In the house, the taps have dried I am searching for the water In the backyard, the pump has dried I am searching for the water Around the corner, the well has dried I am searching for the water Up the hill, the creek has drie

Bobis, Merlinda C

English

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University of WollongongResearch OnlineFaculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts2013Water-Earth (3 poems - Water Trail / Funeral of theRiver /The Flowers That Would Not Open)Merlinda C. BobisUniversity of Wollongong, mbobis@uow.edu.auResearch Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:research-pubs@uow.edu.auPublication DetailsBobis, M. C. (2013). Water-Earth (3 poems - Water Trail / Funeral of the River /The Flowers That Would Not Open). Peril (Online),(Edition 15), 1-6.Water-Earth (3 poems - Water Trail / Funeral of the River /The FlowersThat Would Not Open)AbstractIn the house, the taps have dried I am searching for the water In the backyard, the pump has dried I amsearching for the water Around the corner, the well has dried I am searching for the water Up the hill, the creekhas driedKeywordswater, earth, funeral, trail, river, poems, 3, that, flowers, would, open, notDisciplinesArts and Humanities | LawPublication DetailsBobis, M. C. (2013). Water-Earth (3 poems - Water Trail / Funeral of the River /The Flowers That Would NotOpen). Peril (Online), (Edition 15), 1-6.This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/883Water-Earth | Peril magazineCurrent Edition » Edition 15 - Peril MapWater-EarthWater-EarthWater TrailIn the house, the taps have driedI am searching for the waterIn the backyard, the pump has driedI am searching for the waterAround the corner, the well has driedI am searching for the waterUp the hill, the creek has driedI am eight and it is 38The path as dry as white boneCracking like my soles—but suddenlyFrom a distance, flowersLarge as basins and deeply pinkBut I am still searching for the waterAn hour laterSo far away from homeA trickle from a boulderAnd a catch in the throat—An old man shades his sudden tearsFrom the heat, or me—but I have seenTubig, tubig, tubig—water, water, waterFuneral of the RiverSearch Follow Peril onTwitterLike Peril ofFacebook     ABOUT ABOUT THE EDITORS SUBMISSIONSHOME CURRENT EDITION BACK EDITIONS BLOGBy Merlinda BobisWater-Earth | Peril magazineMerlinda BobisI was not here when they buried the riverWhen they moved the bank with spadesThe fragrant kamya, the unfurled bandera españolaThe bowing bamboo groves, the minty red berries, the earthAll burying the water.But I am here nowNow this road to the rice paddiesAnd my feet are bone-dryFeeling something coursing underneathAnd into me, the buried riverBreaking through like blood.The Flowers That Would Not OpenThe mute child went to the doctor, because the flowers would not open. Thedoctor listened to his heart and sent him home. So the child returned to theflowers, tended them until he was a grown man. Still, the flowers would notopen. One night, as an old man with an ailing heart, he visited the closed budsbut tripped and fell face down. The buds quivered at the touch of his lips, at thelast beat of his heart. ‘Tierra אדמה lupa  đất zeme jörð cré earth …’ it said in alltongues. And the flowers remembered how to open.* * *Writer, performer andacademic MerlindaBobis migrated toAustralia in her earlythirties, thus she feelsthat the Philippines isstill the core home ofher imaginary.While she definesherself as a Filipino-Australian, havingarrived in Australia asan adult, thePhilippines remains“indelibly marked onYou and 532 others like Perilmagazine.532 people like Perilmagazine.                     Peril magazineLikeLikeLikeLikeYou likethis.Tagsabsence activism Andy Quan apt7Article asia pacific triennialasylum seekers bisexual Buddhismchinese Composition Diana NguyenEditorial EleanorJackson Essayfemme Fiction film garyparamanathan gay gender goma HoaPham Hop DacInterviews islamophobiakaraoke Komi Sellathurai Ladiesof Colour Agency LiaIncognita LianLow Melbourne InternationalComedy Festival Ouyang Yu OwenLeong Peril MapPlays Poetry qag queerracism Sheila Pham SpiritWater-Earth | Peril magazinemy body andsensibility”. For Merlinda “writing is like a homecoming, a return to embodiedmarkings”. Against that embodied understanding of writing, she acknowledgesthat the more than twenty years she has spent in her new home of Australiahas added a new layer of markings that have challenged and enriched heroriginal sensibility. While she believes that she writes better because of thislayered (or perhaps, hybrid) cultural sensibility, she acknowledges that this isnot a “happy hybridity.” She says:“There is always the fraught push-and-pull between these two cultures in mychoice of story to tell or style to tell it with, bearing in mind that I publish inthese two cultures and for two different audiences. Each might prefersomething familiar, something closer to their own home rather than the otherhome that I inevitably bring into this telling. And of course, audience preferencedetermines the reception of one’s work. Our imaginaries (in reading as it is inwriting) are always culturally shaped.”It is a great treasure to have Merlinda contribute poems to the Peril Map as,these days, she hardly writes poetry, preferring the novel and performancethough she feels that both forms have retained the poetic voice.  