An review of binary thinking and politics in Locust Girl: A Lovesong by Merlinda Bobis.

[Written in December 2016 for an English class and excavated ten years later, like some long-maturing insect rising out of the earth…]

From rising tensions in Europe resulting from the Syrian refugee crisis, to the anti-immigration sentiment that fueled Great Britain’s exit from the European Union, to Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency in the United States on a platform of naked Islamophobia and racism, the political climate of the year 2016 has been defined more than anything else by the fear and hatred of a perceived “other” [1] [2]. Though the abovementioned events have occurred far across the pond, they should not seem so unfamiliar while the violent anti-drug war in our country rages on, conducted by a president who has advocated the summary execution of suspected drug addicts, and who has referred to them as “idiots [who are] destroying [the] country” (Baldwin and Marshall) and has suggested that they are not human and should not be afforded human rights [3]. In the wake of all that has happened, Merlinda Bobis’ 2015 novel Locust Girl: A Lovesong reads as a timely and compelling warning regarding the dangers and human cost of binary thinking in politics.

In Locust Girl: A Lovesong, society has been sharply divided into two classes – the carers living in the verdant Five Kingdoms, with bountiful harvests and free-flowing water; and wasters (or strays) living in villages in the empty desert, subject to the meager and fickle rationing of resources by the carers. Barbed-wire borders separate the wasters’ villages from each other, and are reinforced by a stream of propaganda sung from everyone’s handheld radios: “No one should look / No one should walk beyond the horizon” (Bobis 10). The separation and deprivation of the strays are so complete that each village does not even know of more than one color that has been designated to them. Bobis revealed that she began writing the book in 2004 from fear of the binary politics that were on the rise around the time US President George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror” and asserted that other nations were “either with [the United States] or with the terrorists.” [4]  Lisa Hill has also suggested that the novel was inspired by the strongly conservative immigration policies of Australia, where Bobis has resided since 1991 [5],  in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and which continue to the present day [6].

The story begins with the bombing of nine-year-old Amedea’s village, in which her father and all her neighbors are killed while she is somehow spared, buried beneath their bodies and sand. An underground locust eats its way into her brow and remains embedded there alive, continuing to flutter and sing songs. After she awakes from a ten-year sleep to begin the rest of the story, she finds her way to another village, where most of the fellow strays she meets express revulsion at her condition. Two orphan children, Hara-haran and Gurimar, originally act boldly around her, but after removing the bandage covering her forehead and seeing the locust, they run away from her screaming “‘The plague, the plague!’” (82) The storyteller Shining Lumi brands her as the Locust Girl and declares that she is “marked with the plague” because “‘[those] who feed on the plague are the plague,” (87) in reference to Amedea’s village’s practice of eating locusts to supplement their inadequate rations before their massacre. Even Beenabe, the young woman Amedea falls in love with, has a visceral negative reaction to Amedea’s body, which no longer has a uniform skin tone after it was burned in the fires that destroyed her village:

‘You’re not one colour!’

For the first time, I looked at all of me too, and yes, [Beenabe] was right. My body was patches of black, white, and grey, partly burnt and partly pale in the parts that were nibbled by the locust before it slept in me. …

‘Not one colour.’ She shook her head in disbelief and instinctively rubbed her brown arms, perhaps assuring herself that she was evenly hued. She could not let the matter rest.

‘Who were you born from? What happened to your father and mother? Don’t you know you can’t be like this? Don’t you know this – this unevenness is dangerous?’ For a while, she would skirt around the word “impure.” ‘Don’t you know you can’t walk with me like – like this?’ (Bobis 27-28)

The discrimination Amedea faces for her appearance and behavior recalls that which is experienced by many ethnic and religious minority groups in the Western world, throughout history and continuing today. Eating locusts is taboo in this society, and Amedea is looked upon with disgust by people from the other village who refuse to even consider the different circumstances in Amedea’s life that led her to do so. This xenophobic suspicion of those possessing a different skin color and cultural practices has been implicated in the “Brexit,” as well as the hostility towards thousands of Syrian refugees attempting to seek asylum in Europe [7], but who are prevented from doing so by strictly-guarded borders – and not merely the physical boundaries separating different countries. Just as harsh are the borders around the minds of leaders and people – in Bobis’ words, “the border within that cuts the heart.”

