|
criticism
Was
Rizal gay?*
by J.
Neil C. Garcia
There
is something malicious about this question—asked
as it has been on various occasions by both scholars
and wags, whose interest in the subject ranges from
the blatantly political to the facetiously absurd. Indeed,
of all Filipino icons, Rizal proves to be the
fairest game as far as this as well as similar lines
of inquiry are concerned: while I was attending an international
poetry festival in Taipei late last year, a kind and
inquisitive poet from Kuala Lumpur asked me if it was
true that Jose Rizal was the father of Adolf Hitler!
Apparently, a Filipino academic had delivered a paper
in a conference in Malaysia a decade or two ago, and
before an audience of Rizalists from the region, had
bravely proposed such a quaint and unthinkable thing!
But far from being quaint or unthinkable, the idea that
Rizal could have been a homosexual merits, I think,
a braver and slightly more serious examination, though
we must admit it is one which necessarily proceeds,
even under the best of circumstances, out of a kind
of scholarly malice—a malice that is inescapable,
for it is the malice of presuming that such a question
could have been intelligible or relevant to Rizal at
all. In this short presentation, I will humor the question
“Was Rizal gay?” if only to open up to discussion
the various conditions under which this question could
be sensibly asked, as well as the various conditions
under which this question could be sensibly answered.
In other words, I wish us to examine just what we must
consider when we inquire into gender and sexuality,
during Rizal’s “life and times,” as
well as—it may be difficult to accept this at
the outset—our own.
Sometime
during the Centennial of Rizal’s martyrdom, Isagani
R. Cruz, local pop-culture provocateur and professor
of literature and Philippine studies at the De La Salle
University, wrote a column for the now-defunct Filmag:
Filipino Magazin, shockingly titled "Bakla
ba si Rizal?"[1]
The answer to this question, if Cruz is to be believed,
is a resounding and categorical “Yes!” And
he offers what he calls “biographical evidence”
in order to arrive at this question’s confidently
affirmative answer.
First, Rizal was a bakla because he was afraid
of committing himself to the revolutionary cause. Second,
Rizal’s kabaklaan made itself apparent
in his periodic “failings” in his relationships
with the women to whom he was supposed to have been
romantically linked. Third, Rizal, unlike his compatriots,
didn’t go “wenching” in the brothels
of Barcelona and Madrid (at least, not very often).
Fourth, Rizal might not have even been the father of
Josephine’s benighted baby boy, since—paraphrasing
noted Rizalist historian Ambeth Ocampo’s feelings
on the matter of Rizal’s “disputable paternity”—Josephine
would seem to have been routinely sexually abused and
consequently impregnated by her stepfather.
Of course, these four “conjectures” hardly
qualify as proof. They are more likely the end-results
of what I can only describe as a largely catty evidential
procedure that begs now to be challenged, if only for
its underlying assumptions concerning what being a bakla
means: one, a bakla cannot ever be a revolutionary
because he is essentially spineless and a coward; two,
failing in your relationships with women makes you a
bakla; three, a bakla cannot possibly
have sex with women, not even when they are wenches;
and four, to be a bakla is to be impotent or
at least incapable of getting a woman pregnant.
The dubiousness—and utter stupidity—of these
assumptions hardly needs to be emphasized: according
to them, basically, kabaklaan is the negation
of everything good and desirable in masculinity and
is hence, devoid of its own inner substance and worth.
Indeed, even if I were to champion the cause of the
bakla and would like to win someone as “big”
and popular as Rizal over to my side, I would nonetheless
balk at Cruz’s way of going about such a task.
His “biographical evidence” demonstrates
nothing, other than the unflattering and sadly naive
opinion he holds of who (or what) a bakla is.
In
saying that I do not find Cruz’s method credible
in the very least, I am of course also saying that there
is a better way of making the project of ascertaining
Rizal’s “gender and sexuality” work.
And this method involves, first and foremost, asking
if the question itself is sensible, given the historical
period in which I would wish it to make sense.
Examining
the categories one is using in one’s study of
such slippery “realities” as sexuality and
gender is the necessary first step, then. This is because
the categories we use are always culture-bound and historically
specific, and as such are never quite neutral and “scientific,”
let alone universally reliable and insightful. To ask
if Rizal was a bakla, one has, first and foremost,
to be clear about what the concept bakla meant
at the time and in the place that Rizal lived. In other
words, the way we understand bakla today most
probably was not the way people in these islands a century
ago understood it. This alone makes one’s project
more difficult than it might have originally appeared,
for it requires one to undertake a comprehensive study
of the “sex/gender system” of mid-nineteenth-century
Philippines—in particular, the sexual and gender
categories that operated in the lives of the Tagalog
ilustrados, whom Rizal most certainly was. Needless
to say, such study involves looking into a miscellany
of Rizal’s own writings—letters, articles,
novels, even an incomplete autobiography—and making
these answer to a “historicist” critique.
Among other things, an assiduous re-reading of them
within a conceptual history of gender and sexuality
will lend further credence to the argument that, as
a national figure or “text,” Rizal is far
from self-evident, despite the monolithic discourses
which have come to subsume him over the last century
of Filipino nationalism. Of these various but complementary
discourses, it is those that make “presentist”
assumptions about Rizal’s unproblematic masculinity
and heterosexuality that call for the most avid
unpacking here.
My
own tentative findings about the “social semantics”
of bakla—in other words, the career this
concept has enjoyed in Philippine social history—would
seem to indicate that, until recently, it didn’t
even connote an identity that is distinguished by its
sexuality, but merely a quality of emotional wavering,
indecision or uncertainty—something that anyone
unlucky enough can suffer from at any point in his or
her life. Until early in this century, in fact,
bakla wasn't so much a noun as a verb: one was
nababakla if he or she was not sure of his or
her choices, or if one was suddenly afraid or confounded
by the unexpected turn of events.[2]
In contrast, nowadays, a bakla is an effeminate
male who wishes to have sex with “real men”
or tunay na lalake. Thus, the bakla in
our midst is a variety of male homosexual who can easily
be recognized because of his swishy ways, and whose
sexual desire defines his innermost and most authentic
sense of self.
