When night falls in Malaysia, the rainforest becomes impenetrable to the naked eye. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hard to imagine how dense green can actually be. The eye does that roving, unreliable thing where it makes figures out of foliage, movements out of colours. I used to make sure that all the lights were switched on before I tentatively stepped out onto the balcony of my grandparents’ house, stomach gnawing at me with fear. Swelling through the air were currents of smells: jasmine, smoke, frangipani, food, petrichor, dirt. The washing, hung up by my mama (of decidedly sturdy stock and with little care for superstition) flapped gently in the wind, the slippery whiteness of towels bringing to mind the sniffing, pale face of the pontianak.
Up until the age of 20, I visited Malaysia once a year. Grandparents had to be greeted in halting, half-formed Chinese, barely-tolerated relatives swatted away like flies, homecoming meals wolfed down as I whiled the summer away in the name of filial duty. I would slump around with my cousins, the language barrier between us yawning, bored and yearning for something to break the boredom. I recall the murky blue tiles cool against my thighs, as one of my older cousins held court telling horror stories. I would move closer to her, the afternoon heat doing little to stop the chills running up and down my spine.
My cousins and I stopped exchanging ghost stories when I was about 16. I haven’t gone back to Malaysia for the last three years. My memories of those summers are a sticky, syrupy mess of food, heat and squawking relatives. But the story of the pontianak remains completely clear and indelible.
The word pontianak comes from the Malay words for woman, death, child.
A victim of ‘bad death’, she is unable to move on to the next life. Pontianak are women who have died in childbirth or pregnancy and who have been buried without the proper ritual performed to prevent them from returning. The ritual is a mixture of images of purity and constraint: glass beads stuffed into the corpse’s mouth, raw hen’s eggs tucked in her armpits and needles placed in her palms. Beads that fill up the throat, feminine adornments that choke. Eggs are symbols of life, new beginnings, rebirth. The needles are an emblem of housework, needles to pierce, needles to pin down.
With flowing black hair, long pointed nails, and accompanied by the sickly-sweet scent of frangipani, the pontianak is the image of unbridled, uncontrolled feminine rage.
Rumoured to disembowel (exclusively) men with a swift flick of her nails, she sniffs out prey through unwittingly hung out laundry. For this reason, particularly superstitious Malaysians don’t hang it outside at night. It is said that if the victim has their eyes open, she will suck their eyes out. Dogs whimper as she draws close. Her call is similar to that of a wailing baby.
She can also perform a seductive facade, leading chumps to a grisly demise. She subverts traditional expectations of femininity, using her beauty and sexuality on men to deadly effect. In death, she is free to unleash the frustrations and anger of a life spent meek and mild, her relentless fury at a world tipped heavily in the favour of men. Her rage combined with her sexual allure is a manifestation of uncontrolled feminine power.
I remember growing up and thinking that Malaysian horror stories were the most terrifying of all. Everyone I knew had a pontianak story and sighting. Videos, paranormal forums and even the Malaysian police have documented stories of their encounters. Unlike benevolent ancestral spirits to whom you could offer paper money, fruit and gifts, the pontianak cannot be appeased. We were told repeatedly not to pee under banana trees, or we would risk having the pontianak follow us home. (And if we did pee, we should chant any religious passages we knew, mutter heartfelt apologies, and cross our hearts.) There was a recurring tale of an abandoned car discovered on a secluded road, surrounded by nothing but the aching, looming rainforest. A male body was found, prostrate on the tarmac. His blood fanning out around his body like a leaf, his arms outstretched towards something, expectant. His face was twisted into a smile, excited, unknowing, foolish.
Despite her violence, I can’t help but perceive the pontianak as a creature to sympathise with. There is another layer to the story, a cruel twist. The pontianak can be lured away from her home in the banana trees. If you shear her hair short, clip her nails and hammer a nail into the nape of her neck, she will become a docile and doting wife, indistinguishable from the average woman. If you remove the nail, she will return to her old vampiric proclivities.
Even in death, the possibility of being controlled by the gendered rules of society lingers.
As I moved about my day in Malaysia, I would think: Who might be a pontianak? Who was itching to break free around me? Who was bristling in their housewifely flesh prisons as I weighed fruits at the market? I thought about what the tale of the pontianak says to me—that if a woman isn’t tamed, suppressed, restrained, she is a woman to fear. It also suggests the capacity of any woman, as wild as she may be, to be tamed by a man, domesticity, the rigidity of gendered expectations. It’s cruel but I feel that there is something redeeming in the pontianak’s ever present and potent rage: a refusal to ever completely bend to a world built around men.
About the author
Panda is a baby poet who lives and works on unceded land. She is currently working on poetry that explores monumental loss, funeral lols & IRL ghost stories.