by Bianca Tham

A week back, I attended a poetry reading entitled “A Certain Sort of Hunger” at the Singapore Art Museum. I was compelled to attend because the theme was The Supernatural. I’ve always been fascinated with stories of superstition and ghostly encounters! Some titles of the poems included “The Original Banana Tree Spirit”, “The Whore With a Hole in Her Gut” and “Pontianaks Plan Parenthood”. I suppose the event was in line with Halloween festivities around the corner then, but more interestingly, it sought to articulate the inexplicable link of the supernatural to the female gender. It is no surprise that the reading was presented by Etiquette SG, an ongoing platform that organises and curates “a multidisciplinary showcase of art, writing and film created by and about women” in an attempt to address gender as a subject of discourse. The need for its discussion is obvious and made apparent to me over the course of the performance. Women are largely subject in both the oral and written narrative, and this is likewise observed in the imagining and construction of the supernatural. Too often have we heard of female witches, and to bring it closer to home, female pontianaks in Indonesian and Malay folklore (vampiric spirit of women who died while pregnant). Of course, scary live/dead men also exist in literature, but come on- a boy that crawled out of the well? A man that appears when you call on his name in the mirror? I’ve heard about Casper, and he is friendly. While I’m being selective here, my point is that the supernatural in popular culture is dominated by narratives that depict women as angry, blood-thirsty spirits.

Tania De Rozario, in her poem “Ladies in Red”, notes that female ghosts are mostly fashioned by men. This makes so much sense! Perhaps it stems from their fear of female authority, which female ghosts acquire in exacting their revenge. The thought of women being free to express themselves in mass hysteria must be frightening for the men. For pontianaks to be lying in wait of unsuspecting male victims and breaking out of their traditional roles is also surely unnerving. In many societies patriarchy is still very much alive, and women are confined within gendered parameters of what is considered feminine and what is not. This gender binarism can be observed in how agency is awarded to the woman “in death and in the transformation of her into a villain” (EttiquetteSG). Cue “madwoman in the attic” trope. Why are female spirits portrayed as entities to be feared? Women are confined in “stereotypical and sometimes unforgiving constructs” even after death (Peatix). I’ve read and watched of one too many women in flowy, white garbs with long, limp hair. Often, these spirits linger around in challenge to the injustices they suffered while alive. The question that should be asked is: Why were they hurt or wronged in the first place? Tania De Rozario answers this in “Ladies in Red”, that women today are already ghosts. We are seen but not heard, both in the supernatural world and the one we inhabit in present. It is no wonder that women return as spiteful spirits!

The topics of the supernatural and gender brings to mind something I learnt in Feminism class. Some feminists revise or rewrite fairy tales. In rewriting these stories, women take control of their own representation and attempt to subvert patriarchy, which many fairy tales inherently subscribe to. One way of feminist revisioning is to expose the constructed nature of fairy tales. For example, wolves were used in French Aristocratic literature to refer to male courtiers who seduced and lure innocent ladies in waiting. Likewise, the tale of the pontianak can be said to have been invented by Malay wives who wanted to scare their husbands from engaging in sexual activity with women on the road (Theroux).

My final thoughts on “A Certain Sort of Hunger”…

I thoroughly enjoyed the reading! It was humorous, and very new to me a number of ways. Firstly, all the performers were women (perhaps it would have been useful to have included a male voice? I’d definitely like to hear his experience with the supernatural). Next, I remain fascinated with how Ad Maulod constructed her poems. With the use of the Malay language she very cleverly intertwined the concept of race in her poems, apt since the Malay community perpetuates superstitions and stories about the pontianak for instance. It made her works accessible and very ‘local’, something we’ve discussed in class. Finally, I found Tania’s poem “Personal Possessions” very striking. Somewhere in the poem, she laments how displaying traits of sexuality outside heteronormative boundaries leads people to dismiss it as a sign of possession. She goes on to mention that it is not the abnormal characteristic that is seen as evil, but the person displaying them. As a professing homosexual herself, her voice lends credibility to the subtle appeal for more understanding. Women are constantly ‘othered’- for their gender, their sexuality, their being.