Category: Singapore

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Look, a sky-walker

 

 

Among female deities, surely few are more formidable than Simhavaktra, a gilded bronze representation of whom I recently encountered in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum.

 

The name Simhavaktra means ‘lion-faced’ and this leonine-faced she-deity, so the information panel told me, “strides over seas of blood which represent the world caught in an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth.”  Important in Vajrayana Buddhism – the form of Tantric Buddhism that developed in India and elsewhere, most notably in Tibet – she’s a protector of Buddhists “in the higher realms”.  And she’s a dakini, which in Tibetan means a ‘sky-walker’, “who guides followers along the right path to enlightenment.”

 

All very well and good, but it’s Simhavatra’s garments that make the biggest impression.  She wears a cloak of flayed human skin, “symbolising the peeling away of surface appearances to reveal ultimate reality.”  Look carefully at her statue in the Asian Civilisations Museum and you’ll see that the arms of that expanse of skin are knotted around her throat, with their hands hanging on either side like gruesome tassels.  Check out her back and you’ll see the head of the poor bugger who donated this skin dangling from her nape, and at least one of his feet adorning the cloak’s bottom corner.

 

 

That skin cloak was presumably removed from its former owner by the tool Simhavaktra wields in her right hand, “a curved flaying knife with a vajira (thunderbolt) handle.”

 

Incidentally, I thought the Asian Civilisations Museum was one of the most attractive and interesting museums I’ve visited in a long while.  Expect to hear more about it in future posts on this blog.

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Day of the Dead… in Singapore

 

 

This was an experience of cultural incongruity – delightful cultural incongruity.

 

On November 30th, my partner and I visited the National Museum of Singapore.  There, we were surprised to discover an installation called Magic Migrations, which had been on display throughout November.  We’d arrived just in time because this was the final day it could be viewed.  Magic Migrations was set up in the museum with the help of the local Mexican Embassy and the Mexican Association of Singapore and was about Mexico’s famous Day of the Dead – Dia de Muertos – holiday that takes every year on November 1st and 2nd.  As a nearby information panel explained, Day of the Dead “is a time to remember family, friends and ancestors who are no longer with us, thereby celebrating the connection between life and death.”

 

Filling a whole room, the installation featured all the items you’d expect with Day of the Dead.  There were altars, candles and flowers (especially marigolds); offerings of bread (pan de muerto), fruit and, for the souls of departed children, toys; fancy, flowery garlands and head-dresses; and, of course, lots of cartoonish skeletons and ornately-decorated skulls.  One skull even reminded me a bit of Albert Steptoe.

 

 

What made Magic Migrations so interesting was the emphasis it gave to another aspect of the holiday – the arrival of migrating monarch butterflies in central Mexico in October and November, which concludes a 4800-kilometre journey from Canada and the North-Eastern USA.  Quoting the information panel again, Mexico’s “Purépecha and… Mazahua communities consider the butterflies as ‘the souls of the departed’ and interpret their arrival as the signal of the visit of deceased relatives and friends on the 1st and 2nd of November.”  For that reason, the installation was phantasmagorically shrouded in a drizzle of dangling paper flowers and monarch butterflies.

 

 

I’ve been fascinated by Day of the Dead for a long time – ever since the early 1990s when, at a loose end one day in London, I wandered into Mayfair’s Museum of Mankind (which sadly closed in 1997) and discovered an extensive exhibition about the holiday.  I like how it combines the serious and emotional business of mourning and remembering the souls of the departed with a jocularity and irreverence towards death itself.  This suggests that death isn’t something to be feared and dreaded, not spoken of and treated as a taboo subject, but something to be accepted as an intrinsic component of life itself.  After all, it’s what puts life in context.

 

Incidentally, my partner’s family live in San Antonio in Texas, about 150 miles north of the Mexican border, and several years ago we went to visit them in mid-October.  Not only were the local shops then full of merchandising for the upcoming Halloween festivities on October 31st, but they contained an equal amount of stuff for the upcoming Dia de Meurtos festivities during the two days after that.  I bought a lot of the latter items as souvenirs of my time in Texas and they now occupy a prominent corner of my desk.  (Disclaimer: my partner would like it to be known that she and her family are Californians, and they only live in Texas because of her father’s work circumstances.  So don’t assume she’s Texan.)

 

 

Also, the plot of one of my all-time favourite novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), unfurls against the backdrop of the Day of the Dead celebrations in the Mexican city of Quauhnahuac.  And as a James Bond fan, it’s never long before I point out that by far the best part of the 2015 Bond movie Spectre was the long, tense and stylish chase / action sequence at the beginning, set during a Dia de Muertos parade in Mexico City.  For part of this sequence, Bond, played by Daniel Craig, was attired in a natty-looking outfit of top hat, skull mask and skeleton-patterned white-on-black suit.  In fact, Craig’s outfit impressed me so much that, a few years later, when my workplace at the time held its end-of-year party, picked ‘carnival’ as its theme, and asked attendees to come in fancy dress appropriate for the carnival theme, I turned up at the party wearing my own, home-made attempt to replicate it.

 

Here’s a photo from the party and a still from Spectre.  You’ll never be able to tell which one is Daniel Craig and which one is me.

 

© Eon Productions

 

For some reason, I’d expected the National Museum of Singapore to be a bit stuffy and formal, but I actually found its exhibitions personable and engaging…  But they’ll be the topic of future blog-posts.

