#YISHREADS August 2023
By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob
It’s the Seventh Month of the Chinese calendar! Aka the Hungry Ghost Festival, that special time of the year where the gates of the underworld are flung open and the souls of the dead walk the Earth… if you believe that kind of thing, that is. Mind you, here in Singapore, even skeptics think twice about desecrating roadside offerings or turning around when a voice calls you at night. We may look like a hypermodern city, but we’re still haunted by uncanny traditions, which is kind of the way we like it.
So in honour of the good elder and younger brothers (i.e. what you formally call hungry ghosts so they don’t get annoyed and merk you), I’m dedicating this month’s column to non-fiction works exploring how spiritual belief still thrives in and has relevance to contemporary society, whether it’s in Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Syria, or the globe seen by a Romanian historian at the University of Chicago. Whatever they tell you, this world is not yet disenchanted.
Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces, by Terence Heng
Routledge, 2021
I've been curious about this book ever since the author (an old friend from our student poetry days) did an NUS talk about it last year. Despite being westernised as hell, he got sucked into the world of tang kees and sin tuas via his photography hobby during the demolition of Bukit Brown Cemetery; now he's a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, specialising in the survival of religious ritual in modern cities, practising what he calls visual-lyrical sociology, i.e. taking loads of lovely photos that don't just document a ceremony, but actually capture its energy, its movement, its spirit.
The result of that is an academic coffee-table book that captures a whole bunch of the spectacle and irony of Chinese religion in Singapore, including the fact that most folks who practise it would never call it Chinese religion! All our infernos of paper pagodas, all the yew keng processions and trance states, they all have to negotiate state regulations of space in order to survive, e.g. combining temples, erecting cages for your bonfires and talismanic barriers; being cool with the fact that town council cleaners might clear your offerings a mere two hours after you lay them out.
He's coined the term "sacred flowscapes" to describe the way holy spaces shift and change, often suddenly and unpredictably, cos of architecture and the whims of both the government and spirits. The numinous and taboo pop-up and parade and fade according to the time of the day, the lunar calendar, the changing of traffic lights. It's not dead and eternal; it's alive and always adapting.
Which is actually cool, when you think about it. Do we really want Chinese religion here to be subject to orthodoxies and 100% collusion with state agendas? Isn't it actually more punk to have the ancestral religion of the majority race be subject to distrust, fugitive and unstable, forced to always find creative ways to survive? When I was a kid, I was always told that these were dying traditions, but I'm middle-aged and they're still here. How do we keep the gods, in every sense of the word, alive?
(Btw, a lot of the pics are of Terence's personal friend and collaborator, Nick, who's a medium for 齐天大圣, the Monkey King. How wonderful to be the friend of a friend of a god.)
Journey to the Land of the Earth Goddess, by Katherine Stenger Frey
Gramedia Publishing, 1986
Another coffee table book, documenting an anthropologist’s visit to the traditional Minangkabau heartlands in Sumatra! The dynamic’s not super colonial, mind you: after all, it’s published by a Jakarta press, in the spirit of Indonesians celebrating and trying to make sense of their own cultures.
The book opens with the legends of Bundo Kanduang, mother of the hero Cindua Mato, whom she conceived by eating an ivory coconut before rising to the seventh heaven—but when the author actually arrives at her destination, she admits a teensy bit of disappointment at the living incarnation of this divine queen: Mande Rubiah, a 20 year-old divorcee with smallpox scars, living in a dilapidated and overcrowded rumah gadang.
Still, this matrilineal, monolith-building, buffalo-celebrating, tarekat Islam-observing culture remains vibrant—Mande’s a little outshone by her assistant, the dukun/healer Mariati, also a 20-year-old girl—and possibly even by Frey’s own assistant, the well-travelled Sjamsuarni Sjam, who’s studied hotel management in Yugoslavia and guided visitors in Irian Jaya and Kalimantan, and who seizes the opportunity of these travels to survey the land she’s inherited as a Minang woman.
Loads of gorgeous photos, nevertheless, and a well-balanced mix of mythic history and everyday reality—the festival processions in Padang, the strange negotiation between patriarchal political and religious power with the simple fact that the women are the ones holding on to the wealth. Sure, I know this is from 40 years ago, but I want an excuse to go and visit to see what it’s like now.
Spirit Worlds: Cambodia, The Buddha and The Naga, by Philip Coggan
John Beaufoy Publishing, 2016
An unexpectedly eye-opening primer about the complex religious culture of the Khmer people. Much of it is Buddhism, of course—we open with a pretty standard biography of the Buddha, and chapters explain monkhood, the social structure of the monastery, hungry ghosts (the festival is a bigger deal than Songkran), kamm (karma) and bonn (merit—though here associated with charisma and protection from the gods that actually allows your whole family to get off scot-free from fatal hit and run accidents, as in the case of Prime Minister Hun Sen!), and Preah Torani, the earth goddess worshipped throughout mainland Southeast Asia.
