This Elusive Bird Helped Shy Dupax Boys Get Circumcised

When I was growing up, we uncircumcised boys hated being teased by our elders when out of nowhere the sound “ku-ku-ku-kuk… supput… supput!” reverberated in the grassy thickets. And so, days before Holy Week, you would see adolescents contacting one another so they could go as a team to undergo the razor on Huebes Santo or Sabado de Gloria or any day within the Lenten season except Good Friday.

I chanced upon this tsakuk by the river in Langka-Mammayang, upstream of Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, one cloudy day in September 2010

I don’t know about the rural Tagalogs, Bicolanos, Cebuanos, Boholanos, Ilongos, Kapampangans, Pangasinenses, Cordillerans, Ifugaos, Kalingas, Ibanags, Muslims, Lumads, or even Ilocanos in Ilocos Republic. But we young and old male citizens of Dupax in southern Nueva Vizcaya are quite particular – or rather, used to be very sensitive – as to whether one is circumcised or not.

Being circumcised was such a badge of honor in our part of the woods. Conversely, not being circumcised would mean something to be ashamed of. Thus, when word gets out that a particular guy was seen bathing in the Abannatan stream or the Benay river with his “manhood” still in tact and not open like what a normal man’s should be, pretty soon the whole town would know about it.

If the "uncut" guy were an English-speaking European, the conclusion would be that the Caucasian husband of a local maiden would also be like him. If the subject happened to be a local, not long after the discovery, the word supput (Ilocano and Isinay term for “uncircumcised”) would be appended to his first name as if it were an integral part of the one he was baptized with. 

Not only that. The poor guy’s being “supput” would be a talk of the town or barrio for several generations or for as long as he lived.  And so, if he were still around or when somebody remembers, his case would be cited as an example of a billy-goat-smelling guy being able to get women pregnant even if the skin of his phallus has not undergone the razor’s cut. If he has gone to Kingdom come or migrated to less nosy villages but anyone of his boys would still be around, the stigma would remain like a monument and so the poor kid would still be called ana^ Anut Supput (Isinay for “child of Anut the Uncircumcised”).

In grade school, if your circumcised male classmates would know that you are like Anut, you better sharpen the way you stare or get ready to project a murderous don’t-test-my-patience look. For, more often than not, during recess or before the school bell rings for the afternoon classes, they would tease you with something like “give me salt” especially when a couple of guys came to class with their T-shirts bursting with marasaba (literally “banana-like” in ripeness) tamarind fruits they hauled down from a child-friendly tree on the way to school.

The reference to salt comes from the fact that uncircumcised “birds” are known to have whitish and salt-like particles technically called smegma. Oh well, that grainy material (called kaper in Ilocano) is indeed salty as it forms when the penis is left unwashed for long and part of the urine dries up and accumulates as salt on its way out of the prepuce.

The Conspiratorial Bird

Like most teasing events, however, the kantiaw (jeering)  didn’t end when the tamarind trees or, alternatively, the mango trees, have ran out of fruits. Thanks (but no thanks) to a bird that kept the song playing. This bird is the Philippine coucal (Centropus viridis), a species of cuckoo that is native to the Philippines and described by avid Philippine-bird photographer Romy Ocon in his blog (http://romyocon.blogspot.com) as “more commonly heard than seen, as it prefers to skulk in the dense grasses or undergrowth.”

Called tsakuk, kakuk or sakuk in Ilocano, siggu^ in Isinay, and sabukot in Tagalog, the bird played a large part in sending boys of Dupax, be they Isinay or Ilocano or Tagalog, to the mangngugit or circumcision man. (Hey, don’t ask me about gays, particularly if they also underwent circumcision. As far as I recall, when I was a boy, there were not so many of such creatures in our part of Planet Earth then; if ever there were some, their closet must have been so tight shut as to get noticed.)

The love call of the tsakuk didn’t exactly say when it is season to undergo circumcision, much unlike the way the song at twilight of the pitpitaw (a type of cuckoo, I gave it that name by onomatopoea or by the sound it made) would mean no rain the following day. Nor was the presence of this often solitary bird in the bamboo clumps or the tall Miscanthus reeds (runo in Ilocano and Isinay) would mean the coming of a specific activity or weather phenomenon.