As a child,she started painting before moving to poetry, a move that she says is “probablya natural transition, because poetry is still very much about image”.She wrote her first poem when she was ten, and in the Pilipino language, butmost of her early readings of poetry were in English (Poe, Rosetti,Shakespeare, Longfellow, Browning, including poetry in English by Filipinowriters). As she explains, at the time of growing up, all subjects includingliterature, were taught in English, with only one subject in Pilipino wherestudents read literature in the national language; at that time Merlinda’sregional language, Bikol, “did not even get a look-in”. About this experience,she recounts:“Such an ‘English language landscape’ was the remnant of Americancolonisation (40 years): we had ‘the full monty’ of American and Britishliterature. But I think back to that first poem at ten years old: in Pilipino.Because of my colonial heritage, my sensibility was already ‘hybrid’ even then;or one might deduce that perhaps, I was already unconsciously decolonising inmy choice of language, though after that poem I kept writing in English. Thus,to this day hybridity, border crossing, and the decolonising impetus are organicto all my works whether it is in my novel, short story, drama, or poetry. Thecore issue/question that occupies me most now, especially given the state ofour contemporary geopolitics, is how do we negotiate alterity — how can I, asWorlds Thuy Linh NguyenVisual art Vuong PhamWater-Earth | Peril magazinewriter and teacher, contribute alternative border interventions that addresssocial justice issues and facilitate an empathetic border crossing towards theother, especially the marginalised other?”Merlinda’s suite of poems, “Water Trail”, “Funeral of the River” and “TheFlowers That Would Not Open” evokes a range of landscapes, the first twounforgiving and harsh, while in the third nature opens itself to a more reciprocalrelation with its human subjects. In some senses, for those familiar withMerlinda’s work, this suite of works evokes the abject poverty and harshness ofthe life led by the mute protagonist in The Solemn Lantern Maker.  For Merlindashe sees these works as little parables, as is The Solemn Lantern Maker. Sheelaborates:“Nature could be harsh and unforgiving; it mirrors how we could be as humanbeings. This seems such a bleak view of life. But then we are struck by amoment of profound connection (though yet uncomprehended) with anotherhuman being, or with nature itself. In the poems, the child ‘sees the water’ (thetears) produced by the old man, the one who has returned to the buried riverfeels it resonant thus resurrected in her blood, and the flowers remember howto open as the old man realises that the earth and its blooming flowers areshared by all cultures — then nature gives. As we do. For the flowers to open,we have to remember that nature gives, only if we do, if we open up to thegiving/forgiving. We break the cycle of harshness, of dryness. I believeempathy, compassion, and especially love are always ‘moistured’, never dry.”In terms of the “pin-ability” of these works, Melinda has a mixed response.  Inthe first two poems in the suite, which are autobiographical, she tells the story:“When I was about eight or ten, one summer my city had the biggest drought:everything dried up. Being the eldest child, I was tasked with finding water. Ican map this Water Trail very clearly in my head. Whenever our tap and pumpdried up, I’d walk around the corner where there was the public faucet (I use‘well’ in the poem instead; a poetic choice) where the whole community queuedfor water. When it dried up, I’d cross the road and go uphill to a place calledBañadero (literally meaning ‘bathing place’) to fetch water from a spring thattrickled into a large creek where I also bathed. So I’d bathe and take home twocans of water afterwards. One day, even that spring dried up, and I couldn’treally go home without any water. Someone from the crowd of ‘water fetchers’said that further uphill, there was water. So I followed the crowd of mostlyadults in a long trek uphill to a place I’d never been to before. The walk felt likeforever. All the time, I was afraid my very strict mother would scold me fortaking so long, but at the same time, I couldn’t go home without water;Water-Earth | Peril magazinemoreover, if I turned back on my own, I could lose my way. So I kept climbingthe hill with the crowd. And this is the most wondrous image that’s imprinted inme: along the way, from afar, I saw this sprawling white bungalow (a rich man’shouse) with a yard full of blooming pink flowers so large! Until now, I do notknow what flowers they were and how in the world that house could have thoseblooming giant flowers in that drought. Finally, we arrived at this boulder thathad a little trickle of water. All queued patiently for a long time, because it wassuch a thin trickle to fill up so many containers. I got my two cans of preciouswater and walked back home with the crowd. As expected, I was severelyscolded by my mother who was so worried as I’d been away for about two tothree hours. I might have cried because of this scolding, so in real life, it wasnot the old man in the poem that ‘produced his own water’ but ten-year oldme.”For the final poem, however, she recollects being a child in the sixties,spending summer holidays with her grandmother in the village of Estancia.