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The day that Gomez, Burgos and Zamora were executed, writes Jacinto,
was a day of degradation and wretchedness. Twenty-four years had since
passed, but the excruciating wound inflicted that day on Tagalog hearts had
never healed; the bleeding had never been staunched. Though the lives of the
three priests had been extinguished that day, their legacy would endure
forever. Their compatriots would honor their memory, and would seek to
emulate their pursuit of truth and justice. As yet, Jacinto acknowledges, some
were not fully ready to embrace those ideals, either because they failed to
appreciate the need for solidarity and unity or because their minds were still
clouded by the smoke of a mendacious Church. But those who could no
longer tolerate oppression were now looking forward to a different way of life,
to a splendid new dawn.
Gomez, Burgos and Zamora, affirms Jacinto, knew how to die for their
compatriots and the land of their birth. Would their compatriots, he asks, be
prepared to sacrifice their lives in turn? That was a difficult question to
answer, he concludes, but one thing was certain: the terror that began with the
scaffold at Bagumbayan in 1872 had not yet finished.
Jacinto prefaces his piece with a stanza from the famous poem
Florante at Laura by Francisco Baltazar (Balagtas), a metrical romance that
tells in “mellifluous and highly allegorical verse” the story of a knight and a
princess in the medieval kingdom of Albania. First published in 1838, its
readers and hearers attached to it their own meanings, some in later decades
seeing in Florante’s travails “a reflection of their own misery and outrage
under the oppressive rule of foreign tyrants.” 1 Here, the stanza chosen by
Jacinto to introduce his tribute to the martyred priests is highly apt: “What
lips yet venture to uphold/ The cause of Truth, of Wisdom bold/ Straightaway
are struck, and stricken cold/ By swords that reap death in their fold.” 2
Beneath the text, Jacinto has written “Year 1 – Issue 2,” which almost
certainly means he intended to publish the piece in the second issue of
Kalayaan. As already noted, however, the issue never materialized; it was still
being set in type when the Katipunan was discovered, and the printing press
had to be hastily destroyed.
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Tagalog text
¡¡¡ Gomez, Burgos, Zamora !!!
1
ng sabing magaling at katutuhanan
agad binibiyak at sinisikangan
ng kalis ng lalung dustang kamatayan
F. Balagtas
2
ang mga alipin at matutuhan nilang ibangun ang dangal ng kanilang
katauhan na tuntungan ng kapalaluan ng sukabang panginoon!
Dimas Ilaw
3
Maynila 30 Abril 1896
Taung 1 – Bilang 2
4
1
Bienvenido Lumbera, “The Nationalist Literary Tradition” in Elmer A. Ordonez, ed. Nationalist Literature: A
centennial forum (Manila: University of the Philippines Press and PANULAT/ Philippine Writers Academy,
1996), 2–3.
2
Francisco Baltazar (Balagtas), “Pinagdaanang buhay ni Florante at Laura sa cahariang Albania” [1838] in Jovita
Ventura Castro, et al (eds.), Anthology of Asean Literatures: Philippine metrical romances (Quezon City:
ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 1985), 341. Translation by Tarrosa Subido.
3
Historians now agree that the executions took place on February 17. Jacinto may well have taken the date of
February 16 from the editorial “16 de Febrero de 1872,” written to mark the twentieth anniversary of the
executions in La Solidaridad, the paper edited by Marcelo H. del Pilar in Madrid, in its issue dated February 15,
1892. La Solidaridad in turn inherited the date of the 16th from a report by Edmund Plauchut that it reprinted
in the same issue immediately following the editorial. Plauchut’s report, first published in the Paris-based Revue
de deux mondes in 1877, suggests in one passage that Burgos, Gomez and Zamora were executed on the 16th, but
indicates in another passage that it was the 17th. La Solidaridad, parallel text edition with English translation by
Guadalupe Fores-Ganzon, vol. IV (Manila: Fundacion Santiago, 1996), 62–75.