The Songs of Salanda: and Other Stories of Sulu.

Abstract

In this engrossing collection of sixteen short stories, H. Arlo Nimmo tells of a young man coming of age while living among a remote cluster of islands in the southern Philippines with a people unlike any he had known. Nimmo combines an anthropologist's eye for the significant detail with a storyteller's gift for bringing his characters to life. His book is a vivid narrative of a people and their culture on the brink of momentous change. The Songs of Salanda is Nimmo's deeply personal exploration of his early anthropological field experiences in the Sulu archipelago. During two years in the mid-1960s, he researched the culture of the Bajau, a small group of nomadic boat-dwellers who plied the waters off the southernmost Philippine islands in small single-family houseboats. Nimmo's stories are based on the people, places, and events he encountered. By the 1970s the Bajau way of life had largely disappeared, an indirect casualty of the Marcos regime's war against the Muslims of Sulu. Nimmo's testimony about his experience of the archipelago is thus an ethnographic treasure. Nimmo reveals the complex and sometimes dissonant diversity that characterizes Philippine island dwellers. In each story, someone new comes sharply to life and a fresh perspective is opened for the reader. A misanthropic Chinese fish buyer, a brother and sister who sell sexual favors to save the family business, an imprisoned young man believed to be possessed by demons, an American GI who senses his impending death in the battlefields of Vietnam, and a Muslim pirate rebelling against the Christian Philippine government are among the characters capturing a time and place which are now lost forever.