Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman: Showcasing Asian Australianness, putting the question of justice in its place^*

* The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO; code FFI2012-32719), and by the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF; code H05).

Abstract

Fish-Hair Woman took 17 years to write and was rejected by six publishers – the “gatekeepers” of the Australian publishing industry, according to Bobis. One of main problems when trying to locate the novel as Asian Australian is that it is set in a militarized village in the Philippines, and therefore Australia and the Australian story occupy only a marginal position. This article will study the novel’s attempt to dilute and reverse this centrality by immersing white Australian characters in foreign and dangerous Asian settings. Some theories put forward by trauma and memory studies will also be used to show how Fish-Hair Woman manages to dig up individual traumatic memories from their ruins so that the painful collective past can somehow be reconstructed and brought to the surface, the memory of the disappeared can finally be honoured, and resilience can pave the way for hope in a better future.

Keywords:

• Merlinda Bobis
• magical realism
• Asian Australian stories
• Marcos’s Total War
• traumatic memory
• shame

Notes

* The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO; code FFI2012-32719), and by the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF; code H05).

1. Estrella and her prodigious hair inevitably bring to mind the figure of Medusa, the Greek mythological guardian. However, whereas Medusa’s monstrosity is endowed with an utterly negative nature, Estrella’s fate consists in using her hair to allow the living to retrieve, mourn and pay their due respect to the dead. In an attempt to look for connections with contemporary literary texts, interesting similarities can be found between Bobis’s Estrella and the Salt Fish Girl, the eponymous heroine of Canadian professor Larissa Lai’s 2002 novel, which also encompasses stories of many varieties, including fantastical fiction and magical realism.