Voudou Fugu

The first day of a new year...ho hum...philosophical musings of the usual kind...but no, I feel I must explain myself a little.

(Strenuous throat clearing).

Why the reference to samurai and sushi? I quick glance at my bio reveals my association with Japan - a brief but intense experience that has enriched my understanding of the world, and myself. And inspired me to write.

It started with a cathartic deluge of personal experiences and second-hand stories that gradually coalesced into something resembling a novel, which I subsequently lobbed at various literary agents. One of whom, Sonia Land, was kind enough to reciprocate with some tough-love criticism. It was hard to take on board that I probably needed to rework the manuscript on such a vast scale, and so it was set to cool on the back burner, and has remained there ever since.

Then, to quote Dr King Jr, I had a dream. It coincided with the viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Stranger Tides, which I found bitterly disappointing, and soon I found myself wading through 17th century history with a story in mind.

A story about pirates, of course.

A story about a teenaged Japanese girl thrown on the mercy of callous greedy gentlemen of fortune.

It became Tankard's Legacy.Tankard's Legacy.
Now I'm working on book two, and that's taken me from Asia back to the Caribbean, and many a dusty tome about black magic and voudou. Little did I realise there would be a connection between the myth of the Haitian zombi drug and the Far East country with which I am so preoccupied.

I knew about Japanese people eating fugu (blowfish), of course. Who hasn't seen the episode of the Simpsons where Homer partakes of this notorious delicacy? But I thought the whole concept was the Russian roulette of 'poison...poison...tasty fish', little did I realise that the whole idea of knowing how to prepare this fish is to leave just enough of the poison so that fugu becomes a tantalising combination of food and drug.

I learned this from Wade Davis's incredible exploration of Haitian zombi culture in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Yeah, OK, but how do zombis fit into this?

There is a Haitian man, Clairvius Narcisse, who claims to be a zombi survivor. He went into hospital one day, seriously ill, and died. The doctors even issued a death certificate. But over a decade later he was identified by a sister when she saw him walking around a market.

He claimed he'd been held as a zombi slave, but his 'master' (a bokor, or sorcerer) had been killed and he was now free.

Species of blowfish exist off the shores of Haiti whose poison produces many of the symptoms that Narcisse dispayed when he was admitted to hospital. Wade's hypothesis when he visits Haiti, is that there is a zombi drug, and the blow fish poison ticks many of the boxes of how an initial deathlike state is induced. When someone died due to fugu poisonings in Japan, bodies were routinely left for several days, because of the number of cases where people had 'reawakened' from an apparent death.

Not quite the decaying, flesh-eating drones of mass-media legend perhaps, but why have we created them to be so 'other'? Is it because it is less disturbing than to imagine a zombi might look just look like anyone else rather than a lumbering, groaning monster? Is it the final scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that really scares us? Because a living death is worse than living after death?

What is a fresh start for some of us, is still Christmas for plenty of others. A new year for this calendar, doesn't begin until February for another. Ends and beginnings are never as sure as we'd like.

There, got my philosophical musings in.