H. Arlo Nimmo’s Very Far But Special Place
/
H. Arlo Nimmo (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Harry’s house is the white-and-gray one by the corner of a path. This was where I met H. Arlo Nimmo for the first time, and this was where I would always see him whenever I came to San Francisco. During those visits to northern California, not once did I fail to spend time with him. His house was where our stories converged.
Harry Nimmo – he said I should call him Harry – died in the middle of May this year. His death was very sudden. It forced those who loved him into a void unprepared. He had had a bad fall, he was rushed to the hospital, he refused a machine to be hooked to him, and on the next day he was gone. It felt not only a loss, but also a disappearance of a very far place that was both real and ephemeral common to our lives.
In the fall of 2011, there was the first Filipino American book fair in San Francisco. I knew Nimmo lived in the city and I had to meet him. I thought the encounter would be brief. I thought it would be an interview. I thought he might give me a lecture on his pioneering anthropological work about the Sama Dilaut, or the Badjaus, of the Sulu Archipelago. I wound up spending nearly the entire day sitting with him by the window, watching people at the park, talking about anything that came to mind.
It was a slow merging of his past and the present I carried with me, but neither of us attempted right away to fill the gaps between before and now. I remembered the pangs of my hungry stomach as the hours lengthened, wondering why someone who had lived in the Philippines did not bother to offer me something to eat. It only occurred to me later on that he had just recovered from cancer and had no energy to move about and which also explained why we just sat there talking. He was soft-spoken, regal in his ways, attentive to his words and thoughts and humble in his demeanor.
And when I had a year-long residency at the University of Nevada between 2012 and 2013, I flew into San Francisco as often as I could. Harry also took me to Twin Peaks, to the botanical gardens where he warned me of the jays, and we discovered we both liked birds and he would, over the course of the years, fill my email box with photographs by professional birdwatchers. We would have lunch at one of the cafes on his block, with him telling me anecdotes about each house along the way (reminding me of his descriptions of the Badjau’s boat houses). He had been lucky to purchase his house before the neighborhood was gentrified, before real estate prices skyrocketed.
He hadn’t been to the Sulu Archipelago in many years and yet it was as if that part of his memory could never be sliced into mere bits and pieces. His work on the islands of Tawi-Tawi when he was only in his 20s had already given him a scholarly reputation. The people he knew, the places he described gave me the impression that I was in a black-and-white Hollywood film where English was spoken in a grand manner. I shared with him a vision that was a diluted image of a paradise that what was not only a very far place, but also a violent one.
I had sought him out because of The Songs of Salanda (Ateneo de Manila University, 1994). I knew I had to see him because when I first went to Tawi-Tawi in the latter part of the 1990s, I would get myself out of bed before dawn, cross the shore from the resort to wait for the Badjaus paddling by in their bancas, and pray that someone in the passing boats would sing the lullaby of a dreamy past. He had been the lucky one with the treasure of our heritage.
The Songs of Salanda and Other Stories of Sulu
The Songs of Salanda are composites of people, places, and events Harry encountered when he spent two years in what he called “one of the most beautiful parts of the world.” Undertaking his doctoral field work in the 1960s, he lived among the boat-dwelling nomads called the Badjaus on the Tawi-Tawi islands of the Sulu Archipelago. His dissertation segued into articles and monographs, but he felt frustrated that personal and meaningful events could not be put into these papers, so he decided to write fictional accounts based on his personal experiences, changing some names of people to protect their identities.
When we shared personal stories, we held on to the imagination of one place, our common islands of Sulu. In his book, Jolo, the capital, was this vivid:
“The Jolo of those days was straight out of Joseph Conrad.” The harbor had sailing boats and ships, there were also tramp freighters from Japan, Hong Kong, Greece, Australia, Singapore, and the United States. He described the colorful scenes of the market place – across from which I had lived with my family in the early 1970s before the uprising of the Moro National Liberation Front. “Taking such a stroll to kill time until my early afternoon flight to Manila, I walked to the waterfront and sat on a pier to watch the loading of an Italian freighter. The warm sunshine added to my lazy mood. I was almost dozing when I heard, ‘Melikan! Do you remember me?’”
“Melikan,” a diminutive for American. Harry then was young and blondish, a boy from Iowa who chose this field of anthropological studies when he was taking his doctorate at the University of Hawaii in the 1960s. In our few meetings in San Francisco, we took our strolls of Sulu together; but in my time I couldn’t be as carefree as he was except that I invented my Melikan in my first novel, a mestiza married to a Muslim professor who drove through the streets of Jolo to dispel her melancholy. The real Melikans that replaced Harry were the “visiting forces” soldiers from America helping the Philippine military against homegrown radical Islamists.
I was in one of the military camps in the outskirts of Jolo when Harry’s manuscript of a short story collection was emailed to me by the publishing house of the Ateneo de Manila University. I read it in the late afternoons by the jetty where children frolicked. Somehow Harry’s world became mine too when, in mornings after, I would walk to the beach to wait for the sun to rise while the moon from last night was still around. This I had to tell him, the Sulu I had. But I kept my mouth shut about being his secret beta reader for A Very Far Place (Ateneo de Manila, 2012), relieved when he didn’t mind my suggestion – even though he didn’t know it was me – to switch the chronological pace of his Tawi-Tawi stories.
A Very Far Place, Tales of Tawi-Tawi
A Very Far Place is a continuation of his first short story collection, adding more stories on his sojourn, about watching babies being born and dying, helping the sea gypsies dig graves, joining fishermen in the open sea, encountering an ancient spirit world. He wrote as a traveler, an ethnographer, a stranger. “I left Tawi-Tawi a very different man from the one who arrived,” he wrote. “Few things frightened me anymore and even fewer intimidated me.”
His stories immortalized the paradise that the southern islands once was, when Sulu was unspoiled and pristine, when there was harmony among the people. It was the Philippines’ lost horizon, the home of the nation’s Islamic history, before rebellions and internal wars shattered the islands.
Born in 1936, Harry was a year older than my father (who passed away in 2014), but not once did I think we had a father-daughter kinship or even that of teacher-student. He sent his latest book by post, Night Train (published in San Francisco, 2017), taking the slower route as did the short stories of a nostalgic past traveling around Asia. I was touched that it was he who came to see me during the fifth round of the Philippine-American book fair held at the San Francisco Library in October 2019.
It was going to be my last trip abroad before the pandemic. Harry was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, but he came anyway and I, in return, did what I always did – visited him in his home in the Lower Haight a few days later. He took me for an avocado toast at the Café du Soleil near his house and I took pictures of many details in houses nearby with him telling me stories by my side. For the first time he made me follow him up the upper floor of his study, the very private space of a writer, and then I understood we had a friendship for keeps.
Harry and Criselda Yabes (Photo by RIck Rocamora)
Our email exchanges flowed a lot more frequently than it used to; from what I gathered there were good days and bad, but he was coping quite well with the illness. His last message happened to be on my father’s birthday, two weeks before he passed away. He had sent me an article I had written that a friend from Sulu had forwarded to him, as if telling me that our bond was professional too, and at some level our friendship was formed by a common love. What made his death so painful was that our very far place, the one we built together though it is not ours, vanished in the wake of his passing. It was, as he had written in his stories, truly ephemeral.
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
More articles from Criselda Yabes
