FILIPINA AMERICAN WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD THROUGH THE EYES OF THE ASWANG

March 2022

An honors thesis submitted to the Emory University Department of English

My mother flies, back in the land of salt.
Above the Spanish roofs is the red morning.

— “Aswang Duplex I”

My wings always reach back to my mother.
The ocean beneath us is an endless body.

— “Aswang Duplex II”

ABSTRACT

The transformations of the Philippine aswang are manifold. In her traditional mythology, the aswang lives as a beautiful woman by day and morphs into a malicious monster by night. Her most famous monstrous form discards her lower body, sprouts batlike wings, and targets expectant mothers and young children. In the context of colonial Philippines, Spanish friars deemed powerful Filipina shamans as aswang to destabilize the pre-existing social order, displacing the aswang’s true identity through this false conflation. Now, as we look to the work of contemporary Filipina American poets, writers, and artists, we witness the aswang in her newest, most transformed iteration. Building on scholars’ previous reflections on the aswang, this thesis engages with Filipina American writers such as Barbara Jane Reyes, Lynda Barry, Melissa R. Sipin, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil and examines the ways in which they invoke, reclaim, and reinvent this important mythological creature through the medium of literature. I examine these writers’ work to explore how they utilize the figure of the aswang to portray Filipina American womanhood and the Filipina American mother, and I argue that the reclamation of the aswang as an empowering figure mirrors these writers’ reclamation of womanhood and their complex relationships with their mothers.

EXCERPTS

My mother tells me that there was magic to her youth in the Philippine province of Pangasinan. More often than not, she doesn’t speak of a nostalgic, Studio Ghibli-esque magic that casts childhood in warm light — although I’m sure there’s much of that as well. Instead, my mother tells me about magic that would strike a mischievous child with a sudden wave of sickness after climbing a tree they shouldn’t have, only curable by an older woman’s practiced spell. The magic of pins in little dolls, or little dolls alight over flame, and soon enough, someone, somewhere meets an unforeseen, inexplicable end. The magic of salt hastily tossed over a dismembered body in the street to prevent its spirit from returning and reclaiming it for harm and haunting. “But that’s only in the Philippines,” my mother says, as if we’re safe here, in our suburban Georgia home. When I ask her, however, if she thinks the aswang can cross oceans, I note that she isn’t sure of her response.

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She spun the small lazy susan that sits atop our table — one of her most exciting TJ Maxx finds, one that I think reminds her of her family’s dinner table back home — so I could reach what remained of last night’s lechon paksiw. Lechon paksiw is a sour pork dish that, like most Filipino cuisine, magically tastes better the next day. I served myself first, the vinegary stew seeping into my rice. 

My mother watched. “Well,” she said finally, “do you believe in it?”

I swiveled the lazy susan back toward her and began to mix my rice, pushing the eye of a peppercorn to the edge of my plate. “I don’t know,” I said, choosing to give the easy, expected answer. “Maybe back then. Maybe in the rural areas of the provinces.”

I would like to think that the combination of this project and the literature that I examine throughout it are more than enough evidence for one to know where I really stand. After all, it is simple: I am the aswang in the way I continually detach and reassemble the disparate elements of myself in search of something more resilient. My mother is the aswang in the way that she is unconquerable while in pursuit of something she wants, in the way that she always persists. I admit that I know little about the women in my family, but I do know that both my maternal and paternal grandmothers are also strong in a way that exceeds words and that they have survived more than they should have needed to. They are the aswang, too. 

For me, it truly is simple. I imagine the aswang persisting inside all the women in my family. I see her lurking in the most rural provinces, taking flight at midnight and promising to herself that she will no longer scare the children. I see her parading through Manila, pondering whether to buy banana cue from the street vendors. I see her in the aisles of Seafood Cities across the United States and Atlanta’s own Manila Mart, still hungry after all this time. In my mind, she has learned to fit in, meet people’s eyes, and smile from the heart regardless of the direction in which her irises reflect the world. Let me answer my own question: the oceans, however many of them there are, would never have posed a problem.