The Serpent and the Rainbow

This is Wade Davis' (an ethnobotanist's) vivid account of exploring the phenomena of 'zombies' in Haiti in the 1980s.

It works on every level - as a remarkable detective story, as a lucid account of exploring the toxicology of plants (and animals), and an exploration into a unique culture forged out of the searing injustice of slavery.

A zombi is created out of the marriage of two separate forces: one biological - a drugging that feigns death and the second cultural - a person judged by their community to have failed it is 'initiated' both through the drug and its cultural contextualization into a form of bondage/imprisonment.

What is so compelling about this account is Davis' recognition of the malleability of persons - the set (a person's own framing of what is happening to them) and setting (the wider context in which a life unfolds) is as important in yielding the result as the biological impact of the given poison.

What is striking to is the way in which this coming to be judged is rooted in community structures that arose at the time of slavery to protect runaway slaves and continued to exist as a parallel system of governance alongside that offered by the elitist structures that governed Haiti for so long (and arguably still do).

Along the way you also get a brief but vivid introduction to voodoun (including several vivid accounts of possession), a history of the Haitian revolution (and how its success has continued to dominate how we see the country, precisely because it was successful, the country must be seen to be a failure); and, fascinating diversions, say, on the effects of 'puffer fish' and why, even though parts are so toxic, people continue to savor them as exotic food items and; and, the Victorian obsession with the possibility of being 'buried alive'!

It is the kind of book I simply love - there is a vivid, unfolding narrative of people with real characters into which is buried not only fascinating information but a way of imagining the world that sees it both as a place of unending wonder on which knowledge is never likely to be foreclosed. There is an enterprise at knowing it that lives into the uncertainty of its continuing mystery and both the knowing and the uncertainty are beautifully balanced: each given their proper place, their due.

It is, also, a compassionate book that judges the complexity of voodoun carefully, recognizing both its value and its shadow, as the tradition itself does, knowing that good and evil are heavily intertwined and that you do not escape evil by refusing to confront it.

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