Obviously,
during Rizal’s time, there was no bakla
or effeminate homosexual: there may have been effeminate
men (called, among others, binabae/yi, bayoguin,
asog and bido), but they were not defined
as such by virtue of the desire they possessed, but
only by their choice of occupations (feminine ones,
like weaving, pottery-making, and the like), and their
womanlike appearance and behavior. In fact, the idea
that people were different on account of the gender
of the object of their sexual desire (in other words,
that people were either heterosexual or homosexual)
was alien to our turn-of-the-nineteenth-century ancestors,
who most probably desired and had sex with whomever
they wanted at whatever point in their lives, without
thinking of what such desires or acts had to say about
their identities, their conceptions of who they essentially
were.
If
we must be accurate about things, even in Europe itself,
homosexuality was not a reality until it was officially
“invented” in 1869—in Germany, to
be exact, by sexologist Karl Maria Kertbeny.[3] Thus, even when Rizal had lived
there at around the same time that the discourse of
homosexuality was steadily being “normalized”
and propagated, it is quite doubtful that he was influenced
at all by the latest sexological revolutions that were
being waged inside the psychiatric clinics in Europe’s
more technologically advanced countries (Spain most
certainly not being one of them.) A passage in
El Filibusterismo, from the chapter titled “Manila
Characters” illustrates how, to Rizal, the thought—the
blatant image—of two men having an intimate relationship
was not a particularly upsetting thing:
That
respectable gentleman who is so elegantly attired
is not a physician but a homeopathist on his own,
sui generis: he believes totally in the similia
similibus, the attraction of likes. That young
Cavalry captain with him is his favorite disciple.[4]
The
chapter from which this passage comes treats the Fili's
reader to a menagerie of Manila's "queer" residents.
This passage not only confirms the existence of same-sex-loving
men in Hispanic Philippines, but the very casualness
of its tone tells us that Rizal was not phobically affected
by what it represented. In fact, the almost-funny "pun"
he must have intended to make when he chose to denominate
this doctor a "homeopathist,"[5]
reveals he found the subject slightly amusing, or at
least amusing enough that he chose not to abominate
it, which he could very well have done, as abomination
was something he often did in his writings, including
this chapter itself. This would have arguably been the
case had he been sufficiently “Europeanized”
in the sexological sense—which is to say, had
Rizal been sufficiently raised and trained in the newly
inducted homophobic regime that had begun to take hold
of the European imagination in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. As the constructionist historian
Arnold Davidson puts it, this regime of “sexuality”
was made possible by the emergence, in Europe, of a
new, psychiatric style of reasoning,[6]
a manner of arguing about sexual personalities, orientations,
“paraphilias” and other such “categories
of being,” which arose alongside the various disorders—neuroses,
psychoses, hysterias, and the like—that were being
discursively produced by the different “biomedical”
dispensations of the time.
Thus, Rizal could not have been a bakla (the
way we currently know this concept), nor a gay/homosexual,
simply because these were categories of being that were
not available during his time. To call him gay or bakla
would be to commit a grave anachronistic mistake, similar
perhaps to calling him a “yuppie” or even—pundits
in UP would hate me for saying this—a "Filipino."[7] Obviously, it would have been impossible for
someone coming from that era to self-identify with the
nuances and complexities of the many dizzyingly new-fangled
nomenclatures of our own time.
All
this doesn’t mean, most certainly, that there
were no men who had sex with each other previous to
homosexuality’s unfelicitous debut into the world.
(One wonders just how accurate is this El Fili
passage, coming as it does from the chapter that purports
to present and introduce the typical “characters”
of Rizal’s Manila). We can only imagine how, from
the earliest times, all over the planet, the male and
female of the species had manifested both heterosexual
and homosexual behaviors. But to repeat that oft-repeated
mantra of social constructionism, engaging in homosexual
sex is one thing, being a homosexual is another.[8] Previous to the sexological “production”
of the homosexual as a “species”—in
Michel Foucault's formulation—of personality,
there were men who loved other men, and women who loved
other women, but they were not much different from everybody
else (in fact, most probably, they were everybody else.)
The
same thing must have been true in the Philippines at
the turn of the nineteenth century. If the confession
manuals from the early Spanish period were to be believed,
it would seem that the newly converted natives of the
islands were not much loath to the activity of mutually
arousing one another—men with men, women with
women, men with women, etc.—within such "harmless"
contexts and occasions as el burlarse, or "childish
play."[9]
We might wish to recall, in this regard, just how scandalized
the proper frayles were, when they first saw
rowdy men in the Visayas sporting all sorts of penile
implants (penis pins and the like), which they gamely
used in order to make their sexual encounters both bloodier
and—they themselves gamely admitted, upon being
asked—considerably more pleasurable.[10]
Needless
to say, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the precolonial
inhabitants of the Philippines enjoyed a kind of sexual
“innocence” (or at least unselfconsciousness)
that only later on became corrupted when the colonial
Church introduced the discourse of sodomy, which for
three centuries it propagated in the Philippines through
the confessional. The discourse of sodomy, however,
was not the same as that of homosexuality, for it referred
to a number of non-procreative, extra-conjugal and/or
sexually “non-missionary” acts that anyone
might be weak enough to sometimes commit (with men,
women, or animals) but that, because merely a variant
of “unnatural sin against the sixth commandment,”
didn’t define one’s psychological constitution,
or sense of self.[11]
Moreover,
the concept of sodomy was itself “utterly confused,”
for not only were the varieties of acts it encompassed
dizzyingly plural and shifting, it also functioned,
in Europe’s “pre-sexological regimes,”
as a most convenient stigmatizing weapon, a demonizing
label with which it was practically impossible to identify,
inasmuch as it was, in fact, an “empty category”
into which the powerless were thrust by those who dictated
the scope and signification of its use.[12] In the case of Hispanic Philippines—as
historian John Leddy Phelan concludes—the resident
Sangleyes or Chinese were the colonial administrators’
most convenient target for this xenophobia-driven charge,
on whom the Spanish settlers in the islands depended
for vital economic services.[13]
Strangely
enough, in his annotations to Dr. Antonio de Morga’s
Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,[14] Rizal himself echoes the Sinophobic
accusation of sodomy, unmindful of the bias in
Morga’s account, which had obviously been “cribbed”
from previous relaciones and cronicas,
written by such dubious sources as Marcelo de Ribadeneira
and Miguel de Benavidez[15].
