Abhijan Toto and Isola Tong for the Forest Curriculum
in Against the Dragon Light, ed. Moonseok Yi and Eugene Hannah Park (2021)
Introduction: The following texts are entries into a glossary on non-human agency and dwell upon two figures - the weretiger and the babaylan. Written by Abhijan Toto and Isola Tong, they draw on the histories of the region and from cinematic narratives and personal histories to think through these characters as forms of queer operation. The text forms part of the longer research of the Forest Curriculum into the formation of a Zomian bestiary which challenges the centrality of the figure of the “human” in thought, and attempts instead to think alongside the eruptive agencies of the more-than-human world. The bestiary, therefore, is a project of the decolonization of thought, and an attempt to lay out the shifting groundwork from which differing conceptions of “nature” may come into conversation. The entries, therefore, appear fragementory but also become dialogic - they do not set out to be “definitions”, but rather offer queer perspectives into how the agencies of these beings might be experienced, and might influence our thought.
The assemblage of the Bestiary is based on an understanding of the modes in which nation-states (as both conceptual configurations and empirical realities) reproduce and perpetuate colonial and pre-colonial violences, and on the role of non-human agencies through these historical and contemporary processes. The project grounds itself in the terrain of zomia, the upland swathe of forests that connect Eastern South Asia, Southern China and mainland and parts of archipelagic Southeast Asia, and that has been the territory of indigenous communities, fugitive and guerrilla groups, and spirits, and more recently violently pierced by transnational infrastructure projects. Through this process, we aim to construct a speculative framework for a post-national imaginary rooted in unresolved narratives of resistance and on decolonization as a continuous process. It seeks to imagine forms of governance and sovereignty that are attuned to the nature-cultures of these geographies and challenge the inherited and inherent hierarchies of nation-state based models.
In the following entries, Isola Tong dwells on the character of babaylan, drawing from her own personal histories as well as her ongoing work on the Arroceros Forest, thinking about the relationship between the babaylan and trans* subjectivity in the Philipines. Abhijan Toto engages with the figure of the weretiger via Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004), thinking about the ontology of the weretiger, thought through the experience of the filmmaker’s cinematic universe. Across both texts, the authors explore the idea of queerness as a space of operation, not only a subjectivity, and the articulation of this in Southeast Asian artistic practice.
Babaylan: Isola Tong
“Before the gods existed, the woods were sacred, and the gods came to dwell in these sacred woods. All they did was to add human, all too human, characteristics to the great law of forest revery.”
Gaston Bachelard
When traced back to their origins, houses and cities must have been indistinguishable just as how at one point houses and forests must have been indistinguishable.
Sou Fujimoto
“The love for an other, a woman, leads to the love of the Other.”
Simone de Beauvoir
In 1942, The Empire of Japan successfully occupied what was then the Commonwealth of the Philippines under the protection of the United States of America. The struggle for the liberation of the Philippines was the bloodiest in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. Meanwhile, as news of the advancing 16th division of the Imperial Japanese army spread, my great grandmother, Nay Bita gathered her children and hurriedly abandoned our ancestral house in a small town near Calbayog City in the Island of Samar to the rainforest. Escaping to the mountains at the heart of the island is a common story told by Filipino elders who survived the war. Geographically located at the Tropic of Cancer, surrounded by oceans and seas, receiving annual rains from the blessing of warm tropical oceans, the highlands of the Philippine islands are thickly covered by ancient rainforests which makes for a perfect hideout from lowland invasion. In fact, the Filipino-led guerilla resistance was so successful, the Japanese were not able to subjugate the country entirely. The intertwining stories of war and the supernatural told by my mother who was raised by my great grandmother fueled my pastoral imagination as a child. Nay Bita is a known Mambabarang or a kind of malefic sorceress in their town, Tinambacan. As defined by an unknown author, “Mambabarang (summoner) is a witch who uses insects and spirits to enter the body of any person they hate. A Mambabarang is a kind of a mangkukulam (witch). Mambabarangs are ordinary human beings with black magic who torture and later kill their victims by infesting their bodies with insects.” Oral histories of her rituals, her familiars, and the stories of her use of black magic to seek revenge to those who transgressed became part of my every day. Nay died in 1994 and I was too young to have understood her sorcery. But years later, the stories, as told by my mother, stayed with me, and made me begin to explore and research about this peculiar folkloric heritage. There is a Filipino legend that when a witch dies, she passes on her cunning to a chosen successor, perhaps, this current direction in my practice was her legacy as a foremother.
