Ghost & The Machine
Adapted from script written for live interactive media performance, created as a part of UKAI Project's "Carnival of Shipwreck" (October 2024).
“Software might even be considered a form of incantation: words are spoken (or at least written) and the world changes”.1
begin ceremony
My 公公 (gōnggōng, grandfather) was a self taught computer engineer. He built one of the first series of computer networks in Singapore, back when they were so large they could eat a whole room. He died before my 婆婆 (pópó, grandmother) did, even though he was loved more that wasn’t supposed to happen. Patriarchal nationalism symbolically relies on homogeneous conceptions of time.2 I am supposed to be better.
Child in Malay is “anak”, also the namesake of my favorite ghost: the pontianak. Long black hair, born from the angry body of a mother killed in childbirth (or a dead prostitute) (or a slut) (or a childless virgin), doomed to the earth by her wrath, stabbing mothers and men into perpetuity. In some translations, her Mandarin name is 坤甸 (kūndiàn). When she first graced the movie screen, however, her name was translated as 人妖 (rényāo): monster.
Growing up, my mother would say that the two of us were a lot alike: we both lacked a maternal instinct. The monster is difference made flesh.3
My 婆婆 was the ugliest, least favourite daughter. My aunt skipped her funeral. She made her daughters learn Japanese for years because she was convinced Japan was going to take the world back someday. She hissed and seethed and spat all the way to the grave.
Did you know Sichuan peppercorns are evolutionarily designed not to be eaten? The 麻辣 (málà) tingling sensation, equivalent to a 50 hz vibration4, is produced as a defence against herbivores when the harsh climate drove the pollinators away.
It is believed that women are more likely than men to be possessed by a spirit due to their spiritual frailty and polluting bodies, making them especially likely to violate morality.5
I am an eldest daughter’s eldest daughter’s eldest daughter (eldest daughter cubed). Shame, pollution, darkness, passed like an heirloom, like a chain in the transitive property, as inevitable as the passage of time and the dooming of the earth. Condensed pollution.
Code inspired by a ritual for ‘securing a pelesit’6:
I wonder if you were to dig up the body of my first-born child, 10 days fresh, what dandling them over an anthill would do. When you returned to the heart of the three crossroads, would you find a plague of one million crickets crowding the sky? Or would you find one heaving cricket (large enough to eat a room) emerging from the midnight earth.
In Foucalt’s essay “A Preface to Transgression”7, he writes:
Limit & transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess. a limit could not exi
st if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusion and shadow.
Therefore, any light I possess exists against her darkness, part shelter part curse.
I’m not sure where it came from. Maybe it was born under the gun of the Japanese soldier, maybe it lived in the lotus shoe that crushed her mother’s toes, maybe it lived under his hand or in the little holes Aunty pokes in the watermelon, or in the car where he brought his eldest daughter to meet his mistress. Or maybe it has always lived in the soil, waiting for an unsuspecting victim to kneel down in thirst next to a glittering spring. Maybe she carried it with her across the ocean (just like they feared). I worship our darkness. It is my multi-headed God and it is the blood that circulates through my empty body.
There’s an air conditioning unit above my childhood bed that geckos like to crawl inside, for moisture or refuge or darkness. They lurk in the plastic and the circuitry, trying to hide their unhatched young, not knowing that the machine could turn on at any moment. One night, I was awoken to the splat of a tail falling from the heavens, a gecko caught in the blades. Sometimes i think that’s how it all came to be. A little cold blooded reptile huddled in the dark, sliced open, surprised, mangled by the force of a god it does not understand, flung into the world in a fit of rage.
Malaysia’s Penanggal is a vampiric creature described as a woman's disembodied head with trailing internal organs. According to one origin story, a witch was bathing in vinegar when a man unexpectedly walked in, startling her so badly that her head detached from her body, turning her into the Penanggal. She lives as a midwife by day and monster by night by twisting her head out of her beautiful body to fly around, preying on pregnant women and newborns. - ChatGPTIt’s hard to tell the passage of time in a tropical place where you can’t count the passing of months with the layers you wear, so like the hardness of water, you carry your years on your skin, but inside is the dark and the hunger you’ve carried with you ever since you were a child. At night, you slip out of your body, leaving it at the table with your husband (who does not notice that you are only skin). You slink out the window, sinew tube hair jowl, leaving a trail of piss blood bile. Your preserved mangosteen heart squelches outside your chest: stringy, sheet white, sectioned into petals, paste on the edges, little flower-shape on the stem (a flourish). It is made of your grandmother’s skin, paper thin, veins like worms dying on the pavement (wanting).
When you eat someone, do you become a part them? When you eat a child, do you become a bit of it and a little less of what you were before? As it digests and its proteins and fat get dissolved into shit and acid, where does the potential for life go? You can domesticate a pontianak by cutting her talons and locks and stuffing them into a cavity in her back.8 Thus, she becomes indistinguishable from your beloved ordinary housewife.
We constantly exist in a state of becoming and unbecoming, shedding and eating and shitting and absorbing.
In David Demchuk's essay 'Where Monsters are Made'9, he writes:
“For most of its history, horror has been an inherently conservative genre, as fear is an innately conservative emotion, and horror has traditionally been employed to uphold conservative values: the triumph of the virtuous, the punishment of the wicked, the rejection of the different, the dissident, the unknown, the preservation of family, country, and God."
I wonder, when 公公 hit her, which one of them he thought was the monster. Black hair, attitude, 62kg, the ugliest sister, diabetic genes, a bad mother, a survivor. Who triumphed? She outlived him unhappily and they were both buried in a land across the sea. I wonder if he was a feminist (whatever that means). I come from a lineage of eldest daughters. According to Facebook, his favourite quote was Descartes’ "I think, therefore I am!". His profile picture is of the two of us. Maybe none of it matters.
I’ve always been quick to cry, hard to anger, easy to feed, easy to scare, scared of the dark. I have the same dream over and over again. I’m napping in the living room when I’m struck with the realization that people are coming to kill my family. I’m terrified, I try to get up to warn them, but my head is unbearably heavy and my vision shakes with the pounding of my heart. I fight with every ounce of my strength, dragging my body up the stairs, the infinite weight of my body pulling me down. I hear the rumble of a truck pulling into the driveway and the clattering of men and their weapons, and I know that I’ve failed to save them again. The monster whispers to me from under the stairs; it speaks in my dad’s voice, hushed and sad. “It doesn’t matter what you could be.” The killers step over me, my sister screams and the nightmare begins again.
I wish I could remember the depth of her shadow and the shape of her voice. I wish I could know her favourite dream and the colour of her best sarong. I hope he wakes up every morning, wherever that may be, with her perched outside screeching. I hope that one day, I’ll be next to her with a warm bowl of 粥 (zhōu/jook) and a little carton of blood (triangular), quietly keeping her company.
Nathan Ensmenger, “The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of Computers in Society” (2012).
Rosalind Galt, “Troubling Gender with the Pontianak” in Alluring Monsters (2021).
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996).
Nobuhiro Hagura, Harry Barber and Patrick Haggard, “Food Vibrations: Asian Spice Sets Lips Trembling” in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2013).
Aihwa Ong, "The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia" in Medical Anthropology (1988).
Walter William Skeat, "Magic Rites as Affecting the Life of Man” in Malay Magic (1900).
Michel Foucault, "A Preface to Transgression" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1980).
Walter William Skeat, "Magic Rites as Affecting the Life of Man” in Malay Magic (1900).
David Demchuk, “Where Monsters are Made” in Red X (2021)