Light at the Edge of the World (12 page)

Understanding zombification from the perspective of the believer led to yet another revelation. Though there was no doubt that tetrodotoxin could induce apparent death, and that the fish used by the bokor contained the poison, the preparation itself was obviously not made with the precision of a modern pharmaceutical laboratory. Indeed, levels of tetrodotoxin among individual fish vary greatly, and at certain times of year, as much as half of the population of any given species may contain none of the drug at all. Thus, any particular batch of the powder may be totally inert. But the bokor does not have to account for his failures. If he administers a preparation that has no effect, he can claim that his magic was deflected by the intervention of a benevolent priest. If, on the other hand, the victim actually dies, the bokor can suggest that the death was a call from God and beyond the reach of his sorcery. A bokor's failed attempts do not count, only his successes. Even if the
poison was effective but once in dozens of attempts, the outcome would support the powerful reputation earned by the zombie phenomenon. Indeed, for any number of reasons, zombification must be an exceedingly infrequent and highly unusual occurrence. However, the phenomenon's power depends not on how often it occurs but rather on the fact that it can and apparently has occurred.

While the potency of the sorcerer's spell and the powder itself suggest a means by which zombies may be created, now or in the past, they nevertheless explained very little about the place of zombification within Haitian traditional society. The peasant knows that the fate of the zombie is enslavement, a concept that suggests the victim suffers a fate worse than death: the loss of individual freedom implied by slavery, and the sacrifice of individual identity and autonomy implied by the loss of the soul, the ti bon ange. The ability to cast a victim into the purgatory of zombification confers immense power on the bokor, should he choose to exercise it. But how and why is someone chosen to become the victim of the bokor's sorcery? Answering these questions prompted the final and most challenging phase of the investigation.

 

FROM THE CASE of Narcisse and reports of other alleged zombies, it appeared that the threat of zombification was
not invoked in a random manner. All of them were pariahs in their communities at the time of their demise. Members of Narcisse's family claimed that he had been brought before a tribunal to be judged. When he returned to his village for the first time, his family did not doubt his identity, but nevertheless ordered him away. His brother, who according to Narcisse had been responsible for his demise, had lived out his natural life in the village. The bokors who administered the powders and wielded the spells also lived within their communities. Whatever their perceived power, it is difficult to imagine any sorcerers being long tolerated unless their activities ultimately served the needs of their communities.

In my travels in Haiti, I had often heard of the Bizango, a secret society feared by many Haitians that constituted a force, if not an institution, parallel to the Vodoun temples headed by the priests. Several bokors had told me that the Bizango controlled the zombie powders. Throughout Equatorial West Africa, the fountain of Haitian culture, secret societies were acknowledged to be the most powerful arbiter of social and political life. The connection between these clandestine groups and the Bizango had been traced in direct lineage by a respected Haitian scholar, Michel Laguerre. In Africa, the societies are known to have a judicial function as tribunals that apply sanctions. To punish
those who violate the codes of their communities, they exploit the toxic power of plants.

The link to zombification was evident, and in the last months of my sojourn in Haiti I was able to enter the Bizango and undergo preliminary training as an initiate. What emerged was a clear sense that beyond the ritual activities, the flamboyant rites that strike terror in the hearts of so many Haitians, the secret societies constitute a true and effective political force that protects community resources, particularly land, even as they define the power boundaries of the villages. Sorcery and poisons are their traditional weapons, and within the Bizango, there is a complex judicial process by which those who violate the code of the society may be punished. Zombification is the ultimate sanction. Clairvius Narcisse, it seems, was no innocent victim. According to the terms and structure of his society, his condition had been deserved, his fate sealed, by his own misdeeds.

