Glossary for an Aswang by Louie Leyson

Louie Leyson has won the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize for Glossary for an Aswang. 

They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point and their work has been published on CBC Books.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions.

• CBC Short Story Prize open for 2024 — submit your new fiction now!

Leyson is a University of British Columbia graduate and writer who lives on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and National Magazine Awards. You can find their works in Catapult, The Malahat Review, Palette Poetry, The Rupture, Nat. Brut and Plenitude. 

When CBC Books asked Leyson about the inspiration behind Glossary for an Aswang, they said: "I was inspired by research I conducted around Filipino overseas workers."

You can read Glossary for an Aswang below.

Glossary for an Aswang 
after Billy-Ray Belcourt

A

ASEMIC

Bhanu Kapil writes that a "scar is memory. Memory is wrong" (49). The scar archives the memory of violence done unto the body, conveyed in what Sarah Dowling names "asemic writing: wordless, without specific semantic content" (752). In a photograph, a scar on the brown leg of Kapil's father stands translucent behind a map of London, site of stubborn violence. Their wordless intersection: an asemic telling of history, one that prioritizes affect over legibility. 

Nothing in this wide country is legible. I look at a building and give it my histories. My skin and my hurts and the road of my spine. Nothing on my brown body is legible. I will not speak if you tell me not to. 

ASWANG

Bad girls become aswang. My mother told me so. Half-woman, half-animal creatures. As a girl I'd stay up and wait to shape-shift into one, crouching alone in the dark of my room. I would whisper prayers to God. I would beg him to pity the poor, defanged thing I'd become. Where are my wings, my scales, my long coiled tongue. I don't want to be soft anymore. 

B

BAGONG BAYANI

Bodies are the Philippines' most urgent export commodity. By 1999, half of the nation's population — around 22.5 to 35 million — had already been directly or indirectly dependent on remittances sent by Overseas Filipino Workers, or OFWs. By the fourth quarter of 2021, the percentage of dependent households had risen to 92.6 per cent. These numbers reflect the heavy dependence of the Philippines economy on remittance inflows by OFWs, whose collective status has been carved in the national Philippines imaginary as self-sacrificing bagong bayani, or modern-day heroes. 

I discovered only recently that the 1980s second wave of feminism in Canada, in liberating white women to join the work force, depended heavily on the importation of bagong bayani in the domestic sector. Therefore the Filipina cooks and cleans for the middle-class home so that the white woman no longer has to. I pored over interviews with OFWs who knew no one else in Canada, who themselves were not used to the cold, to the loneliness. Still, many stayed in light of the decreed promise that after at least 36 months spent caring for white households here, their own distant families might finally come and share this nation's dream with them.

BALIKBAYAN BOX

A crate of goods typically sent by Filipino migrant workers to loved ones in the Philippines. A material expression of longing and care. 

Expected contents: Non-perishable items. Canned goods, chocolates, toothpaste, bar soaps, bottles of lotion, clothes, purses, perfume, makeup, letters, towels, toys. 

E

EPIGENETICS

The spinal cord clings to a trillion pictures. Its grip is very light. None are protected from: light leaks, humidity, underexposure, overexposure, lens haze, shutter trailing. I am trying to remember. Baby blue Ford. Cracked leather seats. A rosary hanging from the rearview mirror. Wheel of Fortune on the television. My Lola pouring milk into a pot of champorado. Lola chasing Lolo around the kitchen with a knife, her scowling, crumpled face nearly childlike in its anger — as if 80 years meant nothing. As if she never aged at all. My laughter, and that of my brothers. My Tita's distress erupting in a panicked stream of Kapampangan. Sunlight glinting off the blade. Off Lola's blue-ringed, glassy eyes. I am trying to remember. My memory is wrong.

Prose: a nervous system, blocked by gravel. 

Prose works: a kind of sifting. 

EXCESS

The Philippines is a place in which everyone is born already wanting to leave, poisoned as it is by centuries of overlapping occupation. Spain, Japan, America. Nations are landscapes that capitalize on longing. Yet so many of these landscapes fail to permit permanent residency to OFWs at all, disqualified as they are in Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Israel — even as they continue to be amongst the most dependent in the world on Filipino migrant work. They are allowed to exist in these nations as labour doled over a handful of years, but not as people. Never as whole lives. Upon arrival, their bodies are already an excess.

L

LACUNA

It is a common notion that the Filipino migrant worker, dressed in the garbs of national but also global expectations of sacrifice, will risk everything for their family — even their life. But it is only recently that I've learned the term bayong bayani was first coined by the Aquino administration to mitigate growing national discontent over severe cases of migrant labour abuse and mortality. I found statistics from around Aquino's term that stated over 68 per cent of Filipina migrant workers had experienced some form of abuse or injustice from their overseas employees. 

Numbers so easily turn the Filipina material body into an abstraction. So even knowing this, I hadn't expected to find so many descriptions of: sexual violence, missing organs, mysterious disappearances, murder after murder, and no justice, no care for the body even when shored back riddled with evidence.

