Tárrida’s writings brought into the European metropole details of the atrocities
that followed in the wake of José Marti’s uprising, and the torture to which
anticolonial nationalists were subject in all of the colonies. These gestures of
knowing comparison were also the mark of a temporal crisis, for what could be
spoken in Europe appeared, in the Philippines or elsewhere, to be unmoored
from reality; it did not (yet) have a referent. Hence the accusations against
Rizal upon his return were not merely of sedition but the fomenting of a revolution
still to come. When he returned to the Philippines, he created La Liga Filipina,
and thus entered into the Realpolitik of imagining how to build a nation, but
that would soon be riven by rivalries and Rizal himself removed from action by a
paranoid elite still clinging to colonialism