Combination Acts: The Devil of Affinities

I am convinced that the dissipation of a single «phantom» is capable ultimately of modifying the structure of the grand abominable Truth – postulated though nonexistent – that nevertheless does, in its constantly changing forms, govern the universe.

– Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do. 

– Gertrude Stein

The close reading which follows creates a theoretical layer that identifies some models for thinking through the mythologies of Manananggal and Geryon – which Lien & Camacho and Lu recreate in their works – from the perspective of these monsters. The poetic text arrives from an affective, embodied understanding of the space in which the monstrous perspective might exist. Following Lien & Camacho and Lu, the poems give voice to these voiceless monsters, and attempt to locate them where they might not be expected in our contemporary universe.

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, MANANANGGAL HANGRY (top half), 2016, modified mannequin and various materials, split into two halves, 96 x 70 x 40 cm. Courtesy the artists.

In a time of little faith, zero certainty and stultifying rage, my trust in poetic language is stronger than ever. Poetry can slide in-between, around and underneath the symbolic language of prose, into and out of a semiotic undercommons. In Julia Kristeva’s terms, the symbolic and the semiotic refer to two interdependent aspects of language. The semiotic is defined as the matriarchal aspect of language that shows the speaker’s innermost drives and impulses. These unconscious drives manifest themselves in tone, rhythm and image. [1] 

The semiotic aspect is suppressed not only by society, but also by the patriarchal aspect of language that Kristeva calls the symbolic. Symbolic language is always oppressive – it is the language into which oppression is written. Poetic language – that which can slip and flow and meander in-between the binary – has the capacity to rewrite, to reimagine. These twin aspects of language exist side by side, or perhaps layered one atop the other. In the work of Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho and Cole Lu, this layering comes into play to highlight, in each artwork, a queered, minoritarian perspective on a character from folklore – Manananggal and Geryon, respectively. In The Devil of Affinities, I draw on the capaciousness of poetic language, collaboratively, by responding to the artists’ work. The poems and the images are intertwined; they exist in collaboration with each other and together they form an imagined exhibition. 

The original touchstone for my project is the work Manananggal by Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho – an ongoing piece which uses the form of the titular demoness from Filipino folklore as a framing device. Herminia Meñez, a scholar and expert of Filipino folklore, provides a general definition of what Manananggal is, and a mapping of the mythological universe from which she originates:

By day, the viscera-sucker appears as an exceptionally attractive woman with long hair and a fair complexion. By night, she discards her lower torso, hiding it under the sheets, in a closet, or among a patch of banana trees. Having converted her arms into wings by anointing her armpits with a noxious oil and being propelled by her now stiffened hair, she takes into the air, alights on a roof, and thrusts her long tubular tongue through the palm shingles to extract the viscera of her sleeping victims through their mouth, nostrils, ears, anus, navel, or genitalia. She stalks tuberculars and pregnant women because she is addicted especially to phlegm and fetuses, as well as to human liver and blood. After feasting, she returns home to rejoin her lower trunk before daybreak. However, if someone, usually her new husband, rubs any or all of the following – ashes, salt, vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, pepper, and other spices – on her discarded part, reattachment is impossible, and the viscera-sucker dies fragmented. [2]

Crucially, Meñez makes the connection that the viscera-sucking creature is most popular and ubiquitous in «lowland Christian communities ... which were the first to be intensively missionized during the Spanish colonial regime from the early sixteenth to the late nineteenth century.» [3] Meñez goes on to observe that, for non-Hispanized animists living in the highlands, Manananggal is not gendered and is more often portrayed as a bird- or dog-like creature. This leads her to her argument that the feminization of Manananggal – the viscera-sucking, self-segmenting woman – is due to Spanish colonial influence. 

Meñez takes her interpretation one step further to argue that the symbol of the female viscera-sucker emerges from the historical context of the encounter between the most powerful women in indigenous Filipino society – female shamans called babaylanes – and Spanish priests. In indigenous society, women had a lot of power and were treated as not only equal members but the main pillars of the community. It was the mission of Spanish priests to eradicate indigenous religions and customs throughout the archipelago, an agenda that necessitated the dissolution of trust among community members – the classic method of «divide and conquer» utilized by the oppressor. 

