The Songs of Salanda: And Other Stories of Sulu

Set in the southern Philippines, these 16 interrelated stories are drawn from Nimmo's experiences there as a doctoral candidate in anthropology in the 1960s. Because the tales share the same narrator--a doctoral candidate nicknamed ``Melikan''--and because they're told in a similarly straightforward, even flat tone, the collection often reads like a memoir. Living with the Bajau, boat-dwelling nomads, the narrator witnesses in ``Masa's Wife'' one of his first native friends losing his wife after complications from childbirth. Later on, in the poignant but sketchy ``Child Bangsa,'' Melikan is rescued from loneliness by his ``shadow,'' a curious eight-year-old boy. The most intriguing moments in the collection deal with saitan , ``spirits the Bajau believe cause illness and other misfortune.'' In ``The Saitan,'' Melikan journeys to an island where the evil spirits are stored, only to return with a severe case of dysentery. In ``The Possessed,'' he visits an alleged victim of the spirits, a violent and mentally disturbed teenaged boy tied up in a hut. Among the best of the rest is ``Amak,'' which details the anthropologist's friendship with a Robin Hood-like pirate whose infamy and death will help to spark the civil war that will erupt shortly after Melikan leaves the islands. Finally, in ``Sulu,'' Melikan returns after a 20-year absence only to find himself a ``stranger in a strange city,'' disturbed by the urban changes wrought in his beloved islands. Looking back, he thinks, ``I cannot help believing that the Sulu of then was a special spot in the world.'' In both eras, however, Nimmo provides glimpses of a place rarely seen. (June)