Monstress by Lysley Tenorio, Ecco, Paperback, Published: 12 June 2020, 240 Pages, 144.8×15.2×142.2mm, ISBN: 9780063010147, £16.99
In an interview with The Paris Review (2012), Filipino-American author Lysley Tenorio narrates how his family would use the Tagalog word uwi or to return home whenever they talked about the Philippines. What for him was a trip, for his family would be a journey to the homeland. He was brought to America when he was 7 months old, and could not feel the sense of loss his own parents had felt about the Philippines. He called the country ‘a phantom presence’ in his childhood home, a lingering haunting from a history that is not his own.
This idea of displacement as an inherited and imposed condition reverberates throughout Tenorio’s short story collection titled Monstress. He uses satire to expose the cruelty of borders, forcefully creating grotesque experiences for the migrant body. By deliberately exaggerating and distorting the migrant experience, he mocks the common-sensical understanding of belonging and assimilation, literalising it as monstrosity imposed upon the body. Peculiar, ill, and often violent bodies demonstrate the absurdity of the forced simplicity of belonging and non-belonging. The stories do not simply mourn the pain of displacement, but ridicule the very constructs that produce this pain through humour and irony. They together form a collective portrayal of the migrant body as a landscape of terror and hostility, a central figure that cannot be trusted, and is always a source of regret or betrayal.
The creation of the migrant body begins with an aspiration for a better life. In The Brothers, Edmond recalls a memory of his brother Eric embracing his truth by flashing his new breasts on national television to the absolute horror of their mother. Each encounter with Eric’s body is brutal for the family– its material weight bearing down on them when they are reunited with his corpse after years of estrangement. Erica’s death is ambiguous, the only revealed fact is that she suffocated to death. Preparing the corpse for the funeral, the mourning mother begs Edmond to help her carry the weight of Erica’s corpse so she can bind its breasts. She attempts to lift the corpse several times, dropping the body preserved with embalming fluid again and again. Edmond gives in to his wailing mother who bandages the corpse, while he holds his sibling close for the first time in a long while, lamenting: “If my brother were alive, he wouldn’t be able to breathe”( p. 50).
The morbid scene of a mother flattening the corpse’s breasts is disturbing. Tenorio uses this mutilation in order to convey the oppressive nature of bordering and categorising. Through Erica’s transition in life and death, the author mocks the rigidity of these categories, exposing the violence of beholding a person to their boundaries. The logic of the nation-state turns the migrant body into a tether, perhaps even a prison. We must carry our bodies everywhere, a bordered world thus makes migration a violent act, putting the body in tension.
This point is furthered in Superassassin, where an unnamed school boy escalates his fantasies of revenge to comic-book levels of drama. The boy is the product of a failed relationship between a Filipina entertainer and an American veteran who abandons her. He embodies this history—he is both the product of his mother’s trauma and its enduring reminder, half his mother’s blood and half her villain’s. To cope with bullying, he disassociates from reality, falling further into delusion as the story progresses, with the tone transitioning from boyish superhero to merciless villain. He begins to present such antisocial tendencies as replacing his bully’s deodorant with a blowtorch. He comes home one day to find his mother having cut her wrists again, taking this as a sign to fully embrace his fate to be a superassassin. Forced by an absence of choice, he occupies the role of both- a villain and a caretaker.
Dressing for duty, he dons his father’s jacket before he works in the darkness, as he says, “Mother’s future slips into Mother’s past as I don my father’s uniform jacket. It fits perfectly; I never knew our bodies were the same.” ( p. 133) Through the narrative of this mixed-race boy, Tenorio problematises the notion that individuals are destined to be nothing but their bodies, defined solely by race or place of origin, framing this reduction as a form of violence imposed upon them. The boy’s villainous side is portrayed as inherited and inescapable—an absurd condition because it implies destiny and denies agency. Through the exaggerated narration of a murderous boy, Tenorio critiques how the logic of borders becomes inscribed within the body of a ‘hybrid’ child, producing a cycle of violence that continually perpetuates itself and underscores the betrayal inherent in the migrant body itself.
Similarly in A View from Culion, Teresa’s dream of a promising life in California is cut short by leprosy. Her body becomes a lifelong prison: though in remission, she remains confined to the island colony of Culion, her body’s history forever excluding her from belonging elsewhere. Both stories show how the migrant body carries visible and invisible borders that cannot be shed, enforcing exile, difference, and betrayal even when the individual aspires to connection or escape.
Teresa’s Filipino body is a literal metaphor for how the migrant body is pathologised, excluded, and contained. She forms a genuine connection with an American patient who has gone AWOL from the military, their interactions limited by the artificial separation of a curtain. After an intimate moment where Teresa draws his portrait based on his description, she later sees him in the clinic and realises they both lied about their appearances: his eyes are swollen shut, his body covered in lesions and open sores, his left hand nearly gone . She too bears hardened flesh and lesion scars from lost skin and muscle. The curtain is lifted, shattering the illusion, and reminding her that only their shared deterioration allowed them to meet. Knowing his desire to leave the island, she reports him to the Peace Corps who take him away, leaving her behind. She desires for the border between them as if to policy the social hierarchy—“I long for the black curtain, for the fabric to rise like a tide and drown us both in darkness” ( p. 105)— believing he deserves better than the people on Culion, even than herself.
