HOW TO DRINK IN CEBUANO
Visayans are good drinkers. So noted the early Spanish visitors who found themselves perennially invited to drink wherever they went in these islands (that is, when they were not met with a rain of spears instead). In Cebu, Pigafetta had to join Humabon to drink tuba, through reed straws, straight from a jar. Visayans did not only seem to be drinking all the time, they carried their drink exceptionally well.
That drinking was such a valued activity is indicated by the wealth of native terms pertaining to it. Historian William Henry Scott -- mining such early Visayan dictionaries as those of Mateo Sanchez (1615-18) and Alonso de Mentrida (1637) -- guides us to the vocabulary of Visayan drinking in the seventeenth century.
Visayans had five basic kinds of alcoholic drinks. The most popular is tuba, the fermented sap of palms, usually strengthened and given a red color by the addition of crushed tungog (tanbark) or the red lawaan bark. The better kind of tuba is extracted from coconut palms but other varieties are made from the nipa palm, buri palm, the ambung and pugahan palms, and the idiok (sugar palm), the fermented sap of which is called habyog. There are other terms associated with coconut wine. Lina is the sweetish sap, with no tungog added, a kind of ladies' drink (though I am not sure the early Visayans recognized such a category). Bahal is the day-old bitter-sour tuba; then there is the stronger brew called lambanog or, when anise seeds are added, anisado.
The second basic kind of drink is kabarawan, which is the bark of the wood of the same name, boiled, mixed with honey, and then left to ferment naturally into a smooth, strong liquor.
The third is intus or kilang, sugarcane wine. Sugarcane juice is extracted and boiled in a cast-iron vat to half its volume. A bundle of kabarawan bark is added as seasoning, and then when cool, the whole concoction is stored in jars and left to ferment or age for a month.
Then there is rice wine or wine or beer, called pangasi. It is made from the mash of cooked rice (or other grains, like millet), fermented with yeast, and placed in jars. In some preparations, such ingredients as hot pepper and ginger are added. The jars are buried in the ground to age for two or more months.
Finally, there is alak (or alaksiw), which is any of the above beverages distilled into hard liquor. Alak is anything made with a still, a contraption that, at the time, consisted of two iron vats (kawa, karahay) and a hollow tree trunk (toong). Alak (from Malay alak, Arabic araq) is drunk from a cup while the other beverages are usually drunk straight from an earthen jar with drinkers sipping through reed straws called tayul or halasam. Alak is hard liquor and the confirmed drunkard is called makialak.
So popular was drinking that, in pre-Spanish times, there was already an economy of drink. Tangway is to trade in wine and taranwayan is any place where the people habitually gather to drink, our equivalent to the Western tavern.
The basic value in drinking lies in the sociality of the act. Visayans never drink alone. Only alcoholics drink alone. The Visayan word pagampang referred to both 'drinking' and 'conversation,' underscoring how drinking goes beyond just the imbibing of drink; it marks, greases, and celebrates social intercourse. In its heightened form, drinking form an essential part of social and religious ceremonies, such as village councils, dispute-settlement sessions, marriage rites, or agricultural and hunting rituals.
A drinking etiquette is observed in all these occasions. A session usually begins with agda, exhorting a person to drink. In formal occasions, the diwata (spirit, deity) is asked to partake of their first drink, signifying not only gratitude to the source of all drink but the sense that men belong to a community that extends beyond the boundaries of the visible and the human.
In formal pangasi drinking, the jars are placed in a long row down the middle of the room. After invoking the diwata to drink first, a master of ceremonies (today's "gunner") invites the guest to drink in turn, indicating which guest and which jar. Men who drink together at the same jar are called itib ("milk brothers") for they are two babies nursing at the same breast. In the course of the drinking, a toast -- called gasa -- may be proposed to someone's health. A variant is salabat, a toast in which the cup itself is offered to the one being honored (which can mean brining the cup to the house of the honorees if he is not himself present). While the pangasi is in progress, the master of ceremonies constantly checks the jars' contents (a procedure called pugad or "nesting"), calling on drinkers to add a certain amount of water or grain mash (basi) and then requiring them to drink the quantity equivalent to what they had put in. The drinking takes place amid banter, challenge, poetic jousting, or the singing of the daihuan, a kind of song in which one of the participants is victimized by a rough but good-natured teasing.
Traditional drinking condenses in a single act values most prized by men: a person's rhetorical skills (since oratory and verbal jousting often go with drinking), his knowledge of "men's hearts" (since orchestrating relations among participants is at the center of the drinking ceremony), and, not the least, his drinking ability (which is the ability to move to a heightened state of wit and still be in command of one's wits).
Today, the tarangwayan goes by the name of "beer garden" -- that ubiquitous establishment one finds in towns and cities all over the Philippines. It is a very secular place, though it is not unusual to find in such places a tiny, bulb-lit image of the Sto. Nino or some saint presiding over the drinkers. (The drink still has a place in our chief religious ritual -- the Catholic mass -- but, as a wag complains, pari ra'y maginom-inom.) "Beer garden," a label with a pseudo-pastoral ring, suggests something more open, egalitarian, and convivial than "bar." In place of the image of a row of lonely men sullenly nursing their drink at the bar, it conjures free space, grouping, movement, music, and talk. The innovation of the "family-size" beer may have been economic in reason but it is also culturally appropriate: drink becomes drink only when it is shared. We no longer drink our beer from a common jar, but, in passing around a "family-size," we can be mag-itib.
A night at the beer garden is not, of course, like the pangasi of old. Often, the scene at a beer garden is not of a community of men coming together but of petty tribes of men, casually and carelessly thrown together, who have little to say to each other. And often, there is much latent hostility in the drink as euphoria and goodwill.
Drinking is an eminently cultural act. The immense success of San Miguel Beer advertising draws from its clear recognition of this fact. This is shown in its artful use of the motifs of history and communal sharing, and even in its casting, using, for actors, icons of 'high' and 'popular' culture -- and devoted San Miguel drinkers -- like Fernando Poe Jr., National Artist Nick Joaquin, sports journalist Recah Trinidad, and writer Erwin Castillo, himself one of the brains of the highly successful ad campaign. Such is the advertising success that for many (forgetting the fact that the principal owner of the brewery is not even a Filipino citizen) -- To drink San Miguel is to perform a 'patriotic,' authentically 'Filipino' act.
Next time you are in a beer garden with friends, remember that your ancestors drink with you. For them and the best of what "drinking Filipino" means, raise a toast. And may the force of tradition be with you.
June 16, 1991
From his recently published book "House of Memory," a compilation of writings from his column "Footnotes to an Absent Text" in Sunstar Weekend magazine (1989-1996).
Dr. Mojares is trained in literature and anthropology. He won several National Book Awards from the Manila Critics Circle for works in fields as diverse as literary criticism, urban and rural history, and political biography. He has been a recipient of prizes for his short stories, a national fellowship in the Essay from the UP Creative Writing Center, and teaching and research fellowships from the Ford, Toyota, and Rockefeller foundations, Fulbright Program, and Social Science Research Council (New York). He has served as visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, University of Hawaii, and University of Michigan.
Other articles by the author in this website.