But woven into this are fascinating stories of lesser, more culturally specific spirits. Some are Southeast Asian regional monsters, e.g. the arp (known as the penanggalan in the Malay world and the phii krasue in Thailand) and the koan krak (toyol/kumanthong respectively). Others are borrowed from Hinduism, e.g. the tevoda (devdas), worshipped in dollhouse altars outside homes, the neak ta (village deities), the mrieng kongveal (child-shaped spirits who live in the wild, naked but with red cloth around their heads, also worshipped in dollhouses), chumneang pteah (protective spirits of the house), and boramey—powerful spirits who go between human and supernatural worlds, possessing female mediums called kru. E.g. Sdech Kamlong the Leper King (an incarnation of the first king Preah Thong!), Yeay Mao the Black Lady (who collects wooden penises!), and even Daun Phann, the evil mother-in-law from the epic of Tum Teav, who claims she was misunderstood and didn’t deserve to be buried up to her neck and run over with a plough.
Also countless invocations of the naga—Preah Thong founded the kingdom by marrying a naga princess Neang Nak, remember; and both monks and brides must dress as nagas as part of their initiation/marriage ceremonies. Plus the dark symbolism of the crocodile flag—were they the original chthonic animals before Hindu influence?—and contemplations on how all these beliefs fed into modern monarchic history, and the terrors of the Khmer Rouge. Fascinating stuff.
Sufism & Surrealism, by Adonis
Translated by Judith Cumberbatch
Saqi, 2005
A 1995 treatise by one of the most famous modern Arabic poets, apparently inspired by his reading of Rimbaud, whom he recognizes as a Sufi!
Honestly, this isn’t a mind-blowing work for me. The ideas he’s arguing are pretty intuitive: though born in different continents in different historical eras, both Sufism and surrealism are invested in the idea that one can attain higher, non-orthodox truths by abandoning rationalism in favour of ecstasy and intuition—both embrace desire and sensory stimulation, both believe in the power of poetry, both are pooh-poohed by conservative scholars for their deviance.
What he’s trying to do, I think, is to convince the Arab intelligentsia to take greater risks in their writing, assuring them that to do so wouldn’t be slavishly imitative of colonial aesthetics. He’s putting his whole intellectual weight behind this, quoting copiously from ibn Arabi and Andre Breton, al-Niffari and Maurice Blanchot. Mind you, in the process of explaining these ideas, he ends up being weirdly sexist, describing the love of the divine in the form of the pursuit of beauty in the form of a woman (or in some of the folks he quotes, a young man!); even describing the custom of the hijab in the context of veiling the ultimate truth—never mind all the great women Sufis and surrealists in history who’re agents rather than objects of revelation.
All very Platonically idealist—which he knows; he celebrates the fact that the Sufis are the inheritors of Mediterranean mysteries, from Eleusis and Hermes in Greece all the way back to Gilgamesh’s experience of seeing the ultimate truth of the world. Which is not quite surrealism as we have it now? Sure, in the age of modernism folks might’ve believed automatic writing got you closer to the truth, but in the age of postmodernism people just like molten clocks cos of the aesthetic.
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, by Mircea Eliade
Orlando, 1959
An old-timey classic on the history of religion, but still a lovely read. The author's arguing that the default state of humankind is religiosity, and that there are widespread commonalities (he stops short of claiming universality) in how pre-modern cultures have perceived the world in spiritual terms. The homeland is centre of the cosmos, often with a pillar or mountain or temple marking the gateway to the heavens; and the cosmos itself takes the dimensions of a house, whether configured through foundation stones or the roof vent of a yurt; nature echoes with archetypes of creator/sky/storm gods and deathly jungles and chthonic seas.
Time as well as space is sacralised, with seasonal rituals marking a return to the divine eternity of the age of the gods, each repetition drawing from the energy of creation, upholding the divine order. Even the most horrifying of religious acts (e.g. human sacrifice, cannibalism) are forms of imitatio dei. Conversely, the breaking of taboos (e.g. the menstruating girl engaging in everyday social activities) violates this order and distances a community from its gods—which sounds like tommyrot to modern secular folks like us, but the psychic distress was real: he cites the case of the Achilpa people of Aboriginal Australia, who, when their sacred gum tree pole was broken, simply lay down and waited to die. Before modernity, there is no such thing as profane life, profane space, profane time, as we experience it when we're not engaged in religious ceremonies. All lived experience was affirmed by sacred meaning.
Strange to read this, as a gay aficionado of multi-culti mysticism, because as much as I'm entranced by the breadth of Eliade's knowledge (he casually cites the Vedas, Ancient Greek rites, ethnographic studies of the Kwakiutls, the new millenarianism of Marxism), and as much as I want my life to be re-enchanted by pantheistic holiness, I'm also aware that faith can mean death to liberty, death to people like me. But it's also super-easy to accept, in the crazy multipolar globalised 2020s, when the once-glorious West is gripped by conspiracy theories and transphobic scapegoating, how none of us are really all that secularised, how religiosity has only been eclipsed by the modern profane, in no way—for better and for worse—extinguished.
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), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation 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 at ngyisheng.com.
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