It is said the Bokor serves the Loa with both hands.

For good or for ill.

Elise, my father, was many things. None of which were a good man. Once I was gone, the hardest part was in him letting go.

I remember the long night he cried to Baron Semadi to not dig my grave. It took two days for my body to rot.

And six days before I walked again.

The term “zombi(e)” has been a part of american pop-culture since the pulp age of literature. Their cultural significance goes back much longer.

George Romero may have invented the zombie, but Haitian Vodoun have known about their existence since the dawn of their civilization. The Zombi is so ingrained in the Haitian culture, that to create one is as much a crime as pre-meditated murder.

I am neither scientist nor philosopher, and I’m certainly not a medical doctor. But there are plenty who are and who were. Sometime around the late-80’s, a guy named Wade Davis had pontificated on the scientific reality of zombies. He focused on the case study of a man by the name of Clairvius Narcisse.

Narcisse was, for lack of a better term, a trouble maker. He defied the common acceptability of Haitian culture. He placed a tin roof on a a hut that should have been thatched, he refused to allow his brother the use of his land to feed his family. And considering social-norms, he was almost a complete and total prick.

It is believed that his brother, feeling the slight from the denial of his land consulted a Bokor, a kind of mercenary magician. The Bokor created a zombie powder, which was used to turn Narcisse essentially into a zombie.

After checking himself in to a hospital for a number of medical complaints,including coughing up blood, Narcisse ended up being pronounced dead by western doctors.

He said that shortly before being pronounced dead, he felt as if his skin was on fire with insects crawling beneath it. He heard his sister weeping as he was pronounced deceased, even felt the sheet being pulled over his face. Although he was unable to move or speak, he remained lucid the entire time. Even as his coffin was nailed shut and buried. He even had a scar on his face from when a nail was driven through his face. He said that while he was underneath the earth, he felt a strange floating sensation as if his consciousness was almost above the coffin. He lay there for an unknown about of time until the Bokor and his henchmen dug him up, where he was immediately beaten into submission, bound, gagged, and spirited off to a plantation where he lived for the next two years while being force fed a single meal a day.

That meal contained Datura, a strong hallucinogenic that is called the zombie cucumber. It causes extreme delirium and total amnesia, among many other symptoms. Narcisse later recalled that his time spent on the plantation was full of days where the world seemed to pass by in an almost slow-motion haze.

Scientific analysis of multiple powders revealed ground up bones, ground up glass, urticating bristles, toads, and all sorts of other witches’ brew ingredients. There was a commonality to the powder though. Tetrodotoxin. The poison inside of a puffer fish that has been known to cause a near catatonic or death-like state.

Keep the myth behind the legend in mind.

Because sometimes, the truth is more terrifying than the fiction.

The Outsider’s Perspective

June 12, 2013

mary

When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I see all kinds of people. People with skin colours from cocoa to olive, from toffee to porcelain. People in turbans, in hijabs, in saffron robes. People wearing crosses, pentacles, Stars of David. People of all ages, of all income levels, speaking a variety of languages.

When I’m writing, I want to reflect that kind of diversity in my stories. Unless there’s a specific story-based reason for everyone to look the same, believe the same, and exhibit the same behaviours, I like my fiction to encompass the wide variety of human experience.

Growing up, I read a lot of stories based on Greek and Roman myth, Biblical personages, fairy tales, Norse legends, King Arthur. The prevalence of these tales made sense in a historical context; these mythologies form the bedrock of modern Western culture. I also found a few precious collections of different mythologies, containing very different personages: Nanebozho, the Ojibwe trickster. Rama, the hero from India. Fox spirits from China. I loved these stories. I’d memorized Cinderella and Snow White. These anthologies provided me with something new, something different. As I grew older, I found that readers, and publishers, are increasingly open to stories featuring a wider diversity of characters, based on legends and mythologies from all over the globe.

Full disclosure time. I’m white, female, of predominantly German ancestry, in a relationship with a man. But I write about all kinds of people. People whose life experiences I cannot base on my own; people whose cultures I was not raised in.

I have to be very careful when I write about these people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking something from another culture and using it to suit your needs. To an extent, all cultures in contact mix and borrow from each other. Suburban youth listen to rap songs about life in the hood; Canadian teenagers read Japanese manga; people all over the world go to movies based on American comic book characters. There is, however, a tension in these relationships, particularly when a group with power plunders groups with less power, taking their symbols and distorting them, commodifying them, stripping them of their cultural context and selling them. There is also a tension when people “try to be something they’re not,” particularly when this means they act out of fantasy and idealization rather than a true understanding, or forget their own heritage in the attempt to ape someone else’s. Appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes (think of how Vodun, aka “voodoo,” struggles to be recognized as a religion), water down symbols (it’s hard to take a powerful symbol seriously when you can buy it as a T-shirt or fridge magnet), and confuse with partial understandings and half-truths. Borrowing mythology from cultures not my own is tricky.