While Rizal's intention in his annotations was clearly
the unpacking of Spanish colonialist "fantasies" and
racist misrepresentations of the Philippines in the
available documents and histories, he didn't himself
realize—rather, he didn't wish to realize—just
how fantastic was the claim that the indios of
the Philippines had been innocent of the “unnatural
sin,” until they were corrupted by the foreigners,
particularly the Chinese.
Typically,
the argument used by the Spanish commentators in the
early years of the Conquista was that there wasn't
even a native word for sodomy among the indios
of the Philippines, as though by virtue of this linguistic
voiding of the “unspeakable crime” (or the
nefandam libidinem), the many acts that constituted
it could no longer be possible among them.[16]
Of course, it is the Hispanic colonial archives themselves
that can be shown to contradict this amazingly specious
argument. In one “confession manual” or
confesionario, written by the friar Gaspar de
San Agustin and published in Manila in 1713, a question
relating to “sins against the sixth commandment”
went: Cun nagpuit, o cun nagpapuit, o cun nagcasala
sa hayop.[17] This question, inquiring as it did into the penetrative
or receptive position the penitent might have assumed
during anal sexual intercourse—as well as into
probable acts of bestiality on the side—unequivocally
proves that Tagalog words existed, at this stage of
Spanish evangelization, to refer to at least these three
forms of sodomitic congress.
Nonetheless,
Rizal's "denial" of the Filipino native's "innate capacity"
to commit sodomy was, in the end, quite understandable,
especially when we recall the fact that his general
purpose in putting out and annotating Morga's Sucesos
was that he wished to paint a bright and “noble”
picture of his countrymen (and only incidentally, countrywomen)—something
that might serve to locate the Philippines in an Enlightenment,
“evolutionary” narrative of development
to which he subscribed, as well as to rectify the vulgarly
unflattering, “Quiaoquiapist” stereotypes
that circulated in Spain and that personally afflicted
him and the other reformists during this time.[18]
In his study, "Rizal Reading Pigafetta," Resil Mojares
makes a similar observation: in his edition of the Sucesos,
we see Rizal effectively writing a “counterhistory,”[19]
a marginal though no less arrogant text from someone
who fancied himself capable of adjudicating between
foreign and native perspectives, between “dubious”
and “correct” knowledges about the Philippines.
Predictably enough, such an undertaking was characterized
by Rizal’s own nativist mystifications and expropriations
of European Orientalist imaginings.
In
any case, by furthering his own uncritical Orientalism,
Rizal unwittingly bought into the same “Humanist,”
colonialist logic against which he was trying to inveigh,
countervailing his own project and contradicting himself
now and again. For instance, in regard to Morga’s
remark that the native men and women of the islands
were sexually “incontinent,” Rizal argues
that they simply saw no sin in sex, believing the act
of reproduction, “like many other peoples…
[as] a natural instinct.” Further, he states that
the pagan indios weren't so much "loose" as possessing
"an excess of naturalism," and that they were not fettered
by "religious or moral prohibition."[20]
Reading his textual "intervention," we realize that
the contradiction is clear: while Rizal sees the unbridled
sexual activities between native men and women—which
were much remarked about and bewailed in the early Spanish
accounts—as constitutive of a kind of natural
innocence or “naturalism,” he cannot imagine
that such an innocence could have allowed the same people
to “wander through [sodomy’s] mistaken paths.”
In other words, Rizal criticizes Morga by “denaturalizing”
his moralistic account of sexuality, yet stops his argument
short when it begins to dangerously wander into the
“unnatural” (yes, Rizal unblinkingly accepts
this adjective!) terrain of sodomy. This seems stranger
since, reading further into the same annotation, we
realize that Rizal understood sodomy to chiefly include
conjugally “heterosexual” acts, as when
he writes that the sodomitic Chinese and foreigners
commit it with the “indio women, who are
their wives.” This well-meaning “defense”
by Rizal of his people is, of course, merely one out
of so many others in the Sucesos, and we must
remember that sodomy, while a social stigma against
which Rizal obviously demurred, was, finally, only a
matter of misguided or “mistaken” activities,
and did not, in the way it was conceived during this
pre-sexological period in Philippine history, constitute
an intimate or definitive sense of identity. (Suffice
it to say that sodomy was simply a discourse of acts,
not selves.)
If
Rizal wasn’t—because he couldn't have been—a
bakla or a gay/homosexual, just exactly what
was he? Might he have been a binabae/yi, which
was a category of gender identity that he most probably
understood? Perhaps not,[21]
for not only was it highly unlikely that anyone of his
class or stature could have voluntarily identified with
what in this nineteenth-century masculinist culture
was clearly a pejorative term of effeminophobic abuse,
there exists no mention of this appellation ever being
tacked on him in any of the available—which is
to say, approved—accounts of his life. (Of course,
it is healthy to stay suspicious regarding such “official”
accounts: knowing how blind nationalistic zeal had damaged
the objectivity of so many of Rizal’s commentators
and chroniclers, we cannot be too sure these accounts
have not been sanitized precisely to conform with the
nationalist imperative to apotheosize the greatest scion
of the Filipino race!) Most probably he was an hombre,
an hombre ilustrado to be precise, which, on
second thought, tells us nothing new about him at all.
