In the Name of the Trees

‘In the name of the trees, I retrieve you from hurt and sickness.’ In a Philippine ritual of retrieval, Lola Narra tries to heal her granddaughter Dao who was paralysed in an accident that killed her father. They live in Canberra, far from the healing trees of their first home in the village of Iláwod where the story began. But between the Philippines and Australia, the land knows, the trees know: wound on wound on wound—lugad sa lugad sa lugad. Such is the colonial inheritance of four generations of Filipinas named after trees: Banaba, Narra, Pili and Dao. Their rifts are deep, their heartbreaks more wounding. They tell stories to hide, evade, or make truth bearable. But trees remember. They do not lie.