Of course, the literal demonization of women based on their role in a community as the holders of medicinal / shamanistic knowledge and female sexual power is nothing new. We have seen it countless times as a tool for subjugating a community at large, notably in the Western world during the witch hunts in Europe and the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century. However, Manananggal retaliates against her oppression by literally cannibalizing the communities which refuse to accept her. Every day, following her night of bloody massacre, Manananggal returns to society as the «exceptionally attractive woman.» In this way, she survives by feeding off of her oppressors in secret. 

In an interview about their Manananggal project, Lien and Camacho cite art historian Patrick Flores, specifically his chapter on «Polytropic Philippine: Intimating the World in Pieces» in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making. In Camacho’s words, «A lot of the time in [Flores’] writing instead of saying the Philippines he’ll say the ‹Philippine,› minus the ‹s.› I think for him it’s a way to denote the idea of the Philippine as a theoretical model and not just a site where cultural production happens, not just a location.» [4] The theoretical model of the Philippine is exactly what Lien and Camacho engage in with their allegorical use of the Manananggal character. 

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, MANANANGGAL HANGRY (bottom half), 2016, modified mannequin and various materials, split into two halves, 114 x 36 x 30 cm, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists.

Though she is rooted in the time and space of the folkloric Philippines, she slips out of her historical context and into the present, resurrected. As if her contorting body froze in place during her time travel, she appears, in Lien and Camacho’s rendition, fragmented – and yet, strangely kawaii. Her legs twist in a girlish, coy manner, and she wears half of a pleated school-girl style miniskirt made of some sort of plastic polymer. Her left shin is emblazoned with what is immediately recognizable as the Yves Saint Laurent logo, but instead of YSL, the letters read ESL – the acronym for English as a Second Language. From the stub of her torso dangles a pink, fluffy rabbit keychain, commonly sold at stalls in Chinatown. Who is this Manananggal, where did she come from, and what is she doing in New York City? 

Aesthetically, this Manananggal has affinities with other art objects made by artists who run in similar social circles – like Stewart Uoo. Uoo’s gooey, dripping, discolored mannequins would, perhaps, be friends with Lien and Camacho’s Manananggal. 

Stewart Uoo, Don’t Touch Me (Bikram Yoga), 2012, polyurethane resin, ink, epoxy, wires, clothing, acrylic nails, accessories, ferrofluid, razor wire, hair, steel ball bearings, eyelashes, vinyl, 246.4 x 38.1 x 96.52 cm. Courtesy the artist.

This affinity is not accidental. For her survival, Manananggal must blend in with her surrounding society. In the daylight hours, she assumes an inconspicuous appearance, so that she can nocturnally prey on her victims. Her operation succeeds only when she is not suspected by her community. Lien and Camacho’s Manananggal «blends in» with contemporary art aesthetics.

In her Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, theorist Sara Ahmed writes about perception and orientation, and what the adoption of a queer orientation toward a subject might garner. Ahmed writes, «We are turned toward things. Such things make an impression on us. We perceive them as things insofar as they are near to us, insofar as we share a residence with them.» [5] When things are not near to us, when we do not share a residence with them, they become Others. Perhaps they become monsters. 

Throughout the book, Ahmed offers the possibility of adopting a queer orientation toward a subject or object – a perspective that is queer because it requires a rejection of the naturalized «effect of towardness» [6] of any given thing. Beginning with Ahmed’s logic that we only see what is in front of us, a queer perspective is one that opens up space for imagining the lives of things which are out of our sight. The monster, in other words, is deemed monstrous because it exists outside of our realm of experience, we do not «share a residence» with it. And thus, it must be vilified. A queer perspective might attempt to see through the eyes of the monster.