Ah,
but let us remember that since Rizal couldn’t
have been a homosexual, it only follows that he couldn’t
have been a heterosexual either!
What
I wish to stress at this point is this: previous to
the invention of homosexuality, individuals were not
heterosexuals either, for the simple reason that homo
and hetero were inverse forms of the same sexual logic
that had not existed before the regime of sexuality
(that is, of sexuality as we know it) overtook
our modern lives. Indeed, while men and women throughout
history married and begot children, they nonetheless
were not defined along the lines of sexual object choice
until the last quarter of Rizal’s century—and
then, only in Europe at first. Thus, for the longest
time, men and women were not cloven into the identities
of “the homosexual” and “the heterosexual.”
Whatever sexual discourse that might have operated as
a minimally significant force in their lives didn’t
discriminate between those who were attracted to members
of their own sex, and those who desired the opposite
sex, although it perhaps might have had something to
say about the frequency in which they had sex, or the
positions they assumed while doing it (these, of course,
were the basic issues which the discourse of sodomy
busied itself with.) As individuals whose lives were
not governed by the homo/hetero distinction, they were
relatively free to commit homosexual and heterosexual
acts without thinking how these acts affected their
selfhoods.
By
contrast, in our own sexually self-conscious time, one
can scarcely think of having sex with another man without
at the same tremblingly pleasurable moment becoming
at the very least “worried” of what this
could mean about who one really is, deep inside.
Rizal
and the other ilustrados of his time were presumably
socialized to think of marriage as the logical social
destiny. But this had little to do with what they could
actually experience sexually, within the privacy of
their own lives. Hence, if we cannot make use of the
relatively recent homo/hetero dichotomy with which to
describe the sexual and erotic milieu in which Rizal
lived, we might perhaps look at the organizing social
principles that determined the relations one gender
at that time could have with the other, or—and
this is extremely important—with itself.
Just
like in the greater part of Europe, middle-class males
and females in the Philippines during the time of Rizal
were socialized separately from each other. Boys went
to boys’ schools, girls to girls’ schools—a
policy that was implemented by the Spanish colonial
administration from the smallest parochial schools in
the barrios to the biggest collegios and
"normal schools" in Manila.[22]
Interesting accounts of just what this arrangement entailed,
in the lives of these students, may be found in Rizal’s
El Filibusterismo, and in a rather candid column
written by Felix Roxas, mayor of Manila from 1905 to
1917.
A
contemporary of Rizal at the Ateneo Municipal, Roxas
wrote for El Debate, a Spanish-language newspaper
from the American colonial period. In a piece titled
“The Danger of Coeducation,” he shares his
memories of “the effects of puberty”
on the young men of the Ateneo, and in particular recalls
the embarassing time when, despite all measures,
“human instinct... develop[ed] [and] passionate
latters [were] addressed to each other by fellow classmates.”
[23] On the other side of the
gender divide, Rizal alludes to the existence of erotic
affection in Manila’s all-female schools in a
scene from chapter twenty-two of El Fili (titled
"La Funccion"). In this scene, the narrator enters Paulita's
mind, and verbalizes how the French word cocher (from
"to ride" or "to mount"), reminds her "of certain terms
which convent girls use among themselves to explain
a sort of passion."[24] And of course, we must remember that even outside
these “exclusive school” contexts, piety
and propriety dictated that young men and women meet
only under the assiduous supervision of spinster aunts
and trusted yayas. Suffice it to say, such "unnecessary
meetings" were generally frowned upon and discouraged.
Thus,
the basic social structure that determined the relations
between the male and female genders of the ilustrado
class in nineteenth-century Philippines, can be called
“homosocial”: individuals were expected
to develop bonds within each of the two genders, bonds
that could be expressed in several ways. Some of the
ways, for example, in which men bonded with one another
were through exclusive friendships, “discipleships”
and cliques, or memberships in fraternities and clubs
(La Liga Filipina would be one of the more illustrious
examples of an “all-boys club” that existed
during the period of the Propaganda movement). Women
bonded with one another within the realm of the home,
in particular, the grantedly “feminine space”
of the kitchen, where they were seen to become their
own naturally gossipy selves, while the men talked endlessly
about matters of consequence (such as the affairs of
state) in the entresuelo or sala.
I
am of course not really interested in male bonds per
se, except perhaps where these bonds may be seen to
express themselves sexually, as they often did in the
heavily homosocial past. Rizal and the other propagandistas
and their European patrons and supporters were all male,
and they all bonded. Vicente L. Rafael, examining the
records and photographs of the period, notices the overtly
“masculine” texture of such bondings: not
only did Rizal and his compatriots organize themselves
into a mutual-aid association called Indios Bravos
("Brave Indians"), they also took pains to further "masculinize"
their bodies by lifting weights and engaging in sports
like fencing and the martial arts, if only to offer
an alternative to the Orientalist stereotypes
circulating in Europe concerning the Philippine indios'
perceived "lack of virility."[25] Thus, while their common ideological persuasion—their
collective wish to enact political reforms back in the
Philippine islands—provided a basis for this bonding,
their gender was also, in truth, the real common ground
on which they confidently stood, embracing one another,
in fond solidarity, as it were. Just where does the
social end and the sexual begin, as far as these bondings
and embracings were concerned? I for one cannot tell.
All we might safely say in this regard is this: in the
absence of the paranoia-making discourse of homosexuality—a
discourse that suddenly rendered suspect one’s
desires and hitherto unselfconscious longings to bond
with others of one’s own gender—men like
Rizal most probably expressed their fellowship and camaraderie
with one another in ways that did not, at times, exclude
the genital.
