A motionless childhood: memoirs of early childhood in rural post-war Philippines

The initial despondency that followed my mother’s death and the realisation of the total erasure of the landscape that featured in my early childhood propelled my need to recover it all. Writing down my story seemed the only recourse to transform it from mere memory into tangible material encapsulating the Philippines, that beloved home of my birth, its people and its landscape. There are two parts to this project. The first is the creative component comprising four chapters of a memoir that aims to reclaim the world of my early childhood: its colours, scents, sounds and the beloved voices of the figures peopling it. This is a world reconstructed from fragments of memories, collected and collated with the imagination in order to paint with words a portrait of a time and place that hopefully captures their beauty and innocence. The first three chapters of Part One are a grouping of memories strung together to tell complete narratives of my “Pre-school Years,” the “First Year of School” and the three years spent in “Bamban” with my grandparents. Chapter Four is intended to be a coda to the early childhood memoirs. This coda is reflective writing about the now-adult narrator, who is an immigrant in Australia. In this chapter, two childhoods from the past are interlaced through flashbacks. It is also a story of the interplay of the lives of two immigrant friends as they carve new lives in their adopted homeland of the present. Part Two is comprised of an exegesis in two chapters. There is also a prologue which describes the beginnings of this literary journey: of my trip back home with the passing away of my mother and the decision to write my memoir in English, which is the language of my Pilipino/Australian children and the language of my adopted home, Australia. Chapter One is a short study of the definition of the memoir and the use of memory and imagination in the writing of this reflective autobiographical genre. There are discussions on why we write memoirs and to illustrate these, the works of St. Augustine, Edmund Gosse, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty and Maxine Hong Kingston are discussed. Chapter Two is a discussion of the writing process. This chapter includes brief analyses of the styles I used in my memoir: of multiple points of view, which is the interlacing of the child’s and the narrator’s voices and the integration of the second person point of view in order to involve the reader. There is also a discussion about the use of dialogue. The Epilogue includes a brief personal evaluation of the memoir and the writing process.