And yet, to write only about white, heterosexual people of European ancestry is both dishonest (in that it doesn’t reflect the totality of human experience) and dangerous (in that it insinuates these are the only people worth writing about).

The beauty of fiction is that it demands that I, as a writer, develop the ability to see through my characters’ eyes. I need to know what motivates them, what their dreams are, what their fears are, what their goals are. Their point of view makes sense to them and I need to understand it in order to figure out what they will do next. I need to see them both in the context of their cultures, and as individuals, whose behaviours and beliefs may vary a little-or a lot-from their cultures’ norms.

And so I imagine what it would be like to be a man. Or a lesbian. Or a Hindu. Or an Asian woman. Or someone who lives in the 18th century. I learn about issues these groups face that I do not, in the hopes that my portrayals are based on reality and not on stereotypes. I do my best to portray the myths of other cultures with respect for the context in which those myths were created, and with the reverence I would give to the figures of my own childhood. And I aim to honour, rather than use; to share in, rather than take.

It’s a balancing act, and I can’t please everyone, but when the alternative is to write about a world where everyone is White and European and middle-class and straight, I’ll take some risks, and do some research, to build a world that’s an honest portrayal of the human experience.

A Secret History: The Real Stories Behind Literature’s Most Legendary Figures

June 11, 2013

Kristin Luna

Character Kristin Luna The Writing Life No Comments

As you are well aware, excellent reader that you are, every story starts from an idea. Every legend is inspired by something real. Think about some of your own stories and the crazy places from which they originated: a phenomenal supernatural event in space, a news report, or a picture you stumbled upon on the internet when you were [suppose to be] writing. Most of my best story ideas come straight from my dreams.

Let’s take a look at the seeds that eventually grew to be literature’s most legendary heroes and villains.

Protagonists

These popular protagonists underwent a few author-induced identity crises to become some of the most iconic characters in literature.

Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fashioned his character Sherlock Holmes after an infirmary clerk, Dr. Joseph Bell. Doyle also had other sources including Sir Henry Littlejohn, a lecturer on Forensic Medicine and a Medical Officer, but Bell provided the main trait of figuring out the mystery from small, seemingly innocuous clues. After Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were published, Dr. Joseph Bell wrote to Doyle claiming, “You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it.” Perhaps we are reading a bit of Doyle himself in the pages of every Sherlock Holmes story.

Captain Nemo

Captain Nemo (aka Prince Dakkar) was not always of Indian heritage. Jules Verne originally wrote him as a Polish aristocrat whose family was murdered during the January Uprising, in which Poles protested against enlistment in the Imperial Russian Army. Verne’s editor feared that Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea would be banned in Russia – a French ally at the time. Verne kept Nemo’s origins relatively vague for the time period (nemo in Latin means “no one”), although he is now clearly identified as Indian.

Hobbits

Before I jump in here, did you know the decision to publish The Hobbit came down to a 10-year-old boy? Unsure if she should publish the story, Susan Dagnall of George Allen & Unwin Ltd. gave the story to her son to read, and because he enjoyed it, Dagnall decided to move forward with its publication.

Although he had been writing about goblins and developing languages for years before he began writing about Hobbits, Tolkien suspected his idea for hobbits came from The Marvelous Land of Snergs by Edward Wyke Smith. Tolkien wrote that the Snergs were “a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and have the strength of ten men.” He also noted that Sinclair Lewis’ character Babbitt had a homebody-like nature, which was also an influence.

Tolkien originally wrote Aragorn, or Strider, as a hobbit. Imagine Frodo’s first encounter with the mysterious hobbit Strider in the Prancing Pony! Doesn’t quite have the same effect, does it?

Antagonists

Some of literature’s more legendary antagonists were created from the most obvious and peculiar places.

Dracula

The name alone triggers shivers down the spine. It may be no surprise to you that Dracula originated from the Romanian word dracul, which means “the dragon’ or “the devil’.

As Bram Stoker dug into Wallachian history, he happened across Prince Vlad III, or Vlad the Impaler. Known for his brutality by impaling his enemies, it’s estimated that Vlad killed nearly 10,000 people.

Vlad’s patronymic name was Dracula, passed down from his father Vlad II Dracul, a member of The Order of the Dragon. These knights were tasked with protecting Christianity in Eastern Europe.

Grendel

In the Scandinavian epic Beowulf, the monster Grendel terrorizes a mead hall and slaughters those poor souls who happened to be drinking inside of it. The author describes Grendel as a grotesque creature descended from the race of Cain (who was the first murderer according to the Bible). Scholars debate the nature of Grendel – was he monster or humanoid? Some scholars even propose that Grendel represented enemies of the Geats, or even more simply, an outcast.

