Through the generosity of Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Libraries have newly acquired books by the Filipino historian and journalist Ambeth R. Ocampo. Professor Ocampo is a well-known expert on José Rizal, the Philippines’ national hero. He also writes an editorial page column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Like Ajarn Charnvit, Professor Ocampo has been awarded the Fukuoka Academic Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies, such as social and human sciences, contributing to the world’s understanding of Asia. The Fukuoka Award Citation from 2016 states:

As an outstanding historian and intellectual, Dr. Ambeth R. Ocampo has made a great contribution to academic, cultural and social progress in the Philippines, through his university teaching, his writing for newspapers and magazines, and his service in historic and cultural administration. His clear and accessible explanations of the wider global context in which the country developed during the period of the Spanish and American colonial regimes have helped promote a more open sense of nationalism, and facilitated the advancement of international exchanges both with Asia and with the West.

Professor Ocampo earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Philippine Studies from De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines. He is currently Associate Professor of the Department of History, School of Social Sciences at the Ateneo de Manila University. As the faculty website explains:

History is the study of past human experiences grounded on the conviction that these share an essential continuity with our present and future. Through the careful reading of documents and historical interpretations, students are trained to see themselves and their world as entities proceeding in time and formed by what has gone before.

Among his experiences in Asia as a visiting professor or research fellow, Professor Ocampo has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Chulalongkorn University. TU students and ajarns who are interested in history should find his ideas useful for their own research. In his journalism he writes in an informal way that may be understood and appreciated even by readers who are not expert in history. In a column published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer last December, Professor Ocampo explains:

Curious people often ask how and when I first got interested in Philippine history, and my answers vary because there was no Big Bang but many initial steps that led to a career as an historian. For me, more than assigned readings and classroom lectures, artifacts played a significant part in bringing history to life.

The article refers to a trip made as a grade school student with his class to Fort Santiago, a fort in Manila which was built at the end of the 1500s and renovated in the 1700s. It was named after Saint James (Santiago in Spanish), the patron saint of Spain. The fort is an impressive historical site because of the way it was constructed, with walls that are 22 feet high and 8 feet thick. Even more important for Filipino people, José Rizal, the national hero, was imprisoned here before being executed in 1896. The Rizal Shrine museum contains displays about the life of Rizal. Part of the complex of buildings within the fort is the house where Rizal spent his last night. He wrote a poem, My Last Farewell, which he hid inside an oil lamp. There are also seashells he had collected during previous travels, books, manuscripts and artworks. These items were not what convinced Professor Ocampo to become a historian, but rather meeting there an old man who belonged to a religious sect known as the Rizalista religious movements. A form of Folk Catholicism, the Rizalista religious movement in the Philippines believes that José Rizal is not just a national hero but also a god. Different groups have different ideas about exactly what sort of god Rizal is, but he is considered holy by all of the them. Some think that Rizal is really still alive, and will rescue believers from poverty and other problems of life. During that class trip years ago, the old Rizalista told Professor Ocampo

that Rizal was alive and moved around the three mystical mountains: Arayat, Banahaw, and Makiling. He talked about the end of time, when seven suns the color of blood would rise and Rizal would return in glory to judge the living and the dead.

This experience with the mythical power of history that can cause people to believe unlikely things, clearly fascinated the young student. Only later did he learn facts about Rizal’s life that helped him to appreciate the items on display in the museum. Relics from the national hero’s life were put on display in high schools and other places, making him seem as much like a saint as a progressive activist. Professor Ocampo adds:

These artifacts reminded me that Rizal was more than a name on a textbook, or a person fossilized into a monument of bronze or marble.

In another newspaper column, also from last December, Professor Ocampo writes on the occasion of Rizal Day, a Philippine national holiday commemorating Rizal’s life and works. It is celebrated every December 30, the anniversary of Rizal’s execution in 1896. He notes:

José Rizal then and now should inspire, and there is no better way to know him than to read him. After all, he left us with 25 volumes of writing that are hardly read outside of what is required in school. His six-volume correspondence, for example, is not just an outline of a short but meaningful life; his letters to family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues in the Propaganda Movement remind those who have forgotten that he was made up of flesh and blood before he was petrified into monuments of marble and bronze.

TU students may experience some of the writings of Rizal, also donated to the TU Libraries by Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus. Among the books about Rizal include Professor Ocampo’s Rizal Without the Overcoat, newly donated by Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri. Rizal Without the Overcoat was adapted from informal newspaper columns written by Professor Ocampo in the 1980s. It is meant to make the national hero more accessible to current readers, who otherwise might be distracted by the considerable mythology that has grown up around him. Among Rizal’s own writings available at the TU Libraries are even some that may be found amusing. This may be unexpected from a national hero with a tragic fate. Yet as Professor Ocampo noted in his newspaper column,

Over the years of rereading Rizal to prepare for classroom lectures, I have been drawn to his sense of humor that remains relevant over a century since they were written.

He notes one passage written by Rizal as an example:

Generally speaking, we mortals are like tortoises; we are valued and classified according to our shells; for this and for other qualities as well, the mortals of the Philippines are the same as tortoises… and we can add, like tortoises some can be quite slow, in mind and movement.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)