Review of A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and edited by Ng Yi-Sheng (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2021)

By Sebastian Taylor

**Gerald Leow, Mat Rock (2011)**
Image description: A rock positioned in the middle of a wooden table with a keris (asymmetrical dagger from Indonesia) stabbed into the top of the rock. The blade of the keris spells out the words ‘Judas Priest’.

Modern stories of folk horror stem from “a backlash to industrial capitalism,” argues Scott Benson, the video game designer. In his appearance on the Spooky Town podcast, he points out the persistent feeling in folk-horror stories that “there’s a hidden structure under this [plot]… a machine that is turning.” The ghost stories of Othman Wok, despite their varied surface detail, follow a similar structure: leading title, transgression, building tension, and then vengeance. The reader knows early on how most of the stories are going to end. Nevertheless, the reader feels a strong sense of horror because they have wandered into an ancient machine, or a “ruleset” as Benson calls it, that they and capitalism have displaced. There is an urge “to go back,” Benson elaborates, but also a fear of discovering what has been repressed.

Othman Wok published his first horror stories in 1952 for the Malay paper Utusan Zaman in what was then called Malaya. A Mosque in the Jungle collects a selection of stories that Othman wrote for various newspaper columns between 1952 and 1987. During that period, Singapore left the newly formed postcolonial state of Malaysia and became an independent nation-state. The collection’s editor Ng Yi-Sheng describes Othman in his introduction as a polyglot with his fingers in many pies. He was the Minister of Social Affairs from 1963 to 1977. After he retired from politics, he served on the boards of the Singapore Tourism Board and Sentosa Development Corporation, the latter responsible for turning the southern island from a British military base and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp into a popular tourist destination. From his vantage place, Othman saw, or perhaps oversaw, the rapid social and economic development of Singapore. His stories, I suggest, express the deep unease springing from the displacement of ancient, local knowledge by modern, global technologies.

Of the 24 stories in the collection, “Her Dead Husband Hasn’t Left Home” is one such story that partly uncovers the mechanism Benson describes. This story, which Ng dubs as “uncannily autobiographical-sounding,” follows the haunting of a student house in 1950s London. Instead of simply revealing the identity of the spirit, the title precipitates tension within the story. At first, the male narrator dismisses the eerie cold wind upon entering his room, “as drafts like this were common” in old houses. However, Mrs Bols, the landlady, suggests that “it may be the spirit of the house.” The haunting remains tame compared to the horror of previous stories in the collection (such as “The Anklets”), but this tension between the knowledge of the narrator, landlady, and reader (whose knowledge is derived from the title) allows Othman to build up a profound uneasiness. The backstory of the spirit is not revealed until the end of the tale when the author provides alternate interpretations of the haunting. From Mrs Bols’ final reaction, the reader learns of a hidden knowledge she has kept throughout the tale. Despite the absence of gore, that horror feeling lies in the knowledge kept safe by a woman from a man, kept away by a landlady from a tenant, and lost almost irretrievably to the modern world.

These conflicting relationships to knowledge and power appear again in the story “The Skulls of Kuala Banat,” written from the perspective of an English District Officer in the days of British colonialism. Officer Martin Haliday is slowly becoming obsessed with old European-style ruins in Kuala Banat. He aims to establish a new colony there, despite warnings from a local shaman, Pawang Mat Yassin. Folk knowledge comes into direct conflict with the knowledge of capital as all Martin Haliday “want[s] to do in his life [is] to be among the ruins, to live there and to work there.” When Haliday tries to convince people to move to Kuala Banat, promising, “what a blessed land it [is] and what abundance it [offers],” his language focuses on economic resources and productivity, the exploitative concerns of imperial power. The resulting story is truly haunting in its resolution. The clash between folk and capital knowledge leaves the bystanders decimated. In the end, the only two survivors are the pawang and Haliday, the holders of conflicting knowledge. Othman himself is of Orang Laut origins with ties to the first peoples of Singapore and Malaysia. If we consider the sad colonial and postcolonial situation of the Orang Laut, this story becomes even more chilling.

Chilling, too, is reading “Si Hitam’s Curse” and being reminded of “The Cats of Ulthar.” The latter story was written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1920. Despite an eclectic writing style and a history of bigotry, Lovecraft still influences modern horror fiction. For example, Benson credits Lovecraft’s story “From Beyond” for specific scenes in his 2017 video game Night in the Woods. It is interesting to consider how the different experiences of the three writers have contributed to a growing body of folk horror. Lovecraft drew from life in New England throughout the tumult of the first Red Scare and, later, the Great Depression. Othman, born in 1924, lived through the Japanese Occupation as well as the aftermath of British extractive capitalism. Benson, on the other hand, is still alive today and has drawn from the history of labour unions in the U.S. for his work. Despite these differences, the fiction of Othman, Lovecraft, and Benson cuts to the bone. “Si Hitam’s Curse” and “The Cats of Ulthar” have similar plots, but they critically diverge in their portrayal of gendered violence.

