Resilience and healing in the slums of Manila: Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker

Abstract

The Solemn Lantern Maker by Filipina-Australian author Merlinda Bobis challenges and criticizes hegemonic racist and sexist capitalist tenets sustaining militarized globalization in the aftermath of the attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. Pub-lished in Australia in 2008 and in the USA in 2009, the action takes us to the megalop-olis of Manila, moving back and forth from the misery of the slums to the luxurious hotels for foreign tourists or the consumerist Christmas frenzy in “the largest shop-ping center in Asia” (Bobis 2008, 89). The narrative addresses tough realities such as extreme poverty, the prostitution of children, police brutality and political corruption, and it puts these apparently Philippine matters in direct relation to globalization and its war on terror . With its recurrent refrain “ I know a story you don’t know ”, the novel exposes epistemic violence and belongs with those stories that “inquire after the miss-ing, the deported, the detained, the de-remembered, and the dead” (Dauphinee and Masters 2007, viii).