These parallels are further seen with the perspective of one of the elite carers, Verompe, as he tries to justify the exclusion of the strays from the wealth and comfort of the Five Kingdoms:

Faraway, in the last green place on earth, lives a harmony of all colours. They love and respect the purity of natural things, which they guard with their lives (so honourable). They believe these are dangerous times and they could lose the very scarce gifts of the earth: water, food, oil, and even clean air. Thus they built a border between the carers and the wasters (so wise) … Because of their wisdom and caring values, the carers can live freely with the gifts and trade in them. The wasters have to be ‘managed’: cared for and rationed. They must be protected from themselves, as history dictates. They are profligate and dangerous, as history proves (I studied history as a child). The wasters are always plotting to waste more, or, worse, steal what the carers worked so hard to preserve. The Five Kingdoms even preserved the history of our poor earth in their books, but refuse to invoke it now. All must move on and contend with the present. The present is about protecting the border. (Bobis 103-104)

The mistrust of outsiders is readily apparent in the assertion that the wasters “are always plotting to waste more, or, worse, steal what the carers worked so hard to preserve.” It is suggested that the carers’ worry is not without basis, having been rooted in some unspecified historical event. Even so, it also brings to mind the growing economic and cultural anxiety in the United States, wherein immigrants have been increasingly scapegoated for stealing job opportunities, disrupting local culture, and perpetrating terror attacks [1]. There are also undertones of imperialism in the suggestion that an entire group must be cared for and “protected from themselves” by a benevolent higher power, who then claim to be justified in controlling the resources of another region and using it to enrich themselves.

Amedea is eventually brought to the Five Kingdoms by the guilt-ridden Verompe who wished to atone for his cruelty toward the strays. He offers her seeds to eat from the fields, where she “fed shamelessly,” clearing several rows of grain; her ravenous appetite appears to disgust him (127-128), even though the carers were the ones responsible for her life of hunger. She encounters some residents who denounce her along with other border-crossers as a “plague on [the] Kingdoms” (137). After she is arrested and tried by the leaders of the Kingdoms, one of them, Ycasa, notes that “the true plague is the fire that they carry in their bodies” (144). From this it becomes clear that the plague that the Five Kingdoms fears from Amedea and the strays is the plague of their existence. Their hunger and desire for a better life, while no different from that of the carers, happens to conflict with the privileged lives that the carers enjoy. It is this self-centered instinct for preservation that leads the carers to continually exclude and persecute the strays, denying them their comfort, as Verompe sarcastically notes, “[because] their peace threatens our own and more legitimate peace” (170).

In her novel, Bobis does not designate one side as completely morally superior to the other, arguing that both sides are hurt by their enforced binary existence. Bobis dedicates the book “For those walking the border for dear life / And those guarding the border for dear life.” The groups on either side of the border are only doing what they feel they must to survive, and no matter how sympathetic the plight of the strays, we cannot completely condemn the line of the carers for what they did perhaps out of necessity to preserve the kingdoms for future generations (even if it is only for their own kind). Similarly, to a certain extent we cannot dismiss the reluctance of countries to fully open their borders and accept refugees and immigrants freely, for there are limited resources and other practical matters to consider. At the same time, the lack of compassion for others based on their differences from oneself remains a great tragedy of modern society. As the novel, now revealed to be Amedea’s tribute to her beloved Beenabe, draws to a close, Amedea directly addresses the reader, “Now you know what we’ve always shared. No border can deny it” (178). Locust Girl: A Lovesong asks us to shed our fixation on the black-and-white binary of “us vs. them,” and to realize that our resources, our problems, and our history belong to us as a collective. Above all else, it implores us to love, for it is the only way we can see beyond our differences and achieve true harmony in the world.

Works Cited

Review of Bobis, Merlinda. Locust Girl: A Lovesong. Spinifex, 2015.

[1] Priyaranjan, Binit. “Brexit supporters to Trump, exploitation of our fear of the ‘other’.” Daily O, 26 Jun 2016, dailyo.in/politics/brexit-racism-xenophobia-donald-trump-european-union-ukip-narendra -modi/story/1/11344.html. Accessed 30 Nov. 2016.

[2] Alexander, Reed. “Dictionary.com word of year ‘not to be celebrated’.” CNN, 29 Nov. 2016,  edition.cnn.com/2016/11/29/world/dictionary-word-of-the-year-2016/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2016.

Baldwin, Clare and Andrew R.C. Marshall. “As death toll rises, Duterte deploys dubious data in ‘war on drugs’.” Reuters, 18 Oct. 2016, reuters.com/investigates/special-report/philippines -duterte-data/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2016.

[3] Ramos, Marlon. “‘Junkies are not humans’.” Inquirer, 28 Aug. 2016, newsinfo.inquirer.net/810395 junkies-are-not-humans. Accessed 1 Dec. 2016.

[4] Bush, George W. “Address to a joint session of Congress and the American people.” United States Capitol. Washington, D.C. 20 Sep. 2001. Speech.

[5] Hill, Lisa. “Locust Girl, by Merlinda Bobis.” ANZ LitLovers LitBlog, 22 Oct. 2015, anzlitlovers.com/2015/10/22/locust-girl-by-merlinda-bobis/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2016.

[6] Phippen, J. Weston. “Australia’s Controversial Migration Policy.” The Atlantic, 29 Apr. 2016, theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/04/australia-immigration/480189/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2016.

[7] Fotiadis, Apostolis. “This racist backlash against refugees is the real crisis in Europe.” The Guardian, 25 Feb. 2016, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/25/racist-backlash-against- refugees-greece-real-crisis-europe. Accessed 1 Dec. 2016.