0 - Eureka Street

wait for its first dew. It will drop like a
gem. Catch it with your tongue. When
you eat the heart of the matter, you'll
never grow hungry again.'
All of the characters who inhabit
Remedios Street are suffering from their
own hungers. Some of them are drawn
together by their mutual hunger, others
are torn apart; some survive their hardships,
others don't.
In the opening paragraph of the novel,
the adult Nenita is looking back at that
summer when she was 12:
When we laid my baby sister in a shoebox,
when all the banana hearts in our
street were stolen, when Tiyo Anding
stepped out of a window perhaps to fly,
when I saw guavas peeking from Manalito's
shorts and felt I'd die of shame, when
Roy Orbison went as crazy as Patsy Cline
and lovers eloped, sparking a scandal so
fiery that even the volcano erupted and,
as a consequence, my siblings tasted their
first American corned beef, then Mother
looked at me again, that was the summer I
ate the heart of the matter.
There is so much in that paragraph,
from pathos and tragedy to humour and
redemption, that is laid out on a platter
to whet the appetite of the reader for the
details, the recipes, the mix of language
and food and human nature that make
up this dish.
Remedios Street is a microcosm of a
world in which hunger and want coexist
with wealth, in which the promise of
the church is never far removed from the
threat of the volcano. Though it is about a
small street in the Philippines, it is also,
as Sharan Burrow said, about larger 'communities
of hunger'.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans has shown us that the balance
between wealth and want, between
haves and have-nots, can tip precariously,
and sometimes catastrophically, in unexpected
places.
After Katrina, which brought a Third
World flood to the First, it was the compassion
of ordinary humans that ultimately
surfaced, highlighting the muddy reality
of officialdom's inability to cope with
basic human needs in a time of crisis.
'We are living in an era in which
compassion is no longer a part of the discourse,'
Bobis says. 'It's all hard-line foreign
policy in how we treat each other,
impregnable demarcation lines, the border
of the other and us.
'I thought you could talk about very
basic things: food, hunger, mother love. The
enemy feels the same hunger, and maybe if
we can find a connection, then we can put
ourselves in the shoes of the other.'
At heart, says Bobis, Banana Heart
Summer is 'a book about forgiveness, a book
about compassion for the mother, compassion
for even someone who has hurt you.
'In a way it is an act of neighbouring
with the enemy, it's crossing the border.
And in that way you're doing yourself a
favour because you're balancing your
heart and spleen.'
•
Banana Heart Summer, Merlinda Bobis.
Murdoch Books Australia/Pier 9, 2005.
ISBN 1 740 45590 8, RRP 29.95.
Robert Hefner is the acting editor of
Eureka Street.
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NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2005 EUREKA STREET 35