The tsakuk rather made us “unbaptized” boys hate it, hate our uncles, hate the older boys who had already undergone circumcision. For when out of no where the sound “ku-ku-ku-kuk… supput… supput!” reverberated in the thickets and made its way to the consciousness of our elders, almost always someone among them would stop planting rice and call out: “Nangngegmo, barok? Agpakugitka kanon!” (Did you hear that, son? It says it’s time for you to get circumcised!)

Preparing for the Cut

Naturally, no matter how afraid we were then of getting our “birds” kissed by the barber’s razor, we would murmur to ourselves something like “Never again!” And so, there and then we would resolve for the nth time to finally undergo the rite of kugit (circumcision) come Lenten Season. 

The foreplay, as it were, would take time.

In addition to going after the tsakuk with a pocketful of river pebbles and our ever-present slingshots when our extrasensory perceptions said there was one about to sound off its irritating call in the ledda (bittuh in Isinay; talahib in Tagalog; scientific name Saccharum spontaneum) reeds nearby, we would be doing a number of preparations for when the big day comes.

Not exactly in any order of priority, one activity would be to scout around the barrio for cousins or playmates or newly arrived migrants from Central Luzon, the Ilocos or the Cordillera provinces who are also ready and willing to undergo the rite. It seemed the fear let alone the pain of undergoing the razor would be greatly lessened when it is shared with other kids.

We would also be asking from those who have recently undergone the cut who was the best mangngugit in the village – plus how much he would accept as “doctor’s fee” or, alternatively, if it was okay to give him a handful of fermented then dried betel nut plus a bottle of gin or Siok Tong.

Depending on how far the skin of your manhood could be retracted backward from its tip, we would also spend more time than ever getting rid of its salt deposits when we bathed by the river. As was normal for us river-loving boys then, we would compare notes as to how much could our respective skins be pulled back. (Note: There would always be hair-like green algae in the more placid parts of the river and we would put some of them around our birds, imagining how the real appearance would be when we would grow up and have genuine hair where there was none before.)

Help from a Wild Plant

If our skin was not yet ready, we would be looking for the shrub with milky sap we called kuribetbet (Tagalog kampupot or pandakaki; scientific name Tabernaemontana pandacaqui). The plant grew by itself by the river bank or on the roadside and we used its sap to shrink our boils or to stop our skin itches, particularly ringworm (Ilocano kurad; Isinay aksep; Tagalog buni), from spreading to other parts of our body.

I don’t remember now who advised us to use the plant’s milk to make our “birds” ready for the cut but I do recall experimenting with it a couple of times and, indeed, the magic worked and gave me a half centimeter mileage each time (but not before I felt stinging pain at first followed by a burning itch that quickly went off once I jumped back to the soothing coolness of the ever friendly river).

Kuribetbet (pandakaki) leaves and fruits from http://www.stuartxchange.org/PandakakiPuti.html

Lent is Circumcision Time

Lent (often referred to as Cuaresma or Holy Week) mercifully always coincided with summer vacation from school. It was also that brief time of the year when we hyperactive kids hang our slingshots and took a break from our bird-sniping, grasshopper-snatching, cicada-catching, and dragonfly-torturing pursuits. 

In place of going outdoors, we farm kids would be asked to help our old folks husk corn, shell peanuts, roll tobacco leaves, baby sit younger cousins or sisters, help squeeze out spiny amaranth or bamboo thorns lodged on an elder's soles, etc.

In many parts of Philippine Christendom, Lent also meant undergoing certain forms of physical sacrifice as form of penitence and “sympathy” with the crucified Son of God.

Like circumcision.

