Getting over the Filipino’s Hump: Rizal’s Appeal to the Youth at the End of the Filibusterismo

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol

At the end of Rizal’s Filibusterismo, after Simoun’s death and while P. Florentino’s  servants attend to the corpse, P. Florentino murmurs: 

Where are the youth who should consecrate their rosy hours, their dreams and enthusiasm  to the good of their homeland? Where are they who should pour out their blood  generously to wash away so much shame, so many crimes, so much abomination? The  victim has to be pure and unstained for the holocaust to be acceptable!... Where are you,  young men and women, who should embody the vital vigour that has fled our veins, the  purity of ideas that has been stained in our brains and the fire of enthusiasm which has  been snuffed out in our hearts?... We await you, young men and women, come; we await  you! [284-85: translation mine] 

The passage is charged with high rhetoric, and so can we be blamed if we see the priest’s words  as a series of rhetorical questions, not to be taken literally, as a high-flown roundabout way of  praising the youth, of reminding them that they are (as the author had called them twelve years  earlier in “A la juventud filipina”) “la bella esperanza de la patria”? 

If we take the priest’s words literally, however, then they become a condemnation of the  adults in Rizal’s novel; if we understand P. Florentino to be the mouthpiece of Rizal himself, as  generations of readers have taken him to be, and the universe of the Fili to be none other than the  Philippines of Rizal‘s time, then his words become Rizal’s condemnation of the Filipinos of his  time, in fact—shall I say it?—of his own generation and the generation before him. And the  youth do not escape Rizal’s condemnation: the first sentence may be read to mean that the youth  P. Florentino was in touch with were precisely those who did not “consecrate their rosy hours,  their dreams and enthusiasm to the good of their homeland,” prompting the secular priest to look  for those who did. Thus, P. Florentino, and thus, Rizal: Rizal had a dim view of the Filipino  youth he was in touch with in the years he wrote the Fili: 1890-1891. 

There are letters and events that I could cite in support of this claim. Just three days ago I  delivered a conference before student leaders in Baguio on precisely this topic. In this brief talk,  however, I want to approach the same topic from a different angle. I want to explore it in light of  Rizal’s other works. 

Read the Complete Essay

This article continues in its original scholarly format, including citations and footnotes.

Rizal_s Appeal to the Youth in El Fili 2012.pdf

Download PDF • 250KB