to his arms and genitals, was a fixture in political cartoons and graffiti from Egypt to Malaysia; Iraqis nicknamed the image The Statue of Liberty.
Eddin was scrutinizing the patient, as if to place her in his memory. She towered over the women attending to her—her sisters-in-law, Eddin guessed—and her features were as angular as theirs were round; her plaid sarong offset their bright yellows, blues, and greens; when she wrapped an orange scarf around her neck—the only colorful note in her attire—Eddin wondered aloud if her problems stemmed from barrenness. The success of the main puteri, he explained, depended upon the shaman discovering the source of her illness; part divination, part theater, this spirit-raising ceremony, usually undertaken as a last resort, would require her to surrender to his ministrations for two nights running, and the resignation etched into her face suggested that she was willing to try almost anything, if it would bring relief. She radiated a kind of fatalism familiar to Eddin.
“The Kelantan sensibility,” he said, laying his hand over his heart, “is located entirely in lament, in loss.” Tonight we would learn what was missing from this patient’s life, in a performance combining animist, Hindu, and Islamic elements. The magical spell woven by the main puteri, drawing on the oldest customs of the Malay Peninsula, was precisely what the purifying Islamists campaigned against. Kelantan is predominately Malay—hence Islamic—but its traditional rituals reflect a more complicated heritage of mixing and mingling than PAS acknowledged—a history of foreign influence dating back millennia. Malays descend from a variety of peoples: seafarers who migrated from China thousands of years before Christ, Indian traders who established kingdoms on the coasts, Arab travelers drawn to the Land of Gold, as it was called in Sanskrit records. The sea lanes fostered exchange with diverse cultures, attracting merchants, missionaries, and warriors from near and far, who helped to shape Malay customs, artistic expression, and religious practice—even as the original inhabitants of the peninsula, the indigenous people known as the Orang Osli, retreated into the interior. Thus Indians built Hindu and Buddhist temples for several centuries before Arab traders introduced Islam around 1400, a pattern repeated a century later with the arrival of Christianity, courtesy of Portuguese, Dutch, and then British colonizers; each group left a mark on Malay life; none destroyed its rival cultures; hence elements of each order contributed to the heterogeneous character of modern Malaysia—a history of exchange that some in power wished to eradicate. How would they react to such a large turnout tonight?
The air was still, the crowd rapt in the firelight of coconut husks burning in a sand pit beyond the stage. The faces of the villagers hunched by the trees were intermittently illuminated by flashes of lightning and the headlights of trucks and scooters arriving from neighboring kampongs. From the rafters hung jasmine flowers and a tray of sticky yellow rice topped with betel nut, coins, and an egg to attract the spirits; more food was set out on the reed mats covering the floor, along with bowls of ritual water and a pillow. The shaman, in a white shirt and blue vest, sat cross-legged before the musicians—the serunai player, ten percussionists arranging a variety of drums and gongs and cymbals, a man with a three-stringed rebab or spike fiddle—and recited verses from the Koran, swaying from side to side, a glass of water in one hand and a tray of food in his lap: a feast for the invisible powers of the earth, air, and water. And as he called on ancestral saints and jins and teachers to heal the patient, apologizing for any omissions, I did not know which to fear more: the arrival of the police or of the king cobra and her brood.
But the spectacle of the main puteri gradually dispelled some of my anxiety. First the shaman blessed the musical instruments with smoke from a burning coconut husk (a Hindu custom); and then, in time to the haunting melody of the serunai, which in my imagination carried far into the forest, and the complicated rhythms of one man striking a floor gong and another tapping a drum, he removed his vest and shirt and began to sing with the rebab player, who served as the minduk—the séance singer and dancer who for the next several hours would summon, interrogate, and appease the spirits from the world beyond the river. The minduk bantered with the shaman, coaxing the spirits to join them onstage, to inhabit the shaman, the medium for this elaborate production, who sank into a trance, and one by one the spirits took shape in his words and gestures, revealing different aspects of the patient’s personality, history, and character. Now he was whirling from the minduk to the musicians, now he was dancing slowly, seductively, around the patient, seated with her legs bent to the side at center stage, under a mobile of bananas, jasmine, rice cakes, bottlebrush, bougainvillea, a pink triangle, and an orange. She watched the shaman with a weary expression. I could not imagine the pain that had led her, or others acting on her behalf, to this very public examination of her soul.
The minduk and the shaman were divining what had upset her balance—and thus the harmony of the universe. The success of the ritual depended upon them discovering whether a hantu, a malign or unsettled spirit, had taken possession of her. Or had she lost the essence of her soul, her semangat? Did her malaise arise from unfulfilled desires? Act by act, the medicine men would summon spirits, populating the stage with a cast of characters from a cosmology rooted in the belief that divinity inheres in everything (in stones and trees, in the distant thunder and the water buffalo grazing by the rice paddies), one of whom might hold the key to healing the woman’s soul sickness.
Eddin described what followed as a form of improvisatory poetry, in the manner of ancient Greek bards who employed stock phrases as mnemonic aids and added new verses to each performance: an oral literature long since vanished from Western practice. No doubt its proscription in Kelantan leant it a certain power, in the same way that some poets in the Soviet Bloc held a special place in their countrymen’s hearts, answering the strictures and tedium of state-sponsored art with more vital forays into the language. And I likened the shaman’s commerce with the spirit world to the modern poet’s role as intermediary between the visible and invisible realms of experience. For I subscribed to the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz’s notion that poetry “is dictated by a daimonion”; hence the hope “that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments.” Like shamans, like divines navigating between this world and the next, some poets work on the premise that good and evil spirits are abroad. Who can say which will possess them in the act of writing—and whether a given poem will heal or harm?
Just as a shaman can be a medium for good or ill, so this ritual preserved, for better or worse, the memory of a people who had inhabited the Malay Peninsula through successive waves of invaders and missionaries and traders, adapting ideas and customs from the larger world—Chinese and Indian, Khmer and Siamese, Portuguese and British. Main puteri called the crowd to its origins, descending through layers of history, through sultanates and empires and kingdoms, to remind the paddy farmers and their families that in Kelantan, the cradle of Malay civilization, where witchcraft was still alive, there were measures to take if they were felled by one of the black arts.
Thus the minduk interrogated the spirits revealing themselves through the shaman to diagnose the cause of the woman’s problems, which, Eddin said, seemed to stem from her angin, her inner winds. From birth these winds had blown through her, now stronger, now lighter, determining her personality, talents, desires. Like the humors of Greek and Roman theory, as well as medieval European and Muslim thought, the four bodily fluids governing individual temperament and health (black and yellow bile, phlegm and blood), the angin constitute for Malays a system of understanding human behavior—the inherited traits and inclinations, which can be expressed or not, depending on a variety of factors, including the environment in which one lives. Indeed the most common condition treated in main puteri, anthropologist Carol Laderman notes in her study, Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance, is blockage of the inner winds, sakit berangin, which tends to afflict artists and musicians, not to mention healers. Main puteri is thus a means of reckoning with sicknesses born of the inner winds, which must periodically be freed and refreshed.
It is also a branch of the secret knowledge that mystics have sought through the ages in various religious traditions: the direct experience
