By Susan T. Layug
Warning: spoiler alert.
Here’s what I think Manang’s memories really are: they are the broken pieces of her heart, puso, that she recovered and wore at the end but were never put back together
See how they were shown as being cradled in her breast, but not resting in her head? How they are bits and pieces of something indistinguishable, but nothing concrete? We will never know what the stolen memories were because they will never be totally put together for her.
Forgotten Island is DreamWorks’ first animated production that is wholly centered around mythological creatures of pre-colonial Philippines. It features two Filipino teenagers who are pulled into a portal that leads to a mythical realm called Nakali. The plot mainly revolves around getting their memories back while trying to fend off the major villain called Manang, a manananggal, or a flying, shapeshifting vampire that splits her body in half when she preys on humans. The youths’ memories are crucial to their ability to go back to their own world. In this film, Manang’s memories also promise to be the key to her redemption from villainy, a plight that seemed to have been resolved towards the end, but to this viewer, was never neatly tied. Here’s why:
I saw a comment on my earlier post that said that Manang’s lost memory is pakikipagkapwa, her shared humanity. And I agree that that was part of it. Somewhere in her ancient narrative, she lost her sense of belonging with the rest of the Nakali community. But I don’t agree that remembering what she once had is how her story ends. Sure, she might temporarily find contentment because she thinks that having the memory of how she once loved and was once loved will neatly dovetail with Jo’s and Raissa’s reconciliation in friendship. But Manang will never be whole again.
Manananggal
Courtesy of DreamWorks Animation
She will still fly around in bits and pieces of her fragmented self, her refracted soul making the most of her broken heart. She will still roam the night, steal other women’s children because she will never have her own, literally or figuratively. She will always have that void. She will suck human blood because she will never quite feel her own warm blood flow in the rivers of her body.
Forgotten Island is not a story for children. Not completely. It is not a neat wave of a narrative that has a beginning, a middle, a reckoning, and an end. Yes, it is for Jo and Raissa; and we see them as they become successful, the way we like our fairy tales. But not for Manang.
Manang is that part of us that knows there will always be those fragments of our lives that will never be quite whole. The unanswered question one asks the love of their life who left them for another: Bakit? Why? The dream that we gave up so we can take care of our aging parents, or our special-needs child or sibling: Ano kaya? What if? Those myriad possibilities we allowed to be carried away by the flood – baha – of life: Sana! I wish!
They haunt us – and time and again, compel us – to leave the lower half of ourselves, searching for what has been lost but can never be taken back. At times we are Jo and Raissa. Many times, we are also like Manang: incomplete and severed in places where life has broken us.
Still, in our being Manang, we carry on. We bravely live. We hope and dream that someday we’ll make memories again.
And in this, we are in our most human: living our days and nights in constant rearranging of the innermost parts of us. Imperfect beings with imperfect lives and imperfect memories. And as such, perfectly human. And in an ironic kind of way, perfectly heroic.
Susan T. Layug is a writer, translator, and interpreter based in Chicago. She keeps a literary translation blog, social media accounts, and a household that hums day and (deep into the) night with discussions on life, love, and keeping alive in these challenging but totally worth-it times with her husband and younger son.
https://www.instagram.com/sulayug
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