There is a happy confluence to all this, as I see it now. It is as if Holy Week was purposely designed to allow boys the opportunity to go through the rites of manhood that the Man on the Cross was said to have similarly undergone as a boy. Consider, for example, the following:

• First, the school break meant freedom from  school assignments, rough schoolmates, and daily classes that would otherwise stay on the way of getting one’s phallic wound heal quickly. 
• Second, the good behavior enforced by the Lenten “curfew” meant one’s elders would not say no to a few coins to buy a bottle of gin or to ask one from grandmother’s mini store to use as “thank you” to the circumcision expert.
• Third, since the past few days of Lent saw one being able to do many chores as well as favors, the days after the cut would mean well deserved exemption from such chores as splitting wood, fetching water, taking the carabao to the hills, and riding one’s bike to town for some errands. 
• And fourth, the bloodletting plus the throbbing pain days after the cut would pass for a cleansing of sorts and a penitencia that befits the season.

Goodbye to Boyhood

I’ll soon post a more detailed or rather a blow-by-blow account of how I underwent the passage from boyhood to manhood. 

For now, let me park by saying something close to blasphemy. Since the circumcision was made on or earlier than Huebes Santo (Maundy Thursday) and the Sunday after would be Easter, hallelujah – the church bells that went silent since Good Friday would sound like thunder again, saying the Lord has risen… but also seemingly proclaiming to no one in particular: there’s a newly born man in town! 

A new man who no longer gives a damn even if a million tsakuk birds would sing “ku-ku-ku-kuk… supput… supput” all day long! –CHARLZ CASTRO

When pencils, beetles, and tadpoles were toys

IT SURELY was a different life we had then when my sisters and I were young. Back then, we spoke both in Ilocano and in Isinay -- very much unlike kids in Dupax today (be they of Ilocano or of Isinay ancestry) who no longer speak a word of the native Dupax tongue -- only Tagalog which they learned from watching too much TV, and reinforced by the educational system that gives preference to using Filipino and English for instruction. We also had insects for toys and playmates then (such as the cotton weevil or baka-baka in the photo above) -- compared to the play stations and computer games that kids now commonly have.

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We had indelible pencils that papa brought home most likely from his election duties at the Dupax Elementary School (which oldtimers used to call then Gabaldon). We didn’t know why there were such pencils then. I recall we would put the pencil’s tip on our tongue each time I would use one on the pages of Mama’s notebook for her dressmaking measurements or when Arlyne would draw her stick figures on her part of the cabinet where she and I were sent to sleep on summer afternoons when Mama would be singing Tennessee Waltz and Changing Partners to whoever was her baby that needed to be sung to sleep then (most likely Merlie and Tessie). Our lips would be blackish violet due to that pencil then.

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There were tadpoles and grasshoppers and dragonflies and bumblebees and alutiit (house lizard; batbatilaw in Isinay) and atlas moths and large green worms around the house in Dupax then. Plus litlit (bats) in the roof, owls at night, pirpiriw (bee-eaters; plepplew in Isinay) up in the kapok trees, baka-baka (cotton bugs) in the fallen kapok cotton capsules, black ants in the guyabano, ulmog (chicken mite; alin-amut in Isinay) in the poultry, flies in the kitchen, ipes (cockroach; baya-i in Isinay)  in the aparador, lamok (mosquito; imu^ in Isinay) at night, and kiteb (bedbug; itov in Isinay) in the bamboo bed and the rattan chairs. We also had pag-ong (turtle; bau-u in Isinay) in the pagarasawan, rats in the kamalig, noisy pigs in the pigpen, housebirds in the saraguelas and starapple trees, and titit (sunbirds) in the zigzag flowers. In the dry parts of the house’s periphery there were red ants that bit my sisters’ feet (that’s why Tessie had nabo^gan toes). And there were ant-lions we called sunud-sunud that we caught by getting one and tie it with long hair then let it dive on the conical hole on the dust and the resident ant-lion would come out of hiding to bite the intruder. There were also baka-baka in drying kapok fruits and we delighted the red and black color of them with their young of all sizes as they crawled just like cows grazing on hilly land. There were seeds colored red and black that we used to collect, and lipay seeds from Surong that we used as pamato.

