Merlinda Bobis explores four generations of colonialism and violence in the Phillipines

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.

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.