Essay: The Canny in the Uncanny by Roy Tristan Agustin

This essay by Roy Tristan Agustin is a part of Kitaab Quarterly Vol 1.

The uncanny as canny.

In a 1973 interview with The Atlantic, author Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave what can be seen as his commentary on the style of writing that he used. The style, which would eventually be called “magic realism” was, at least in the interview, called “semi-surrealist” by interviewer William Kennedy. In the space of the conversation with Marquez, Kennedy would describe Marquez’s fiction as surreal, to which Marquez replied, “In Mexico surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.” I completely understand what he means. This is not egotistical flexing on my part, I am by no means anywhere near Señor Marquez in terms of stature as a writer, but, as a person who shares a similar history of colonization by, incidentally, the same colonizer, I see where he’s coming from. I can, for example, say the exact same thing: surrealism comes from the reality of Metro Manila and people who live in Metro Manila (or anywhere in the Philippines, for that matter) will nod their heads solemnly at the statement with no irony whatsoever. It’s probably why I don’t really see his work as a kind of “fantasy.” To me, it isn’t.

Let me give an example to help illustrate why this is so. Years ago, when I was working with my father’s small construction company, our account executive was an attractive young woman whose job was to secure projects for the company. One lunchtime, as she had lunch with some of our workers (it was comfortable having lunch in our worksites as they were often in the guest rooms of five-star hotels), she complained about not being able to sleep well lately, and that she kept getting ogled by an old man who would watch her walk home in the afternoons. This was enough to pique the interest of the workers, all hardened tough guys who came from the toughest part of Manila: Tondo. When they asked her to describe the old man, she noted that the man did not have a philtrum or that shallow groove that runs from the middle of one’s nose to one’s lip. This was enough to release a flurry of pronouncements and suggestions from the tough guys of the group:

“Ah, he’s an aswang.”

“Yeah. Make sure you have garlic and vinegar on your windowsill.”

“And run a circle of salt around your house or your room.”

There was no incredulity, no hesitation, nor even an acknowledgment of any other possible explanation as to why she was not sleeping well. The consensus, arrived at nearly instantly upon mention of the old man’s lack of a philtrum, was that he was an aswang and that he was watching her at night, which was why she was having problems sleeping. The response they gave was a set of prescriptions: methods and techniques on how she could ward the aswang off. There was no moment where they entertained the possibility of there being any other explanation. She nodded at the suggestions, took notes, and happily exclaimed a few days later that, after following those suggestions, she was now sleeping soundly once more, and the old man no longer sat outside watching her. The tough guys nodded and simply said, “see?”

This was not fiction, this happened. I was in the room when it did, as I was also in the room when she claimed that her problem was fixed. To everyone in that room, the aswang was not some fictional or mythical creature, it was real. It was real enough to warrant an immediate suggestion of remedies to prevent any possible harm from coming to her. The remedies sound silly, but, if we look at it in terms of how they may work as a magical remedy, then, it fits the thinking that this wasn’t a moment of fiction, this was a moment of truth. The truth, to those people, was that aswangs exist and that these remedies worked to ward them off.

The illustration I gave is not unique. I’ve run into many stories about ghosts and creatures from various people who all know that what they are saying is true. Magic is not a fictional thing in the Philippines; it is very real.

This is why I see where Marquez was coming from when he was insisting that his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a novel based on reality. Because, for the story to work, that’s exactly what it had to be. In an interview for the Paris Review, Marquez said that “there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” It is this wildness that I see in the Philippines. Magic, strangeness, the uncanny – these aren’t things that are merely dismissed as folklore and superstition, though they definitely are, they are also part of the fiber of daily life of many Filipinos, more so in areas where the city is a distant location.