We
know, reading the voluminous correspondence between
Rizal and the Austrian ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt—as
well as, to a lesser extent, between Rizal and the other
“reformists” living in Spain and elsewhere
on the continent—just how appropriate is this
figure of los abrazos or "embrace." Indeed, this
was how Rizal and those dearest to him usually ended
their postcards and letters to each other: "I embrace
you."
We
also know, especially as regards Rizal and Blumentritt,
just how affectionate and loving this epistolary discourse
could become, so much so that they would write (jokingly)
how they are “desperately in love”
with the other,[26]
would keep sending photos, bric-a-brac, mementos and
flowers (!) to the other,[27] would say that they would "dare
everything" for the sake of the other,[28] would profess that they were always thinking of the other,[29] or would suffer disturbing dreams about the
other. In one letter, Rizal relates that his strange
dream of his “dear brother and friend” ended
with him “waking up tired and sweating; it was
very hot on the bed.”[30]
While
it may be a mistake to read anything more into such
declarations of intimacy between the younger Rizal and
the “brotherly” Blumentritt—whose
strongest point of affinity with one another would seem
to be, to all intents and purposes, an intellectual
one—we must nonetheless remember just how such
bonds between men at that time constituted a continuum,
and how this continuum conceivably stretched from one
form of affection to the other, such as fraternal intimacy
to romantic love. How else can we explain the ease with
which Rizal and Blumentritt could call each other “dear,”[31] or declare that they "love" each other in their
letters, without any sense of shame?
On
the other hand, there exists one letter, written by
Rizal, in which an intimation of a kind of shame creeps
in, though it is one which he quickly brushes off[32]: in it, he would seem to be defending the “intimate fraternity
which [they] profess mutually” against “enemies
[who do not] understand this sentiment [because they]
don’t have a delicate sentiment” and are
“rude.” Writing “you honor me enough
by calling me dear friend," Rizal refuses to
discuss the matter further in this letter to Blumentritt—"I
have no more comments to make"—and merely says,
"Perhaps you may undertand me." Not in so many words,
Rizal would seem to be saying that he and his beloved
friend are being "intrigued" by some Spaniards back
in Madrid, and while in this letter he denies its veracity,
he nonetheless cannot do so plainly, and merely appeals
to the hope that Blumentritt "may understand" what he
cannot quite bring himself to say.
This
denial and the verbal difficulty in which it is couched
do not, in themselves, mean anything: the intrigue may
or may not have any basis in fact, despite or precisely
because Rizal mentions it in such an atypical fashion
(atypical because Rizal, in his letters, is rarely at
a loss for words). What this letter does make clear
is that such possibility (a sexual one) existed for
the kind of "sentiment" Rizal and Blumentritt shared,
if only because it was found cogent both by the "rude
Spaniards" and by Rizal, who acknowledges it enough
by writing Blumentritt about it. (And of course, we
see that Rizal, at the same careful moment that he acknowledges
the rumor's existence, turns suddenly inarticulate in
his disavowal of it.)
Is
there proof to be had to make this and other such “intriguing”
propositions more tenable? I’m afraid that after
the nationalist historians (who were raised in the American
colonial system, and thus were all too clearly aware
of the stigmatizing effects of homosexuality) had gone
through and “cleaned up” every little scrap
of Rizaliana, it might no longer be possible to ascertain
anything in the extant records that vaguely suggests
Rizal had sex (or wished to have sex) with men, such
as with any of his compatriots, for instance.[33]
In fact such historians seem to have lost no time in
accomplishing the opposite goal: from as early as I
can remember, according to enlightened lore, Rizal was
a hero made more heroic by his spectacularly abundant
machismo, managing to have a girl fall helplessly in
love with him everywhere in the world he went. For sure,
in retelling the life of this national hero, these historians
were inscribing that life with some of their own values,
which they wished Rizal himself had shared—even
if Rizal clearly hadn't.
And
then, there may yet be some hope left. In a personal
conversation with Ocampo a couple of years ago, he mentioned
that there are still bits of Rizaliana out there that
can offer us an alternative picture of our country's
most beloved hero. In particular, he was referring to
a few hard-written illustrations or "sketches," apparently
drawn from life by the good doctor, of his patients'
penises in various stages of tumescence, in a notebook
to be found in a collection housed in the Newberry library
in Chicago. The notebook itself has already been perused
and copied by a number of Rizal archivists and scholars[34];
it's indeed very telling how none of them has mentioned
the fact that such "interesting" drawings even exist.[35]
Even as these drawings may not signify anything more
than a conscientious physician’s clinical documentation
of the cases he was managing (how curious that a number
of them should have to be “venereal,” however),
Ocampo does make the oft-repeated point clear that most
Filipinos have yet to see Rizal plainly, or “without
the overcoat.”
Needless
to say, to the extent that Rizal is a national hero,
the full range of his “human complexity”
has largely been glossed over by nationalist hagiographic
discourse, for the sake of emphasizing the unimpeachable
“greatness” of his heroism. Of course, Ocampo
wasn’t the first person to realize this, or even
to articulate it in public. A graduate student of the
University of Santo Tomas, Ante Radaic, bravely offered
an alternative picture of Rizal in a series of thoughtful
articles that came out in the Weekly Women's Magazine
in 1962.[36] In "The Fears of Rizal: Life and Love," Radaic attends to Rizal's
published Memorias de un estudiante de Manila,
and surmises how he must have suffered from a kind of
“inferiority complex,” borne out of
his painfully keen awareness of his own physically diminutive
size. To Radaic, this peculiar “melancholy”
rendered him miserable throughout most of his childhood
and adolescence, and it subsequently compelled him to
overcompensate by excelling not only in his studies
but in every other aspect of his finally amazing and
“monumental” life.
That
Filipinos don’t know the “complete picture”
was, likewise, precisely the point raised by Rizal’s
own younger sister, Maria, in an interview with Carmen
Guerrero-Nakpil (then Guerrero-Cruz) in the Evening
News, shortly after the end of the Second World
War.[37] In this interview, Maria confides
that his famous older brother kept certain “secrets,”
to which only his immediate family was privy, such as
the fact that one of his shoulders was markedly lower
than the other and that his face was slightly prognathous.