“It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat,” begins Lovecraft, because “[the cat] is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.” Similarly, in “Si Hitam’s Curse,” the narrator’s grandmother describes the cat, Si Hitam, as “descended from those the ancient kings of Bali used to keep,” to justify the old Sanskrit-engraved collar the cat wears. Both descriptions stress the folk knowledge of respect for cats. Cats are an old species and are therefore connected to something larger than the narrators of both stories. In “The Cats of Ulthar,” the special cat belongs to a young travelling boy, and his reliance on the cat is severed by “an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours.” In response, the boy’s prayers are answered by the town’s cats joining together to seek vengeance on the old couple.

A large woven sculpture in the middle of an empty field. The sculpture is made of bamboo, steel, and Thai sticky rice baskets that are known as ‘Huad’.

The narrator of “Si Hitam’s Curse” enacts similar violence on Si Hitam and her kitten; however, the cats’ revenge is channelled through a woman rather than the cats themselves. The description of the violence is much more visceral than in Lovecraft’s tale. In the latter, only picked-clean skeletons are left; whereas in the former, the culprit is found dead and “on his neck [is] a gaping wound, as if sharp teeth [have] sunk into it. Blood [is] spilled all over the mattress.” The gore is exacerbated to reinforce the association of the female avenger with the cats. As such, the folk knowledge of royal cats is upheld through the women in the story. Othman seems to have transmuted Lovecraft’s image of capital (signified by the disadvantaged position of the foreign and nomadic orphan boy) into a form of gendered knowledge. More generally Ng’s selection of stories emphasizes this conflation of folk and female knowledge, an emphasis that may be lost in a less contemporary selection of Othman’s work.

In his role as editor, Ng has arranged the stories so they progress “through both space and time." In his selection process, he has also assessed the effectiveness of Othman’s stories to inspire dread. He explains that sometimes linguistic anachronisms distract from the horror of the stories. A prizewinning poet and fiction writer, Ng has not translated the collection himself; he has only made minimal aesthetic edits to the translations while referring to the original Malay. In his introduction, Ng confesses that he does not consider himself qualified to re-translate the entire collection. Still, there remains some clumsiness in the resulting language of the book. In the story “Her Dead Husband Hasn’t Left Home” the translation reads “more than forty years of age” in a description of a character. The formula sounds outdated. Then, in “Si Hitam’s Curse,” we read “Sweet Jamilah, a fellow student at the university, with whom I had fallen in love.” The overly formal placement of the preposition “with” can be off-putting. Arguably, such archaisms situate the contemporary reader in relation to the text, reminding the reader that the stories are old. In a way, the clunky translation preserves some of the old tensions of 1950s Singapore: the toll of rapid modernisation, the dismantling of indigenous autonomy, and the new spaces and language of gendered violence, for example.

I did not know what to expect when I first began reading this book. It had the potential to be a monster-of-the-week collection, or perhaps a collection of cautionary tales. Instead, what I found was a timeless melange of surprisingly modern anxieties trapped inside Scott Benson’s “hidden machine.” Though the language, or more specifically the syntax, feels archaic at times, the editor has chosen and arranged the stories well. Ng hopes “that this publication will prompt others in the future to delve deeper into Singaporean, Malaysian and Malayan literary history.” It is my opinion that this collection of stories does just this, exploring knowledge that is both of and for the modern world.

Gerald Leow, Sticky Rice 3 (2021)
photographed by Arnuparp Jantakaew
Image description: An inside view of the sculpture that shows the woven design of the bamboo roof and the Thai sticky rice baskets (Huad) more clearly. There is a hole at the top that allows in light and shows a portion of the sky.

Sebastian Taylor has an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of St Andrews and is now pursuing an MLitt in curatorial practice at the Glasgow School of Art. They are fascinated by performance poetry, and they write on the themes of queering the body, self, and space, after having served as the Head Editor of the University’s Creative Writing Society.

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience and Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website ngyisheng.com or his Twitter and Instagram at @yishkabob.

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Gerald Leow (b 1984, Singapore) is a visual artist and sculptor. His practice is a material based exploration between culture, history and interpretation, investigating the obscure boundaries between the sacred and the profane. His work has been showcased at Chan + Hori Contemporary (Singapore) and the Queensland College of the Arts (Australia), as part of the Singapore Art Museum Front Lawn Commission (Singapore), Palais de Tokyo (France) and Art Science Museum (Singapore).

A Mosque in the Jungle

By Sebastian Taylor

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