Another story: I was in the mountains in Bacolod, where I was spending some time with some friends. Bacolod is a province near the central region of the Philippines, a place that is distinctly different from Metro Manila particularly because it was a sugar province. Sugar cane fields ran for miles, often being the only thing, one sees on the highway all the way to the horizon. That made the trip to the mountain a bit of a relief from the endless sugar fields that carpeted the island. We were looking down from a bridge at a small group of shanties on a riverbank. My friend, Lee, pointed at the shanties and said that there were aswangs there. I, being the incredulous urban Manileño, asked how he knew that. He replied with a story: one evening he and his friends were out drinking and were walking back to the house of their friend who lived near the bridge. They were drunk and were going to spend the night at his place. But, because they were drunk, one of them decided to scream at the small cluster of houses, “IF YOU’RE REALLY ASWANG, COME AND GET ME!!” They laughed and all staggered back to the house. Three hours later, they were awakened by ghastly screams from one of the rooms, followed by gunshots. When they rushed to the room, they found their friend, the one who had dared the aswangs, with a horrified look on his face, a gun out, and bloody scratches on his face, and the window to his room shattered. Finishing the story, he looked at me and said that’s how he knew.

Again, the story was told in utter confidence. The difference between this and other “urban legends” is that this did not happen to a “friend of a friend,” or the convenient layer of anonymity that allows these stories to dodge any attempts at verification. This one happened to him; it was a first-hand account.

Experiences of the supernatural thus tend to be seen as something common in this country. Ghost stories are not told to scare, instead, for a lot of people, the stories are informative. Another story: a colleague of mine sometimes would ride with me on her way home to save on transportation costs. She was a very pretty lady; she competed in beauty contests in her spare time. One evening, as we rode home, she told me, nonchalantly, about how there seemed to be something that stays with her at home, how sometimes her blanket would start to ride up when she was in bed and how she would feel hands, at times, on her even if she lived alone. Her partner was away, a soldier who was deployed to Mindanao, so she had their house to herself. I, mildly horrified, asked if maybe she dreamed of these encounters. She said no, and that she has already, rather crossly, told the transgressing party to stop doing those things which it did. There was no sense of fictionalizing from her; this was merely something she decided to talk about as we were slowly driving in traffic in the middle of rush hour. In my head, thoughts of conscientious (but also lecherous) ghosts floated as she then proceeded to ask me something about work, the value of her prior story taking a back seat to her now a more pressing question.

There are streets in Metro Manila that are known to be haunted, yet they’re also very busy streets. Are there stories of people sighting a “white lady” in the area? Yes. Does that prevent anyone from going there? No. It’s simply one of those things to look out for. If, late at night, there is a young lady in white trying to flag you down, do not stop. It’s practical advice and one that you would be given if you were driving in Manila. If, in Bacolod, you’re driving on the main highway and it suddenly forks into three branches (it doesn’t, or, more precisely, it shouldn’t; it’s a single, long, straight road), honk your horn or you will get lost. If hiking in the mountains and you start to go around in circles, turn your clothes inside out to confuse the Tikbalang (a creature with the head of a horse and the body of a man) playing pranks on you. Be wary of the sounds of crying children in abandoned locations; they may not be children at all.

These pieces of advice aren’t told to scare people, they’re simply the coping methods told to a typical Filipino trying to navigate an un-typical existence. The uncanny requires a kind of canny to deal with, the advice is to help with that. An uncanny life needs uncanny solutions.

The idea of the supernatural as common extends beyond the aswang and the ghouls. In Quiapo, one of the oldest districts of Manila is the Quiapo Church and, right next to it, Plaza Miranda, where many purveyors still sell items that could easily be found in fantasy stories. Love potions. Curses, counter-curses. Abortive concoctions. Talismans for protection. The word dasal, which means prayer, is also used for incantation or spell. The love potions sold in Plaza Miranda often have rituals and dasal included, which must be followed for the spells to work. The people selling these are very secretive about their wares, not allowing any photographs of these to be taken as, in their words, the spells will lose their efficacy.