Although it was ultimately impossible to prove that Narcisse had received a dose of the poison, or that he had passed close to death and been revived, his case, provocative as it was, provided an extraordinary conduit to culture and obliged the scientific world to take seriously a phenomenon that had historically been dismissed, even ridiculed, often in a racist manner. When the investigation began,
even sympathetic students of Vodoun viewed the popular belief in zombies as but a lamentable example of a nation's notorious instincts for the phantasmagoric. By the time it ended, there was no longer any doubt that the bokor had identified a natural product that not only could induce a state of apparent death but had done so many times in the past, as is evident in the medical literature. The purpose of science is not to discern absolute truth but, rather, to generate better ways of thinking about phenomena. Twenty years on, the link between the toxic powder and zombification remains compelling, and the hypothesis still stands.

But when I think back to my time in Haiti, it is not the zombie research that I recall as much as the Vodoun culture itself. For the first time, I was exposed to a belief system so profound in its implications and to a people so distinct in their perceptions that they provoked a fundamental shift in my own worldview. Not that I became an acolyte. Vodoun embodies not only a set of spiritual concepts but prescribes a way of life, and, like most religions, it cannot be abstracted from the day-to-day lives of the believers; spiritual convictions are fused into their very being. From my perspective, I could no more become a Vodounist than I could become a Haitian, and to suggest otherwise was to deny and, in a sense, betray the power and depth of their devotion. But what I could do was bear
witness to an amazing culture in which there was no separation between the sacred and the profane, between the material and the spiritual. A land where every dance, every song, every action, was but a particle of the whole, each gesture a prayer for the survival of the entire community.

The first night I was in Port-au-Prince I watched a man in a state of trance carrying in his mouth a burning ember for several minutes. I knew of other societies where believers affirm their faith by exposing themselves to fire. In Brazil, Japanese immigrants celebrate the Buddha's birthday by walking across beds of coals. In Greece, firewalkers believe that they are protected by the presence of Saint Constantine. The same sort of thing goes on in Singapore and throughout the Far East. Western science accounts for these extraordinary feats by invoking the same effect that makes drops of water dance on a skillet. The theory suggests that, just as heat vaporizes the bottom of the water droplet as it approaches the skillet, a thin protective layer of vapour is formed between the burning rocks, for example, and the firewalker's feet.

To my mind, this explanation begged the question entirely. A water droplet on a skillet is not a foot on a red-hot coal, nor teeth grasping an ember. I still burn my tongue if I place the lit end of a cigarette on it. After what I had witnessed in Haiti, any explanation that did not take
into account the play of mind and consciousness, belief and faith, seemed desperately hollow. I had no experience or knowledge that would allow me to rationalize or to escape what I had seen. The man had entered the spirit realm with ease and impunity; his body had not been harmed by the fire. Here was proof of the power of conviction.

 

HAITI LEFT ME convinced that cultural beliefs really do generate different realities, separate and utterly distinct from the one into which I had been born. During subsequent years, as my travels led to other parts of the world, the forests of Borneo and the Tibetan plateau, the deserts of East Africa and the ice floes of the Arctic, memories of Haiti continued to serve as a lens through which I took the measure of a place, knowing always that each culture represented, by definition, a unique facet of the human legacy and promise. The more intensely I embraced this notion, the more I came to see in the sweep of modernity an impending catastrophe, as we drift away from diversity, as languages are lost and ancient peoples are convulsed in an upheaval of violence and transformation.

IN A BITTER MOMENT OF RESIGNATION, CLAUDE LÉVI-Strauss said that the people for whom the term cultural relativism was invented have rejected it. Indigenous societies throughout the world, he suggested, have deliberately abandoned the old ways and chosen instead to embrace the uncertain promise of the new. In this case, the great anthropologist was only half right.

Traditional cultures have survived precisely because of their ability to cope with change, the one constant in history. People disappear only when they are overwhelmed by external forces, when drastic conditions imposed on them from the outside render them incapable of adapting to new possibilities for life. In eastern Ecuador, I lived in a Kofán
village that was destroyed in a single generation by the discovery of oil. When I returned later, the shaman I had worked with was dead, and his son had a job with Texaco. In Colombia, Barasana men whom I knew well have been reduced to coca-growing serfs by the drug lords and their allies, the revolutionary guerrillas of the left. Cattle barons tear down the forests of the Bora and Witoto. In Africa, warriors who once fought with spears now have their choice of automatic weapons.

