Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis

Author:Wade Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Published: 2010-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

FROM THE START, I pursued two avenues of research. To satisfy Kline and his colleagues, I sought to document the elaboration of the poison, in the hope of identifying a natural substance that could actually induce apparent death. But the higher goal was to make sense out of sensation, to provide a context for a folk belief that had been exploited in a lurid, even racist, manner to discredit an entire people, their culture and their religion. Though sent to Haiti to seek the chemical basis of a social phenomenon, I would, in the end, explore instead the psychological, spiritual, political and cultural dimensions of a chemical possibility. As it turned out, the zombie phenomenon was one small dark thread woven through the rich and colourful fabric of the Vodoun worldview.

When I arrived in Haiti, I knew little of the culture. But it did not take long to realize that a chasm existed between reality and the popular misconceptions that had sent the agricultural agent at Kennedy Airport into a paroxysm of fear and anxiety. The capital of Port-au-Prince was a sprawling muddle of a city, but life in the streets had a rakish charm. Street-side vendors in alleys damp with laundry hustled their herbs, market women sauntered with exquisite grace along broken boulevards while down by the docks where the cruise ships glittered, men with legs as hard as anvils dragged carts piled high with bloody hides. Children were everywhere, their angelic faces laughing. As I drove into the city, a solitary figure, dressed in white, quite sane and perfectly harmless, stepped into the road, halting all traffic as he stood alone, dancing with his shadow.

That evening, I visited Max Beauvoir, a Vodoun priest, or houngan, whose name had been given to me by Nathan Kline. An organic chemist by training, Beauvoir had worked in the United States and France, but had found his calling in Vodoun upon his return to Haiti, in a moment of revelation inspired by the death of his grandfather. A man of great charm and generosity, fluent in several languages, Max would over the course of many months lay his country before me as a gift.

He began that very night with an invitation to a ceremony at his hounfour, or temple, located south of the city along the Carrefour Road. There, with the wind coming off the sea, I watched in awe as white-robed initiates invoked the spirit. Responding to the rhythm of the drums, the invocations of the priestess, the resonance of songs, they moved as a single body, circling the centre post of the temple. The dance was deceptively simple: feet flat to the ground, small shuffling steps, shoulders and hips moving with a fluidity that seemed to have all of nature swaying in sympathy. The voice of the priestess was clear and powerful, slicing through the joy and celebration. Libations were blown to the wind. Small clouds of dust hovered above the dry ground. A continuous battery of sound drove each moment forward.

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