With Rizal, in exile

I’m saving a review of 2020 for next week, although today’s column still takes off from this terribly difficult year, using a rather different approach to reflect on the year with a poem from Jose Rizal, whose 124th death anniversary we are observing today.

I’m referring to Rizal’s “Mi Retiro” (My Retreat), which he wrote while in Dapitan, where he was exiled from 1892 to 1896. This small town, located on the northern tip of Zamboanga del Norte, should be a “pilgrimage” site for every Filipino to fully appreciate Rizal, and his many dreams for the Philippines.

In Dapitan he engaged in agriculture, engineering, medicine, education, and, many people are unaware, anthropology. It was here, too, where Rizal the naturalist emerged, studying how plants and animals (including humans) lived and interacted in different environmental settings.

Rizal, it seems, was interested in everything, collecting and documenting all kinds of biological specimens, including shells, which also makes him a conchologist. In one of his letters to his German friend, Adolf Bernhard Meyer, the director of the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum in Dresden, Rizal offered his entire collection of 300 shells to Meyer: “Do you want it? How much would they give me for it? They are all shells of the district of Dapitan.” He ended with a cryptic “I have no rifles yet.”

We don’t know what happened to the offer, but the Dresden museum does have some of Rizal’s shells.

Dapitan provided the ambiance for Rizal to write poetry again, after a long hiatus. Look up Nick Joaquin’s translation of the original Spanish into English, described as “loose” but which better captures Rizal’s literary style.

“Mi Retiro” is a poem of longing and sadness, as would be expected of an exile. But these strong emotions are woven around Rizal’s descriptions of the interconnected webs of life around him, in nature. What we see in “Mi Retiro” is a poetic rendition of environmental science, even if the term had not yet been coined in his time.

There’s a term used now in environmental conservation: “from ridge to reef,” emphasizing the need to connect conservation efforts from upland areas down to our seas. Look for that connection in this stanza of “Mi Retiro”:

“If the sky is serene, meekly flows the spring, strumming on its invisible zither unceasingly; but come the time of the rains, and an impetuous torrent spills over rocks and chasms—hoarse, foaming and aboil—to hurl itself with a frenzied roaring toward the sea.”

We read of forests and mountains, of fields and rivers, set against the day, and nights, some silent, others mysterious.

Rizal saw butterflies and thought of his own life, of having been “vagrant everywhere, with no qualms, with no terrors, squandered in foreign lands the April of my life.”

In exile, he compared himself to a “weary swallow” with broken wings, “faith now sold to others, and ruins everywhere.”

The last stanzas of “Mi Retiro” refer to Rizal’s memories of those he had loved, and of faithful friends, ending with ambivalence: “I found in my land a refuge under a pleasant orchard, and in its shadowy forests, serene tranquility, repose to my intellect and silence to my grief.”

Rizal’s poem could well be our poem, as a nation in COVID-19 times. We, too, yearn for better times from our past but, unlike Rizal, who knew his future was bleak—he was let out of Dapitan in July 1896, only to be imprisoned, tried, and executed in December—we have our options today.

Might we find inspiration from Rizal in appreciating what we have, in being humbled by nature and, I hope, slowly understanding how our battle against the pandemic must include an understanding of how our neglect of the environment — from our encroachment into wildlife areas, to our disregard for basic human needs, particularly shelter — made us so much more vulnerable?

I’ve been getting many holiday greetings expressing hopes for a better new year. Beyond hoping, we need to do whatever we can to create the conditions for a better future. Might we start by dispensing with the fireworks this year? The noise isn’t going to drive away the COVID-19 virus, even as the smog will make life more difficult for people already suffering from respiratory ailments and COVID-19.

There are so many other ways to bring holiday cheer, quietly defying the virus by giving time and presence to all we love, even those physically apart. And who among us is not in one way or another in exile?

[email protected]