Framing Folklore: The Politics of Storytelling in Philippine Media
On "Trese," "Aswang," and the future of the Philippine nation
Greetings from my very pink, very cluttered childhood bedroom! Proceeding with my adult life (taking meetings, answering emails, conducting interviews, teaching class) in the time capsule that is my childhood bedroom always feels weird, but I’m super grateful to be able to spend a week at home with friends and family before launching into The Next Chapter™, which includes a 9-5 job and a lot of business casual. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind, not just for me personally but for the world at large.
On a personal note, the pace at which things are changing (friends moving out of Madison, career shifts, and even the weather changing at speeds faster than our ACs can handle) feels incredibly overwhelming right now, and it’s hard to figure out where to put my energy at any given moment. I’ve found that over the past year or so, I’ve grown incredibly averse to “checking in with myself” on a regular basis, and populate my day with meet-ups with friends and other social activities to avoid it. I used to love sitting with myself and journaling about how I’ve been feeling and doing, but I’m definitely out of practice right now. I’m grateful for the ways in which this newsletter offers me the space to reflect, even if it’s only bi-weekly, and for all of you for allowing me to keep doing so :)
Ok, mush time over. To the goods!
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
Graduation was a whirlwind that I don’t quite remember, thanks to the first sunburn of the season and a near heat-stroke. The 90-minute ceremony did, however, finally bring my beloved mother out to Wisconsin, which she enjoyed thoroughly! It was fun to show her around all of my usual stomping grounds and have her meet all my friends who, up until now, have only been mythic creatures that I’ve obsessively talked about. The lakes undoubtedly won her over and she’s sad to be away from “rural life.”
One of my biggest goals for my shift into post-grad life is to make more time for exercise, which I’m making strides towards with regular yoga and cardio. Thanks to the app Down Dog (which gives you one month of free unlimited classes!!), I’m right on track for getting my Thighs of Steel back from when I was biking everywhere to get around in Copenhagen. Will I take up climbing next so that my arms can catch up? Maybe.
The great thing about not writing a thesis or being in grad school is that reading is fun again! This week, I’ve been making my way through Leni Dumas’ dystopian novel Red Clocks and Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut Disorientation. While neither of the books exactly serve the function of “escapism” for me (one is about a world in which abortion is illegal and the other is about a literary PhD student who is basically losing her mind because of her dissertation), both are beautifully written and engaging and help me to think about these same issues and worlds in different ways. I’d recommend both!
NEW WRITING
As if passing my thesis defense wasn’t enough to kick off Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM), I also had some exciting pieces come out earlier this month that continue to celebrate Asian and Asian American creatives.
Click here to check out my first piece with Electric Literature, where I tell you all about the 11 Filipino-American authors who should be on your radar.
I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Burmese wonder and poet Mandy Tu about her debut chapbook, Monsoon Daughter, which came out this month with Thirty West Publishing. You can read our conversation over at Tone Madison.
POEM OF THE WEEK
I tweeted recently that I just wanted to be at a party where endless shoes were piled outside the doorway of an apartment and everyone was outside smoking. Maybe it’s a yearning for my pre-pandemic European life, or the ephemerality of youth that feels lost on me these days, but I’ve been increasingly nostalgic for this very specific human interaction that I’ve definitely dreaded in lives past.“The Years” by Alexander Dimitrov captures the quiet loneliness of house parties perfectly, a kind of sadness that I’m maybe missing in my sunny, always loud, always boisterous Madison life.
On May 9th, the whole world watched in horror as Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was consistently projected to win the 2022 Philippine election. With reports of ballot buying, claims of broken machines, pre-shaded ballots, and other bureaucratic injustices flooding national and international news outlets alike, it became clear that this “landslide victory” was a mere product of strategic, gross corruption. Many like me held out hope that the now-Vice President Leni Robredo would pull ahead in the polls, but the iron-grip of the Marcos-Duterte campaign was immovable.
