Filipina-Australian
writer Merlinda Bobis’s new work Locust
Girl: a love song is a surreal allegory on the divide between selfish
privilege and disenfranchised victimhood.
The
protagonist is a young woman, Amedea, who is saved after ten years’ burial
under the bones of her 500-strong community controlled in its movements and its
memories by the authorities of the Five Kingdoms. Both are separated by a forbidden border
which sees one group condemned to hunger and thirst, to an absence of colour
and vegetation, to personal and species infertility, and to thought
manipulation and control via speaker boxes; the other exists in a paranoid
defence and protection of the one remaining refuge of food, water, colour and
trees.
For
three or more generations these two binary communities have coexisted in
fearful opposition and containment. The
first group are the wasters, punished by the second, the carers, for their alleged
inability to look after the resources they once had. For their own good, the carers argue, these
resources had to be protected behind a boundary that the wasters are forbidden
to approach on pain of death. Sometimes
the death is personal, imposed on “strays” who approach or cross the border; sometimes
it is communal, as was the case with Amedea’s village. In the case of the latter, the descriptions
of the explosions and fires that leave charred stumps of limb portions on the
survivors suggest the phosphorous bombs that the Israelis use against Palestinian
communities in the Gaza Strip.
Amadea’s
compellingly readable story combines the contemporary reality of refugee camps
and asylum seekers braving the journey to the forbidden horizon with the fantasy
of a girl who has the mark of the locust on her brow and an inability to
control its whirring noise and its song-making.
Bobis teases the reader with Amedea’s experience of artefacts unknown to
her but which are part of our daily lives: we see them as Amedea sees them and
their true nature is revealed through the guesswork and conjecture of our own
engagement with the text. At times we
seem to be in a hall of distorted mirrors where the distortions only serve to
more accurately reflect the reality of our societies and our times.
At the
story’s heart is the malevolence of imperialism and its mercenary and parsimonious
protection of the little that is left of its plunder of the remainder of the
world. This is no pointer to the future:
the future is now and we live the border and the divide.
The
danger to the hoarders of the green remnant is the memory of the
dispossessed. They are not merely
controlled in their physical movement; they are controlled in the intellectual domain
of memory. If there is any salvation for
the wretched of Bobis’s earth, it is memory, the fire from which a phoenix of
resistance might eventually arise. The
destruction of a community’s shared memory is the means to its enforced
passivity and control, failing which there is the phosphorous bomb.
Bobis
dedicates this book not just to those “walking to the border for dear life” but
also to those “guarding the border for dear life”. If they are binary opposites then each is
condemned to suffer, and within each there is movement towards the opposite:
traitors among the wasters and persons of compassion among the carers. When Amedea utters an anguished string of ten
phrases preceded by “why” it is Verompe, a cross-border carer who observes
resignedly “Why is terrifying”.
As we
observe borders being removed for the movement of capital and reinforced for
the movement of people with all the terrifying inhumanity and indifference to
suffering, we must force ourselves to confront the most terrifying aspect of
our lives, the question of “Why?”.
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