"Death is a Night Wind"

IN THE DAYS BEFORE HIS EXECUTION, a 35-year-old Filipino named José Rizal leaned over a wooden desk and wrote 14 stanzas in neat Castilian handwriting on a paper about the size of his palm. He folded the paper twice and tucked it inside a gas lamp. On his sister Trinidad’s final visit, he whispered to her, using English so that the Spanish guards would not understand, that she should look for something in the lamp after his death. Just a few miles from his prison cell, in the hills by Manila, a revolution was stirring: a movement that he had inspired and then condemned, one that would bring freedom to his country and then tear it apart. Early in the morning on 30 December 1896, Rizal dressed in a fine, black suit and a white shirt, and turned his back on the near-empty cell. Just after dawn, he stepped out into the city.

His death sentence had been read to him the morning before, concluding a hasty trial within the walls of Manila’s Fort Santiago. He had spent the rest of the day receiving guests, composing letters, conducting interviews for the press in Madrid, and enduring the repeated visits of a group of Jesuits, who had orders to secure a retraction from the prisoner for his strident criticisms of church corruption.

When Rizal came to the third stanza in his poem, he wrote: “I die when I see the colour in the sky begin to turn/ And, at last, announce the day after a night of gloom.” His poem, filled with passionate love for his country and condemnation of colonial rule, went on to be translated into dozens of languages. A printer in Hong Kong gave the verses their first title, “Mi último pensamiento,” or “My Last Thoughts,” before another version settled on the poem’s most recognised title, “Mi último adiós,” or “My Last Farewell.” Within a few years, it was printed in major newspapers in New York, Boston and Washington, DC. It was read on the floor of the US Congress by liberals arguing for a bill that would create the first Philippine assembly of locally elected representatives. Miguel Unamuno, the Spanish poet, called Rizal the “Tagalog Christ” and explored the poet’s ambivalence towards the Philippine Revolution in an essay comparing him to Hamlet. Rudolf Virchow, the legendary German physician and anthropologist, recited a eulogy for Rizal to the anthropological society of Berlin the year after his death. The poem helped to spark a revolution that eventually ended more than three hundred years of Spanish rule, making the Philippines the first Asian colony to rise up for independence.

Schoolchildren in the Philippines have recited the verses for years, first in Spanish, then in English and now in Tagalog, the language spoken by most of the country’s 105 million inhabitants. The poem is memorised, translated and debated. Its instruction is legislated into the country’s constitution by a 1956 law mandating that all students study the stanzas and the life of the poet behind them. And over a century after it was written, many of the issues that Rizal struggled with are as vital and as unsettled in contemporary Filipino society as ever before.