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River, River

by Merlinda Bobis

This March, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, Merlinda Bobis, will perform her play 'River, River' and present a keynote paper at University of Zaragoza's international literature conference in Spain. The conference titled "Between the Urge to Know and the Need to Deny: Ethics and Trawma in Contemporary Narrative in English" will be held from 26-28 March 2009.

‘River, River’ (One-act solo performance adapted from Bobis’ short story Fish-Hair Woman) by writer-performer Merlinda Bobis
Music: ‘Pasyon’ chanting style of the Bitabara family (in recorded performance by the Filipino-Australian River choir). Compositions by Sarah de Jong.
Soundscape: Jane Ulman and Russell Stapleton

To keep a place alive in your heart, it must dwell in your mouth.
And so the river is spoken and sung — and all the beloved thrown into the water.

Estrella Capili, the Fish-Hair Woman, uses her twelve-metre hair to trawl corpses from the river in Iraya, a militarised village in the Philippines. The river has become the dumping ground of victims of summary executions. Each time a body is thrown into the river, the water changes flavour: from river sweetness to brine, then later, to lemon grass. Is this myth? A trick of memory? An attempt of the village to story itself out of grief? Estrella remembers a night with no moon but lit by fireflies. She is taken by the soldiers to the river to retrieve a body from the water.

This cross-genre play marries storytelling and drama with poetry and music (traditional Philippine chanting and Western music). The chanting is based on the Pasyon, the traditional chanting of ‘The Passion of Christ’ during Holy Week celebrations. While the play is about the total war of 1987, it hopes to accommodate a bigger world beyond one Philippine village.

More information

Merlinda Bobis http://merlindabobis.com/
Zaragoza International literature conference http://cne.literatureresearch.net/conference/

Download Programme

Faculty of Creative Arts
University of Wollongong
March 2009