Local Myths in a Global World: Merlinda Bobis' White Turtle

Abstract

When a Filipina storyteller gives a performance at a writers' festival in Sydney, a mystical white turtle from her native homeland appears in the room, beguiling both audience and storyteller. Merlinda Bobis' "White Turtle" interrogates the ways in which different cultures react to 'uncanny' narratives – those tales situated between the real and the imaginary, the familiar and unfamiliar. In doing so, the story calls into question our relationships with Self and Other, Self and Self. This paper traces the geographical and mythical trajectories of "White Turtle", where distinct currents of Asian regionalism and Australian nationalism are linked by a shared, bodily experience of the uncanny, which, in this case, can be categorized as Other. More broadly, the notion of Other (may it be another nation, race, collective unconscious/mythic template, or state of existence) intertwines with the concept of the "transnational imagination" – a boundless imaginary space where anything becomes possible, including the entrance of a giant white turtle bearing the dreams of dead children. This paper follows Bobis’ character, the storyteller Lola Basyon, who travels from the Philippines to Australia, crossing more than geographical borders along the way. Much as the white turtle she conjures totes its shell, Lola inherently carries the myths and traditions of her country into the belief systems and stories of other nations, cultures, minds and bodies – that global flow of the world beyond.