Many Filipinos, myself included, have been moving through the world in a cloud of horror and despair as we brace for what’s to come in this new presidency. The nightmarish injustices under the Duterte administration will not cease—instead, they will simply wear a new but familiar face. While there are many feelings of hurt and betrayal stewing in our hearts, I know many of us are even more galvanized to continue to fight for justice and to seek out unadulterated truth. On the evening of the election, I drove down to Chicago to participate in a rally hosted by the Chicago chapters of Malaya Movement, Anakbayan, International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP), and other organizations. While I wasn’t able to be with my New York Malaya kasamas, the determination and strength amongst the Chicago crowd was palpable, as was our grief and rage.
I wrote the essay below maybe half a year ago during a graduate communications seminar, still in the midst of the Duterte administration, where extrajudicial killings and other horrors remained steady in my home country. With the turn of the election, my thoughts not only remain the same, but has been granted a new urgency.
Framing Folklore: The Politics of Storytelling in Philippine Media
Folklore has always played a significant part in molding a society’s culture. By mapping a community’s morals, shared knowledge, and important lessons, the stories we tell play a crucial role in how we define ourselves to others. To be acquainted with the lore of one’s culture is to know its values, and potentially, even its hopes for the future. Beyond original tales, the ways in which we retell folklore also points us to potential shifts in our cultural ideologies. Madeline Meyer’s 2018 bestselling novel Circe, for example, reclaims the damaged figure of the goddess by the same name and grants her an interiority she has been previously denied. And while some mythologies have broken into mainstream popular culture more successfully than others—with Greek gods dominating everything from Marvel, to the Percy Jackson series, to even Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—Philippine mythology has only recently gotten its footing on the global cinematic stage.
Lauded for bringing Southeast Asian mythology into the global mainstream, the Filipino komik Trese received much acclaim upon its release on Netflix. For those hungry for representation and a refreshing feminist lead, Trese not only delivered, but even introduced its international viewers to a whole universe of unfamiliar folklore figures. Similarly, the 2020 documentary Aswang was praised for its indicting and sobering depiction of the Philippines’ dystopian present under Rodrigo Duterte, told through the extended metaphor of the aswang. Both works’ focus on the everyday plight of Filipinos reveal the revolutionary possibility that folktales into can have.
As folklore scholar Margaret A. Mills says in her article “Defining and Creating (A) New Critical Folklore,” folklore has the potential to “achieve more effective access to channels of communication by which representation (of selves or others) can reach new publics and persuade them of the need for greater social justice.” In using storylines that are familiar and accessible to their viewers, popular media is able to turn much-needed attention to issues of concern that might otherwise be too complex, convoluted, or painful to talk about.
And yet, while folktales are often used as a rhetorical tool to invite conversation around social ills that are easily understood through fables, the use of folklore in these two recent works of Philippine media has demonstrated a different—and almost opposite—effect. The characterization of folklore figures in both the Netflix series Trese and the 2020 documentary Aswang as perpetrators of crime and violence in the Philippines displaces the blame from those actually responsible for the country’s suffering and reinforces scare tactics used to control local populations that date back to colonial times.
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Adapted from Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo’s comic series by the same name, Trese tells the story of a Philippine babaylan named Alexandra who fights crime involving supernatural beasts. Straddling the world of humans and that of mythical beasts, Trese explores timeless questions of good and evil, duty and allegiance, and destiny and choice. Released during the tail end of the Duterte administration (which began in 2016) and the punitive president’s bloody War on Drugs, Trese additionally offers viewers the space to interrogate the fate of the Philippine nation amidst its fraught political landscape.
Trouble descends upon the capital city of Manila when the pact between various mythical tribes and Alexandra’s family is broken and these creatures begin to wreak havoc on human society. Alexandra is pulled into a series of cases by the trusted police chief Captain Guerrero in the hopes that she can use her powers to communicate with the otherworldly in order to solve cases. With the help of her indigenous powers and sorcery, Alex combats figures such as the tikbalang and wind women to save those who have mysteriously disappeared.
Further conflict arises when Alexandra and Captain Guerrero discover that the corrupt Mayor Santamaria has been colluding with aswangs—viscera suckers who prey on human flesh and organs—to further disenfranchise local communities. His promise to relocate families whose homes were destroyed by natural disasters takes a dark turn when he begins to sacrifice these people to feed the aswangs. Once in jail for his wrongdoings, he uses black magic to convert prisoners into his own oppositional army. As the human accomplice of Datu Talagbusao—the war god and mortal enemy of Alexandra and her family’s kind—Mayor Santamaria played a key part in Talagbusao’s plan of breaking down human society and building it anew under his evil rule.