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My dog then was named Dargo. It was a gift from Uncle Osio (Ambrocio Mambear). I think it was the second dog we had at home because before then we had the bitch Brownie that bit me on my toe and which later "was put to rest" when its mouth got froth (they called it agu-uyong in Iloko and natahe in Isinay) and started to chase anybody (particularly women who had long dresses) who came to the house, including Mama's dressmaking customers. We also had a cat that was always giving birth and we gave its kittens to neighbors or relatives. We also always had a martines on a cage (often given by Mama's friend Nana Lita Dicen-Calacala whose husband Tata Ikko was Judith's favorite barber) and a mother cat that always gave birth in Mama’s box of dirty clothes. Of course there were also the rats in the rice granary (kamalig in Iloko; e-yang in Isinay) and in the rice bin (pagbagasan in Iloko; pampurutan in Isinay). I always had fun holding the pink babies of the rats on my palm, even as they always chewed Papa’s old combination black-and-white shoes including the tolda (canvas) that he would bring each time we went on a picnic to the river in I-iyo and we caught fish the old way by damming or diverting the stream and make the goby (sappilan), river crab (ahasit), and shrimp (ahdaw) easier to catch.

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My toys then especially in I-iyo consisted of whatever was available in the trees or around us kids. If the tibbeg trees (Ficus nota) bore fruits, we would have endless supply of easy to reach fruits to make into wheels. We also treasured the fallen sheath of the betel nut palm as it was good for our trak-trak – one rode on the wide sheath while another pulled the petiole. It was, however, the May beetle (abal-abal in Iloko; salagubang in Tagalog) that gave us the most fun. When they started to emerge during the first rains of April, the abal-abal season meant we would have plenty of games, almost all of which were cruel, using the poor insects as protagonists. For instance, we chose the most agile pairs and made them do a tug-of-war (ginnuyudan) and locking of horns (sinnangduan). At times, we asked our aunties to thread them with a needle and a strand from the pagabelan (weaving loom) then we would delight at letting them fly here and there (pinnatayaban) -- failing which we would throw the lazy ones (beetle plus strings and all) to the ever-alert mother hen. If we got tired of insects, there were always flat cans of Rosebowl sardines that we turned into gargarusa (toy trucks) whether wheeled with tebbeg fruits or just plain pulled with a bast-fiber string. We also played with the itchy atattaru worm by making them crawl or burying them in the tapok (dry soil) that we had plenty of in I-iyo. Depending on the mood, we also had palsuot, salbatan, torotot and kadang-kadang. Of course the more common toys we had was the palsiit (baris in Isinay) and the daldalig (dalij-dalij in Isinay). All of these we brought with us when we went to the farm or brought the carabao to take a cool dip in the river.

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Surung and Pitang were our foraging as well as play grounds, especially for me. Surung was when I was Ilocano; Pitang was when I was Isinay. But either way, both places meant lots of sunshine that "almost all the time made me high" (to borrow from a song by John Denver). That clinches it: I was always "high" each time I was out there in the great outdoors, cold rain or searing sunny weather. Ah, the memories! Looking back now, I'm not only thankful I was (and I still am) a country boy but grateful too that I have lived during those times when Dupax was still green country and crystal-clear river and gentle hills and bird-rich and there were no NO TRESPASSING signs... so much so that I can relate to "Greenfields" and other such songs of summer by the Brothers Four, and the poems of Hiawatha ("Minnehaha, the laughing water"), and the nature writings of Henry David Thoreau (taking long morning walks at Walden Pond) and Aldo Leopold and John Muir.