In the mythology in which she is anchored, Manananggal is less than human: a monstrous object. However, Lien and Camacho adopt a queer orientation to Manananggal by giving her a voice to speak to us, challenging the historical force which banishes her (and by extension, the populations she represents) to the realm of the monster. «Who you callin’ ugly?» they ask.

Cole Lu, In the last seconds, it is as if everyone leaped off the mount, hold hands. The end approaches like approaching ground. Like honey is the sleep of just. (Orthros), 2019, fiberglass, aqua resin, polyurethane, concrete, plaster, MDF, polycarbonate, 162.56 × 99.06 × 187.96 cm. Courtesy the artist.

In the historical and geographic landscape of Manananggal, social minorities such as women and colonized subjects become vilified as the monstrous social other. Cole Lu, in their recent body of work The Dust Enforcer (All These Darlings Said It’s the End and Now US), also explores a queer orientation toward a particular monster, this time from Greek mythology: Geryon, from the myth of Hercules’s Ten Labors. The theoretical crux of Lu’s The Dust Enforcer comes from the episode – as narrated in Geryoneis by the lyric poet Stesichorus in the sixth century BC – in which the hero slays Geryon, the three-headed monster, and steals his cattle as one of his ten Labors.

For Lu, it is important to ask questions about that which is generally taken for granted in this myth – namely, the monstrosity of Geryon, who is casually minding his own business until a bloodthirsty Hercules comes to slaughter his dog and only companion, Orthos, before doing away with him, stealing his cattle and then sailing away from the bloodied island toting the fruits of his conquest. Lu reads this event as a portrayal of age-old colonial power, in which mechanics of othering inscribe themselves as justification for the colonial act. Geryon, as the colonized body, is denied subjectivity and is portrayed only as a flaccid, dead character. For an interview with Living Content, Lu writes:

Often, in western mythology–Greek mythology in this case–the internal monstrosity is always aligned with external monstrosity. There is this collective portrait of the monster buried as the seed of a social construction model of ‹the other›. It is establishing a fundamental moral value that someone who appears different from the western standard of norms is evil, hence deserves punishment or misfortune. [7]

Lu creates a self-projective identification with the «monstrosity» of Geryon as a queer, POC, gender nonbinary first-generation immigrant. To quote again from the interview, Lu writes, «my intention of applying – or more precisely of rewriting myth – is to provide alternative perspectives through the lens of the other: the monster, the demon, the evil; an alternative perspective that is apart from the conventional viewpoint that vilifies.» [8] The monster signals a glitch in a worldbuilding narrative: an explanation for a disturbing incongruence, a marking of yet uncharted water. What happens when we zoom in on the glitch?

Cole Lu, Supposed old old age might show grow old to show what it meant the soul is made of wind instead of warm red liquid (Crossing River Styx), 2019, Cold cast bronze, 76.20 × 160.02 × 2.54 cm. Courtesy the artist.

I believe that, by zooming in on the monster, the mythological space that these artists hold in their work allows for a re-imagining of the myths they reference. To access this reparative rendering requires holding, in yourself, a both-at-once-ness. The queered perspective happens when the original object is held in mind simultaneously with its art-object double. Hopefully, this text assists in performing this action. I try to engage with this holding space in between the layers of the original myth and the art object, where reparative reading can happen, in my poems. Poetry is the ideal form for this type of radical imagining because, as Pasolini wrote, poetry is unconsumable. Poems reject assimilation into systems. 

We find ourselves now in the belly of the beast, so to speak. Various interlocking systems of oppression – depressingly familiar – scrape away at our tenuous cultural script: poverty, illness, deadly xenophobia and racism, economic collapse. The fear, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of our current slow burn into fascism, into reactionism. To empathize with the monster, as Lien & Camacho and Lu do, is to resist these systems, if only for a moment. It is to affirm the spaces, throughout history, wherein these systems have rendered their victims into monsters, and to reevaluate this rendering, to imagine a different one. Tackling the concepts I wish to explore in The Devil of Affinities requires a collective effort. I cannot do it on my own, I need help from my friends.

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