“Ay, siyempre , Gran, of course, Oz is—multicultural!”: Merlinda Bobis’s Crossing to the Other Side as Reflected in Her Short Stories
2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1920-1222
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoI'll dream you a tonight; Cradle on her back Bone-white. I'll dream you a tonight. (Bobis 49) A white ferrying the dreams of the dead. (1) A communal tongue. A woman's twelve-metre hair rescuing corpses from a lemongrass-scented river. A man mesmerized by the colours worn by a woman to the point of falling in and out of love with her without ever daring to disclose his feelings. A curse that makes a child pay for the death of her own mother. A working siesta in a five-star hotel. A young man who falls in love with a painting of a dead girl and tries to woo her with his cooking. A heartbroken mother who finally manages to wash the remnants of her young son's last days at hospital. Hearts that have a life of their own. A little girl in brand-new plastic shoes who will never see her mother again. The cultural abyss that separates a grandmother from her 'postgraduate' granddaughter. A sadness collector that is about to burst after eating so much human loneliness and sorrow. An old female storyteller who manages to defy a whole army and keep the moon from rising. A jar that speaks to a poor saleswoman and recommends her taking up belly dancing as her ultimate revenge on her lascivious boss. A Wind Witch in Darlinghurst who is eventually charged with scandalous and deranged behaviour. These enigmatic and enhancing tales of chance, hope and frustration are but some of the most outstanding twenty-three set in the Philippines and Australia that make up Merlinda Bobis's collection White Turtle (1999). Merlinda Bobis was born in the Philippines but now lives in Australia, which turns her, to take Salman Rushdie's well-known expression, into a translated woman, that is, a woman who has been carried across different cultures and who consequently cannot be defined by making exclusive reference to any of them. Her condition of in-betweenness provides her with a privileged perspective that allows her to talk from different angles, and thus to bridge the gap (or else to bring to the fore) the discontinuities that separate one world from another. (2) Turtle, the short story from which the collection takes its name is, without any doubt, one of the most puzzling and meaningful, for it can be said to encapsulate the most pressing concerns of postcoloniality, (3) and, by extension, of the multicultural diasporic subject. Although my analysis will mainly focus on this short story, a full understanding of it will only be possible if intersecting references are made to the other in the collection, since they are all parts of a whole and, consequently, find their ultimate meaning in the relationship they establish with one another. Filipina storyteller and chanter Lola Basyon is taken by an Australian anthropologist, who met her during his research on the origins of native peoples, to a writers' festival in Sydney so that a big audience can listen to the enigmatic story about a white that he so much enjoyed during his stay in her village Iraya. He had literally fallen in love with her chant about the white turtle because, in his opinion, it was pure poetry (40). This poetical tale is, without any doubt, also a mythical one, and thus part of the oral tradition and cultural heritage of Lola Basyon's people. The same oral tradition that Selma, the storyteller of the North and South in Before the Moon Rises will again be bound to preserve and transmit on her hundredth year, much to her disappointment. Selma, who had promised herself to wait for her last days peacefully in a hut apart from people and their stories (143), without caring any more, feels compelled to help her people defy the army that wants to expel them from their village, and remember their past so as to ensure their present and future dignity. It is only by keeping alive that people can assert their identity, cope with their existence and sustain some faith in the future, however fragile this faith may be. …
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