Rizal painstakingly “hid” these apparently
hurtful truths by wearing specially tailored suits and
by presenting only his most flattering “profile”
every time he posed for a photograph.
I
don’t believe conventional biography or even autobiography
is the only recourse we have if we wish to pin down
certain vital “truths” about such a historical
personage as Rizal. As Leon Ma. Guerrero points out
in his translator’s preface to the book, The
Young Rizal, Rizal apparently subjected his only
existing autobiography—the aforesaid Memorias—to
"considerable revision," implying that he was willfully
cultivating a persona in his own writings.[38] What's worth noting is that
these emendations were not strictly stylistic. Some
were blatantly substantive, especially the erasure and
substitution of certain names and facts, ostensibly
for the purpose of concealing his identity, already
effectively dissimulated by the pen name "P. Jacinto"
on the manuscript's title page.
In
particular, Guerrero points out an interesting erasure
in the second chapter, “My Life Away from My Parents—My
Troubles," referring to the nickname by which the young
Rizal was teased, by his burly boy classmates in Biñan.
Alberto and Tomas F. Barretto, who published the Spanish
edition of Memorias in 1949, had decided—rather
erroneously, as Guerrero declares in an endnote—to
put "Calambeño" (one who hails from Calamba)
in place of the original word which had been "crossed
out... so thoroughly" in the manuscript. Guerrero doubts
if this was indeed the case, because "Calambeño
does not seem to be, as an epithet, sufficiently opprobrious
to have called for an excision."[39]
Moreover, its cursives’ three tall strokes are
not consistent with the discernible two tall strokes
of the original word that Rizal used. Reading about
this biographical “mystery” now, we are
left wondering what this word could have been, which
proved to be so derogatory and “opprobrious”
that it needed to be scored over and over by its writer.[40]
The
clue is that whatever it was, it had something to do
with the roughhousing and bullying that Rizal regularly
suffered at the hands of his taller and bigger classmates,
who dwarfed and overpowered him at play, and whom he
tried to beat in classroom contests instead. Like most
childhood taunts, this one must have conferred on its
victim a most annihilating feeling of “shame,”
an affect within which an early sense of self most probably
developed, which the writer of these memoirs, already
a young adult, scornfully repudiates. (Rizal writes:
“I have no desire to spend my time counting the
beatings I received or picturing my emotions when I
suffered.”[41])
In his essay-series, Radaic concedes that autobiographies
are far from factual and are necessarily interested
texts, in Rizal’s case most trenchantly so.[42] It is easy to see this "interestedness"
in the final and longest chapter of his memorias,
a chapter made memorable by the fact that it is the
most “fictive” chapter of all, employing
dialogues and lyrical descriptions that are lacking
in the previous sections of these quaint childish memoirs,
which are full of “exclamations and apostrophes.”
(It is here that Rizal recounts, in a sentimentally
mannered fashion, his youthful infatuation with the
fourteen-year-old Segunda Katigbak.)
Suffice
it to say, the fortunate thing about Rizal is that he
wrote a great deal, and in many of his writings, he
unwittingly laid bare his own personality. I do not
simply mean that he self-consciously wrote his own self,
his own identity, in his texts—in his two novels,
for instance—but that in depicting life as he
knew it, he was already providing some clues as to what
kind of world he lived in, as well as what kind of person
he was in relation to such a world: clues like, for
example, his surprising awareness of male-to-male sexual
emasculation in the opening scene of his little-known
satire, “The Vision of Fray Rodriguez,”[43] as well as his own attitude
toward the question of women and the revolution—his
famous letter to the "Young Countrywomen of Malolos"
comes to mind, as well as his characterization of women
(and men) in both the Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo. (Of course, among Rizal’s
“fictive females,” the most curious are
the two Doñas, Victorina and Consolacion, both
unflattering caricatures of grasping, shallow, silly,
conniving and despicable women.) Other clues may be
found in his correspondences with friends and compatriots,
a revealing example of which is his vociferous letter
to Blumentritt, in which he viciously excoriates a certain
Doña Antonia Rodriguez, whom he calls “a
despicable whore” because she has had multiple
affairs with all manner of men, from Catalans to Alsatian
Jews.[44]
Rizal writes this to caution Blumentritt against ever
writing or associating with her. In the process he professes
such hatred for her that he can bring himself to say
that “to be outraged by her is an honor.”
Definitely, this letter reveals a kind of prudish masculinist
misogyny on the part of the otherwise charitable and
liberal-minded hero.
At
this point, I wish to carry out my own reading of a
certain form of masculine bonding that I feel undergirds
the central plots of his two novels. In particular,
I am interested in suggesting possible interpretive
trajectories into the world of Rizal’s first novel,
the Noli Me Tangere. A caveat, in any case: the
following is merely an attempt at delineating just what
such trajectories might look like, and is therefore
hardly sufficient in demonstrating the cogency, let
alone the intricacy, of this approach. Let me just say
that I am not originating this “method”:
the famous study, Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire, written in the mid-80s
by American feminist critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, actually
inaugurated the vibrant field of gay or “queer”
studies in the United States. In her study, Sedgwick
argues that male homosexual behavior is but one instance
of male homosocial desire—other social practices,
other bondings between men exist alongside it, forming
a continuum that constitutes patriarchy itself. Thus,
this theory posits desire to be in fact a social force—which
is to say, it exercises certain social effects—rather
than just a personal issue of private, arguably “psychological”
wants.
Before
the invention of homosexuality, realizing the existence
of this continuum was much easier, for its practices
visibly moved into and reinforced each other, as the
literary evidence Sedgwick cites clearly demonstrates.
