Ang Pusó Mo!

The Philippine countryside is crammed with coconut trees.  Even our neighborhood, Katugasan, which is so named because tugas (molave) used to be thick in the area, is overrun with towering coconut trees.  Of course, we don’t bewail this fact.  The tree has several uses.  The trunk can be lumber.  The fruits can be eaten, used for its tono or to produce virgin coconut oil, or, if left alone until mature, made into copras.  The husks can be used to polish the floor or scrub pots and pans.  The palwa can be firewood.  The midribs can be collected to become brooms.  The bulig can be tapped for tuba or lambanog  And the lukay; well, they are a permanent sight during Palm Sundays, when young, yellow-green fronds are fashioned into crosses or weaved in and out in a variety of designs for the priest to bless with holy water.

In our country, especially in the islands of the Visayas, the leaves of the coconut palm have secular uses as well.  They are as versatile as the tree they come from.  They can be made into thatches or shingles which, though not as durable as nipa, are sturdy enough to provide shelter from the elements for one in need of it.  For kids, however, their uses are almost exponential.  Coconut leaves can be eyeglasses, watches, rings, belts, whistles, and, not to forget, balls for games of rizal-rizal that can cover two or three neighborhoods and last well into the twilight or until mothers call.

But there is one more thing that the dabong nga lukay can be used for.  It is a use that is pervasive in contemporary Visayan pop culture, for anyone who eats barbecue or ngoyong, and that stretches back to generations upon generations of our forebears and, perhaps, even into our pre-Hispanic past.

Long before the invention of the plastic cellophane, or of Tupperware, we Filipinos had the pusó.  Hanging rice, so they call it in English these days.

Not only is it a convenient way to carry cooked rice from one place to another, cooking rice as pusó also makes it aromatic, much like the practice of putting pandan leaves in a pot of rice.  Yet another plus to the pusó is that it keeps longer than pot-cooked rice, presumably since it is handled less.

But is the pusó indigenous to the Philippines?  Or is it something we share with the rest of our Southeast Asian neighbors?  They have similar ways of using leaves to package food.  As we do with a number of our suman.  But do they have our pusó?  I do not have the answer to this question.  But whether it is unique to the Philippines or not, we Boholanos strongly identify with it.

In the late ’80s and for the greater part of the ’90s before the Agora burned down, Tagbilaran had Sky’s the Limit.

It was no five-star restaurant but it was the place to be for a true-blooded Tagbilaranon.  It was a place where people from all walks of life congregated at the end of the day to a meal of barbecue and pusó with their choice of softdrinks, beer, tuba, or kinutil to wash it down.  Of course, as the night grew later, those who frequented it were apt to be less wholesome.  But in spite of this seedy side of Sky’s the Limit, it was still a place for the celebration of Filipinos coming together in merry-making.  Every day at Sky’s was a virtual Pista sa Pusó.

It was because of Sky’s that I learned about the pusó.  Particularly, how to make it.  From Nang Cherie, a neighbor who had a stall at Sky’s, I learned about the top-shaped kinasing and the squat binaki.  These were the two pusó designs we learned then and are common now.  Over the years, we learned to make the flat-bottomed kinasing sapyot, the double-sized binaking dako, and my elongate version of the binaki that I mistakenly thought to be the inunlan nga pusó that some old pusó-makers once described to me.  There is, in fact, a pusó design called inunlan which looks very much like a pillow and requires two leaves to make.

During a visit to the town of Anda last year, I finally saw for myself the especially intricate pusó called the binangkaso which, according to local tradition, is used only for shamanic rituals. It takes four leaves to make one.  They also have a pusó called the inumol for which they only use one half of a leaf.

There may be many other designs to this wonder of convenience, aroma, and food preservation, but whatever shape it takes, the pusó will always be in the heart of the Boholano.