Moby-Dick

An enormous, albino sperm whale covered in barnacles that attacked whaling ships in the early 1800’s served as the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Jeremiah Reynolds, an explorer in that time and who was thought to have inspired the character Captain Ahab, wrote of the whale Mocha Dick, describing how its attacks on ships appeared premeditated. It was rumored that Mocha Dick had around 20 harpoons in his back from the 100 or more encounters it had with whaling ships that sailed near the Chilean island Mocha.

The saying goes that legends are born, not made. But, as evidenced above, they certainly can be made – created from an idea half the size of a man, or as terrifying as a bloodthirsty albino whale.

Writing in Our World Instead of Another

June 10, 2013

fictorians

Craft & Skills Guest Posts The Writing Life World-building 1 Comment

A guest post by Michael A. Rothman.

For a fantasy writer, it’s very convenient to create your own world – because you follow the rules that you set. Much like the famous Twilight Zone saying, you control the horizontal and vertical.

However, what if you want to embark on a journey that isn’t quite set in the mundane world you’re familiar with, yet you might be exploring some of our world’s mysticism? Things like numerology, religion, and legends are all fodder for creative authors to take advantage of.

Why would someone choose to dive into what is essentially someone else’s world? Use its characters and storylines?

PartingSea

The answer is rather simple – people are already familiar with the beliefs of certain religions. That being said, if your story relates in some way to something familiar, you’ll have a premade audience that will instantly relate in some fashion to your work. Think about it. How many people are familiar with the parting of a particular sea, or the turning of water into wine?

WaterToWine

These images are only the beginning, consider other concepts that have been leveraged such as fortunetelling or numerology. In the case of numerology, Dan Brown in the oft-cited bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, uses numeric sequences as clues. He poses many what-if’s that people could go ahead and investigate on their own.

In fact, I just recently finished a manuscript that leverages numerological concepts that follow both a religious and numerological theme. The earliest forms of the bible were written in Aramaic (same lettering system as Hebrew). From this, a numbering system that assigned numbers to letters and words was formed and is oftentimes referred to as gematria. Many studies associated with the bible and its hidden meanings use gematria as a form of numerology. An example of such a thing would be where I use an upcoming villain’s name as a code. His name is Bedsem. It’s a play on words in another language, but suffice it to say that I’ve used the gematria system to associate a numeric value to it. One that people might recognize with a simple illustration.

Yes, I’m guilty as charged. I’ve crossed several genres of religion and “sciences” to associated my villain’s name with what is oftentimes posed as the ultimate villain.

Consider that with numerology, you have the ability to pose many “what if” type of questions to the reader. Take certain “coincidences” in the world and make them go “hmm”.

A word of caution, though. Some people might take offense.

Let’s face it, as authors, we will inevitably write something that people will take offense with. I recall having a scene in one of my earlier books where I had two twelve-year-olds holding hands when one of them decides to give the other a kiss on the cheek.

Wholesome, right? Not a big deal, you’d think?

Well 99% of the responses came back on stating how refreshing and wholesome the book was and how nice it was to have something that was “safe” for the kids to read, yet was an epic fantasy. I only mention this because I got one or two comments that inevitably crucified me (ok, maybe poor choice of words considering context) because I was treating kids as sexual objects who shouldn’t look at each other that way. And to think most people don’t believe we live in a puritanical society. Hah!

When you begin to leverage certain things that people might consider a pseudo-science, you might not get too many critics – unless you’ve botched up your facts. However, once you dive into religion or certain cultural affectation or historical references, that’s when the people who take offense can most certainly come out.

For instance, Salman Rusdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses. It won many prizes and was critically acclaimed by the literary establishment. All good things. Good until such time as some very conservative followers of a particular religion took great offense. Since the book does touch on one of the prophets from this religion, there were those in the conservative community that didn’t appreciate the way their prophet had been characterized. Given this belief that their religion was being assaulted, there were calls for the author to be killed.

Needless to say, this is the extreme of such possibilities – but when you leverage the topic of religion, it needs to be with both eyes open. Understand how others would appreciate your work or possibly misunderstand your intent.

I’ve spent years informally studying religion, numerology, and related topics – so I’ve been cautious about introducing these things. Nonetheless, these are tools in an author’s toolbox that are easy to deploy, and they can be a powerful draw to an audience that is a match for your subject matter.

***

Mike has had a long career as an engineer and has well over 200 issued patents under his name spanning all topics across the technology spectrum. He’s traveled extensively and has been stationed in many different locations across the world. In the last fifteen years or so, much of his writing has been relegated to technical books and technical magazine articles.

It was only a handful of years ago that his foray into epic fantasy started, but Mike is a pretty quick study. He’s completed a trilogy, has a prequel under consideration with editors, and is actively working on another series.

In the meantime, if you want to see his ramblings, he lurks in the following social media portals: Twitter – @MichaelARothman, Facebook, his blog, and his books.