Myths

Myths in Southeast Asia take many forms, ranging from magical beasts that protect the waters and lands such as the Naga (a giant serpent), or the mrenh kongveal, a guardian to animals that travel in herds. There are also scary supernatural beings such as the orang minyak (oily man), pontianak or aswang (a female vampire). They also come in every objects that infuse religion, magic and politics such as magical stamps in Thailand, to everyday memories of ancestors and their ghosts, sometimes experienced through dreams.

In this section, myths are understood as manifestations of knowledges that cannot be confined within mainstream knowledge systems, and perhaps hence found in ghosts, spirits and supernatural or divine beings. Yet these knowledges, though partial and fragmentary, are nevertheless a way of sense-making for humans to explain the seemingly unfathomable.

This could be seen in Andrew Johnson’s description of the Mekong river, where offerings and shrines for Naga cohabit with disruptive projects of dam building, and fishermen ask Naga where is good to fish. When lands and seas have been scarred by constant terraforming, it is the flows of prayers, spells, whispers and intelligences that have been ignored or erased which are sought, so as to intervene by going beyond the known, ordinary and apparent, in poetic artworks from the exhibition, Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau.

This section also interrogates inherited myths, such as origins of nation-state boundaries, the promises of progress, through projects of modernisation and technologies, or accepted norms in relation to gender/sexuality and race. Against these, myths of other kinds from the ground up may offer potentialities and options for different knowledges and worlds.

For example, speculative fiction that offers tales of futurities through apocalypse or glimpses of a world that was devastated being rebuilt; or losing control of one’s own shadow due to the shadow’s accumulated anger and hence rebellion as a minority. Or when Heonik Kwon highlights ghosts of mass civilian deaths during the Vietnam War who neither received glory nor recognition as war heroes, nor claimed by family members as ancestors, how do living communities seek to live with such ghosts and at the same time find their lost ancestors or children and bring them home through dreams and stories? Or according to Alicia Izahruddin, even if the pontianak (female vampire), whose hearty laugh is often seen as grotesque or excessive, her dark laughter holds potential to mobilise resistance against a patriarchal order and rehabilitate the knowledges and thoughts of females.

With such a magical, mysterious world of our own fantastic beasts, we hope their stories, memories and bodies would allow us to slip in and out of the empirical, linearity and western notions of rational science, as we imagine what secrets and stories await to be told. It is also with the hope of knowing that such creatures often relegated to the margins or backwardness are not only with us, but that there is potential to build ally-ship, while being surprised at other possible ways of seeing, knowing and living, even if it seems to invite precarity and potential danger.

If Southeast Asia is often understood as ‘Third World’ or belatedly having arrived at modernity, we hope myths, religions, beliefs, ghosts and speculative fiction of our heterogeneous region would not only be sites of contesting for other ways of living and understanding, but also inspirations that offer options of ‘otherwise’ in imaginations, reconstructions of histories and charting ways into futurities.