One of the first things that struck Merlinda Bobis when she arrived from the Philippines to do her PhD at the University of Wollongong was how much Australians eat.
‘You go to a restaurant and you have a whole fish,’ says the poet and author, ‘but in the Philippines, even if we’re in the middle class, we would share that fish. It would not be for one person.’
It’s not surprising that food is the central metaphor in Bobis’s novel Banana Heart Summer.
When Nenita, the 12-year-old central character, accidentally burns the ‘weary looking, passed-over carp’ that was meant to feed her family of eight, including her five siblings, mother and recently unemployed father, her mother beats her and then throws the wok with the burnt fish and oil at her, scalding her foot.
So desperate is Nenita for her mother’s love that she does not complain but, rather, offers a little prayer later: ‘I only want to cook good, I only want to eat good, I only want to be good.’
Poverty, hunger and the violent rage of a mother whose dignity has been destroyed by her inability to feed her family are the bitter spleen of this novel whose pages are imbued with the smells, tastes and flavours of the Philippines. But as its title implies, it also has a heart, a huge heart at the centre of which lie love and compassion.
‘A lot of the issues in the book are the same as those of the Philippines,’ says Bobis, who is currently on sabbatical from the University of Wollongong to work on a new novel as a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. ‘They include child labour, poverty, hunger and domestic helpers going abroad.
‘Each time I go home my mother says the poverty is worse and we’re very lucky we’re now middle class. But you cannot close your eyes. You can be thankful, but you see the poverty. We have people knocking at the doors asking for food, money for food, and even in the village you will have a pot of rice being stolen. It tells you a lot about hunger. And apparently now in the Philippines there is a business where people get leftovers from restaurants. And then they heat it and it’s sold. I was shocked. That is really the pits.’
Banana Heart Summer is an extraordinarily moving book. At a forum on child labour, hunger,