Gendered Colonial Complicity and Postcolonial Desire: Daphne Marlatt’s ‘In the Month of Hungry Ghosts’

First published in The Capilano Review in 1979, Daphne Marlatt’s ‘In the Month of Hungry Ghosts’ is a multigeneric text that emerged out of a trip that Marlatt took to visit her childhood home in Penang, Malaysia. This essay focuses on the narrator’s relationship to her surroundings in Penang, the representation of her memsahib mother, and the narrator’s desire to reconnect with her childhood caretaker. The narrator positions herself in relation to these two women to grapple with the legacies of the class and gender dynamics of her childhood household. She experiences a disquieting sense of colonial complicity as well as an anticolonial, feminist desire to articulate that complicity and to cultivate relationships that move beyond colonial scripts.