Shamanic Dissidents in the Mountain
In the late 19th century, during the Spanish occupation of the Philippines, Ponciano Elofre, a village leader in the island of Negros, decided to go to the mountains with a group of cohorts after his father got beaten to death by Spanish soldiers. In the forest, he encountered a group of Babaylans or roughly shamans who he coopted in his rebellion against the colonial church-state regime in the lowland. Babaylan is a specific identity that is difficult to box in terms of modern western conceptions of gender but to elucidate this precolonial gender role, I shall quote from a Filipina trans writer Jaya Jacobo: “The babaylan was associated with babayi (woman)… Yet, because gender was understood as an occupation and a role not fixed on birth sex, sex-assigned male at birth but female-presenting people were allowed to perform priestessly duties and were considered women as they conducted themselves as such... A remarkable feature of this feminine status is that gender-crossing is signified by the donning of women’s clothes.” (Goldberg, Beemin 2021) Elofre later renamed himself as Dios Buhawi or “Storm God”. He included religious freedom in his battle cry to convince the shamans in joining his cause. In 1988, Dios Buhawi led an unsuccessful attack on the town of Siaton and died in battle. Shortly following his death, a self-named follower, Papa Isio, rose to lead the Babaylan rebellion. He led successful campaigns against the church and the Filipino elites and was able to liberate towns surrounding the Kanlaon, the mountain hideout which was sacred to the shamans. The rebel faction grew stronger and was even recruited by a more organized and numerous Spanish uprising in Luzon led by Andres Bonifacio. When the Spanish Empire collapsed and lost control of the Philippines, the United States ceded the control of the islands and in 1902, the Philippine Constabulary, the predecessor of the modern Philippine National Police captured the shaman leader and was hanged in Manila. The juncture of the forest, the mountains, resistance, animism, peasants, and shamans were perhaps the impetus of my investigations on the correlation and interdependencies of marginal lives that resists and thrives at the peripheries of power. The stories of Nay Bita and the Babaylan rebels revealed possibilities of human and nonhuman relationalities and interconnected agencies that repudiate hegemonic white-patriarchal-capitalistic control and exploitation.
Transpinay and the Forest of Agencies
Taking cue from Beatriz Colomina’s argument that space could be “a form of representation” and the “home” and other private spaces could be a “polemical expansion” of the street, expanding the idea of fixed masculinized spatiality as a voyage, I chose the only urban forest in the city of Manila, the Arroceros Forest Park as a site of creative research and exploration. The investigation revealed its rich but turbulent history which involves centuries of power struggle between authorities and marginal lives. In the 16th century, the site was called the Parian de Arroceros, a booming Chinese mercantile riverside enclave where rice, silk, porcelain among other things were traded, hence the name Arroceros or those who dealt with “rice” or arroz in Spanish. Suspecting a collusion between the Manila Chinese and the marauding Chinese pirate Limahong, the Spanish forces decided to murder the settlers. In the 19th century, the site was acquired by the Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas owned by the Lopez family of Barcelona where they planted the Fabrica de Arroceros. A memorial plaque installed in Ermita Manila in 1951 by the National Historical Institute states that the company is “Notable por su trato equitativo a los obreros.” or “Notable for the fair treatment of their workers.” However, given the fact that this is a Spanish owned company during the Spanish colonial era, this claim is contestable. In 1993, a women-led Winner Foundation drafted a 15-year plan to develop the site to become an urban forest which will house thousands of native florae. At several points between the early 2000s and late 2010s, the forest faced threats of demolishment from the city government, who itself promised to be the co-caretaker of the forest. However, this was prevented because of the resistance by these women and the call their raised online which was amplified by the thriving of social media in the Philippines. Their online call spread awareness of the existence of Arroceros Forest Park nationally, eventually gaining traction which halted plans of its destruction. The narrative of this intersecting lives of women and nonhuman agents made me question, is it a mere coincidence that female subjects and the struggle for arboreal existence align? Or is it a natural propensity for marginal lives to find solidarity? Inspired by this cosmic alignment of marginalities I began to explore how my transness relates to the anomalous and defiant existence of the forest, and all the lives that thrives within it, in the middle of a stifling masculinized city. What does it mean for a transpinay and the forest to exist in a space dominated by oppressive regimes and competing geopolitical and economic interests of global powers such as China and the United States? Perhaps it helps to elucidate my positionality if we define what a transpinay is: “Activist contexts offer novel possibilities of identity politics through the term transpinay. They deploy transpinay to describe figurations of Filipina womanhood, which include pathways toward agency and coalitional possibilities through the bakla. Such nomenclature is powerful not only in announcing a modern subject but in introducing a woman who articulates her agency in decolonial and transfeminist terms.” (Jacobo, 2021) This unproductive alterity of the forest in capitalist regimes perhaps could provide a geography of resistance, a landscape of transfeminist and decolonial articulation in the time where we are beginning to reckon with anthropocentrism, neocolonialism, and environmental issues. And how queerness and transness, together with nonhuman and human kinship could create poetic possibilities, polemics, and self-determined imaginations from marginal voices within marginal places.