It is not change that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, it is power, the crude face of domination. Given a chance, indigenous societies can thrive in a period of flux and transformation. But, as in any time of turmoil, there are risks, and the consequences can be dire, as is evident in the stories of the Waorani and Penan, rain forest peoples of the Amazon and Borneo, and of the Rendille and Ariaal, nomadic herders from the deserts of East Africa.

 

KOWE WAS A Jaguar shaman, too old to hunt, but just the right age to empower the poison darts. Younger men made the actual curare, scraping the bark of the liana, placing the shavings into a funnel of palm leaves suspended between two spears, slowly percolating water through and collecting the drippings in a small clay vessel. The dark fluid was brought to a frothy boil, cooled and fired again until a thin
viscous scum formed on the surface. Then, just as the curare congealed, Kowe would take his place on a wooden stool by the fire, his feet resting on a stone axe, and slowly spin the tip of each dart in the resinous poison. One by one, he placed the darts into the earth, and as the tar hardened into a jet-black lacquer, he sang the forest into being, sliding his voice up and down in a chant that only the Jaguar Mother had the power to translate for the world. His voice rose to the black and smoky rafters of the lodge, mingling with the feathered spears that had killed more men than he could remember.

Kowe's life spanned the entire modern history of the Waorani, a tribe that had once terrorized all of Amazonian Ecuador. As a child, he escaped raiding parties by burying himself in the mud and breathing through the hollow shafts of reeds. As a young hunter, he tracked peccary and capybara, shot hummingbirds out of the canopy, learned to distinguish by scent animal urine at forty paces and identify the species which had left it behind. With his father, he cleared fields using stone tools, axe heads not made by the people but found on the forest floor, the gifts of the creator Waengongi. He was an adult in 1957, when five missionaries died in an attempt to make first contact. Among their many mistakes, the American Baptists dropped from the air eight-by-ten, black-and-white glossy photographs
of themselves in poses that we would view as benign and friendly: a warm smile, a friendly wave, a sincere look of concern. The Waorani, who had never seen anything two dimensional in their lives, lifted these pictures from the ground and looked behind the image, seeking the form of the face portrayed. Finding nothing, they concluded that these were messages from the devil, and when the missionaries arrived at a sandbar on the banks of the Río Curaray, promptly speared them to death.

After that, things went poorly for the Waorani. The military intervened, and the missionaries redoubled their efforts. In their isolation, the Waorani had been astonishingly healthy. Medical studies at the time of contact revealed a people essentially disease-free, with no history of cancer or heart ailments, and no evidence of exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid fever, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, serum hepatitis, or the common cold. They had practically no internal parasites and virtually no secondary bacterial infections.

But in the wake of sustained contact, pestilential diseases swept the villages. Scores of Waorani succumbed to polio and influenza, afflictions deemed by the missionaries to be the judgement of God. When I met him, two decades later, Kowe was an elder lost between worlds. By night, he was a man of the forest, seeking inspiration in
the sounds of the wild. By day, he dutifully attended the missionary church, mouthing the hymns, mimicking the motions of the younger members of the congregation. His own children and grandchildren had left to seek work with the oil companies that had laid claim to the vast pool of petroleum that by cruel chance lay beneath Waorani lands. From their labour came clothes, shotguns, flashlights, a cargo of goods that had undoubtedly made life easier.

Having been raised in complete isolation, Kowe, like all Waorani of his generation, had no sense of what it meant to lose his culture. By the time any of the Waorani understood what had transpired in but two decades of contact, the attraction of the new life was overpowering, and the only people who wanted to retain the old ways were the ones who had never lived it. Whatever else it had wrought, Christianity had stopped the spearing raids, the killing of innocent women, infanticide, and the live burial of children. Before contact, life as a Waorani had been many things, but pleasant was not one of them.