My Blind Old Yaya

Since the birth of national consciousness in Philippine writers and intellectuals, the retrieval of folk stories was present in their narratives. At the end of the 19th century and until independence in 1946, at a time when attempts were being made to discern what the Filipino essence was beyond the history of successive colonizations, the return to indigenism was a useful resource as counter-literature, outside the Western canon and what was taught as "correct literature" in the schools. Folk tales appeared in places and genres as disparate as newspaper editorials, the speeches of the suffragette Rosa Sevilla de Alvero or the scholarly texts of Isabelo de los Reyes. And in literature: in novels and short stories like "My Blind Old Yaya", by Ramon D. Soliman.

As a student, Soliman recounts his personal experience of how he came to know the mythical figure of the "Aswang" through his yaya. In this, he connects with Adelina Gurrea's book Cuentos de Juana, which also unpacks a series of mythological stories through the tales of the narrator's yaya. As opposed to other mythological stories told by Americans or by Spaniards, who take them as curiosities or objects of study and sometimes even as justification of the "difference" of the Filipino people from the West, Soliman's story introduces the mythological characters in his day-to-day life, explains his personal experience with the idea of the aswang, and how it affected his routine. It can be confronted with the account of Francis Lewis Minton, an American citizen living in the Philippines, who in an article in The American Chamber of Commerce in 1929 spoke of the same being, the Aswang, from a disbelieving distance to highlight the obscure beliefs and backwardness of the Filipino people.

Soliman, Ramon D. 1936. “My Blind Old Yaya” Graphic. February 13, 1936, p. 45. In Open Access Repository @ UPD.

Agrava, Leonor and Araceli Pons. 1955. Leyendas filipinas. Madrid: Imprenta Dosan

Cook Cole, Mabel. 1916. Philippine Folk Tales. Chicago: A.C. McGlurc & Co. 

Reyes y Florentino, Isabelo de los. 1889. El folk-lore Filipino. Manila: Imp. de Sta. Cruz.

Eugenio, Damiana L. 2001. Philippine Folk Literature. The Myths. Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press.

Gurrea, Adelina. 1943. Cuentos de Juana. Madrid: Imprenta de Prensa Española. 

Minton, Francis Lewis. 1929. “Something about the Asuang”, The American Chamber of Commerce Journal, June: 22.