Looking at a selection of important English Romantic
Gothic and Victorian texts from the mid-eighteenth to
nineteenth centuries, she discovers that in the typical
plot of “heterosexual” rivalry—the
ever-present "erotic triangle"—men's homosocial
desire proves stronger precisely because it takes a
"detour" through the same beloved woman.[45]
In other words, men's desire for women is merely a "strategy"
to pursue their desire for each other. With the pathologization
of homosexual acts, however, this very structure was
suddenly shaken, and a paranoia began to overtake men's
bonds. This has led to the twentieth-century stigmatization
of homosexuality, its paranoid "othering." Presumably,
it is by the stigmatizing and disavowal of this one
segment that the rest of the male homosocial continuum—patriarchy's
most essential structure—could be kept inviolate
and “safe.”
And
so, on to reading...
Elias
and Ibarra are, in all of the Noli, the most
closely knit of characters. Their bonding is such that
they take turns saving each other’s life and,
at times, appear to be alter egos of each other, polemicizing
what are obviously Rizal’s own dialectical views
concerning the matter of sociopolitical reforms and
armed revolution currently gripping the country. This
bonding is confounded by the revelation that Ibarra
is the direct descendant of the man who had caused the
downfall of Elias’s own family, but is reinforced—if
not ennobled—by Elias's immolation for Ibarra's
sake at novel's end.
It
is possible to demonstrate the presence of an admiring
male homosocial gaze in Rizal’s depiction of Elias,
Ibarra’s significant other and greatest “lover”—for,
lest we forget, here is a man who gives up his own life
to save that of another. And this admiration derives
from Elias’s enigmatic “difference”:
in his very first “intimate” encounter with
Elias, in his house as he is “putting finishing
touches to a change of clothing,” Ibarra is “surprised”
by the “severe and mysterious figure of Elias.”
After a brief conversation, in which Elias proves himself
strangely eloquent, it becomes clear to Ibarra that
this man is “neither a pilot (bankero)
nor a rustic," and he "gazes" at him and his "muscular
arms, covered with lumps and bruises."[46]
Thus, Elias's otherness is made more desirable (for
all desire is desire for difference), because it touches
on and is proximate to the same: Elias, despite being
quite unlike Ibarra in obvious ways, nonetheless talks
the talk of someone who might have gone through the
same "cultivation" as Ibarra did. (And so he is different
enough to be desirable, yet not so different as to be
completely unrecognizable.)
And
we see this desire expressing itself in Rizal’s
narrative later on. In the forty-ninth chapter, “The
Voice of the Hunted,” we encounter the following
descriptive paragraphs that spring at us in the midst
of the long and highly polemical dialogues between the
two “similar yet different” men riding the
same beleaguered skiff. At first, Rizal frames the dusky
and masculine figure in a romantic tableau, one enchanted
evening:
Elias spoke passionately, enthusiastically, in vibrating tones;
his eyes flashed. A solemn pause followed. The banca,
unimpelled by the paddle, seemed to stand still in
the water. The moon shone majestically in a sapphire
sky, and a few lights glimmered on the distant shore.
(p. 316)
And
then, this same earthy and mysterious figure, standing
just across the impeccably clean ilustrado, Don
Juan Crisostomo Ibarra (who, I must add, has not been
much convinced, up to this point, of the virtue in the
other’s position that bloody struggle is an inevitable
thing), is transformed into a great manly shape: “Elias
was transfigured; standing uncovered, with his manly
face illuminated by the moon, there was something extraordinary
about him. He shook his long hair and went on...”
(p. 325).
Now
these are just a couple of instances in which a homosocial
structure might be shown to inhere in Rizal’s
texts. By citing them I do not mean to suggest that
Rizal had intended for Ibarra and Elias to desire each
other. In truth, to the degree that homosociality was
a social structure in which Rizal was raised and from
which he wrote his novels, he could not have intended
its presence in his texts inasmuch as it was always
already constitutive of them. Nonetheless, these passages
should cue as a little into the kind of milieu in which
the men of Rizal’s time and background worked—alongside
one another¾as friends, compatriots, fellow-revolutionaries,
enemies, rivals, or whatever else.
It
might also prove important to mention that Elias’s
“transfiguration” in this scene paves the
way for his Christ-like sacrifice toward the end of
his the novel, in which he meets and instructs the boy
Basilio (a boy whose features are “attractive,”
as Rizal’s text goes), to whom he bequeaths the
Noli's most memorable lines: "I die without seeing
the dawn..." And it is likewise significant that it
is this very same boy, Basilio, who in the El Fili
becomes the ward and closest follower of Simoun. In
that novel, another homosocial configuration takes over
the admiring and consummate friendship that existed
between Elias and Ibarra, and this configuration is
one of mentorship between an older man (the master)
and his student. (Rizal’s fortuitous description
of the elegantly dressed homeopathist and his favorite
“disciple” walking the cobbled streets of
Manila just now comes to mind.)
But
what has happened to Maria Clara, Ibarra’s declared
romantic interest, while all this intimate bonding is
taking place on the suddenly romantic lake? She is in
her home, presumably, where women should properly be.
Even Elias’s ostensible love interest, the enigmatic
Salome, must finally be exiled from the novel’s
plot—as well as from the novel itself, in its
published form—because Rizal's affectional world
is, quite simply, a world dominated and made fascinating
by men. In the Noli's missing chapter, "Elias
and Salome," the ineffectuality of men's bonds with
women and the potency of men's bonds with one another,
may be seen to be clearly expressed. In the first and
only time we read about them and their "friendship,"
Elias is already saying goodbye to Salome, for he has
"lost his liberty" to the man who has saved his life
(Ibarra), and must now follow him to "discharge this
debt."