While all of these events prove horrific in the context of Trese’s universe and viewers are grateful for Alexandra’s heroism, contextualizing crime through the lens of folklore presents an interesting absolution of the politicians guilty of the Philippines’ adversity. By addressing issues like houselessness and displacement within this web of mythical collusion, it becomes easier for us to imagine sacrificial feedings to hungry monsters than to admit the biopower that politicians hold and enact through actual laws and prioritization. Decisions around who lives and who dies has always been a question of money in the Philippines, and the poor are often left behind, or worse, for dead. What more, by shifting the blame onto the aswang and other creatures, the police is given an opportunity to step in as the good guys—a move that works to reinstate the public’s trust in law enforcement, even in the fictive Manila that the series has to offer.
Trese’s central notion of a broken social treaty between various folklore tribes and humanity also redraws the lines of allegiance for the haves and have-nots in Philippines society. By presenting this alternative crisis of mythic betrayal, the real unkept social contract—that between the Filipino people and the government tasked with caring and advocating for their needs—is pushed aside and the focus is redirected onto defeating a common external enemy that is far from the actual source of strife. The dynamic is switched for the masses to believe that the government is on their side, when really, they are the active perpetrators of their struggle.
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While the use of folklore in the documentary Aswang (2020) is arguably more intentional and imbedded in reality, its extended metaphor of the aswang-as-killer does similar work in obscuring the everyday circumstances of living in Duterte’s Philippines. Told primarily through the perspective of a little boy named Jomari, whose parents have been incarcerated because of allegations of drug use and dealing, the documentary explores the rampant violence and grief that have defined urban centers like Quezon City and Manila as law enforcement continues to terrorize poor communities in search of “guilty” criminals.
Most striking in Aswang is the lack of agency that characterizes both the narration of the documentary itself. Periodically throughout the film, the narrator interjects, “Whenever they say that an aswang is around, what they really mean is, ‘be afraid.’” Fear has always played a central role in mass control. In the Philippines specifically, the weaponization of fear harkens back to the use of the folktales during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines to ensure that community members would not “wreak havoc” during the night. By introducing the figures of the tikbalang (a half man half horse) and the kapre, colonial forces successfully kept locals afraid of leaving their homes after dark. As seen in Aswang, what happens at night thus remains unwitnessed, and thus, unprotestable. What is left then are the face-down corpses of community members found in the morning by their loved ones, with no one knowing who—or what—is to blame.
Early on in the documentary, the narrator says, “[the aswang] kills anyone that dares to look back and one must never look.” This additional emphasis on an inability of people to look back implies a humans’ powerlessness to control or otherwise stop the actions of the aswang. As explained in the scholarship of bell hooks and Nicholas Mirzoeff, the “oppositional gaze” and the “right to look” are crucial to marginalized populations’ ability to resist oppression and defy the ways in which they are being mistreated, misrepresented, and exploited. By defining the aswang as something to avert one’s gaze from and impossible to confront, the possibility of defiance is once again quelled.
In a way, using the metaphor of the aswang to explore depict the overwhelming amount of extrajudicial killings in the country points to a succumbing to the notion that justice will never be achieved for these cold-blooded murders. To imagine the monstrosity of the Duterte regime as one that is otherworldly and beyond our control is to understand that it will never be defeated. The documentary ends on a bleak note: though Jomari is reunited with his parents after they are freed from jail, he continues his childhood in the world of Duterte’s extrajudicial killings, always a possible target by the police.
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In both Trese and Aswang, the use of folklore to interrogate societal struggle raises important questions of digestibility and even palatability when it comes to bringing political conversations into the public sphere. By using these extended metaphors of monstrosity as stand-ins for corrupt government and neglect for humanity, the communicative goals of this media become unclear: are we using a common knowledge—that Filipinos grew up and are familiar with—to make harsh realities more legible? Or more sinisterly, are we diverting the much needed attention that should be on calling out these injustices in blatant and literal ways by shrouding them in analogies or lore?
