The Magindara: A Secret Within Me
by Roselle Panganiban | From Issue One (Fall 2025)
In a limestone hollow, she lies in wait at the bottom of the ocean. Fishermen tell wary tales of her, the aswang of the sea who shows no mercy to the adults who might come across her. But when she's not craving human flesh, she will actually rise to the surface to purchase salted dry fish, or tuyo, from vendors at the palengke—disguised, of course, as a beautiful woman.
So that she can make money for her dried fish, the vicious sirena known as the Magindara takes on the name "Dara" and busks on the streets of Manila. Or so a tale might go.
While the Magindara is a sirena who wallows, often in anger, alone in the ocean depths, she also inhabits my body, her soul sharing space with other souls I keep hidden inside. For instance, there is a four-armed weaver deity who guides me like a mother. Then there is a version of the Visayan goddess Dalikmata, who is a child, bears no mouth, but has dozens of eyes upon her face, thereby guiding me with her different perspectives. Those are just some of the souls which I carry within me. But as for the soul of the Magindara, she is the deepest secret within me, as she is a tale who challenges my boundaries between kunwari and reality.
I don't quite remember when I first met the Magindara, but she certainly emerged at a time in my life when I was learning the bitter truths about society. Like the grotesqueness of unearthing a dead body over and over again, the Magindara would constantly rise from the depths to my surface at inopportune times: I would speak with an angrier tone, and a sharper tongue. The psalms at church which used to calm me no longer served me, as I was learning the true ways of the Catholic church throughout history. The Magindara led the way, showing me the realities of the world I was sheltered from.
The Magindara, being a very beautiful woman, also taught me the ways of her seduction. Without getting into intimate details, she opened up a world for me, like new ways to express myself in a manner dissimilar from the purity culture ingrained in the Catholic church. The Magindara does not repress her sexual expression. Knowing her ways, her hyper-intellectualized mind, and her desire to be melodically heard and understood, freed me from the confines of a guilt which was almost as fundamental as my flesh and bones.
But just like any miracle drug, having a taste of the Magindara's toxicity also led to new maladies. For the first time in my life, I was having disagreements with people. The passive existence which I used to live came to an uncomfortable end, and I lost a lot of connections along the way. Even now, I struggle with paving a more tranquil path versus letting that fierce sirena take the reins. It's a balancing act of knowing when and how to be righteously angry, something I had tried to learn in advocacy circles, but have since removed myself from.
And then came the anger and trauma manifesting as somatic hallucinations in my body. There was a time, between multiple psychiatric ward visits, when I thought the spirits of the world were punishing me for letting malevolent energy into my life, like the Magindara. For a time I believed that I had to go back to church, or had to find certain tricks to reset my life to the way it used to be. But it didn't work. As someone who has had multiple episodes of psychosis, I found that the stimuli from church was overwhelming for me, the delusions were too much… everything was too much, and I needed to go back to my depths, to that lonesome cavern deep within my flooded soul.
In times when no one else understands the delusional horrors I go through, it is my multiple souls, including the Magindara, who console me. The emptiness which the Magindara feels on a regular basis is a pain she has taught me to carry forward.
Sure, I may need to coax her violence, and her spilling innards, back to sleep. Sure, the Magindara might have been the one responsible for severing her torso from her upper body. But there is important knowledge in duality, like seeing our souls shared with one another as kapwa.
In all honesty, I can't say that I like my life a lot more than before, but I certainly feel more like myself when I rely on the intricate wisdom led by this character known as the aswang of the sea. And so, I will continue to rely on the Magindara—a soul which I house in secret from the rest of everyday, mundane life—in the times when I need her the most.
This personal essay builds on the autobiographical poem I wrote "A Mechanical Bride: The Magindara and the Machine" featured in the Lupa Newsletter.
Roselle graduated from the University of Winnipeg with a BA in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications with a minor in Interdisciplinary Linguistics. As an advocate of mental health, Roselle believes that words, whether through song or poetry, can offer great healing.