(Originally published in Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror.
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Short Non-Fiction.)
If there is one Indonesian word you know, it’s probably amok. As in children dressing in Halloween costumes and running amuck, amuck, amuck (that’s a quote from the 1993 movie Hocus Pocus). The original connotation isn’t cute, though. It’s not playful. It’s an episode of frenzied violence, a sudden mass assault (Hempel et al., 2000) in which a brooding individual with no apparent violent tendencies grabs a weapon and starts attacking everyone in sight. It happens, overwhelmingly, to men. Which is not to say that women weren’t also going crazy in colonial Indonesia and Malaysia. They just did it in a different way: they became latah.
Like amok, latah is associated with frenzy and disruption. Unlike amok, latah isn’t violent. It’s just shocking, for everyone involved: a person is startled and then enters into a trance-like state filled with profanities, screaming, boisterous laughter, echolalia, and echopraxia (Bakker et al., 2013).
This behavior may sound innocuous to a Western reader, but it’s uncharacteristic for the average Malay woman, who is meant to grow from the sweetness of girlhood to the grace of motherhood without ever becoming crass or coarse. In wayang terms, she must always be halus (soft). She must never be kasar (rough). After my mother and I left Indonesia, my American teachers would comment on the deferential way I stood next to their desks when they asked to see me—chin down, hands clasped. Like I was about to get hit. I was just trying to be lady-like.
(The only teacher who ever hit me was a Western man in an international school. But that’s neither here nor there.)
Latah and amok were originally classified as as-yet-unidentified mental illnesses by colonial Dutch psychiatrists in the early 20th century (Bartelsman & Eckhardt, 2007). Exotic diseases to go with the exotic people and wildlife, I suppose. They’re still classified as “culture-bound syndromes,” though Malays aren’t the only people who experience them. There’s the jumping Frenchmen of Maine, for example, and Arctic hysteria (piblokto) among the Greenlandic Inuit. Anthropologists call this the “latah paradox”: the culturally unbound culture-bound syndrome.
Our cultural mental illness isn’t how Malays understand latah or amok, unsurprisingly. Amok is traditionally attributed to an attack and possession by a powerful tiger demon (hantu belian). Latah is attributed to…well, spiritual weakness as a whole. They are literally lemah semangat, weak-spirited, with spirit referring here to an inner strength that’s both psychic and secular. Women are seen as more easily shocked, more prone to losing control, more “easily ‘poked,’ ‘pierced,’ ‘invaded,’ and ‘taken over’ by spirits” (Peletz, 1996, p. 177). They’re more susceptible to suggestion, both human and inhuman.
It’s probably important to note, here, that you don’t need a whole lot of ritual to access the spirit world in Indonesia. I always tell people that you can feel it as soon as you step off the plane, though that’s probably the humidity: the spirit world has constant access to you. Which isn’t to say that spirits have nothing better to do than bother you, but humans are meddling in those waters, too. Spiritual energy can make you sick, cause you misfortune, steal your money, steal your spouse, steal your kid. It crashes planes and starts earthquakes and determines trial outcomes. It’s the country’s biggest, richest black market, and you’re really better off not messing with it if you’re not a spiritual elder of some kind. The one thing you can do to protect yourself from its impact is to be kuat semangat. Strong-spirited.
Hold on, you may be thinking: how can women be open to all this spiritual malware and also limited to quiet sweetness and light? Glad you asked. It’s because women feel more shame (Peletz, 1996).
I’ll be honest, I’m not very strong-spirited. I don’t need a spiritual elder to tell me that. I don’t know how much my parents really were, either, so maybe I can blame it on them—my mom would tempt fate by wearing green on a beach where a Spirit Queen drowns green-clad people (it’s her favorite color, you see); my dad would worry about it, the same way he worried about everything.
“You have to pray for your parents,” one of my babysitters once told me, probably when she realized that my father wasn’t a very devout Muslim and my mother was, well, nothing—the greatest spiritual risk of all. When my father died, his friends urged me to “be a good Muslim” for the sake of his soul, but my mother’s illness had already spread to me—I had already decided, by then, that I didn’t believe in God.
I didn’t believe in God because I didn’t feel God—or didn’t feel whatever other people claimed to be feeling, anyway. But you’d never catch me dead saying I don’t believe in ghosts or demons or black magic. Being an atheist hadn’t protected my mother from being attacked in a rental house by the ghost of the previous owner. An omnipotent, undepictable God was beyond my imaginative powers, but I took my religious teacher more seriously when he told us that jinn were lurking over our left shoulders at all times, urging us to sin. I could believe that I needed to say a set of magic words (“prayer,” people call it) before getting in a car or going to the bathroom or going to sleep. I believed in danger. I could feel fear.
That’s another thing about women, apparently: we worry more (Peletz, 1996). My experience has not backed up this generalization—as a small child I once wrote that “daddy is worried a lot”—but there’s no doubt that I’ve followed in daddy’s footsteps in this regard. For most of my life, I’ve treated my anxiety—spiritual and otherwise—with a clench. Stomach or jaw or shoulders, curled and calcified into stone. I suspect that I’ve been trying to be strong, to be resilient in the way that Indonesians are quite proud of, even when it means survival at the expense of rebellion.
Grace under pressure, that’s how former coworkers used to describe me. But under my placid exterior I was always screaming, see? Inside, I was swearing, flailing, running to the roof so that I could fantasize jumping off. And sometimes, when I was startled—really, genuinely startled, like that time I walked into my living room and saw the infamous German K-fee coffee commercial, the one where a relaxing scenic drive is suddenly interrupted by a screaming monster—I would feel the clench letting go, beckoning me to dive into what I can only describe as a lawless void where every bone and blood cell would be free to burst loose. I never went latah, though. I was too young for it.
