This multimedia essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s translation series, with art by the author.

“Any sound you make never disappears, it’s out there somewhere. When you stop singing, that sound isn’t gone—it’s out there.”
–Ricardo Trimillos, 2025 interview about the Sama Bajau and other Indigenous communities of the Philippines

Ombo Ombo 

Ombo Ombo Takea
Angindam dampong pea
Pag-igalan kuhita
Ag iring aka buna
Surukin bi na tombong na

Nearly forty years after my mom taught me my first words in her Indigenous language through a binua, a lullaby, the words and melody flashed at me like a storm of reckoning. I wanted to translate the words into English and realized I couldn’t, because the words were not in Tagalog, as I originally thought. I cried myself to sleep that night. 

In the days and years that followed, I started coming to terms with this profound cultural and linguistic erasure. I was grateful to know some words in a Philippine language, in this case, Tagalog. Many of my adult Filipino American friends were not raised bilingual. According to Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut’s Immigrant America: A Portrait, only 13 percent of U.S.–born Filipinos speak a mother tongue. Even so I wondered why the Tagalog language was deemed more important to use in our home than this other language. Of my two birth tongues, why had only one made the crossing?    

This other language, Sinama, and the culture accompanying it are fraught with negative connotations. When I returned home to the Philippines from abroad as a teenager, for instance, I understood the word “Bajau” as a pejorative. I noticed it used in response to a statement or action perceived as ridiculous. The closest comparison I can think of is the American term “hillbilly,” used to dismiss people as uncultured or ignorant. The fifteen-year-old returnee I was tracked “Bajau” as synonymous with “gago,” “bobo,” or “tanga” (all words describing stupidity).

I didn’t know then that “Bajau” was one of the names for my mom’s people. I didn’t know they were my people.

If you search “Bajau” or its many variants, most notably “Sama Bajau” in scholarly circles, you’ll find videos of fishermen walking the seafloor. There are reports that they have larger spleens than the average human, an adaptation to centuries of free diving. You will also find Western tourists visiting their communities, often to sensationalize their way of living and make a spectacle of them. 

I remember being eight years old and visiting one of the two Bajau communities in Zambales, the province where my family settled sometime after World War II, neighborhoods known as Morohan, which consist of pile dwellings. It was daytime, low tide, and the descent from the wooden plank walkways to the seawater seemed steep to my eyes. Only one family in my extended family lived there at the time. 

My youngest aunt took me to see my uncle’s house, deep in the cluster of pile houses. Once we arrived, I sneaked terrified glances between the slatted bamboo floorboards, where I could see waves crashing on the rocks. A couple of my boy cousins made a jungle gym of the plank-bridges between the houses. The younger cousin slipped, perhaps on a wet wooden beam, and his head began to bleed, his cries nearly numbing my ears. His mother was unfazed. Sure enough, he was fine and sustained no long-term injuries from that fall.

Familial anecdote aside, the significance of seeing that coastal community was lost to me as a child. The rest of our extended family lived inland, and I probably thought my uncle lived there because it was where he could afford to raise his many children. Only when I became an adult did my mom finally explain that Bajau is her ethnolinguistic tribe, part of a Moro (Muslim) minority, Indigenous to the Southern Philippines. 

When I research Bajau cultural history, I often see the terms “nomad,” or worse, “gypsy,” used to describe them. However, I believe this is a misunderstanding of the nature of Bajau fishing expeditions, since tribes always return to their home moorages. Jennifer L. Gaynor, in Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture, notes that the Sama Bajau “have no country.” Other Sama Bajau live in the present-day nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia. The idea of fluid homelands is supported by Clifford Sather in The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-Eastern Sabah: “the sea took on an almost transcendent moral value as an interconnecting medium largely without borders.” It makes more sense to me to claim a Southeast Asian identity over the limiting notions of a nation-state, especially since the Bajau think of homeland in terms of water, not land.

