Merlinda Bobis’ In the Name of the Trees beguiles with its intricate prose and compressed poetics. In less than 150 pages, it tells the story of four generations of Bikol women, all of whom must, in various ways, resist and adapt to the colonisation and violent regimes of the Philippines.
Its capacious text demonstrates the ways in which present and past are inextricably bound, and how acts of violence disrupt the very divisions and boundaries they attempt to enforce. Throughout the novel, myths, stories, secrets and truths are powerful forces that bind and heal, create and destroy.
Review: In the Name of the Trees – Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex)
Bobis is a Filipino-Australian writer, poet and artist. Her extensive …
Merlinda Bobis’ In the Name of the Trees beguiles with its intricate prose and compressed poetics. In less than 150 pages, it tells the story of four generations of Bikol women, all of whom must, in various ways, resist and adapt to the colonisation and violent regimes of the Philippines.
Its capacious text demonstrates the ways in which present and past are inextricably bound, and how acts of violence disrupt the very divisions and boundaries they attempt to enforce. Throughout the novel, myths, stories, secrets and truths are powerful forces that bind and heal, create and destroy.
Review: In the Name of the Trees – Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex)
Bobis is a Filipino-Australian writer, poet and artist. Her extensive body of work includes plays, radio performances, essays, four novels and six collections of poetry. Her novel Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015) won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Philippine National Book Award. Her last book The Kindness of Birds (2021) was also shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award and the Steele Rudd Award.
Merlinda Bobis. Mude/Spinifex Press
In the Name of the Trees is the second book in a thematic trilogy, following The Kindness of Birds, with a third book planned on the world of fish.
The novel begins in Canberra, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, with a short and enigmatic opening scene. Seventeen-year-old Dao is in bed watching her grandmother, Lola Narra, and her mother, Pili, argue out of earshot over a “bath basin of lukewarm water, the white plate with the little book, the holy oil, the candle and the matches”.
It is clear that a ritual of some kind is planned, but exactly what kind of ritual is left unspecified. It hangs over the story until the frame closes, or at least partially closes, at the very end of the book.
We discover early on that Dao is partially paralysed following a car accident that killed her father. But this is not a novel exploring Dao’s individual psyche and experience of paralysis. Rather, her story is threaded into a network of stories, some of which feel like histories, others like emerging and as yet unfinished myths.
This strategy of under-determining Dao’s experience of paralysis and grief, while leaning into ancestral stories and the pasts of her mother and grandmother, challenges expectations about narrative emphasis – about foreground and background and subjectivity.
What emerges is a striking polyvocal story that insists on relationship and connection as primary forces, over and above the individual character arc.
Traumatic histories
The title works by substitution and ellipsis. It echoes a Christian prayer, replacing “Father” with “trees”, and leaving out “the Son and the Holy Ghost”. This just the first of many moves to subvert dominant colonial and patriarchal structures. The novel is interested in the malleability and hybridity of such structures at the level of lived experience.
That a book titled In the Name of the Trees begins in Australia’s bush capital is no accident. In a novel that dramatises the devastating effects of successive waves of colonisation and invasion on the Indigenous people of the Philippines, Bobis does not forget that Australia is a settler colony with its own history of violence. Garal, the Wiradjuri name for wattle, is an integral part of the book’s overall vision.
Throughout the novel, Bobis controls time precisely and strategically. The lives of her characters intersect with some of the most violent events in Philippine history. While it is unflinching about the atrocities, the novel emphasises lives lived over grand narratives, and particularly prioritises the lives of women. By shifting perspectives between the four generations of women, including Dao’s great-great-grandmother Lola Banaba, Bobis explores the ways in which traumatic histories of colonial violence influence both material worlds and intimate relationships.
Tensions emerge between generations over the question of how to negotiate colonial power as colonised Indigenous people. The older women prioritise survival, especially holding onto one’s land no matter the price, even if that ultimately includes accepting the advances of the colonial master. The younger Pili resents what she experiences as her mother’s servitude.
In the Name of the Trees makes it clear that the colonial situation distorts and prevents relationships based on equality and justice. The original violence is perpetuated, ultimately begetting misery for the colonial family as well as the Indigenous population, though the scales of suffering are always skewed.
The importance of language
Language is an important theme throughout the book. Bobis pays attention not just to what language is spoken, or how well it is spoken, but the ways in which language, particularly naming, plays a part in either recording or erasing the past.
Bikol, Spanish, the Latin of the Catholic Church and binomial naming systems, as well as words in Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal, are all incorporated. The reader who has only English must adopt a different approach to reading. Although a lot of the unfamiliar language is glossed, accepting moments of partial understanding is part of the experience.
In Bobis’ intricate prose, a particular understanding of language emerges, one where its capacities for permeability, motility and inference are primary. This becomes important as young Dao struggles to communicate with her Bikol-speaking grandmother. In Australia, Dao’s mother insists that Dao speak only English. This as much about closing the door on her past as it is about wanting Dao to excel at school. Yet Dao works hard to decode her grandmother’s words and expand her understanding of the language in defiance of her mother’s prohibition.
As might be expected, trees are integral and active participants in the book. They offer shelter, medicine and food; they mark territories and are often the source of origin stories. Trees are part of the genealogy of the women in the story and they are powerful determining forces – the women who are named for them take on the qualities of the trees.
Each chapter is named for a tree and includes a short epigraph giving information about the specific tree’s habitat, features and uses. Trees are also metaphors. In the conversation between the young Dao and her grandmother, they are “mata-4: four eyes” (mata is Bikol for “eyes”). They offer new and multiple ways of understanding the world and its histories. “Trees are not only for looking,” the novel tells us. “They look back.” Metaphors are about seeing “more that what’s seen and what we wish to see”.
Family trees are often used to represent genealogies, but in Bobis’ novel they go well beyond representing the family lineage. “So what’s a tree? Ay, something rooted on earth before reaching sky, like you”, Dao’s grandmother tells her.
In Bobis’ vision, trees become a way of understanding the past not as a linear and grand narrative, but rather as organic process. Entangled, at times fused, living and mutable. Transplanted, sometimes cut down, yet relentless, even in the face of oppression and injustice. Whether they are capable of healing deep injuries and the traumas of violent histories remains to be seen.