I would just scream, and scream, and scream, even after the electric shock wore off.
One explanation for latah is that it’s what happens when you can’t hold the clench anymore. Many anthropologists have suggested—and let me tell you, anthropologists love latah—that latah is a “symbolic representation of marginality” or “a learned coping strategy in the form of a cathartic stress response.” (Kenny, 1978, p. 209; Bartholomew, 1994, p. 331). Basically, latah provides a way for women—especially older, poorer, widowed women living on the social margins—to act out.
While women get access to emotional response through the nonsensical behavior of latah, men get access to emotional response through the anger and destruction of amok. There’s no equivalent “amok paradox” because there doesn’t need to be—we know this type of destruction is so viscerally understood as a lightning that strikes men, especially after a period of setback and depression. We know family annihilators. We know men who commit suicide-by-cop. We know berserkers. We always have.
How does the phrase go? Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them?
This un-mystery of masculine madness has made amok a useful tool of the state. The fascist Suharto regime began blaming violent incidents on “amok” as soon as it made a run for power in 1965, a habit that Indonesian military and police continue to this day. It’s not that troops and cops fired into a crowd of people—it’s that the people ran amok (Bachelard, 2014).
It’s easy to see why the state likes “amok.” I can think of three benefits the state gets by blaming violence on “an impersonal force beyond human control” (Colombijn, 2002, p. 50): the state’s hands are washed clean of blood, even as the military hands out weapons and paramilitary provocateurs bate crowds; it keeps civilians in a dizzy state of fear, worried their neighbors might go on a rampage at any moment; and it discourages any international inquiry into the true cause of the conflict. It actually banks on exoticism.
No, wait, four purposes: it also gives the state a pretext for bringing down an iron fist. Those angry people are out of control, after all.
Funny is the wrong word, so I’ll say that it’s ironic that a condition as frenzied and uncontrollable as “amok” gets used to enforce the social order of the fascist state. That includes punishing women who step outside of it. For years, the Suharto regime propagated a ghoulish story about Communist women killing six military generals in 1965 while partaking in “naked, sexual dancing,” castration, and eye-gouging (Wieringa, 2011, p. 15). The story was a lie, but an enduring one. In the mass killings of millions that followed, members of the Communist women’s organization were specifically targeted for attack, rape, and murder. Why blame women specifically? Because the fascist social order will always put a special priority on controlling women. Because in embodying the polar opposite of the Indonesian feminine ideal (Larasati, 2013, p. 39; Robinson, 2009, pp. 63-64), these shameless “Communist whores” represented a dangerous threat to the social order that had to be destroyed.
Despite all the ink that’s been spent debating it in anthropology journals, the feminine madness of latah isn’t actually much of a mystery, either. Like those jumping French lumberjacks, latah is best understood as a “culture-specific exploitation” of an exaggerated startle response (Simons, 1980, p. 195). Your startle response can get stretched out of shape by all sorts of stressors, including those common to marginal life in Indonesia. Hunger on the factory floor, for instance (Ong, 1987). Or the deaths of loved ones. Describing accounts of spirit possession in Reason and Passion, Peletz (1996) writes that “Mak Zuraini […] was never subject to latah until she experienced the deaths of two of her children” (p. 177).
Maybe that’s why consulting religious elders and healers—the go-to solution for most cases of spiritual affliction in Indonesia—doesn’t seem to do much to “help” cases of latah. In his review of latah in Southeast Asia, Winzeler (1995) cites one man who claims to have stopped experiencing latah through “his own efforts and the Will of God” (p. 133), but notes that he should be considered an exception, not the rule. Many women who experience latah don’t think salvation is possible, and wouldn’t want it, anyway.
This sort of fatalistic shrug is a common sight in Indonesia, because hey, what else are you going to do? There are these melodramatic commercials that air on television around Eid—usually sponsored by oil companies and the like—about families separated by poverty or illness, that serve to explicitly remind the viewer to endure their trials with poise, to have ketabahan (faith) that relief may someday come.
Ketabahan is another traditional Javanese quality that I don’t have much of. After my dad died, my mom gave me a necklace with a golden seashell charm that was meant to symbolize ketabahan—only for me to start a long, ugly, angry protest against the world as it spun, refusing to continue living while my father was dead. It took me many years to start believing people when they said everything will turn out okay, and more years with medication and therapy to subside the anxiety that used to make me feel like I was barely holding in a scream. These days when I’m startled, I shriek for a normal length of time. But Indonesia isn’t known for its investments in mental healthcare.
On the other hand, latah isn’t a true disorder in the clinical sense. It’s a “disorder” that causes disorder, and intentionally so. It disrupts order. And that’s the point: latah sets you free. Under spiritual suggestion, the shame that holds back your ferocity like a scold’s bridle is lifted.
Latah lets you “respond in kind” to any teasing and abuse you may endure (Winzeler, p. 135). Latah lets you rebel against rules and bosses with other women (Bartholomew, 1994), because if women are inherently more suggestible—prone to spiritual influence, weak-spirited—then your friends can hardly be blamed for catching the “bug,” can they? And latah gives you plausible deniability over whatever you may have done under its influence. So sorry, you can say, I don’t know what came over me.
There are limits, of course, as there always are. I’ve never heard of latah being used for political purposes, or to disrupt a military action. At least not yet. But I’m reminded of this piece of advice I started hearing in college, and many times since: that if you think you’re being followed and you’re on your own, you should act crazy. Flail your limbs like you’re having a seizure. Sing a nursery rhyme in a loopy voice. Act possessed. Become ungovernable. Tap into whatever your culture perceives a madwoman to be and watch the berth you’re given widen; watch the leash you’re on extend.