In
this triangle of loving reciprocities, the woman is
the weakest link, finally reduced to looking longingly
on, “listening to the sound of [Elias’s]
footsteps, which gradually die[d] away.”[47] In the end, we can say that
in all likelihood Rizal didn’t think the revolution
to be the “proper” place for women. In fact,
in his “To my Young Countrywomen...,” he
may be seen to typify the patriarchal view that, even
or especially in times of social ferment, women
are to be defined in male terms—as supportive
mothers to their revolutionary sons, toward whom (like
the legendary women of Sparta) their ultimate loyalties
and responsibilities must be directed.[48]
Like every other important affair, the revolution, for
Rizal, was unmistakably male-inclusive. How else should
it be, after all, given the undeniable maleness
required of every significant form of social intercourse
in his time?
On
the other hand, we must understand that male bonding
as a form of relating did not cancel out romance with
the opposite sex. Patriarchy’s “traffic
in women” is incontrovertible proof of men’s
power, for it reduces women to exchangeable commodity
between one group of men (fathers) to another (husbands).
Marriage is essential to this system, in which women
exchanged between households function as a kind of social
adhesive to secure men’s bonds, and keep them
firmly in place. Thus, while Rizal included women and
romance in his novels, his vision of the revolution—as
well as of fraternality and possibly community—nonetheless
shows that there were spheres of social life which were
shut off from women.[49]
Within these exclusively male spaces, male homosocial
desire reigned supreme, and encounters between men quietly,
though not for that matter unpassionately, took place.
Finally,
I wish to reiterate the point I made earlier on: the
question “Was Rizal gay?” has no answer,
simply because it is misinformed. Nonetheless, I think
the activity of raising such an inquiry has not been
all that uninsightful and fruitless. As we have seen,
it leads us to asking if the question of Rizal’s
sexual orientation—as well as other similar questions—is,
in the first place, the right kind of question to ask.
We must remember that not just gender and sexuality
but the subject—the "person"—herself cannot
be presumed to be the same across periods and cultures.
Thus, looking into forms of intimacy in the late Spanish
and early American period in the Philippines necessitates
the writing of what Foucault has called a “genealogical
critique.” This is a kind of conceptual history
that traces the origins of seemingly natural and timeless
essences like sex, the psyche and even identity itself
to discourses, practices and institutions which may
be demonstrated to have a history, an unmistakable material
base.
Especially
in relation to such difficult questions as gender and
eroticism, we must remember what Judith Butler, the
foremost theorist of the socially constructed subject,
has said: sex is not a biological template, a “given”
upon which gender rests—as its random and oftentimes
inequitable elaboration—but rather, a “performativity.”
Butler’s performative thesis takes all sex, gender
and sexuality (and the identity they collectively evoke
and represent) as the discursive effects of ritualistic
performances of idealized “norms”; moreover,
it is these performances and not an innate gender “core”
that in fact “produce” their subject, precisely
as their effect.[50]
Thus, according to Butler’s theory of performativity,
sex and identity itself are “regulatory fictions”
forcibly enforced across time, materializing the very
“bodies that matter,” the very subjects
they supposedly merely describe. This performativity
must be seen not as any singular or single deliberate
“act,” but rather as a process, a reiterative
and citational practice by which “discourse produces
the effects that it names.” It is in this sense
that we may see identity as being what ones does, rather
than what one is. In a manner of speaking, we are
not what we are; we are what we do.
What
I have attempted to do in this exploratory essay is
partially situate certain social performances of masculinity
during Rizal’s time within a “homosocial”
context—homosociality being, for my purposes,
a heuristic that refers merely to easily observable
social bonds. As such, the concept of homosociality
does not presume to lay claim to any psychic (or psychosexual)
dimensions, which I am not prepared to do, since indeed
that would be courting more danger than I am
willing to face. In any case, I can say that the real
work lies ahead: carrying out a more detailed social
history of the sex/gender system of the period in question,
a clear description of which would provide what, in
the case of Butler’s study of twentieth-century
gender and identity in the hegemonic West, the “heterosexual
matrix”— which is to say, the mode of intelligibility,
the signifying structure or regulative discourse which
renders certain acts and performances intelligible,
while denying this very same intelligibility to
others.
For
Butler, this matrix has three constituent parts, all
of which function as binarisms. This “structuralist”
insight, thanks to countless other feminist thinkers,
is already well known: there are two sexes (male
and female), two genders (masculine and feminine), and
two “essential” sexualities (heterosexual
and homosexual). Of course, according to heteropatriarchy,
the ideal combinations can only be: male, masculine
and heterosexual; female, feminine and heterosexual.
Already, one wonders if a comparable matrix obtained
in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period,
and if it was in any way stable, coherent or hegemonic
across the different social classes and ethnic groupings
in the archipelago. On second thought, given the lack
of normalizing techonologies in the backward Filipinas
of Rizal's time, this "matrix" most certainly couldn't
have been all that stable or hegemonic. (Certainly,
as we've already clarified, it couldn't have been heterosexual
either, despite the "male/female" binarism that may
have obtained on the level of genital sex).
In
parting, let me recur to my paper’s controversial
question, which proves fruitful in another sense. Allow
me to elaborate. Sometime in the Centennial year (1998),
in his column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer,
Ambeth Ocampo stated that imputing to Rizal gayness
is not the worst thing that’s been done to this
national hero. To Ocampo, the worst that anybody has
said about Rizal is that he and his greatness
are fabrications by the Americans.
While
I agree it is simply terrible to think this of Rizal,
I also wish to register a specific demurral against
Ocampo’s unwitting implication that thinking Rizal
might have been gay is, all things considered, still
and all bad enough.
If
anything good came out of Isagani R. Cruz’s cheeky
column on Rizal’s kabaklaan, it would be
this: in pondering the mystery of whether our nation’s
greatest hero was a bakla or not, we have discovered
the truth, not so much about Rizal, as ourselves. And
what truth is this? It’s simply that we cannot
be said to be accepting of the bakla in our midst
to the degree that we cannot begin to accept the possibility
that someone we have been taught to admire from as early
as we can remember, could have been such an awful, awful
thing.
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