or: when the aswangs are feminist and the villagers are not

I bought Aswanglaut by Allan Derain because I’m a fiend for aswang lore. Give me shapeshifters, old magic, small-town superstitions and vaguely damp horror vibes and I will show up, wallet open, eyes wide. Add “deep Tagalog” to the mix and I’m basically signing a soul contract. Books that dive headfirst into Filipino lower mythology without trying to “modernize” or over-explain it? Rare. Books that do it in full, literary Tagalog? Unicorn-level.

So I was ready — ready to work, to reread whole pages, to Google obscure words, to surrender to paragraph walls like a good nerd. I’m not afraid of a hard read. What I wasn’t ready for was the creeping realization that the deeper I got, the more the story’s women were being flung around like plot devices… and punished like moral lessons.

The book starts strong with promise — a setting at the cusp of colonization, a mysterious girl tied to local aswang legends, a whole village caught between belief and betrayal. And Derain’s language is lush. You can taste the history in the vocabulary. The Tagalog is deep, yes, but not inaccessibly so. It’s self aware. It’s textured. You feel the mud, the rot, the pull of myth trying to survive the oncoming wave of Spanish ideology.

But here’s the catch: while the book is doing all this work to preserve precolonial mythology, it quietly installs colonial morality right at the heart of the narrative.

One of the central conflicts in the early chapters involves a woman being accused of pangangaliwa or pangangalunya (infidelity). The consequences are brutal. Not just social exile — I’m talking full-on, biblical-style punishment: public shaming, drowning, the works. The elders — the ones you’d expect to carry some precolonial nuance — are gleefully punitive. There’s no questioning, no wrestling. Just swift, righteous violence.

Which would make sense… if the story interrogated that. But it doesn’t. At least, not overtly. The violence is presented as inevitable. Cultural. Traditional, even. But is it?

Here’s where I start tilting my head.

Because precolonial Filipino societies were different. Women had more autonomy. Divorce existed. Polygyny was normal for men and polyandry wasn’t unthinkable for women in certain tribes. Affairs weren’t ideal, sure, but they weren’t a literal death sentence. And yet here we are — in a novel that reveres native mythology — watching a woman be punished like she walked out of a friar’s confessional box.

So which culture are we in, exactly?

That’s my beef. Not with Derain’s language, which is undeniably rich. Not with the ambition of the book — we need more works like this. But with how easily the narrative seems to accept the punishment of women as an unquestioned part of this imagined Filipino past. The mother exists to be seen, accused, and symbolized. The female lead — at least in the early parts — feels less like a character and more like a narrative shell. The male gaze is everywhere, even when the man isn’t in the room.

And that’s a shame. Because if any creature in our mythos deserves a feminist reclamation arc, it’s the aswang. She’s been demonized, feared, eroticized, made into a scapegoat for everything from miscarriages to bad harvests. But at her core, she’s a figure of resistance. A woman who refuses to play nice. She survives — through transformation, deception, appetite. She is literally hunger embodied. That’s power.

So to place an aswang-like woman at the center of a story, then strip her of that power — to make her voiceless and objectified — feels like a missed opportunity. Worse, it risks reinforcing the same colonial scripts the book is ostensibly challenging.

Now to be fair, I haven’t finished the book yet. And maybe there’s a big reveal coming. Maybe the whole point is that we’re watching how colonial logic infects even our mythologies. I want that to be the case. I’m holding out hope that Derain is building a trap only to spring it later. That this drowning isn’t just punishment, but setup. That the girl isn’t just a ghost, but a mirror.

But still. I can’t shake the discomfort. I’m not mad the book made me work — I’m annoyed that it made me work just to watch a woman be dragged under, again. With no pushback. No question. Just the familiar old silence wrapped in cultural writings.

So this isn’t a final review. It’s a footnote in progress. A long, side-eyed bookmark. I’m still reading. I want to finish. I want to see where it goes. But if we’re going to write mythically — if we’re going to resurrect the aswang, the babaylan, the stories buried under 300 years of Spanish guilt — then we owe it to them to do more than just dress them up and throw them into the seas.

We owe them voice. Teeth. Appetite.

And maybe a little rage.