Noteworthy biographies by Filipino authors.

Among the biographies of Rizal written by Filipino writers, the

notable ones in my view are the following: (1) Rafael Palma, Biografia de Rizal. (2) Carlos Quirino, The
Great Malayan. (3) Camilo Osias, Jose Rizal: Life and Times. (4) Gregorio F. Zaide, Jose Rizal: Life,
Works, and Writing and (5) Leon Ma. Guerrero, The First Filipino: A Biography of Jose Rizal.

All the biographies (except that of Zaide) were written in response to a national biography-writing contest
sponsored by the Philippine government.

In 1938, at the instigation of the Philippine Commonwealth, four were recognized from among eight
noteworthy submissions to the contest. The first-place winner was given to the manuscript submitted by
Rafael Palma (submitted under the pseudonym Lakandula). This was published as a document of the
National Library (Oficina de Bibliotecas Publicas).

The committee awarded the second place to the manuscript of Osias. Third place award was a tie
between the submissions of Carlos Quirino and of Asuncion Lopez-Bantug.

The books by Osias and by Quirino were published in English by private printers. They must have been
revised versions of the contest submissions that were cited. I cannot comment on the book of Lopez-
Bantug because I could not locate a physical copy of it.

The work of Leon Ma. Guerrero was the first prize winner of the biography-writing contest under the
auspices of the Jose Rizal Centennial Commission in 1961. The publication of the Guerrero biography
was sponsored by the Philippine National Historical Commission.

The details of the awards of the 1938 contest were derived from the preliminary information (“Advertancia
Preliminar”) by the director of public libraries for the Palma book when it was published in 1949.

In the case of the 1961 contest, the Guerrero manuscript was chosen from among half a dozen entries,
which were not detailed. This information was conveyed from the introduction written by Carlos Quirino,
who at the time of the book’s publication, was the director of the Philippine National Library.

The biographies and their coverage. Although their works tell the story of one life, they differ in the
emphasis on details and on episodes of that life and, of course, in terms of style of presentation.

But they all reveal the essentials of the life of Rizal – his family, his early fascinating youth, his foreign
study and travels, his love-life, his interactions with compatriots in Europe and with other foreign scholars,
the circumstances surrounding the writing of the Noli and of El Fili, and his road to martyrdom, beginning
with exile in Dapitan, trial and execution.

The Palma biography, published originally in Spanish, reached later generations of Filipinos through the
English translation by Roman Ozaeta with the title, The Pride of the Malay Race. The Palma biography
was meticulous with documentation. However, Ozaeta’s translation spared some attention to this detail,
perhaps in the desire to reach a wider audience.

Carlos Quirino’s biography utilized a liberal approach of attempting to put the narrative in story-telling
mode, transforming some thoughts of Rizal or other involved persons, sometimes breaking into direct
conversation. At best, this was somewhat imagined journalistic. This approach could be criticized as
being too playful with his material.

Quoting Rizal directly whenever necessary is one advantage of having the primary material available in
his own writings. Sprinkling these documents into conversational narratives sometimes dramatized
effectively, but it could be overdone.
In contrast, Camilo Osias and Gregorio F. Zaide were more restrained and, therefore, were more
conventional in their approach to the Rizal narrative.

Zaide’s work was published immediately after the passage in 1956 of the Rizal Law, which required the
teaching of Rizal’s life and works as part of the public educational curriculum. Its didactic approach was
intended to follow this path of informing about the life of Rizal.

In fact, after the passage of this law, there was a rush to publish works about Rizal’s life and his works.
This activity included the preparation of many translations of the works of Rizal into English and Tagalog
and other dialects of the country. To this was added many versions (perhaps plagiarisms) of the
translations of the Noli and El Fili.

Guerrero’s The First Filipino. The outstanding biography of Jose Rizal is the one by Leon Ma. Guerrero. It
is not only the most comprehensive among the Filipino biographies. It is also the most well-documented,
even though the style of documentation is unconventional.

Many of the books on Rizal tend to draw out his achievements and contributions to nation building.

Thus, they are “hagiographic”, that is, they extoll his virtues mainly. Guerrero’s work tends to be an
exception in this regard. He gave Rizal a fuller treatment, giving him a more human cloth, also liable to
errors of judgment.

The other notable biographies. I must mention two outstanding biographies written by foreigners.

First mention must go to Austin Coates, an Englishman, who wrote Jose Rizal: Philippine Nationalist and
Martyr. Published by the Oxford Univerity Press in 1968, this book is a well-written biography of Rizal and
is most careful with its sources, which is well-documented. One virtue of the book was that it placed Rizal
in international context, within the sphere of Asian history during the 19th century.

In my Dec. 30 essay, I already noted the biography of Rizal by Jose Baron Fernandez, which is a well-
written work by a Spaniard.

Notable among these exclusions is the work of able historian Ambeth Ocampo. His Rizal Without the
Overcoat (Anvil, 1990) and his other works on Rizal are essentially anecdotes, snippets, and other side-
stories about Rizal. He has yet to write a biography of Rizal that is within the definition used in this article.

Nick Joaquin, the national artist, also has works that are on the boundary of biography. His Rizal in Saga
(1996) comes closest to a biography. Joaquin is essentially a fictionist, a very capable wordsmith. He did
not write a biography.