To call political issues into question with the use of literary and colloquial devices also calls into question the effect this kind of storytelling has on audiences—presumably, the Philippine masses and beyond. As Gideon Lasco writes about in his essay “Politics as Teleserye,” the Filipino tendency to cast politicians in the light of celebrity makes it so the people’s relationship with their leaders is a parasocial one: one that is marked by entertainment and passivity, and thus incapable of meaningful intervention. By similarly casting politicians as folklore figures who lack consciences and mercy, does this exacerbate viewers’ feelings of helplessness and inability to fight back, while also exonerating their very oppressors?
With the return of the Marcoses in power, the nation is bracing itself for a more deliberate and violent wave of historical revisionism to take over the country, while the masses watch in horror. With Vice President elect Sara Duterte, who is no other than the daughter of ruthless Rodrigo Duterte, stepping into her new role as education secretary of the Department of Education, there is no telling to what extent the atrocities of her father and the Marcoses will be retold to the point of extreme manipulation or erasure—in other words, there’s not telling what kind of false storytelling we as a people will be subjected to. Not only will the many documented extrajudicial killings under the Duterte regime be swept under the rug, but the Marcos dictatorship will continue to be falsely peddled as a “golden age” of the Philippines in which the nation enjoyed limitless prosperity.
It is no doubt that the much-feared Marcos-Duterte tandem will continue the practice of what feminist Filipina scholar Neferti X. Tadiar has coined as “fantasy-production,” or the shaping of a people’s imagination to yield the ruling power’s desired political and economic results. In her book by the same name, fully entitled, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order, Tadiar explains that “Fantasy-production practices create a common imaginary geography and history—that of the Free World—as the grounds of their operation.” Tadiar argues that during the Marcos regime, fantasy-production was used to deliberately curate Filipinos’ dreams to mirror and mimic those of Americans, imposing not only American culture, but their aspirations, onto the Filipino masses, so that they might live and act in ways that benefit the ruling class.
The idea then of The Good Life, which is often achieved through work overseas, is not a simple osmosis of ideologies from the “First World” to the “Third World,” but a deliberate shaping by the Philippines’ capitalist elite in order to get their desired economic outcomes and collusion with “First World” countries. It is important to note that the term “Overseas Filipino Workers,” or OFWs, was coined during the Marcos dictatorship, and OFWs continue to make huge sacrifices in their personal lives to contribute almost 10% of the nation’s annual GDP. By injecting these western, “First World codes of fantasy” into Philippine ideology, powerful forces like the Marcoses will continue to feed the Filipino people to global capitalist machines that have made forces like the global care economy and the Philippine sex industry into the empires that they are today.
The ways in which fantasy-production thus becomes a weapon of imagination control poses a grave threat to the agency of the Filipino people, especially as the nation enters a presidency of truth bending, historical revisionism, and various violences, both physical and epistemic. How do we begin to imagine an alternate future when the very dreams that we are made to aspire to are not our own, but the product of cultural, economic, and political manipulation? How do we begin to seek justice when we lose agency in shaping the world we want to live in? According to Tadiar, it is only once we understand the inner-workings of fantasy-production and its manipulation by the elite class that we can take the first liberatory step in allowing Filipinos to enact “wayward dream-acts of living social movements,” which would make way for “[Filipinos] dreaming new tastes, trying out new lives.”
Folklore, and the burgeoning media that draws inspiration from it, shows great potential in being a crucial site of intervention for the damaging effects of fantasy-production. When used as a way to try and right the wrongs of the past—to present alternative narratives, to arrive at simpler truths, to utilize the otherworldly to imagine what else is possible in the world that we do inhabit—these retellings and reimaginings become a vital avenue for Filipino futurity, for creating versions of our world in which the people are in power.
Trese and Aswang may bring Philippine folklore into a larger arena of knowing, but they both play dangerous games with what should and should not be believed in, what can and cannot be fought, challenged, and resisted. As we forge ahead into the threatening and uncertain Marcos-Duterte presidency, we must remain staunchly critical of what the media is presenting to us and to what ends. As Tadiar has said, it is exactly because “imagination has become a central force in the creation of new social projects” that we must not take lightly that which we are made to imagine, or dream towards, for they have real and lasting material effects that threaten to hurt us as much as they hold the power to liberate us.