Considering the rich folklore, dark mysticism and brooding illustrations ensconced within the pages, “The Magic Island” is not the title I would have chosen for this collection of tales written by W.B Seabrook. Seabrook himself had a dark, brooding, almost sordid air about him, and a thing for dark magics, though not much is known about him otherwise. After spending a year or so as a soldier in the French army during World War One, he became a reporter for The New York Times and went to travel the world, ferreting out its secrets as only a journalist can.
During his travels, he dabbled in cannibalism, dark magics and vodun, (voodoo to you) even consorting with Alastair Crawley on occasion, the famed English occultist and hedonist and ceremonial magician, and one of the most controversial human beings of all time, even called “the wickedest man of all time,” by the press of the day. Seabrook himself lived quite a similar life to Crawley, exploring the world and taking in tales of dark mysticism, from Arabia to Guere to Haiti and the like, collecting the stories and writing on them, taking care never to embellish anything he was told. He finally died of a drug overdose in 1949.
Considering that the author himself was careful to state that his books were neither “fiction nor embroidery,” one might conclude that he is either lying or insane when it comes to the stories in “The Magic Island.” As previously stated, “The Magic Island” takes place in turn of the century Haiti, and takes the reader deep into Seabrook’s quest for knowledge, bringing to light a side of the island that outsiders scarcely got to see.
The selection that was read for class was, obviously, involving zombies, which as Seabrook notes is a being only heard of in Haiti. More specifically, it involved the tale of Joseph, a bokur that is a Vodun sorcerer, one that “serves the loa with both hands,” or practices both black and benevolent magic as an opposed to a priest or priestess of the faith, a houngan or mamba. This bokur raised people from their eternal slumber to serve as fieldhands so that he can make a profit off of their labor, without doing much work himself, one supposes.
His wife, pitying them for their endless, mindless, work decides to take them to the Fête Dieu festival while her husband is away, to liven up their afterlives so to speak. The Fête Dieu is the French name for Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament that takes place sixty days before Easter, and is a festival that commemorates the sacrament of the Eucharist, the bread or wafers that become the body of Jesus during communion. Quite fitting for a zombie tale.
As “everyone knows” zombies should never be allowed to eat neither salt nor meat, for the adverse effects it would have on them. Knowing this, the wife, Croyance, still wants to treat them to something, and buys a type of candy, thinking that because it is sweet, it will not affect them. Unbeknownst to her, the nuts in the candy were salted, and as soon as the salt hits their dead tongues, the zombies’ mental faculties returned and they knew that they were dead. What else would the dead do but return to their resting places?
Outraged that their loved ones would be so abused after death, the family members of the zombies restore their graves, then summon another bokur to create an ouanga, which is a talisman that houses the spirits of the dead. They kill Joseph while he sleeps, so that his own magic will not weaken the spell and stop his soul from being housed in the needle ouanga, a fitting punishment for one who would use the dead for his own ends.
No comments:
Post a Comment