Giving Up Ghosts: Notes on Trauma and the Possibility of the Political from Southeast Asia

Ghostly Occurrences

In Bao Ninh's 1991 novel The Sorrow of War, ghosts of the Vietnam War dead return to trouble the dreams and the daytime moments of the living, appearing as soft corpses beneath the wheels of cars or laughing in the decimated groves where napalm was sprayed.¹ Elsewhere, on the banks of the Salween River, as described by Pascal Khoo Thwee in From the Land of Green Ghosts, the groaning specters of the battle dead in Myanmar's insurgencies appear at night to wake the young rebels but vanish like smoke when confronted.² In Singapore, rapacious widow ghosts visit Thai construction workers, causing several deaths and terrifying villagers in the area whence the workers hailed. In theatrical acts of civil disobedience, Thai democracy protestors conjure the spirits of those who have been killed by the police or the military and invite regional spirits to join with them in acts of political vengeance.³ In Indonesia, beneath the rivers where the bodies of the communists were dumped, unhappy spirits threaten passing motorists.⁴ Wherever there is violence in Southeast Asia, even if this violence is merely the force that possesses machinery, there are ghosts.⁵ We can perhaps say that wherever there is a force that would oppose life, even and perhaps especially by resembling it, there are ghosts.

It is widely believed throughout Southeast Asia that a premature death—a death experienced "before its time," and especially a violent death for which no preparation has been possible—generates an unhappy ghost. Such ghosts tend to linger in the place of death and, in fits of vindictive melancholy, are apt to trouble the living, making them ill or even causing their deaths in jealous efforts to obtain companionship. They appear in popular narratives, in pulp novels and cinematic productions of highbrow and B-grade varieties, in rumor and folklore, in the literature of the elites, and in auto-ethnographic accounts of local culture; in other words, they are not limited as symptoms of a particularly narrow cultural or class milieu, though disavowal of a belief in such ghosts is frequent among members of the highly educated classes. For the secular humanist elites, ghosts can only be uncanny presences, returning to a space from which they had been banished by disbelief. For others, they are less uncanny than frightening, because real: expected, but only in their suddenness.

Commonly, the ranks of such specters, one of whose defining characteristics is untimeliness, are densest in the places where the accidents of modernity are most like to occur: highways, railways, and industrialized spaces where heavy machinery is located. In places where war has ravaged the landscape and claimed the lives of individuals, they are even more likely to arise. There is, therefore, a doxa, according to which the appearance of ghosts is a function or at least the effect of context. However, this context is better understood as one of unforeseen and unpredictable convergences, such as may cause one to be in a particular place at a particular time, making one vulnerable to death and, more specifically, the death that is caused by another death.

Such convergence is often a function of technology, of the technologization of life and death, movement and war. In war, and especially the kind of mechanical war in which death is so widely distributed and so thorough that the dead outnumber the living (who would otherwise bury or cremate them), ghosts make frequent appearances. But ghosts are also apt to appear at the scene of an accident that claims a single life, and even when the victims are given proper rites. So the issue of ghostliness is not, as some anthropologists would have it, simply a matter of improper burial—though rituals of interment and propitiation are often called for on such occasions.⁶ Rather, ghostliness in Southeast Asia offers itself as an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead, despite (or because of) the fact that, in most...