The Sun Swallows Me Whole
THE HAUNT PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
Nonfiction by Tamara Montina
I dreamt of you, Ma. Of your soft voice that sang me morning hymns, of your calloused hands, freckled and brown. We were more than sun kissed. Our skin dipped in bronze syrup, encased in gold and polished with beeswax. I dreamt of those hands lightly caressing the crown of my head, your fingers edging downwards, drawing abstract shapes at the nape of my neck. Those hands were everything you hated about yourself, and everything you hated about me.
If conversations between co-existing bodies were a language in itself, this was our dialect. It was our variation, our revision of the mother-child dyad. Words so often fail us; always the wrong letters/words/sentences/lectures at the wrong time. Instead, touch was our love language.
As we stepped into that simple house held together with concrete squares and love, I saw on your face a smile that revealed how good it was to be home. Here was a place to lay your head during the night, even when the rain seeped through the corrugated, metal ceiling as you tried to sleep. A dripping of soft tears pooled in quiet corners, its tapping melding into a dissonant orchestra arising from sprawled bodies snoring. I hid under a softened quilt with you by my side.
During the day, that house was a place to leave; to leave quickly and to escape into the sun. Outside, ivory sand was inlaid with pebbles and corrugated conch shells; dotted with trees, spindly and fuzzy, bearing families of coconuts. I saw the children, barefoot and topless, running headlong toward the ocean. Against the foaming tides, uninhibited, concentrated laughter echoed from mid-morning till a quiet indigo darkness fell. I was filled with a new-found sense of liberation and happiness.
Out at sea, bangka boats were docked at the lip of the waves, nets kissed the face of the water, each one held steady by brown men with toned arms. Pink jellyfish belled and billowed below the skin of the water. I felt their sting; hot and lingering. My stomach filled with salted bubbles as I pushed my narrow hips up to the edge of the water, floating like the puffy clouds trailing above. I’d imagine prodding their swollen bellies with an extended finger. Floating amongst the mid-morning stars, I counted each one with a click of my tongue. I sprawled my slender arms and legs across the ocean face; water sat above my ears, and below my rounded chin. Enveloped voices and laughter fused with the hard silence of the ocean floor. I breathed out. Serenity.
This is how I see you and me, as if looking into the water’s reflection would show me your face too.
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This dream breathes in a story from a summer in 2008, reflecting a quaint seaside village in the Southern Province of the Philippines. We were there on an all-expenses-paid trip, thanks to my aunt who had won a lottery. Her gift to herself, and to us, was to return our disbanded family tree to our motherland. Once there, my mother paraded us around; her steps light with the certainty of her own belonging to this place; her body not needing to be braced against condescension or being asked to repeat herself in English. She was with people who looked like her, who understood her. She was home.
Since I first breathed in that province air, I have been determined to always remember it.
I was still a child, not even a teenager then, when I discovered for the first time the simple beauty and richness of my culture. Years later, that insight comes to me only as waves that ebb and flow; never offering smooth sailing. I am Australian born, detached and disconnected from my heritage, but those memories are a single, tenuous thread to my Filipino roots. I know if I am not careful, I will lose this cache of memories, sitting so delicately at the edge of my mind.
‘Half’ Filipino. I had never truly known, experienced, or understood that ‘half’ of myself until my time in the Philippines. Instead, I was growing up in a society with a parent who conditioned me to believe that I am not Filipino, but the daughter of a white man, perfectly assimilated.
As a child, I vividly remember attending office parties for my father’s carpentry company, which he managed poorly. On first introduction, his obnoxious colleagues would lean toward me and ask about my cultural background. My father would always interject confidently, “She is Australian”. This, I learned, would only ensure interrogations: “What are you, really?”
I was only five years old when I was told that I was not allowed to learn Tagalog, because I was Australian. And whilst it may not be my mother-tongue, Filipino is my mother’s tongue. A tongue that was ignorantly stripped from my mouth by heavy hands. My soul pried open, raw, and grieving. My white father did this before I could even utter the words ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ in the language that should-have-been. I have been mourning that loss since.
