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    The Heart of The Nation Merlinda Bobis's Banana Heart Summer

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    The document provides a summary and analysis of Merlinda Bobis's novel "Banana Heart Summer". It discusses how the novel is told from the perspective of the narrator, Nining, as an adult reflecting on her experiences as a 12-year-old in 1960s Philippines. The summary highlights that Nining recalls stories and myths from that summer, including the myth of the banana heart told by her grandmother Nana Dora. The document analyzes how the novel uses food, body, and storytelling to convey the "heartbeat of the Philippine nation" and nobility of ordinary Filipino life.

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    The Heart of The Nation Merlinda Bobis's Banana Heart Summer

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    The document provides a summary and analysis of Merlinda Bobis's novel "Banana Heart Summer". It discusses how the novel is told from the perspective of the narrator, Nining, as an adult reflecting on her experiences as a 12-year-old in 1960s Philippines. The summary highlights that Nining recalls stories and myths from that summer, including the myth of the banana heart told by her grandmother Nana Dora. The document analyzes how the novel uses food, body, and storytelling to convey the "heartbeat of the Philippine nation" and nobility of ordinary Filipino life.

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    The document provides a summary and analysis of Merlinda Bobis's novel "Banana Heart Summer". It discusses how the novel is told from the perspective of the narrator, Nining, as an adult reflecting on her experiences as a 12-year-old in 1960s Philippines. The summary highlights that Nining recalls stories and myths from that summer, including the myth of the banana heart told by her grandmother Nana Dora. The document analyzes how the novel uses food, body, and storytelling to convey the "heartbeat of the Philippine nation" and nobility of ordinary Filipino life.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    84 views3 pages

    The Heart of The Nation Merlinda Bobis's Banana Heart Summer

    Uploaded by

    m
    The document provides a summary and analysis of Merlinda Bobis's novel "Banana Heart Summer". It discusses how the novel is told from the perspective of the narrator, Nining, as an adult reflecting on her experiences as a 12-year-old in 1960s Philippines. The summary highlights that Nining recalls stories and myths from that summer, including the myth of the banana heart told by her grandmother Nana Dora. The document analyzes how the novel uses food, body, and storytelling to convey the "heartbeat of the Philippine nation" and nobility of ordinary Filipino life.

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    The Heart of the Nation

    Merlinda Bobis’s Banana Heart Summer

    Ruth Jordana S. Pison

    Close to midnight, when the heart bows from


    its stem, 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.

    Nana Dora, Banana Heart Summer

    T he twelve-year-old narrator of Merlinda Bobis’s Banana


    Heart Summer, Nining, is listening to Nana Dora. And,
    although quite peeved at the numerous aphorisms and Nana
    Dora’s know-it-all attitude, Nining goes home with the story
    of the banana heart lingering in her mind. Years later and in
    another land, Nining still remembers the myth, “the charm”
    that she has always “kept in [her] pocket ever since” (225).

    89
    Pison / The Heart of the Nation

    In Bobis’s novel set in the 1960s, the reader is treated


    to a feast, not just of a sumptuous array of Filipino food and
    recipes integrated into the narrative of Nining but to a string
    of stories and tales, both hilarious and heart-rending at the
    same time. The novel opens with a series of “whens,” the
    events that happened in the life of Nining who at forty, relates
    the story/stories of the most important summer in her life. It
    was in the 60s, remembers Nining,

    [w]hen 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 Manolito’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. (2)

    With this enumeration of events opening the novel’s


    first chapter entitled “For those who love to love and eat/For
    those who long to love and eat,” the reader gets a peek at the
    stories about to be told, all of which, although about the
    experiences of an adolescent girl in a small town in Albay,
    Bicol, are actually disquieting.

    That summer might have been a woeful one but it


    was the same summer when Nining hears the invaluable story
    of the banana heart, a myth that has since then inspired her
    to search for the first dew, the charm which will hopefully
    appease her family’s hunger and win back her cruel mother.
    And thus, begins Nining’s narration of the lives in her street
    of “sweets and spices” (3). Setting the parameters of her story,
    she says: “Let’s begin with appeasement, my first serious

    90
    Diliman Review 54, 1-4 (2007)

    business venture long ago. . . Let’s begin with a makeshift


    kitchen [Nana Dora’s], a hut with no walls, under banana
    trees in bloom” (3).

    In a novel that orchestrates metaphors of food, body,


    and narrative/story in recounting what had happened in
    Remedios street forty years ago, the reader hears and senses
    the heartbeat of the Philippine nation. In Bobis’s Banana
    Heart Summer are murmurings of the nation and the nobility
    found in the ordinary, everyday life of its people.

    Remedios Street in Her Heart

    Like the other novels included in this study (e.g.,


    Grajo Uranza’s A Passing Season, Ty-Casper’s Dream Eden,
    and Apostol’s Bibliolepsy), Banana Heart Summer‘s first few
    pages establish the “geographical” contours of the novel’s
    setting. Nining introduces the readers not only to the
    cacophonous sounds of Remedios street but also to its
    “flavors.” In a seemingly adolescent’s voice but one tinged
    with foreboding pain and air of gravity, she begins:

    From the site of her remark [Nanay Dora’s


    myth of the banana heart], I will take you
    through a tour of our street and I will tell you
    its stories. Ay, my street of wishful sweets
    and spices. All those wishes to appease
    stomachs and make hearts fat with pleasure.
    And perhaps sweeten tempers or even spice
    up a storyteller’s tongue. (3)

    But while the other novels, narrated as they are from


    either the third person point of view or from the first person
    point of view by an older narrator who relies only on words
    to describe the imagined community in the narrative, Banana
    Heart Summer, narrated by a forty-year-old woman trying to

    91

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