Pontianak

The pontianak is the ghost of the woman who dies in childbirth, and its earliest attestation is neither Malay nor English but Portuguese: the account of Malacca that Manuel Godinho de Erédia dated at Goa on 24 November 1613 gives a chapter to sorceresses, and in it he describes a kind he calls *ponteanas*, found hanging in high trees, who are said to be the women who have died in childbirth and are therefore the enemies of men. A hundred and fifty-eight years before the city that bears the name existed, the definition is already complete. Newbold gives it in English in 1839 and adds the shape: she is commonly seen as a huge bird uttering a discordant cry, haunts forests and burial grounds, appears to men at midnight, afflicts children and pregnant women and causes them to miscarry. Fifteen years later Veth describes her from Borneo: she appears naked and with her hair loose, amid anguished moaning, and is so hostile to men that the mere thought of meeting her under a kapok tree, her favourite perch, freezes the blood of the steadiest. The name points to *mati beranak*, "died in childbearing". This is worth stating precisely, because Skeat translated it in 1900 as "stillborn" and concluded from it that the pontianak was an infant and not a mother: the prefix *ber-* turns *anak*, "child", into a verb, and the phrase is about the woman, not the child.

Sultan Abdurrahman left Mampawa with fifteen vessels on 23 November 1771 in search of a place to found. He chose the confluence of the Kapuas and the Landak, and off the point lay an islet notorious as the dwelling of dreadful spectres. Veth tells what he did: he had his praus ranged around the island and shelled it for a couple of hours to drive off the pontianaks, for so the spectres were called that gave this place its name, and then leapt ashore first, parang in hand. The first huts went up on 7 January 1772. The direction of the borrowing matters, and is usually told the wrong way round: it is not that the being is named after the city, but that the city is named after the being. Veth adds a disabused note worth keeping in view: the terrors of that islet were not only imaginary, for it was also a pirates' lair.

Much of what is told about the pontianak today appears in no source before 1950, and deserves to be dated. The iron nail in the nape, her most repeated motif, is not in Newbold, nor Veth, nor Skeat, nor Wilkinson, nor Annandale and Robinson, nor Gimlette. What is there, in Skeat and in 1900, is that the langsuir is tamed by cutting her hair and nails and stuffing them into the hole in her neck: the nail is a late double drift, of the instrument and of the being. Nor is the white dress old, for Veth sees her naked and Skeat dresses the langsuir in green. The frangipani scent appears in no nineteenth-century source, though the tree itself is documented from the mid-nineteenth century as a cemetery plant, which is the link the motif later grew from. The inverted baby's cry, distant when she is near and near when she is distant, has no attestation before this century. And the banana tree is not her tree: the old sources give the kapok. What is old, and is usually credited to the cinema, is that she attacks men: Newbold writes it in 1839, and in considerably rawer terms than any film. Southeast Asian cinema, from Cathay-Keris's *Pontianak* of 1957 onward, fixed the image now recognised, but did not invent all of it.

In Indonesia she is called kuntilanak, and it is the same being: the official Indonesian dictionary reserves the word pontianak for the city and defines kuntilanak as the female spirit that carries off small children and troubles women who have just given birth. Ferdinand Blumentritt assembled the list of related names in 1895, and it is still the best there is: pontijanag and puntijanag on the Malay peninsula and in the Dutch islands, mino-kokanak among the Dayak of Sarawak, hantu-baranak in south-east Borneo, bechu-matiana on Nias, kuntianak among the Sundanese. In the Philippines the loan left a grammatical trace: Tagalog took *pontianak*, made it *patianák*, and then, mistaking that first syllable for the Tagalog prefix *pa-*, dropped it, which produced *tiyanak*. Fray Juan de Plasencia already notes in 1589 that the patianac is the woman dead in childbirth together with her child, both heard lamenting at night, which confirms that what travelled was the mother and not the infant. With the langsuir the relation is simpler than it is usually told: they are two names for the same archetype, and the current Malay dictionary settles the matter by defining each of the two with the other.