We see in Plaza Miranda the wisdom found in the strange in practical, palpable, and purchasable, form. The most obvious, and perhaps the most controversial are the abortion concoctions. They are herbs in jars, often with instructions and disclaimers about the efficacy and waiting periods. While many of those selling their wares in the plaza aren’t the practitioners themselves, some are albularyo, medicine men, who will not just sell you potions and talismans, but actually, perform curses or counter-curses should you need them. The plaza is a place where people seek solutions in the unconventional, not revel in some occult celebration. While some go to enjoy and experience the occult strangeness of the market, many who go there go to address a genuine problem, be it romantic, financial, or something graver in nature. The great irony of Plaza Miranda is, of course, it’s right outside one of the most prominent Catholic churches in the country. But in a country where the supernatural and the religious often intersect, this proximity becomes less ironic and more logical. Where else would one go for solutions to problems that can seem insurmountable but to God and the supernatural?

But it isn’t just in Plaza Miranda that we find the supernatural. Often, if one asks around, there’s an albularyo or a mambabarang (witch doctor) somewhere nearby. A quick rule of thumb to check if one needs their services is to align the lines of one’s little fingers to see if the fingertips line up evenly. If they don’t, and they did before, then that signals the need to start looking for one of those people. The presence of the supernatural remains very clearly in the fabric of Philippine life. Besides the albularyo, who specializes in the herbs and potions that solve ailments, there is the manghihilot or the masseuse. Except that hilot is not just a massage, but a form of medicine that goes beyond unknotting tight muscles. Hilot has been applied to almost any ailment, from common aches and pains to more mystical causes of suffering. I, for example, was sent to a manghihilot for my asthma. The old man held the flesh between my thumb and index finger and declared that I had “lamig,” or cold spots, in my lungs which needed to be massaged out. He didn’t massage my chest, however, but rather my hands, perhaps, thinking back now, maybe this was a form of acupressure. Often, people look to hilot or an albularyo to cure ailments that would otherwise require a potentially pricey visit to the doctor, which may partially explain why it remains a popular alternative medicine.

The drive to find otherworldly solutions is not limited to backyards and medicine men. Uncanny wisdom crossed over to interact with modern media. In the 1980s, a Disk Jockey named Johnny Midnight would conduct “toning” sessions over the radio, at midnight, of course, where he claimed he could create water that had curative properties via chanting incantations over the radio. People tuned in, glasses of water near the speakers of their radios, to have them “toned” and then drink the water in the hopes of receiving some curative remedy. He also believed in the power of the pyramid, and recommended listeners place their glasses under these pyramids (which I suppose he sold) to “increase their power.” My grandmother listened to these faithfully and claimed to have some benefit from them. Midnight eventually lost his show, but he continued his healing sessions in his own “temple.” Ironically, before his passing in 2014, the last news item about him was a bribery scandal where he was accused of bribing drug officials because his son was involved in a drug case.

Similarly, TV weatherman Ernie Baron also was a proponent of “pyramid power.” He spoke at our high school, where he spent an hour and a half talking about the supposed ability of the pyramid to increase intelligence and improve school performance. I remember how there was an exact location in the pyramid where the “cosmic energies” around us can be focused and, thus, increase their effects on whatever was in that location. My honor-student classmates used a considerable part of their energies, and newfound geometry skills, to create aluminum foil pyramid hats to wear, with that location positioned precisely where their brains could reap the benefits of the “cosmic rays” their hats focused.

The uncanny spills out in many different directions all around the country. Construction projects in Metro Manila still commonly include a ritual where a chicken’s throat is slit open and its blood spilled on the new project, to ensure the safety of the project. Drinking sessions still have the customary pouring of the first shot, which is then thrown out. It is the shot “for the devil” so that the devil does not join the drinking session. Some families leave some food out for their departed relatives during gatherings and feasts; an offering for them to enjoy as the living celebrate. I personally know of psychics who work out of their condominiums in Makati, the central business district, helping people make sense of lives that seem hopelessly chaotic and giving them a different perspective on the circumstances they find themselves in.