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The sinister side of Singapore

 

© Marshall Cavendish

 

Here’s a review of another book that’d make an appropriate Halloween present tomorrow…

 

A while ago on this blog, I wrote, “When you’re in a new culture, a good way to get insight into that culture is to read a selection of traditional ghost and horror stories from the place.  Finding out what makes people scared and finding out how they like to scare others give you some appreciation of their psychology.”

 

Thus, after I arrived in Singapore earlier this year, and found myself for the first time in a Singaporean bookstore (Kinokuniya in the Takashimaya Shopping Centre on Orchard Road), and saw a volume called The New Singapore Horror Collection by local author S.J. Huang, I immediately purchased it.  Not that the 13 short stories inside are what you’d call ‘traditional’.  They don’t have historical settings or folkloric ghosts or monsters.  Huang’s stories take place in the 21st century and in a modern-day Singapore that’s instantly recognisable to me.  It’s the place I see every day from the windows of my apartment, my office and the bus I take to work.  Also, while the horrors featured in many of these stories may be supernatural, they may equally be psychological, created by the minds of their beleaguered protagonists as events tip them over the edge.

 

Huang’s work still provides insight into the character and culture of the formidable city-state they’re set in.  Boasting the second-highest GDP per capita in the world, Singapore is one of the biggest economic success stories of the past 50 years.  But in a society where so much value is placed upon ambition, drive and work-ethic, there are inevitably a few casualties – people who can’t handle the pressure.  And some of Huang’s most effective stories explore what happens when those casualties end up in dark places indeed.

 

The main character of The Office, for example, quickly unravels when he finds himself trapped and alone in his workplace one evening, 66 floors up.  This is just after he’s heard that the former colleague he pushed aside in order to get a promotion has committed suicide by jumping off another tall building.  In Penance, a man who’s always in a hurry – presumably for work-related reasons – causes a fatal traffic accident one day.  He escapes prosecution, but then becomes the subject of a bizarre and madness-inducing haunting that has his mind working at ever-increasing speeds his body can’t keep up with: “His eyes and the corners of his mouth twitched  as if they had a life of their own, quickened by a manic pulse of electricity that coursed through his features every few seconds.  It was exhausting to watch, and I could only imagine what it had to be like for him.”  In The Last Goodbye, a loser who messes up a lucrative business deal desperately summons supernatural forces and makes a bargain with them to turn the situation around.  Or does he?  Perhaps he merely imagines that he has.  Then, after the business deal somehow turns good again and he’s rewarded with a promotion, he realises he has to honour his side of the supernatural bargain he (might have) made…

 

Elsewhere, there are many references to contemporary Singaporean life: national service, which provides the male characters with something to reminisce about, years later, as they start to slip into middle age; the country’s HDB (Housing and Development Board) public housing, which accommodates the majority of the population, but which high-flyers look down on (someone sneers in The Last Goodbye, “As the VP of Sales and Distribution, he was probably the most senior guy at the bank still living in public housing.  It’s totally ridiculous”); the nightlife, which forms the starting point for Taken for a Ride, another psychological horror tale, one that has a nice, nasty twist; and the conservative social attitudes, which form the context for the sad ghost story Lines.

 

Singapore’s education system also gets a look-in with Lights, in which two teams of competitive schoolboys play a ‘wargame’ on one of their school’s sports fields, at night-time, with the floodlights turned off – carrying red or blue light-sticks to show their position and their team’s identity.  There’s an uneasy undercurrent to the game because, some time before, one of their fellow pupils disappeared without trace while crossing the same field after dark.  And when the spectators notice mysterious lights of a different colour starting to appear on the black field, while the game is in progress, things become truly creepy…  In fact, I’d say Lights is my favourite story in the collection.  There’s no explanation given for what ultimately happens, which makes it creepier.

 

Although there’s a Poe-esque emphasis on the psychological, Huang also finds room to experiment and a few stories go off on unexpected tangents.  The Elixir is essentially an old-fashioned Egyptian-mummy tale, although the embalmed cadaver featured isn’t ancient Egyptian, but ancient Chinese, the concubine of a cruel, long-ago emperor.  The Chinese authorities, it transpires, have entrusted her perfectly-preserved body to a ‘Singapore government research agency’ to determine the composition of her mysterious embalming fluid.  Charmingly, The Elixir reminded me of the 1971 Hammer horror movie Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb which, similarly, didn’t feature a lumbering, bandaged mummy but a miraculously-undecayed lady from ancient times.

 

Meanwhile, The Legacy takes place in 2031.  It has astronauts from “the Perses program… founded on 2nd February 2025, as a joint initiative between the Republic of Singapore and the United States of America,” landing on Mars and discovering a cave that leads into a strange extraterrestrial cathedral or temple.  Inevitably, things then take a dark turn.  The Legacy is initially reminiscent of the movie Alien (1980) – or God help us, Lifeforce (1985) – but its final paragraphs made me think of the social satire / comet-disaster film Don’t Look Up (2021).

 

I felt The Elixir and The Legacy were the least effective stories in the collection, as they seemed a little too ‘far out’ to be properly disturbing, though I did find both of them good fun.

 

Overall, I really enjoyed The New Singapore Horror Collection.  I especially appreciated S.J. Huang’s prose, which is straightforward, solid and unshowy – and all the better for that.  I look forward to his next collection, which I trust will further explore, to good effect, the sinister side of Singapore.