A View from Culion is cognisant that the world is structured by superficial yet powerfully hierarchical barriers. Culion, a real leper colony established under American occupation, is a product of the workings of colonial power. The singular American patient’s easy removal from the island reveals how exile is a punishment reserved for Filipinos alone, exposing the unequal hierarchies that grant some bodies freedom to move even through the harshest forms of banishment. The story uses leprosy, an illness marked by deformation and a visibly wounded body, to expose the way society creates and enforces borders, turning the migrant’s body into a justification for exclusion and exile. A View from Culion is a satirical exposure of the deep hypocrisy of an island justified as a greater good: even the American becomes a lesser body as a migrant in Culion, yet only he is granted the freedom to escape his condition.
This question of where a body belongs and the freedom it has to move, reveals a racial hierarchy between Filipinos and Americans—one that persists within the hybrid identity of Filipino-Americans. Tenorio overstates this by using illness once more to illustrate this hierarchy Felix Satorro.
Felix Satorro is a con-man who performs a fraudulent faith healing ritual by muttering prayers while pulling bloody masses he calls “negativities” (p.52) from patients’ bodies using pig liver and fake blood, convincing them they have now been healed. Through this story, the author confronts the complexity of Filipino migrants’ relationship with their own Filipinoness. Grandfather Felix pretends to perform an abortion on a desperate pregnant nurse, which he believes is an act of mercy. The salvation he offers, it seems, is the indulgence in the potent comfort of delusion that something has been done, even when nothing can be. Despite the desperate lengths one will go to transform the body, you cannot escape the “illness” of being Filipino.
The body’s tethering to the motherland is a catch-22 for grandson Felix: to break from his grandfather’s fraudulent legacy, he must commit his own deception to stay in America. At the end, Felix imagines his grandfather eerily waving back at him, conveying both guilt and a resigned surrender to deception deemed necessary. The story frames the complex, ambivalent feelings of Filipinoness through grandson Felix’s hesitation to abandon his name, even as he feels that his connection to the Philippines through his grandfather diminishes him. Much like Superassassin, Felix Satorro uses satire to expose the trap of the migrant body chained to an inescapable fate. Ironically, in trying to break free, he becomes exactly what he sought to escape. It is a parody of how the migrant body is condemned to be more of itself, precisely when it seeks to become something else.
Each story features a character who holds on to the illusion that coming to America will change one’s self and life with finality. The titular story, Monstress,features the actress Reva Gogo who plays the Creature in her lover Checkers’ ridiculous B-horror films. Despite hoping to abandon the degrading role of monster, she travels to America under Checkers’ aspirations for Hollywood success. Asked to reprise her role, she crawls on her hands and knees in a set in the producer’s mother’s basement, outfitted with the same cheap makeup and homemade props. But after receiving her first line of dialogue in a film, no matter how cliche, she feels empowered and chooses to stay in America. She even weeps at the ludicrously melodramatic romantic scenes in which, dressed as a monster, she kisses the leading man as the world ends– a scene which provokes uproarious laughter from college students at an almost empty rerun.
In the end, she sits alone in a rundown theater, her films barely remembered, taking pleasure in a distorted memory that the lover who tried to sabotage her wanted to save her. But Reva no longer belongs in the Philippines, and neither is she fully accepted in America. “I was a working professional in America; back home, I didn’t know what I was.” ( p. 24). Monstress employs tragicomedy to liken the grand promises of migration to a forgettable, humiliating low-budget film. It not only displaces the migrant but forces their body into the very demeaning, monstrous role they sought to escape in exchange for some semblance of dignity. Acceptance in America demands becoming Filipino-American– marked as different in order to claim even a fragile, superficial sense of belonging.
Through the grotesque, the Monstress collection confronts the Frankenstein-esque condition of the migrant body—partial, unnatural, and unaccepted. Each short story functions as a satirical reckoning of the epistemological cruelty of bordered territories, using dark humour, exaggeration, and grotesque imagery through the body, to expose the social hierarchies that distort and displace the migrant’s way of being in the world. They reveal how bordered logics produce experiences that are strange and tortuous precisely because borders themselves are absurd. Yet where such borders fail to accommodate complexity, Tenorio insists on making space for a new category that transcends the polarities of origin and destination: a monstress.
References
Sloss, A. (2012, Jan 31). An Interview with Lysley Tenorio. The Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/01/31/lysley-tenorio-on-%E2%80%98monstress%E2%80%99/
Tenorio, L. (2012). Monstress. Ecco Books
Eugenie is a writer and political communicator from Manila, now based in London. She holds an MSc (Distinction) in Politics of Conflict, Rights, and Justice from SOAS University of London and a degree in Psychology with a minor in Literature from Ateneo de Manila University.
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