Post-Apocalypse Literature in the Age of Unrelenting Borders and Refugee Crises: Merlinda Bobis and Australian Fiction

Abstract

This essay analyses Filipino–Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s novel Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), winner of the Christina Stead Prize for fiction, in the context of the post-apocalyptic Golden Age we are living in and the much-celebrated dystopian Australian tradition. Bobis’s novel is a futuristic political fable that describes a girl’s magical and nightmarish journey through an indeterminate border in a context of environmental and human apocalypse. It foresees ecological disasters of unprecedented dimensions and warns that the damage done to the planet and the largest part of humanity may end up being irreversible. Moreover, it tackles other truths so far exclusively denounced by realist narratives, namely, the Australian government policy on refugees. Some trauma theories, together with Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and Agamben’s notion of “bare life”, will be used to analysee the ways in which Locust Girl denounces the lethal effects of globalized undeterred capitalism and unitary and exclusive forms of nationalism, which are mainly responsible for the enforcement of unfair border laws and the inhuman treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers in the so-called “civilized” world, and in particular in Australia as one important member of the Pacific region. On the other hand, this essay also relies on Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “the posthuman” to show that Locust Girl also testifies to the power of women’s agency and transnational relationships in order to offer some hope of rebirth through suffering and love.

• Australian Refugee Crisis
• Bare Life
• Necropolitics
• Post-apocalypse Literature
• Posthumanism
• Trauma

Notes

1 The idea that Asian Australian women’s stories can be classified as “confessional” narratives, often in the form of (disguised) autobiography, has become commonplace in western literary circles (Khoo 2003, 149). However, Wong contends that the publication of works that dare to introduce new styles and content in Asian Australian women’s literature is clearly succeeding in broadening the area, while bringing to the fore rather more disturbing global issues that do away with the celebratory spirit with which a number of scholars interpreted globalization processes at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Hence, Wong’s distinction between “literature of Necessity” and “literature of Extravagance”, which she describes as rhetorical opposites. Whereas “Necessity” is seen as “contained, survival-driven and conservation-minded”, “Extravagance” entails “freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism” (1993, 13). However, according to Wong, the two sides of this coin should be seen as complementary, and thus taken into consideration when analysing this kind of texts, since they provide the tools required to transcend the stereotyped educative purposes which this literature, so often labelled as “ethnic”, is said to promote.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (METI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) [FFI2015-65775-P].