I felt it in the absence of understanding when I sat below my mother’s feet, pillow held to my heart, to watch Filipino dramas without a single line of subtitles. Some days, I could improvise dialogue in my head based on the context of the emotional scenes of lover quarrels or affairs gone wrong. Other days, I would pester her, suspending our silence:
‘What does that mean?’
‘What are they saying?’
‘Is he finally confessing his love to her?’
I felt it in the moments of invalidation where Filipino aunties would hobble into the hole-in-the-wall cafe I worked at. After discovering I was Filipino too, the only question that often ensued was, ‘Do you speak Tagalog?’
Into the awkward silence that would follow, I would meekly confess that there was a time I could understand and speak the language of my heart, but that I was now detached from it. Over the stretch of my eight-week stay in the Philippines, I had absorbed the culture well. I could understand certain words, and respond to a passing remark without hesitation—that feels like a lifetime ago now. Disappointed at my response, those aunties would nod; in that gesture, I saw their implicit question, ‘How can you claim to be Filipino?’
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Ma, I see an answer in the memory of you plucking hibiscus stems from the heart of the branches along our communal riverbank. You planted one in your braid, another behind my ear, because the homemade bob you clumsily scissored through was too short to braid. The flower’s delicate petals with their strikingly red veins spiralling from every direction were mesmerising. They mirrored the muddy red undertones of your hair when the sun graced your face, complimented the rouge of your cheeks, and the brown of your back under the humid sun.
A riverbank encircled by chartreuse foliage and moss, inching and sprouting in every unknown space; a cavity, of oblivion, of non-existence. Until it did exist. It existed to you and to me—to us. We made this a space of laughter and learning. In the shallow water, you taught me how to locate the perfect rock to skip: how to slice it along the skin of the water, splitting the surface and opening wounds, how my spine should be straight, and how I should hold it in my right hand, my fingers curving like a backwards ‘c’. We turned over every layer of pebble, every sharpened and eroded corner of stone. This was our love language.
With the sun reaching over us in the mid-afternoon, we scrubbed vigorously at our dirty laundry; cotton tees, blood-stained shorts and linen dresses escaping the brim of our plastic baskets. The bar of bleach, an iconic marigold-orange, was placed in my hand like a paintbrush. Drawing along the fabrics was curing. Suds bubbles beneath my fingertips as I drew lines across the linens. It was the same soap bar you had handed me to cleanse my own body from sole to scalp.
I understand now, when you handed me that vibrant soap bar, that you were trying to rid me of my brown, of my melanin, of any inkling that would make it overtly obvious that I was Filipino. I would scrub myself until my skin transformed into a dry and chapped surface. I’d imagine peeling and unravelling myself from my skin, as if I were a snake shedding an old casing, finally revealing a new form; a conventionally beautiful apparition.
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I experience an all-consuming yearning for connection to my cultural identity, but feel as if I am a stranger to my ancestors. I can only whisper an experience while others can sing theirs; I can only limp while others can run.
While my wardrobe space is wedged with Western clothing, it is devoid of cultural prints and silhouettes. My voice has been trained only to respond to my mother's coo of ‘anak’, she often used this name affectionately with me when she wanted me to fill the rice cooker with Jasmine or boil hot water for her favourite black tea on Spring afternoons. I sit in Filipino restaurants, hoping the wafting of oil and sizzling pork from the kitchen can awaken a memory or a feeling from way back when. I awash my mind in ripples of thought.
While I have told myself repeatedly that I will never be whole enough to treasure the beauty of my heritage, I do have memories of being whole.
Here is one: sitting on your bed, I cried in silence, unable to tell you how I felt. You, who had not received certain kinds of comfort as a child, did not always know how to extend your hand, did not know how to lend your voice. You could not be expected to love me in the way that I wanted. Yet, you carved out a space for us. You’d hum lullabies and your favourite karaoke songs while rubbing my back. It was your pride in your culture and your people, and it was your heart and your voice that reassured me of my belonging to you and to them.
Ma, when I forget, will you remind me?
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Tamara Montina is a multidisciplinary creative from a Filipino-Australian background. Born in Kogarah and currently working on unceded Kaurna land, Montina’s featured work centres on the exploration of identity and cultural longing. Her debut short story, ‘Petunia is Wilting’, has been published in Verse Mag. She is currently working on a number of multimedia projects for 2023.
