The Voodoo Halfworlds (series). Netherworlds Remembers – Ch.4
Clark (2014), Dayan (1995), Fernández Olmos & Paravisini-Gebert (2017), Hebblethwaite (2015), and Nwokocha (2023) argued that Afro-Creole spiritual traditions and “ritual language” exerted a “profound and pervasive creative influence” on Latin America and the US, particularly New Orleans, Louisiana.
By Miguel A. Reyes-Mariano
The acclaimed writer Leu Seyer searched for and took a voodoo potion to improve his storytelling skills. This experience not only helped him in his efforts to improve his narratives but also changed his whole world through a connection with the voice-hearers’ realm that will follow him to eternity.
Previously:
Writer Leu Seyer spent a fortune on a Haitian creativity potion. "It requires permission to be rewritten," the Vodou priestess warned him. Soon after he drank it, his career took off. A year later, he returned to Haiti and was found out of his mind, raving on a beach with no writing hand (payment from spirits). Once found, all he muttered was that the unwritten stories were still "in hunting season."
CHAPTER FOUR: THE BODY’S SYLLABUS
A heart beating faster than normal. Breathing was barely possible because inhaling was more difficult than exhaling. In his ears, a malfunctioning ringing sound that seemed to only increase in volume. Leu Seyer could only see no further than his nose because of the thick morning humidity and rain. In the midst of this chaos, he still could not figure out in his recollections how he had gotten to that place. The worst part was that he had no idea where he really was. He tried to shout for help, but his voice was muffled entirely by the deafening silence. He also had no idea how long he had been there, in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, a voice rang in his ears: “Are you okay?” asked a stranger…
A year after the writer Leu Seyer was found on a deserted Haitian beach, he needed more care than a newborn. He was found sunburned, delirious, and missing his right hand. In short, his life became an endless list of supervised tasks. It was as if his own body needed a syllabus to return to everyday life. First came the hospitalization, followed by constant clinic visits. Then he was moved to a small rented room near relatives in Buffalo, New York, under the care of a Personal Care Assistant (PCA).
The rented room required installing handrails and very sturdy elastic bands throughout the house. All of this was meant to help him coordinate and balance his movements. The family helped with the expenses because Leu was still not in his right mind to access his financial resources. Meanwhile, his progress was assessed using increasingly stringent measures of how well he could perform simple tasks. He had to be re-taught by health care professionals how to fasten his shirt buttons, pick up cups with minimal tremors, and write his name using his left hand. These were referred to by the doctors as the effects of trauma. The therapists called it adaptation. But Leu might have called it (if fully conscious) “exile.” Each exercise reminded him of what he had been deprived of or was temporarily denied.
In time, through hard dedication and practice, he learned to open doors by combining his left hand with his right elbow or shoulder. He learned to cut food one-handed and to tolerate the stares that preceded pity. At night, after the clinic's lights were turned off, he could still taste paper in his mouth, as his desire and ambition to write better novels had led him to this deplorable situation – only now had he come to this realization. At times, he had awakened believing he could hear the key striking somewhere else, as if his fingers had clacked the keys with a hand no longer his own.
Occupational therapy focused on making him functionally capable; physical therapy worked to strengthen him. Neither helped him learn to write as a novelist using only one hand on the keyboard. Although he was missing his right hand, knowing he could still rely on his left hand gave him some hope and stimulated his determination to succeed. Nonetheless, when he tried to type with only his left hand, the cursor blinked like a mocking metronome, and the sentences that appeared were not sentences—only fragments, like quotations torn from books he had forgotten or had never read.
Leu attended support groups with men who had lost their fingers at factories and veterans who had lost an arm due to explosions. He felt embarrassed to share what he believed about his hand being taken by lost souls who wanted to write and may possibly be writing somewhere else. Even the psychiatrist asked Leu if he would like some medication for the "auditory hallucinations." Leu agreed to, as he once did when visiting the mambo's hut, just nodding, as it is simpler than challenging institutions. In fact, the whispering voices of unwritten authors have not disappeared but have changed their ways of nonsense.
He has grown less vocal, more subtle in what he is passing off as his own thoughts. When he finally got the documents saying he was "now somehow independent and stable", Leu knew "stable" was a code for whatever the system could no longer pay to treat.
For many months, he tried to treat the memories of the beach as a mere chance occurrence and his missing hand as a tragic event without a deeper spiritual or philosophical context. He was gradually returning to his normal activities. After a year of constant therapies and treatments, he has started taking short, completely balanced walks, making shopping lists, and calling his family and friends. He was regaining the strength that his body had lost in the limbo of his memory. He also worked to pay off his debt by negotiating in shame some profits from his old novels.
During those twelve months, his agent contacted him only once, very tentatively, almost as if reaching out to someone who had passed away and left an address behind. Plus, Leu did not respond because replying could have implied one more ridicule for him, and his future seemed to be a draft he could no longer define at the time.
