Female ghouls in folklore of the Malay Archipelago: Profiles

bajiaogui

芭蕉鬼 Ba Jiao Gui (China, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore)

Literally the “banana ghost”, this is a female ghost who dwells in a banana tree. She appears wailing, under the tree at night, and is sometimes observed carrying a baby. In certain magic traditions, an evil priest will tie a red string around the trunk of the tree and then stick sharp needles into the tree. Next, the priest will tie the other end of the red string to his or her bed. At night, when the ghost appears, it feels the pain of the needles and the binding of the magic cord. The ghost then begs the priest to set her free in return for providing information (i.e., winning lottery numbers). If the priest does not fulfill the promise of setting the ghost free after verifying the information, he will meet with a horrifying death. Additionally, priests who perform exorcisms, sometimes make it a habit of tying ghosts to trees with red cord. If the priest forgets about the ghost, within 10 years the magic wears off, the rope breaks and the ghost can escape.

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Reading on female spirit possession: Spirits of Resistance

A disclaimer: this text doesn’t talk about female ghosts, per se, but it highlights an incident of supposed spirit possession of a group of women in similar social and working conditions – an episode that is strongly tied to issues of gender roles and female identity.

The passage reproduced at the end of this post recounts the phenomenon of latah, a group of symptoms that plagued female factory workers in Malaysia during the 1970s and 1980s. Contrary to the general mass-production boom euphoria, these women workers had violent and seemingly irrational outbursts that the native population identified as spirit possession. Aihwa Ong deconstructs this incident, looking at the impact of the shifting roles of women in society on their self-identity and psyche.

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Reading on female ghosts: Haunting Experiences – Gender and Ghosts

Book Title: Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore
Chapter Title: Gender and Ghosts
Chapter Author: Jeannie Banks Thomas

Thomas looks at “supernatural legends that in some way raise, emphasize, or rework gender and the cultural ideas associated with it”. One gendered figure she raises is the “Deviant Femme“, who is “the antithesis of the traits traditionally associated with femininity …  She is a manifestation of … rage, violence, mental illness, and eccentricity.” Thomas maintains that the Deviant Femme is “conservative” in that she “[replicates] ideas about gender and gendered behavior that [exists] in contemporary culture“.

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Interview with a Malay Studies Major

This is the first interview I did with a participant who majored in Malay Studies. She was very open and willing to share about her experiences and knowledge. I particularly enjoyed her take on female ghosts and what they could reflect of Malay (and to a larger extent, Southeast Asian and East Asian) society.

The words in bold are from my mouth while everything else is from her.
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Attempting to make sense of things

I’ve been trying to make sense of what I want to incorporate in my FYP by doing more research, but I’m not sure if this approach is helping. This information overload makes me feel like my initial idea is too narrow, yet I’m wondering if it’s better to narrow down my approach instead of researching everything and anything related to the topic of ghosts.

To recap my initial plan: I wanted to look at issues and themes particular to Singapore through the retelling of traditional ghost stories and folklore, in the form of a graphic novel. It would be an exploration of what ghosts and spirits might symbolically represent or embody, by looking at their characteristics, cultural background, and associated rituals.

This approach would be more literary (by using ghosts as symbols of pervasive conflicts in Singaporean society) as well as cultural (as Singaporean ghosts are very much culture-specific, even though it does not mean that someone of a particular ethnic group would not believe in ghosts of another culture, which makes for another interesting discussion). However, my research has led me to many other facets of ghosts, such as: why people believe in them and why they want to, why people enjoy being scared (in controlled environments), and haunting as part of the individual psyche as well as a collective phenomenon (in response to systemic oppression)… Continue reading