Resilience and healing in the slums of Manila: Merlinda Bobis’s The solemn lantern maker

Abstract

This article examines Merlinda Bobis’s novel The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) with recourse to affect theories on terror and vulnerability. The narrative addresses harsh realities like children’s prostitution, extreme poverty, and brutal corruption, and puts these apparently Philippine “domestic” matters in direct relation to globalization and to the so-called war on terror. The analysis of the narrative pays attention to the strategies of resilience and healing developed by vulnerable civilians, taking into account the increasing degrees of risk at the intersection of race, ethnic, class, age and gender differences. It examines how such differences are negotiated in the text via reciprocal care among the main characters in a context of extreme violence.