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I went to school with no money. So during recess I joined classmates who heeded teachers’ word to eat guava. We raided Latar family’s fence, braved the Benitez dogs and the old man himself. Abused Bunyeng’s anonas trees. We had a term: “recess ti-ve” (literally: having snacks at recess time only to have constipation). One time my friend Ariston Laccay bought ice cream from Oppie Ferrer, the sorbetes man. He gave me one tip of the cone filled with the delicious thing. The next time around, I saw myself finding opportunity selling toyo and suka bottles. But not enough. So twice I secretly put and egg from the baki  on my pocket and sold them to Linda benitez on the way to school for diyyes (10 centavos) each – enough for a double icecream cone, pad paper at the store of Anut Suput and Incion Pawa, a new pencil (not the Mongol) or a mammon bread or candy with lastiko. Later I would be saved by Inang who would often give me salapi (50 centavos) which at the time was already very generous. She gave me money each time on weekends I would go and help in the farm work even if only to make bubon (shallow river well), tend the stove fire, weed the corn of overgrown kalunay, gather paltong or beans, and in the evening help “pusi” (pry the kernels from the cob) the corn and then do “surgery” on their soles to remove kwantung (spiny amaranth; suwit in Isinay) thorn that got their foot swollen.

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Accidental deaths of our pets occurred in our house — with me around the scene of the crime. For instance there was the case of a hen and a puppy (her name was Mona, after Mona Sulaiman, the fastest Filipina runner at the time) that went to kingdom come when Abeth was being baptized. A distant uncle, Karting “Manmanaas” Jasmin was around to help Uncle Atong butcher and cook the pig for the occasion. Oh, even as I was thankful he was the one who dug the hole when we buried the puppy while someone dressed the chicken, I hated it when he kept saying that the puppy died of a cracked head or something and even went to the motions of showing how the animal’s forehead became soft. And yet, I swear to high heavens that I was only holding my puppy’s two forelegs then. The case of the hen was of course a different one. I remember it was making lubbon (occupying the baki nest of another hen) and so I took her out and threw her on the ground. Mama was angry and so, even as the guests were enjoying their snacks, I stayed in the corner contemplating what happened. Could it be that I got mad at the chicken out off frustration that the newest member of the family was again a girl and not somebody I could call brother?

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We went to school using the church bell as clock. It rang at 7 then at 1. We called it “koling” (calling). Ah, the church bells were the strongest sound one could hear in Dupax then. We could hear it even when we were gathering firewood at Abuwew, flying kites in Pitang, or gathering slabs and trimmings at the sawmill. At 6pm, the bell would be pealed again to signal vespers time which  oldies called “dalas”. Time to get home for dinner. Dalas also meant getting the right hand of elders (in our case, particularly Apu Dalin Mambear, Papa’s maternal aunt who I never heard speak a word of Ilocano) and putting the back of their palm on your forehead. If you don’t do it and one who was aware of the revered Isinay custom remembers, you would hear the Isinay command “Naveyandah, mammano ayu!” (By golly, go kiss the palm of your elders!).

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There is a hill we used to call Kudus. Kudus is of course Isinay for cross. When I was a boy the word was used to refer to that hill above Uruddu or southwest of that part of town where the house of Uncle Ado Boada and those of the Daran families and the cluster of houses they call Kadingrasan (on account of the folks surnamed Raza, de la Cruz, Ramos, and others who were said to have migrated from Dingras, Ilocos Norte). It was one hill I have yet to climb.

Bits and pieces of information I got here and there from conversations of old folks and Isinay classmates revealed that Kudus Hill was called as such because in the olden days there was a huge cross on its peak that served as end-point of the Way of the Cross prayers done around town, with the small lime-and-brick dome-shaped structures as stations.

The structures were also called kudus. We had one such in front of the Salirungan house, on the intersection of the road to Auntie Tibang’s house. We used the said kudus mound to test our prowess at jumping from up high. It was for us kids then a big thing and woe to those who could not climb on it then jump down on the grass below. Once in a while we would use the kudus structure as “save” when on fullmoon (tallivung in Isinay) nights we would play tuttut or kukulandoy (hide and seek games). One such structure stood in front of the Boada family’s house. I think I have climbed that also when the Boadas would tender a lunch gathering for the Castro, Boada, Daran clan to celebrate Uncle Ado and Aunti Tanacia’s wedding anniversary or something.

Probably built in the 1940s or earlier, very few remnants of such structures are left and I feel the urge and the duty to one of these days take photographs of them for posterity. --CHARLZ CASTRO