of Arts and won numerous prizes. At the same time he took a course in land surveying, and then enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas. When his mother began to go blind, he moved to the medical faculty and chose ophthalmology. He was already writing poems and plays as a student: his poem “A la juventud filipina” (“To the Filipino Youth”) won a contest of the literary Lyceum in 1879, and his play “El Consejo de los Dioses” (“The Council of the Gods”) won in 1880. So as not to be associated with his brother Paciano, whose name was linked with the executed priests, he kept only the surname Rizal on enrolling.

In May 1882 he left for Spain without his parents’ knowledge, with the secret support of his brother. In Madrid he studied in the faculties of medicine and of philosophy and letters, took language lessons, painted, sculpted, fenced and joined a Masonic lodge. In the summer of 1883 he visited Paris. At a celebration in 1884 for the painters Juan Luna and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo he raised a toast to the idea that talent does not depend on skin colour or place of birth. The speech was printed by the Madrid magazine Los Dos Mundos.

In 1887, in Heidelberg, Rizal completed his specialisation in ophthalmology under Professor Otto Becker; there he worked with the newly invented ophthalmoscope, intending to operate later on his mother’s eye. He wrote to his parents that he spent half the day on German and the rest on diseases of the eye, and twice a week went to a beer hall to practise with his student friends. He finished the last chapters of his novel Noli Me Tángere in Wilhelmsfeld, in the house of the pastor Karl Ullmer. The book was published in Berlin in 1887 and banned in the Philippines as subversive. The title comes from the Gospel of John, but ophthalmologists also used the phrase for cancer of the eyelid, and some biographers see in it an allusion to the religious orders. The sequel, El filibusterismo, was printed in Ghent in 1891.

He took sculpture seriously. His best-known piece, the clay “The Triumph of Science over Death”, shows a naked young woman with a torch standing on a skull; he sent it to his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt. He worked in clay, plaster and wood, and the literature counts 56 sculptural works, of which 18 were known to survive as of 2021. His friends in Germany kept even the napkins on which he had made sketches.

Rizal wrote for La Solidaridad in Barcelona under the pen names Dimasalang and Laong Laan. The reformers asked for representation in the Spanish parliament, Filipino priests in place of Spanish friars, freedom of speech and assembly, and equality before the law. In 1890 a dispute began between him and Marcelo H. del Pilar over the leadership of the movement, and most of the expatriates supported Del Pilar. After an article by the commentator Wenceslao Retana he challenged him to a duel; Retana apologised in print and later wrote the first major biography of Rizal.

In 1892 he returned to Manila and founded La Liga Filipina, a moderate organisation that the governor dissolved almost at once. In July 1892 Rizal was deported to Dapitan on Mindanao. During four years of exile he built a school, a hospital and a water system, treated patients, taught boys and worked on his farm and garden. One of his pupils, José Aseniero, became governor of Zamboanga. The Jesuits tried to bring him back to Catholicism, but in a letter to one of them Rizal explained that he believed in God, not in the revelations claimed by individual religions. There too he learned Russian, ordering Gogol, Turgenev and Korolenko. In 1895 he met Josephine Bracken, an Irishwoman; they were not allowed a church marriage, and a son was born and lived only a few hours.

The uprising of the Katipunan, a secret revolutionary society, began in 1896. Rizal thought it premature, although the Katipunan named him its honorary president and went into battle using his name. He volunteered as a doctor for Cuba, received permission from Governor-General Ramón Blanco and left on 1 August, but on 6 October he was arrested in Barcelona and sent back to Manila. In Fort Santiago he wrote a manifesto in which he distanced himself from the uprising but did not renounce the goal of independence. A court-martial found him guilty of rebellion, sedition and conspiracy and sentenced him to be shot; Blanco had been removed by then, and his successor, Camilo de Polavieja, confirmed the sentence.

He was shot on 30 December 1896 in Manila. The firing squad consisted of Filipino soldiers, with Spanish troops standing behind them.

The doctor, it was reported, found his pulse normal. The body was secretly buried in Paco Cemetery with no name. In 1898 his sister Narcisa obtained permission from the American authorities for an exhumation. The remains were kept by the family, and on 30 December 1912 they were reburied in Luneta Park, where a monument was unveiled the following year, on 30 December 1913.