Wheaton Wire

Issue date: 11/11/09 Section: Arts & Culture

Novelist/Playwright Merlinda Bobis recently visited campus as part of teh Evelyn Danzi Haas '39 Visiting Artists Series.

Media Credit: Noel Manu '13 / For The Wire

Novelist and playwright Merlinda Bobis gave dual presentations this week as part of her visit for the Evelyn Danzi Haas '39 Visiting Artists Series.

On Monday, Nov. 2 Bobis lectured about storytelling with the help of passages from her latest novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, and on Tuesday, Nov. 3 she performed her one-woman play River, River. Both of these works tell what Bobis describes as the "small story within the larger story," using individuals to represent larger political and social movements in her homeland of the Philippines.

Bobis talked about her creative process for much of her reading, describing in detail how she crafted the story of The Solemn Lantern Maker. The protagonist, a mute 10-year-old pauper who saves the life of an American tourist on a busy street in Manila, is based on a picture that Bobis saw in a pub.

"The story finds you," says Bobis, "and it gives you goosebumps." Bobis projected the photos that had inspired various characters and places behind her, including one of the intersection at which the main event of the novel, a drive-by shooting, happens. "My taxi stalled at the intersection," she says, and then a motorcycle zipped by her and she was swept away by the idea. She says that when inspiration strikes, "it is not you the writer doing something but something that happens to you, something to be grateful for."

River, River, her one-woman play, is set in the Philippines as well, in a small village enchanted by a magical realism reminiscent of the work of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. The protagonist, a girl named Estrella from a small village with hair twelve-meters long, is forced by the military to fish the bodies of rebels from a river using her Rapunzel-like locks. An Australian journalist soon arrives in the village and falls in love with Estrella, though their romance is doomed from the start. Bobis tells the story using a combination of spoken word and song in both in English and Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines. The presentation, although simple, was emotionally affecting.

Bobis' style, both in her performance and in the short passages that she read from her novel on Monday, skirts realism, with numerous sensual metaphors taking the place of more traditional descriptions. The result is both mystical and gut-wrenching; her award-winning play about a child prostitute is called Rita's Lullaby, the title a description of what the protagonist calls the act that makes "the big men go to sleep." Bobis said that she writes because she gets "so angry that you can hardly breath," a passion that illuminates all her work with an authentic and emotional light.

Her visit to Wheaton's campus allowed her to shine some of this light into the minds of the lucky students who were there to witness it.

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