Invictus misused as excuse
I first studied William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” in high school, at a time when it was easy to confuse growing pains and social pressures with a perceived unfairness of the world at large. Invictus was easy to idealize because of its imagery: that we could be slapped by trials and stalled by obstacles, but we would remain proud, unfazed, masters of our fates, and captains of our souls.
Henley wrote Invictus while going through painful treatments for complications of childhood tuberculosis. Invictus, therefore, is about how one is not defined by their health, the color of their skin, or the social class into which they were born, but how one lives with the cards they’ve been dealt.
For trials caused by one’s wrongdoing? Invictus might not be the poem of choice.
Invictus has been criticized for focusing on individual strength instead of the bonds forged by a community united in solving a problem. The poem has also been criticized for romanticizing resilience, instead of calling attention to a deeply flawed system that needs to be fixed. That is: in simply taking the blows year after year, are we not normalizing poverty, suffering, and violence?
I had once taken pride in being able to take on multiple tasks, smile through challenges, and persevere even when things didn’t go my way—something I ascribed to some personal Invictus. In the years that followed, I constantly received reminders on how the critiques of the poem made sense, and how limited the poem was in appraising the human condition.
The first came during my master’s thesis, when I kept at my experiments but got no results. My thesis adviser told me to drop all my work and start from the beginning.
“Our best efforts are not always enough,” she told me, “You are not defeated. You’re just being realistic.”
Much later, I had to revise our graduate program at Ateneo, while juggling research and teaching. I was bracing for the scenario of every meal and commute turning into a war room of a thousand tasks.
“You’re supposed to ask for help,” my chair reminded me, “You’re not supposed to do everything alone. You have experts here for a reason.”
Every semester, I have to deal with a brand of student who waits until the last minute to complete their requirements, blames circumstances for their poor output, and then whines that they are under stress.
“Take responsibility for what you did and then learn from the process,” I always tell them.
Changing my thesis topic allowed me to graduate with good research under my belt. Our department finished the work quickly, with all hands joyfully on deck. My students are getting better at managing their workload.
So when Vice President Sara Duterte spent her airtime saying, “In this bloodbath and bludgeoning, I will be bloodied but unbowed,” I wondered: why do the Dutertes love Invictus so much? Kitty Duterte once recited the entire poem in response to questions about her father’s imprisonment. Sebastian Duterte also read it at a rally in The Hague.
Invictus, however, speaks more appropriately to the experience of unjustified suffering. It is not meant to absolve wrongdoing, substitute for accountability, or silence the call for justice.
Like the Oklahoma City bomber and the Christchurch shooter, the Dutertes misused the poem to paint themselves as innocent, well-intentioned victims driven back by the hostility of the heartless and blind.
This is not leadership: it defines leaders as mere recipients of accidental challenges rather than designers of a country’s future. It completely ignores the Dutertes’ many calls to murder and violence, the corruption cases to which they are linked, and the poorly managed systems that they were in charge of.
The overuse of Invictus is an attempt to make the Dutertes look helpless and defenseless, an effort to excuse them from their responsibility to respond to the evidence and participate in due process.
It’s easy to fall in love with Invictus when you’re young. It takes maturity to realize that not all your troubles are coincidental, that you are not merely a victim of circumstance, that not everything is under your control, and that not everything is about you.
The Duterte brand might be that of bluster, brawn, and bombastic speech, only to end in butchering a poem to play the victim. The Dutertes do not represent the best of us. They are part of our country’s deplorable past, not our models for a blessed future. Perhaps a new poem is in order.
In this land that seems to be
Dark in words and deed and thought
We pray that every soul will see
Not what it wants, but what it ought
For not all trial is circumstance
Not every leader is crude and loud
Not every bludgeoning is of chance
When the country is bloodied, but the guilty unbowed
They may weep with poems and tears
Yet let not our good sense fear or fade
We might have lived in injustice for years
But must allow that damage to be unmade
By the evidence that now storms our gate
So: let us not with thieves condole
Let us change our blackened fate
Let us redeem our loving soul
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
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