The Manananggal's Lost Heart

About the legend

Being

Manananggal (aswang)

Cultural meaning

The manananggal is one of the aswang, the shape-changing night beings of Filipino folklore. In the old tales she lives as a quiet, ordinary woman by day. At night she flies on wings like a bat's. Her name comes from the Tagalog word tanggal, 'to separate', because her upper body is said to fly off and leave the rest behind.

Fun fact

Aswang stories are told almost everywhere in the Philippines, and most of all in the Visayas.

Cultural notes

Aswang stories belong to Filipino folk narrative, and the manananggal is counted among the aswang. Spanish chroniclers wrote as early as the 1500s that the aswang was the being the people feared most. The stories are especially well known in Capiz, where an Aswang Festival began in 2004; the local government stopped it in 2007 after criticism from the Catholic Church. In Hiligaynon and Waray the manananggal is usually called wak-wak. Salt is an old protection: in the old tales, salt sprinkled on the body she leaves behind keeps her from becoming whole again, and people carried a pinch of salt against the manananggal and the aswang, as Grandma does in the story. The folklorist Maximo D. Ramos studied these tales in The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore. Filipino has a word for what Tala does for Alima: pakikiramay, sharing another person's sorrow and helping to carry it.

About this retelling

Original fantasy inspired by folklore An original gentle fantasy about Tala and Alima, inspired by—but different from—frightening manananggal folklore.

The manananggal comes from Filipino folklore, where she is a frightening night being, and the old warnings about her are not wrong. Tala, Alima, Grandma, the lost heart and the welcome home are new, written for Filipino Tales. In this story Alima really is a manananggal, one who has never harmed anyone; the story does not claim that the manananggal of the old tales is harmless. The heart is a symbol of grief and belonging, not a body part. For children we left out the separated body and the hunting of the old tales, and Tala always stays where her grandmother can see and hear her.

Sources

• Filipino oral tradition around the manananggal and aswang
• Maximo D. Ramos, *The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore* (Phoenix, 1990; first published as *The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore*, 1971) (Open Library)
• "Aswáng", Sagisag Kultura / CulturEd, National Commission for Culture and the Arts (CulturEd)
• The Aswang Project, "A Compendium of Creatures from Philippine Folklore & Mythology" (The Aswang Project)

Themes

• Compassion
• Reconciliation
• Belonging

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