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was to dress like Virgin Mary by “[borrowing] odds and ends of
clothing and jewels from the life-size Virgin Mary,” while she
drives through the city of Malolos, drawing “in her wake men,
women, and children who stared at, ran after, and hailed her
passing, calling her witch, whore, saint, patroness, insane” (156).
This corporeal transformation, this becoming the Virgin Mary, I
will argue, is a response to the colonizer as well as the
contradictory demands of the colonized local community, which
wavers between disciplinary governance and patriarchal morality.
Maya’s becoming the Virgin Mary is positioned as a response to
her feeling of shame for being judged by the public, as well as the
pleasure she should not have felt. Judgment by the public (public
shame) and by herself (private shame) are forces she must respond
to in order to exist. In responding to the violence of social
judgment and the intensity of her shame, she becomes violent so as
to harness her shame and grow powerful. Performing and usurping
the position of the Virgin Mary whenever she cruises around the
city, she receives the petitions from peasants and whips the statues
of proper saints to coerce the divine power to grant their wishes.
Her shame, therefore, moves her to rebel against the saints while
mimicking Mary.
Assuming the role of Virgin Mary entails a forfeiting of a
linkage with Philippine women prior to Spanish colonization, who
“walked with wisdom, dressed simply in an ankle-length piece of
cloth wrapped and knotted about the hips, breasts left bare . . .”
(Rosca, 1988: 192). Here Rosca invokes the holistic existence of a
precolonial matriarchal society, when women were “in communion
with the gods and praying to the river, the forest spirits, the
ancient stones, pouring out blood libations in evening rituals,
healing the sick, foretelling the results of wars, quarrels, couplings,
and the seasons” (192). The revelation of a powerful community of
women healers, fortune-tellers, and priestesses associates Maya’s
predicament with the pre-Spanish women spiritual leaders known
as the Babaylan. According to Alicia Magos, a Babaylan in Filipino