Black Orpheus

“The Red of His Shadow,” the latest novel by Cuban writer Mayra Montero, is an astonishing work of the imagination. There is hardly a writer, Haitian or otherwise, who has so successfully and honestly--and without all the usual mediation and qualification and equivocation--dealt with the culturally controversial subject of Haitian vaudou (even the orthography for the term is in hot dispute: vaudou? voudou? vodou? vodun? voodoo?). This book gets you right to the heart of vaudou and doesn’t water it down with any kind of helpful or instructive or redemptive Christian-influenced finale. It’s not a pretty subject (what religion is, really?).

Montero’s book follows the rise of Zule, a Haitian vaudou priestess, from a precocious childhood on a cane-cutting plantation in the Dominican Republic (the time is now, I believe, but it might as well be 200 years ago) to her final battle with a powerful and beloved rival vaudou priest.

Zule is not very nice or admirable by our standards; no character in this book is nice. The characters are not written from the interior out, either. We don’t know why Zule as a small girl wants to watch her father and stepmother make love for the first time. She and the other characters are almost flatly portrayed, and their inner motivations--their psychology, to speak in un-vaudou terms--is to be guessed at rather than known.

Jealousy and loyalty are the predominating human emotions in this book, along with fear, and they are the emotions most at play in village and plantation life, where poverty is terrible, families have known each other over the generations and any stranger poses a threat. And the main amusement here, as in any village where there are no books, no television, no radio, no nothing, barely any food, is sex--and drink.

But both love and living it up are so deeply entwined with the religious life of the plantation that they seem like part of the vaudou ceremonie . And Montero is wonderful at writing sex scenes and drinking scenes; the two carry a lot of this book. Montero also understands family loyalty and writes about Zule and her father with great sharpness, even though Zule is entirely without sentiment or softness.

The story of Zule and her cohorts venturing out on Easter weekend to greet their fate is magical realism without the magic (well, one character does have three testicles). Not that it isn’t fantastic or atmospheric or strange; it’s just that all those aspects happen to be part of the truth of life in these weird places that actually do exist.

There are Haitian cane-cutters living in virtual slavery in the Dominican Republic as you read this review. And they do live like this: as skin and bones at the very extremities of life. They do occasionally drink so much firewater that it induces visions of greatness or retribution or divinity, and sometimes these people who live so close to the abyss--who exist so nearly without material objects--don’t even have to drink to have visions. In this book a mirror is an amazing thing to have. Beds do not endure lovemaking. Two dollars is a lot of money.

Drums and bamboo horns are the only musical instruments (who needs more? a Haitian might ask). A bottle of rum is a passport to anywhere. Rabid mongooses infest the plantation and everyone dies of rabies, a curable disease. These things do happen now, today, in such places.

It will be sad when others write, as they will, that this book propagates stereotypes. Inevitably, a book about vaudou that describes drunken people and people having sex will be thought of by some as more of the usual outsiders’ cliches--same stuff that visitors to Haiti used to describe 200 years ago when their eyes were blinded by reflexive racism: writhing black bodies in fantastic orgies wallowing in animal blood and rotgut.

Montero is not like this in any way. She’s a risk-taker who tells what she’s seen in order to go deeper into the truth. She understands the uses in plantation society of rum and its cheaper, higher-proof cousins, and she knows the places of sex, and that it doesn’t always happen between a man and a woman and that it has to do with power as well as love.

“The Red of His Shadow” is a powerful and important book. It’s a ripping read, which most books that cut across cultures are not, and the story is seductive and glorious in spite of itself, in spite of the darkness that envelops it, in spite of its bleak fatalism. Zule is on an odyssey, after all.

Like an epic hero, she experiences setbacks, has love affairs, endures afflictions, subdues opponents and beasts and the lords of the underworld, and she reconfigures the actual world to meet her vision of what it should be. But she cannot triumph over her own fate. Weakened by love, she is finally defeated. The ending is blunt: It may not leave you satisfied, but it will certainly shock you. *