Weretiger: Abhijan Toto
Can cinema become a shamanic gesture where realities are not represented, but rather worlds are brought into conversation, a process of encounter, of a mutual enfolding? The films of the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (P’Joei), often written about as “strange” or “magical” are, I would argue, a making-tangible of the points at which worlds come into contact. It is a making-tangible of the texture of the worlds themselves, in all their resonant granularities. As Erik Bordeleau writes, in the tradition of Whitehead, read through the work of Stengers, it is producing an experience of this intermingling of worlds. It is dramatization of the enfolding of multiple naturecultures, which are not idyllic, but rather in constantly reshuffled relations of predation, and of becoming predated.
Tropical Malady (2004) was P’Joei’s fourth film and unfolds as a diptych, seemingly two stories loosely tied together. The film takes place in the Isaan region of Northeastern Thailand, where the director is from, and much of his work is set, and appears to follow the stories of Keng, a soldier, and Tong, a working class man. The film begins with Keng and his company discovering a body near the forests, and documenting their find before transporting it back. We follow Keng on his journey back into town, where he eventually encounters Tong, who works in an ice factory, and the two become romantically entangled. P’Joei uses the form of the Thai melodrama as a basis for the narrative structure - the will they or won’t they, the romantic moments. The deployment of this form becomes a political gesture, thinking about the idea of the melodrama as one that distracts one from the real problems of politics in the country. Indeed the film is peppered, as many of his films are, with scenes of the characters congregating around television screens - the content of which we are never allowed to see. The audience is instead treated to the mundane but tense depiction of people being totally absorbed, pulled out of reality. As much as the film draws from the form of the melodrama as dramatic structure, the long tense moments such as this, through lingering mid-shots and an attention to the seemingly mundane makes the act of viewing into an act of collectively dissecting the melodramatic mode. We are constantly aware of what the film is doing precisely because it makes use of familiar tropes: the date, the act of singing for a lover, the furtive glance. Through his use of command over the form, he forces us to examine our expectations, and makes us ever more keenly aware of the points at which it subverts them.
There is a feeling of heat present constantly through the film, as the title suggests. Expressed equally through the colours and the use of sound in the film, with its associative tendencies. At points, you feel like the heats pours out of the screen and affects you, pulling you into its world. We encounter Tong as worker in an ice factory, slicing again and again into giant blocks of ice. The scene transforms ice into an almost magical substance, whose presence in the tropical heat seems otherworldly, yet deeply mundane - incongruous, but familiar. One is reminded immediately of Kidlat Tahimik’s seminal film, a key work of what became called ‘Third Cinema’, Perfumed Nightmare (1977) where the presence of ice in a remote village in the Philippines becomes a deep allegory for both the introduction of Western machinery and technology into Southeast Asia, and its subsequent indigenization, through its use and forms of distribution. Or indeed, of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel 100 Years of Solitude, one of the most significant works of Latin American post colonial literature, which begins with a rumination on the first encounter with ice in the hot tropics. The ice - in its ephemeral materiality, melting in the tropics - bears within itself a strange lineage of post-colonial thought, politically charging the ever-present experience of heat.
The first half of film ends with an erotically-charged scene between the two men, seen kissing each others hands, almost consuming each others bodies, their essences, followed by a long scene of Keng riding his bicycle alone into the night. It seems like a fitting conclusion to a melodrama, a love story simply told. We almost don’t notice the man being beaten up on the street behind Keng as he waits at a traffic light, and continues to ride to sound of a popular Thai love song. It is at this point the film switches perspective. What follows are a sequence of animated images that tell the viewer about a shape-shifting shaman in a forest who could transform into any animal he chose to.
