A Motionless Childhood

A MOTIONLESS CHILDHOOD: MEMOIRS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD IN RURAL POST-WAR PHILIPPINES Julieta D. Gibbons BA (ENGLISH & DRAMA) UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS, MANILA BA (ENGLISH HONS & CLASSICS) UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE, NSW MEMOIR AND EXEGESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY IN CREATIVE WRITING. Faculty of Education and Arts School of Humanities and Social Sciences UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE NOVEMBER, 2015 1 STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository**, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. **Unless an Embargo has been approved for a determined period. 2 For Benjamin, Jordan and Sarah. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m deeply indebted to my supervisors Doctors Keri Glastonbury and Kim Cheng Boey for their encouragements, direction and patient tutelage throughout the writing of my memoir and exegesis. Thank you both for your gift of friendship. I’d also like to thank the gentle Helen Moffatt for all her assistance and for preventing me on two occasions from withdrawing from the course; bless you. My thanks and appreciation to my friend Jenny for her optimism and her trust in my writing; and to dear Vicki for her patient reading of my drafts in search for bad tenses and “strange” sentence constructions. And lastly, my endless gratitude to Norman for always being there. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART ONE A MOTIONLESS CHILDHOOD: MEMOIRS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD IN RURAL POST-WAR PHILIPPINES. CHAPTER ONE: THE TAMARIND TREE: THE PRE-SCHOOL YEARS 8 CHAPTER TWO: THE SCHOOL AT THE OLD RICE MILL 45 CHAPTER THREE: THE SANTOL TREE 71 CHAPTER FOUR: A SIMPLE FAITH: A LUNCH WITH YOLLY 127 PART TWO A SYNTHESIZED CHILDHOOD: A LITERARY JOURNEY TOWARDS A NARRATIVE OF THE SELF PROLOGUE 145 CHAPTER ONE: ON MEMOIRS: WHY WE WRITE THEM 152 CHAPTER TWO: THE WRITING PROCESS 179 EPILOGUE 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY 196 5 SYNOPSIS The initial despondency that followed my mother’s death and the realisation of the total erasure of the landscape that featured in my early childhood propelled my need to recover it all. Writing down my story seemed the only recourse to transform it from mere memory into tangible material encapsulating the Philippines, that beloved home of my birth, its people and its landscape. There are two parts to this project. The first is the creative component comprising four chapters of a memoir that aims to reclaim the world of my early childhood: its colours, scents, sounds and the beloved voices of the figures peopling it. This is a world reconstructed from fragments of memories, collected and collated with the imagination in order to paint with words a portrait of a time and place that hopefully captures their beauty and innocence. The first three chapters of Part One are a grouping of memories strung together to tell complete narratives of my “Pre-school Years,” the “First Year of School” and the three years spent in “Bamban” with my grandparents. Chapter Four is intended to be a coda to the early childhood memoirs. This coda is reflective writing about the now-adult narrator, who is an immigrant in Australia. In this chapter, two childhoods from the past are interlaced through flashbacks. It is also a story of the interplay of the lives of two immigrant friends as they carve new lives in their adopted homeland of the present. Part Two is comprised of an exegesis in two chapters. There is also a prologue which describes the beginnings of this literary journey: of my trip back home with the passing away of my mother and the decision to write my memoir in English, which is the language of my Pilipino/Australian children and the language of my adopted home, Australia. Chapter One is a short study of the definition of the memoir and the use of memory and imagination in the writing of this reflective autobiographical genre. There are discussions on why we write memoirs and to illustrate these, the works of St. Augustine, Edmund Gosse, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty and Maxine Hong Kingston are discussed. Chapter Two is a discussion of the writing process. This chapter includes brief analyses of the styles I used in my memoir: of multiple points of view, which is the interlacing of the child’s and the narrator’s voices and the integration of the second person point of view in order to involve the reader. There is also a discussion about the use of dialogue. The Epilogue includes a brief personal evaluation of the memoir and the writing process. 6 A MOTIONLESS CHILDHOOD: Memoirs of Early Childhood in Rural Post-War Philippines The house, like fire and water, will permit me, […] to recall flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected. In this remote region, memory and imagination remain associated, each one working for their mutual deepening. In the order of values, they both constitute a community of memory and image. ... Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. And when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. (Gaston Bachelard 5-6; first emphasis is mine; second emphasis in original.) 7 CHAPTER ONE: THE TAMARIND TREE: THE PRE-SCHOOL YEARS I can recall a fragment of memory from the distant past which I believe was my first awareness of having arrived. It was about the same time I realised I was responding to a word that referred expressly to me. It happened naturally as though it might have been that way forever. That word and I were one entity. No one else in my world answered to it but me. It could be said with fondness and affection in my direction; or it could be a call to play, to smile, to eat or drink; or it could be called out with the note of threat or anger. In whatever way it was called out or spoken, it defined my presence, my cognition, my primal distinctiveness. I remember this time clearly, as though I’m looking down at it now through a lens in my mind. I wake up next to Mother. I’m in a familiar place, and I know instantly that I belong there, am glad to be there. Mother is lying on her side facing the other way. She’s breast-feeding a little baby. Father is sitting next to her, an arm hugging the curve of her hips. Realising that I’ve sat up, he smiles. “Little Julia is awake,” he tells Mother. There is also another chip of memory which comes from very far away in time—so far away and so long ago, it seems like a dream. I know it happened because I can see it plainly through the same lens in my mind. The lens is focussed into a little room in another part of our house. I am very small and have to pull myself up to get onto my feet. And there I am, standing in front of another figure. We are looking at each other. We are of the same height and this figure seems to be doing every movement I’m doing. We are slapping at each other’s hands. Now, I’m trying to press my mouth at her face but my lips can only feel the hard surface between us. It feels cool and smooth in the warmth of the day. ~ I must have been very naughty at times—and Mother had a quick temper. Sometimes, I would climb up onto the window sill in the main room of our house, pull myself up on top of the armoire and go through the little manhole directly above it and hide in the ceiling. It was dusty and small up there and the unpolished 8 whole bamboo poles were rough, I had to move carefully or they’d move and turn, but it was a grand space nevertheless because it was secret. Up there you could cry quietly, feel resentful. And then you thought you would stay up there forever—they would soon be looking for you and they’d be so sorry not to see you ever again. And if you stayed quiet, no one would ever guess where you were. No one else would make you feel better, no one else loved you, except that somebody, that someone in your mind who was always present with you. But soon the sun would burn through the corrugated tin roof. And heat like a sweltering cloak pressed heavily on you, making you sweat profusely and your eyes would sting from the salty oil and liquid that seeped out of your skin. The heat would set your head to pound and pins and needles would run down your ears and your neck and you could hardly breathe.

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