"This is not a project of merely telling history differently," writes Lisa Lowe in the prologue of Intimacies of Four Continents, "but one of returning to the past its gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions." Each unrecorded, absent body represents an absent history, an eclipse not yet inserted into historical time. Yet here I am, a fool of time, with arms that try to move the moon.

N

NARRATIVE

Katherine Hayles posits that narrative as a form of discourse resists disembodiment. She writes: "The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative […] With its chronological thrust, polymorphous digressions, located actions, and personified agents, narrative is [an] embodied form of discourse." 

The nervous system: form. The heart: narrative. 

A history without narrative is a history without bodies. Without heart, without nervous system. A dossier. A tracing. Watch, now, how they erase me. Watch as I narrate the body back into existence.

NON-PERISHABLE 

Overseas Filipino Workers sign themselves into proximity with death — a commendable sacrifice in the eyes of both the global economy and the nation state. But what must it mean, bound by this public proximity, to eat and to send that which is non-perishable, that which can never die? When migrant workers gift their loved ones canned foods across oceans — often food that is sneered at by a Western middle class, yet seen as cosmopolitan and vied for in the Philippines — do they send back a feeling that, too, can never die? How, then, might I learn this feeling's private language? In what secret hour of the night is it spoken?

P

PASALÚBONG 

As a child, I used to help my mother pack balikbayan boxes to send to her family in the Philippines. Irish Spring soap, Marlboro cigarettes, books in English, clothes from Value Village that my brothers and I had rapidly outgrown. But mostly she filled the boxes with non-perishable food items, purchased in bulk whenever on sale at the nearest grocery stores — dried pasta, condensed milk, canned fish, Canadian chocolate. Cans upon cans of Spam corned beef. As I tip-toed to peer over boxes past my height — at the time they loomed over my two little brothers — my mother had used to say something along the lines of, remember, anak, a single centavo here is worth a hundred pesos in the Philippines!

Then into whatever small gaps in the boxes these overlapping, undying items wouldn't fill, she had poured all of her care: a quiet water. A form of speaking. She told me to remember. I have not forgotten yet.

PAMPANGA, 1970 

Somewhere that exists in my mother's dreams.

S

SUSPENSION 

What does it mean to compose narrative, in the context of examining crimes that hinge upon the toppling of entire semantic worlds? I realize now how this toppling leads, always, to a material proximity to danger. There is peril in places that leave you without language. And so we build lists and glossaries, we scribble in margins, dissecting old stories to salvage for parts in the hopes of finding, long last, what might save us. Slowly, we return to history its gaps — but imperfectly, not wholly. A recollection starts to slant; slivers of mystery are kept. Could withholding function as language, too? I am trying to remember. My memory is wrong. 

V

VENGEANCE 

My Lola used to light candles for prayer every morning. The image of her altar in my mind was always elegant: elaborate lace like a layer of snow, round lily candles, a scarlet glass rosary. Mary weeps at the centre, fashioned in blue ceramic. Palms up to catch a forgotten rain. 

Jessica Hagedorn concludes Dogeaters with a prayer for Mary: Ave Maria, mother of revenge. The Lord was never with you. But she situates the prayer within Filipino histories, fragmented as they are, rendered scarlet by Spain, Japan, America. I would curse you in Waray, Ilocano, Tagalog, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Mandarin, Hagedorn writes, because even our belief has long signified our grief. I would curse you but I choose to love you instead. 

I must have been ten, eleven when I'd pricked my finger on Mary's halo, my first time trying to hide her away. A thin, brass thorn. A small, confused rose on the pad of my thumb. I want my writing to embody the peril of that moment, even if no other part of her—to be that sharp, that alarming, that vengeful. Yes, I would curse but choose to love her instead, Mary who has forsaken me. Mary whose ancient name has taught me that vengeance, too, is a form of desire. Mary in blue, her rain-wet hands. 

Bibliography

Dowling, Sarah. They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil's 'Humanimal. American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2013, pp. 735–755.

Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1991. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill, 1999. Print.

Kapil, Bhanu. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2009. Print.

Kapil, Bhanu. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2001. Print.

Lowe, Lisa. Autobiography out of Empire. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015. 43-72. 

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas. Servants of Globalization: Second Edition. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014. Print. 

Ruiz, Neil G. The Rise of the Philippine Emigration State: Protecting Migrant Workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries. Asianization of Migrant Workers in the Gulf Countries. Springer Singapore, Singapore, 2019.

Read the other finalists

• That Poor Girl by Finnian Burnett (Princeton, B.C.)
• Environmental Services by Christine Lowther (Tofino, B.C.)
• Black Diamond by Barbara Joan Scott (Calgary)
• The Edge of Change by Kelly S. Thompson (Colorado Springs, Colorado)

About the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize

The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2023 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2024 and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2024.