Suddenly Keng wakes up alone in a bed, visibly disoriented. The feeling of heat grows stronger. He seems unsure of where he is, even though there is a sense of being familiar with his surroundings. There is the sound of a radio in the background. Keng looks through images of Tong, in a small album, almost as if trying to remember. Or perhaps trying to convince himself his memories were real, and not a fever dream. Or perhaps trying to convince the audience. Keng goes into the forest, having received orders to track down and kill the beast that had been hunting the villagers' livestock.
Keng wanders deeper and deeper into the forest, and grows aware that he is being watched. Eventually the audience discovers who the watcher is: it is Tong. But it is not the Tong that we watched fall in love with Keng in the first half of the movie. This Tong is covered in tattoos or markings. He is naked and feral. His movements are not human, nor are they entirely animal. They occupy a queer space in between. The presence of these tattoos will be instantly familiar to those who have grown up with the myth of the weretiger. Across South and Southeast Asia, there exist similar stories of the people that are sometimes tigers and the tigers that are sometimes people. The name weretiger seems to suggest a kind of lineage with the idea of the werewolf - one that transforms at the time of the full moon into a wolf, and after a certain time has passed returns as a human. This is something of a misnomer. The weretiger is not only one who can shapeshift into a tiger at a designated time, whether moved by natural forces or at will. It refers instead to one who is both simultaneously man and tiger, one who is two, two who are one; one who is both human and more-than-human at the same time. A figure that lives in more than one world, and through whom, and in relationship to whom, one might experience other worlds, other times. The presence of the markings on Tong’s human body, therefore, are not vestiges, but rather signify this multiple belonging, referencing similar practices of tattooing of tiger-marking found in parts of Thailand and Myanmar.
As Keng is driven deeper and deeper into the forest, he is warned by a passing monkey - or monkey ghost - that a tiger is following him, and that the tiger is fascinated by the strange device Keng carries - the radio, full voices of absent beings. The tiger stalks his through the foliage, casting furtive glances, detected only in traces, and distant roars. Keng slowly begins to lose his sense of distinction between himself and the forest - to avoid being tracked by scent, he covers himself in mud. He begins to hunt and eat what he can find, as he begins to run out of food. Leeches cling onto his legs, sucking his blood, and pulling him into their ecosystem, predating upon him as much as he attempts to predate upon his surroundings. The distinction between the predator and the prey shifts constantly as he and the tiger continue to hunt and avoid each other.
Tong the tiger finds Keng. After a brief heated tussle, the tiger flings Keng off the side of a hill where he rolls down. The tiger watches Keng’s body lying at the bottom. Keng slowly awakens, and falls deeper and deeper into the forest. He is now bereft of his military backpack with his supplies, his radio: the only thing he has managed to cling onto is his gun. The forest has consumed the radio. Keng follows a swarm of fireflies who illuminate a tree in the darkness, and realizes that the buzz of his radio has become the buzz of thousands and thousands of fireflies - technology has once against become its own ghost. Keng continues his hunt, or rather continues to be hunted - we see Tong now in the body of a tiger, no longer a man with markings. Keng hears the tiger, the tiger hears Keng as the shaman, ringing his bell, Keng the soldier hears the bell of the shaman, the feral Keng hears Keng the shaman. And finally they hear a gunshot.
Perhaps Keng died at the bottom of the hill. Perhaps the body that Keng and his company find at the beginning of the film is in fact Keng’s from another world, where Keng was the shaman, the guerilla and the tiger. Anika Fuhrmann in her book Ghostly Desires (2016) argues: “While the film’s first, social half altogether eschews the presentation of homosexuality as a case of diminution, in its second half Tropical Malady improvises on the convention of haunting to establish homosexuality as the primary figure of subjectivity. In each case the film performs a deminoritizing move.” Taking this a step further, I would argue that the perspectivist vision that P’Jeoi articulates in Tropical Malady is precisely a dramatization of a queer ontology of shapeshifting. The film becomes a space where the agency of weretiger in its multiple valences become made-tangible: it allows us to access naturecultures as non-minoritized, living sites of thought. The weretiger as a shapeshifting being therefore is not a metaphor for queerness and its capacity for the transformative, but rather a metonymy of queerness as being or becoming.