If anything, the examples I shared above showed how the strange was not something that was limited to the folk beliefs of those who were not as well educated or not as wealthy. The school I went to enjoyed a mostly middle to upper-middle-class population, our parents were, invariably, college-educated. The ones who listened on Johnny Midnight’s show came from a wide swath of the population; I remember hearing my relatives talk about “toning” and the like as something they either avidly practiced or, at the very least, were curious about. Even in the circles of those who thought of themselves as “sophisticated” or “educated,” the uncanny as a form of wisdom creeps in.

Is the Philippines really such a strange place? Are we, as some mystics have told me, simply more sensitive to the strangeness that happens around us? Are we such a unique nexus for peculiarity?

I suspect that it isn’t so much that we are special in our weirdness, or that the weird is somehow stronger where we are but that we are still, as a people, uniquely open to the idea that human beings do not know everything there is to know about the world.

Partially, I suspect, this openness is because of poverty. Some cannot afford medicine or education and yet, their need to understand and find solutions remains. Where does one turn to if one cannot afford “modern” methods but to the ones used in older, stranger, times? The Manghihilot and Albularyo remain in neighborhoods because illness is still around us, and for those who simply cannot spare the resources for a doctor, these people can be a way to heal. For those who cannot afford another baby and cannot afford the expensive (and illegal) visit to a doctor who will perform an abortion, how else can one solve that problem? Those potions in Plaza Miranda become a godsend. For those who are desperate to make a little more money, or to have some good opportunities finally come their way, a charm, a little spell, or a small trinket doesn’t hurt. Regardless of whether or not it does any good.

Perhaps another reason for this openness to the strange is that the Philippines remains a slightly wild place. The country is never really settled and stable; it is visited by typhoons yearly. The landscape and climate shift rapidly and sometimes violently. Filipinos are accustomed to sudden changes in their surroundings. I remember, on my first trip to Singapore and it rained, my colleagues and I from the Philippines all donned jackets… to the curiosity of the Singaporeans. It was a humorous exchange:

Singaporean: “Why are you wearing a jacket?”

Us: “Because it’s raining.”

Singaporean: “Are you cold?”

Us: “No, it’s raining.”

Singaporean: “But are you cold?”

Us: “No. It’s. Raining.”

What we Filipinos realized, later on, was that rain in Singapore falls, mainly, vertically. Thus, an umbrella would suffice in a rain shower. In the Philippines, rain can come horizontally and, thus, the standard rain gear will include a jacket. What is typical for us is strange to another culture.

There are still places in the country that are unknown. There are parts of the country that remain undiscovered. As recently as 2013, scientists discovered a new species of beetle… right on the campus where I work. There remain places that tourists don’t visit, and the villagers are scant. While we bemoan the deforestation that has befallen much of the country, there are also still forests and islands that remain pristine, and, thus, hold secrets. There are places that one is told to avoid for many reasons. Filipinos understand that their country is not a fully discovered one; that it still carries secrets and surprises, and the best thing to be is open and ready to discover.

Probably this is why, to Filipinos, the uncanny is seen not as strange or alien, but as something that we simply accept. Acceptance breeds a kind of respect, one that leads us to see the uncanny not just as acceptable, but as a potential source for wisdom that would otherwise simply not be.

Author’s Bio

Roy was born in the Philippines, a place that has the problem of being perennially interesting. This has resulted in him being immersed in key moments in history, to which he responded by becoming an English Teacher at Ateneo de Manila University. He has also worked in shipping alongside tattooed thugs in Manila, worked in shipping in Singapore (no tattoos), and tried his hand as a small businessman. Aside from writing and teaching, he helps manage a consultancy firm that his wife uses for her practice. He is a father to a long-haired college student, is no longer able to grow his own hair, and has decided that middle age is a great age to be in. He practices Aikido and tries his best to live up to its principles.