As it’s already January 2024, let me share with you ElziStyle Bookshop’s Top Seller in the previous month of December 2023 (Jumadi’l-Awwal – Jumadi’th-Thani):

* Mansoor Limba, “’mBayuka Tanu! Maguindanaon Bayuk Transcription, Translation, and Annotation,” (ElziStyle.com, 2022) 169 pages, US$11.99, https://amzn.to/3viQlgv     

eBook: https://www.elzistyle.com/product/bayuk (US$5)

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About the Book:

“The first thing I could say about ‘mBayuka Tanu! Maguindanao Bayuk: Transcription, Translation, and Annotation is that it is most likely the first book of its kind. It pays attention and respect to a local poetic form as practiced in a particular community or place and provides examples in the original Maguindanaon tongue, with translations into English.

Second, the book introduces for the first time the older as well as present pababayuk or practitioners of the art. Previous studies did not mention their sources of the bayuk, except for one or two. Just because the form is folklore doesn’t mean only the lore is important and not the folk who uttered it.

Third, it is written in a warm, relaxed, and very personal manner and is shorn of the usual jargon of scholarly writing despite the fact that the author has done his homework well. The thirteen chapters and the book itself are framed within a personal narrative of researching, writing, and producing the book. Thus, the collection is really a personal anthology of anecdotes on the aforementioned activities—a far cry from the usual cut-and-dried “scholarly” literary anthologies around.

Fourth, as a consequence, it is reader-friendly. Twelve of the thirteen chapters deal with one after another of bayuk collected (one chapter takes on, instead, the question, “Is Bayuk an Innovation in Religion (Bid’ah)?”). Every bayuk is framed in terms of the context of its utterance. This is important because every bayuk is composed and recited or sung in terms of an event in life that occasioned it.

Fifth, the chapters are short and each one has an ‘Action Item’ at the end. These Action Items, varying from one to three in number, are a way of direct engagement by the author with the readers “to know [their] honest feedback and comments for the improvement of the translation.” Here he addresses the readers directly, asking them questions about what they just read or their personal reactions to what they have read or else giving them links to where they can send their responses to him as well as to other sites they can check out for viewing or for more information on other related things.

Sixth, the book overcomes its own physical limitations by reaching out of its printed form and links up with another medium. Links with various sites in the worldwide web are an important

supplementary element of the book and of its sales pitch since most of them can be found on YouTube where the reader can actually see and hear the bayuk performed. The limitations of visual text are therefore overcome by access to its original orality and the virtual presence of a speaker.

Seventh, there are black-and-white pictures for every chapter, providing the reader with the additional visual pleasure of being virtually there at the place or with the people that the writer talks about. There’s nothing like having a quick relief for mind and eye from the linearity of texts, I tell you.

Eighth, a glossary of Maguindanaon words used in the book are thoughtfully provided for at the end, including a list of books consulted by the author.

Finally, the cover photo completes the intimate and personal connection between [the] writer and his book. When asked about it, he wrote back to say he took the photo himself and chose it for a number of reasons, among which are: the marshy scene in Kabuntalan is typical of Maguindanao landscape (etymologically, he pointed out, Maguindanao means maging’d-a mindanaw or inundated inhabited place), and the balal or makeshift hut where he rested once to “savor the tranquility of the place” was also where fisherfolk-farmers stayed in the daytime “to watch over their nearby rice field or fishpond” and sometimes “recite or sing bayuk or play palendag (a Maguindanaon bamboo flute) or kutyapi.””

Ricardo de Ungria, “Sounding Up Bayok: A Review on Mansoor Limba’s ‘mBayuka Tanu! Maguindanaon Bayuk: Transcription, Translation, and Annotation,” Kinaadman Journal (Volume 43).

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