Page 151 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

134 Jolyon Mitchell

as a predominantly Catholic country reflects on its own birth story and
passion narratives.
The story of Rizal’s execution reverberated particularly powerfully after
the assassination of Benigno Aquino on August 21, 1983 just a few minutes
after he had arrived at what was then known as Manila International
National. As with Rizal, public spaces were transformed or changed to mark
his death. The airport was later renamed as Ninony Aquino International
Airport in his honor. On the plane back from his three-year exile in the
United States, he admitted to the accompanying journalists that “My feeling
is we all have to die sometime and if it’s my fate to die by an assassin’s bullet,
so be it.” Aquino personally linked his own story with Rizal’s story, who
had likewise returned home from exile to face death. After his assassination,
many other commentators did the same. It was later pointed out that just as
Rizal’s death marked the beginning of the end for Spanish rule, so Aquino’s
death marked the beginning of the end of Ferdinand Marcos’ twenty-year
autocratic rule over his own people.
These parallel narratives are told and woven together in many places.
Increasingly, the Internet has become a site for Rizal’s story to reverberate
around the world. The official web site is maintained by the Jose Rizal
University and offers surfers extensive details about his life and death.
3
There are a few signs of the contested elements of Rizal’s narrative, though
the materials provided about his last hour “retraction” of some of his anti–
Catholic Church views are particularly useful, allowing the reader to engage
with different biographers who offer conflicting accounts of whether Rizal
ever made such a retraction. The fact that so much ink has been spilled over
this question illustrates the importance attached to preserving, correcting, and
owning his narrative. The web allows for the diversity of views to be easily
available in the public domain and provides a setting for the reverberations
of the debate to be considered and then added to by participants.

Conclusion

In the previous sections, I have analyzed four related processes in the
formation, circulation, and reception of one set of narratives related to
the life and death of Jose Rizal. Canadian composer John Cage was well
known for developing the “prepared piano,” which involved elaborating
on the design of the original instrument by adding rubber, stone, screws,
and wood between the strings of the piano. The result was to transform
the way the amplified piano sounded, changing the musical repetitions and
reverberations that emanated from its body. This was used to memorable
effect with his music designed to evoke the sounds of Asia, in particular
Bali. My argument is that audiences and media producers have done and are