During his recovery period, the only time he made even a slight attempt to write again, he produced paragraphs that read as if written by someone imitating him. So, he ripped them up with his left hand, as if ripping them would restore his authorship. Even so, he could feel the Halfworlds in those thin hours just before sleep - the same way one can feel a change in air pressure - the same way one can feel the presence of impending rain when one smells the ink that has soaked through into the air. It began to occur to him that the Halfworlds were not closed to him; instead, he was the one hesitant to re-enter, fearful that upon re-entering, he would be forced to accept that the unmaterial debt they were claiming was a permanent condemnation.
Then it happened. While he was shopping at a pharmacy, Leu suffered an uncontrollable seizure due to his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As he tried to lean on an unscrewed shelf that was unbolted to the floor, the weight of his body caused it to collapse, destroying the display of new facial-cleansing masks. The scream of the floor associate in charge of that area was so piercing that every single customer in the pharmacy ran out of the place, screaming, too.
The stampede of people trying to leave the store at the same time caused a devastating domino effect: all the shelves that were not literally anchored to the floor with screws collapsed. The floor was covered with a collage of all sorts of colors and smells as a result of broken containers and spilled items. Minutes later, having recovered, Leu too walked out the door like everyone else, heading—of course—to another pharmacy to buy the medicines and accessories he needed.
At the following pharmacy, there he was, standing in an aisle, looking at the bandages he no longer needed – and once again he tasted that old flavor on his tongue: paper, pulp, and the faintly metallic echo of bronze. He could hear an echo, almost like the faintest metallic copper. He could not remember it, but he had a connection - and it reminded him that the key to the halfworlds' doorway was still in him. He thought he could feel the way to manipulate the hinges to open the doors into the world of the unwritten voices, where he heard the whispers. That same night, he would dream about a bright red briefcase at his feet, and when he awoke, he would find his left hand balled up as if he held the handle of that case.
Nonetheless, Leu, unhappily, realized that his complete recovery would irrevocably impose a new set of constraints. Nevertheless, he felt stronger, more stable, and more resilient in facing the challenges of the halfworlds. Having previously undergone transformation through the Loa associated with the Haitian Whispers’ Potion, he remained confident he could overcome it again. For him, that may be the only way to return to the point where his life was disturbed. Thus, he stopped treating the whispers as symptoms and began viewing them as messages.
A couple of weeks later, he made up his mind and informed his relatives of his decision to return to Haiti, a decision that drew horrified looks from his loved ones, who still had fresh memories of the images from when they went to rescue him more than a year ago. But Leu was no longer an inexperienced, desperate novice in pursuit of a dream. He knew he would arrive there as a seasoned man, one who had endured much pain and carried many medical records that served as his passport, or scars that served as his credentials. So, without wasting much time, he prepared for his trip. He was ready, thanks to the financial resources from the sale of his previous novels, which continued to be well received in international markets.
In Port-au-Prince, his nostrils got filled with the scent of burning incense that seemed to permeate every fabric in the city. Meanwhile, the painted eyes of Vodou loa like Erzulie Dantor, the fierce protector, Papa Legba with his wise knowing gaze, and Baron Samedi's skeletal grin, all seemed to follow him from the walls of buildings. About his quest for the potion, however, his lips remained sealed. In matters of Voodoo (New Orleans, USA) or Vodou (Haiti), loose lips invited not just failure but retribution.
Once on his erratic journey, his worn leather sandals slapped against the rough concrete, worn by years of tropical rain and neglect. He walked through narrow streets where old bicycles leaned against the walls, their colors faded and their paint peeling. Leu could still hear the silent whispers in the city's salty, humid air, guiding him from one tin-roofed shack to another. Every secret sign—a nod, a three-fingered gesture, a word in patois—marked a path he had walked before, though now it felt like a faded dream his memory struggled to recall or wanted to forget.
Furthermore, accepting that misinformation is a necessary component of the ritual economy, he found that his dead ends only strengthened his resolve rather than weakened it, for he had come to claim back a stolen state from the Halfworlds. Namely, his determination weighed heavier than his own struggles. When he ultimately found a source (whether a priest, a mambo, or an intermediary), he did not barter in money as if money were sufficient; he bargained with need, the only currency recognized by the spirits. The question was what non-monetary price he would have to pay this time to re-enter the corridors of the halfwords.
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Do not miss Chapter Five of the series: Leu goes back to Haiti to negotiate a monthly supply of Whispers' Potion. The voice of the whisperers' authors needs him only because he has endured the transition to the netherworlds. He is always pushing himself toward the bargain to spread the spirist’s unwritten stories.
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REFERENCES
Brown, K. M. (1991). Mama Lola: A Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press.
Clark, E. S. (2014). Afro-Creole spiritualism in nineteenth-century New Orleans [Doctoral dissertation, Florida State University]. FSU Digital Repository.
Dayan, J. (1995). Haiti, history, and the gods. University of California Press. (Reprinted 2008 by University of California Press.)
Fernández Olmos, M., & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2017). Creole religions of the Caribbean: An introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo (3rd ed.). New York University Press.
Hebblethwaite, B. (2015). Historical linguistic approaches to Haitian Creole: Vodou rites, spirit names and songs: The founders’ contributions to Asogwe. In La Española – Isla de Encuentros / Hispaniola – Island of Encounters.
Nwokocha, E. A. (2023). Vodou en vogue: Fashioning black divinities in Haiti and the United States. University of North Carolina Press.