“No electricity, no running water, but we had a well. And a few metres’ walkaway was a spring where my aunties and I used to bathe or do laundry. Itcoursed into a waterway that flowed through the rice paddies towards a river.In the nineties, when I was already living in Australia, I went home to thePhilippines and, with my mother, to Estancia, when I was researching my novelFish-Hair Woman. We visited the spring, but it had disappeared! ‘Dinagaan na,’my mother said in Bikol: meaning, it had been filled with earth. We stood there,on earth, knowing that underneath our soles was the buried water. I rememberthis clearly: we stood there and faintly I heard the now faraway river roaring.”What is also roaring in the distance for Merlinda, is more stories; her practiceseems rich, busy and a clear reflection of the fact that she feels “very much amulti-tasker in relation to story-making”. Merlinda wants to do more than just“tell stories”, she wants to facilitate others’ telling of stories because “story-making keeps us grounded, keeps up those border crossings, thus keeps usconnected with each other”.To that end, she is working on two novels (one in its final revision, and theother just getting started), doing small performances of River, River, her playadaptation of Fish-Hair Woman, and developing a community project onregenerating Illawarra waters and the cultures and communities around themthrough storytelling. Reflective also of elements of her pieces in the Peril Map,these projects, including the novels, are about water as resource and territory,and “as the lifeblood of community”.Water-Earth | Peril magazineShare this:This primacy of community, and the integral role of resources and theenvironment in this connected system is a core concern for Merlinda.  Shestates:“Locally and globally, resource and territory are always sites of contestation,even violence. These human contests are harshly arid and unforgiving. In Fish-Hair Woman, there’s a village wake that brings out deeply seated conflicts andresentments, and one character proffers this insight: ‘… there is never anymoisture in malice. Malice is always deprived.’ (p 270). But there’s always thepossibility of empathy, even love — and love is always ‘moistured’, never dry.We must remember that the search for water, that often arduous water trail,leads us back to ourselves but always in relation to the other and the widercommunity.”interview with Eleanor Jackson, Peril Poetry EditorThis entry was posted in Current Edition, Edition 15 - Peril Map and taggedBañadero, decolonising, Estancia, Fish-Hair Woman, Funeral of the River, Illawarra,Merlinda Bobis, Philippines, River, The Flowers That Would Not Open, The SolemnLantern Maker, Water Trail, Water-Earth on July 14, 2013 by Merlinda Bobis.About Merlinda BobisMap data ©2013 GTerms of UseFacebook Twitter Google +1 EmailWater-Earth | Peril magazineFilipino-Australian writer, performer, and academic Merlinda Bobiswrites in three languages: English, Pilipino, Bikol. She haspublished three novels, a collection of short stories, five poetrybooks, a monograph on creative research, and scholarly essays oncreative-critical production, militarism, migration, and thetransnational imaginary. She has received various awards for herworks, among them the Prix Italia (Radio Fiction) and the AustralianWriters’ Guild Award (Radio Play) for Rita’s Lullaby; the SteeleRudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian ShortStories, the Philippine National Book Award, and the Judges’Choice Award (Bumbershoot Bookfair, Seattle Arts Festival) forWhite Turtle / The Kissing (US title); the Carlos Palanca MemorialAward for Literature for her poetry; and the Philippine BalagtasAward, a lifetime award for her fiction and poetry in English, Pilipinoand Bikol. Her poetry book Summer was a Fast Train withoutTerminals was short-listed for The Age Poetry Book Award, and hernovel Banana Heart Summer, for the Australian Literature SocietyGold Medal. This novel also received the Philippine Golden BookAward. Her latest novel Fish-Hair Woman will be adapted into aplay in Pilipino by the Harlequin Theatre Company (Manila). Bobis’ssix plays have been performed/produced, some as her one-womanshow, in Australia, Philippines, US, Spain, Canada, France, China,Thailand, and the Slovak Republic. As a multi-genre writer and aperformer for stage and radio, Bobis has worked with artists fromvarious disciplines. She teaches Creative Writing at University ofWollongong, Australia. About her creative process, she writes:‘Writing visits like grace. In an inspired moment we almost believethat anguish can be made bearable and injustice can be overturned,because they can be named. And if we’re lucky, joy can even bemultiplied, so we may have reserves in the cupboard for the leantimes.’ Author’s website: http://www.merlindabobis.com.auView all posts by Merlinda Bobis →

Water-Earth (3 poems - Water Trail / Funeral of the River /The Flowers That Would Not Open)

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Water-Earth (3 poems - Water Trail / Funeral of the River /The Flowers That Would Not Open)

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