It is difficult to get a clear picture of who and where my people are today. In my birth country, the 2020 census likely underreports the number of Sama Bajau. They are precariously on the margins of society and easily overlooked in census surveys. The way they are referred to is changing, and some scholars simply use the word “Sama” nowadays, the tribe’s endonym (what they call themselves), which has an Austronesian root word meaning “together,” or “kin.” The term “Bajau” is actually an exonym (what outsiders call them), with Iberian etymology in “shoals” (baixo/baxo)—a reference to when Portuguese colonizers initially met the Sama Bajau.

There are other Southeast Asian Sea People, as they are also sometimes called, such as the maritime tribes of Orang Laut and Moken. As recently as my great-grandmother’s generation, Sama Bajau lived in houseboats and moorages, receiving the name Boat People from one of their lead ethnographers, H. Arlo Nimmo. Urbanization, migration, environmental, and economic pressures have threatened their centuries-old practices and traditions. An aspect that remains, albeit “endangered,” is their music, including poetic and oral traditions. According to Nimmo, “Virtually every Sama [Bajau] is a singer of songs.”      

The arts are integrated into their daily lives. Nimmo noted functional genres for songs, including binua (lullabies), lia-lia (children’s songs), tenes-tenes (ballads), kalangan baliu (“songs of the wind” sung by men on fishing or sailing trips, which includes the kalangan kalitan, a subgenre specifically sung when shark-fishing), kata-kata (long chants in epic verse to heal the sick), and kalangan matai (songs of the dead).

In researching the short song forms, I found translations of wind songs the most striking, reminding me of classical East Asian poetry. Here is Nimmo’s translation of a kalangan baliu, dated 1966, from his first anthropological study of Sama Bajau in Sulu:

O wind.
You blow the waves—and my heart—
into a thousand pieces.

Tribes also use kulintang orchestral instruments, comparable to the gongs, drums, and xylophones seen in the wider-known gamelan ensemble. These are played at weddings, coming-of-age celebrations, and other ceremonies. The voice is the Bajau’s primary instrument, occasionally accompanied by a gabbang, a bamboo xylophone.

Ombo Ombo

Lola Lola Takea
Pahiram ng kapirasong bao 
Pagsasayawan ng pugita
Kaparis ang isang isda
Kilitiin mo na ang pwet nya

This is my mother’s Tagalog translation of the original binua. Below, I offer an English translation and illustrations. For the English version, I defined a tempo for the lullaby, which turns out to be slightly faster than my mother’s. I took inspiration from how certain Bajau oral epics employ play-rhyme, particularly with verbs. I drew from my Western toolkit of literary devices, as well.

Great-Great Grandmother

Great-Great Grandmother Takea
Peel a sprig of coconut shell
So octopus can sway and sashay
Paired with a fish in a hurried ballet
Bowing before they tickle your tail     

In exploring my family history and oldest-known Bajau homeland, I think of a story my mother told me. It was the seventies, and she took the two-day boat ride from Luzon to Mindanao to see her great uncle, my great-grandfather’s older brother. She described him as “short” and always sporting a sombrero. His pile house in Zamboanga was barer than my uncle’s. He had no furniture, only a hearth and cooking stove, and they slept on mats on the floor, “parang sardinas” (“packed like sardines”). They used cardboard boxes on an overhead shelf as drawers for clothes, and their only other personal belongings were enamel cups, the kind I use on camping trips. 

One day as he and my mother stepped out to shop at the open-air market, he felt self-conscious of his appearance.

“Hindi ka ba nahihiya na kasama mo ako?” he asked. “Are you not ashamed to be seen with me” (literally “to be together with me”)?

“Bakit ako mahihiya? E lolo naman kita!” (“Why would I feel ashamed? You’re my grandpa!”) she answered, hooking her arm in his as they walked the dirt road to town. 

And why should I feel any shame or embarrassment? These are my people.