Archipelagic thinking in Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman corpus

ABSTRACT

Following Édouard Glissant’s lead, archipelagic thinking challenges neocolonial epistemes and methodologies in imagining alternative relations among difference. It offers productive lines of thought in relation to Southeast Asia, which has historically been marginalized in the global imaginary. This article examines archipelagic thinking’s potential to rewrite this metageography through a reading of Merlinda Bobis’s narratives of the Fish-Hair Woman who trawls the river with her magical hair for victims of the 1980s Philippine communist counter-insurgency in the fictional town of Iraya, Philippines. Recuperating neglected geographies and histories through storytelling and deploying magical realism by way of deconstructing hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies, these narratives subvert centre–periphery dynamics by endowing the Philippines with cultural specificity and mythic significance while positioning it as a zone of cultural exchange and interconnectedness. Through them, Bobis articulates a model for negotiating relations among difference characterized by fluidity and respect, in alignment with Glissant’s relationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Merlinda Bobis
• Fish-Hair Woman
• Philippine literature
• archipelagic thinking
• Édouard Glissant
• magical realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The definition of an archipelago is complicated by its vulnerability to environmental events and the construction of artificial archipelagos in the 21st century. This destabilization of meaning is central to the archipelagic framework (Stephens and Martínez-San Miguel 2020, 1–44).

2. The term was popularized during World War II by the British to demarcate regions for warfare. Prior to and alongside it, the region has also been organized along other conceptual lines such as “Nanyang”, “Nusantara”, and “Sundaland”, which do not map neatly onto what is recognized today as Southeast Asia.

3. This differentiates archipelagic thinking from, while allowing it to engage in productive dialogue with, other frameworks that privilege difference such as assemblages (Stephens and Martínez-San Miguel 2020, 18).

4. Examples of mermaids in Southeast Asian mythology include the Filipino Sirenas, Magindaras, and Kataws; the Thai and Khmer Suvannamaccha/Sovann Maccha; and the Malaysian Duyung. Additionally, regional cultures steeped in Hindu, Javanese, and Sudanese mythologies have Matsyāṅganā and Nyai Roro Kidul.

5. In Bobis’s native Bikolano, “Iraya” means “from where the water flows, the wellspring in the hills” (2011, 57).

6. Fish-Hair Woman cites such “covert ‘translations of difference’ that facilitate the entry of the Other story through the gate” (Bobis 2010, 3) in Inez’s denouncement of foreign writers “who take because they can, because they don’t have to answer for the taking, or for whatever they’ve taken” (Glissant 2010, 11).

7. Estrella attempts to rewrite the narrative and “depart from the blood trail” by imagining the dead alive and the coffee grove, a murder site, a place of communion (Bobis 2012, 56) while Pay Inyo tells the soldiers stories to buy the communists time to escape in order to avoid conflict (199).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore under Start-Up Grant (No.04INS000799C420).

Notes on contributors

Cheryl Julia Lee

Cheryl Julia Lee is Assistant Professor in the English Division of the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has published essays in Textual Practice, Asiatic, and TEXT. Her research interests include contemporary Southeast Asian literature and culture.