[THEME MUSIC]
[SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: The next day, I go to visit Max Beauvoir, a
man considered the voice of the vodou community.
During Wade Davis' stay in Port-au-Prince, Beauvoir
served as his guide and mentor.
But in the years since, he's become the Supreme Chief of
Haitian vodou
MAX BEAUVOIR: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Hello.
MAX BEAUVOIR: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
How are you?
HAMILTON MORRIS: Hamilton.
Good.
How are you?
MAX BEAUVOIR: Very good.
Glad to see you.
Hello, please come on in.
HAMILTON MORRIS: Beauvoir started
his career as a scientist.
MAX BEAUVOIR: Do not be afraid of my dog.
HAMILTON MORRIS: Receiving a degree in biochemistry from
the Sorbonne, and went on to investigate the medicinal
plants of Haiti, patenting a method to isolate cortisone
precursors from agave.
Though he once straddled the material world of chemistry
and the metaphysics of vodou, Beauvoir has abandoned his lab
in favor of the temple in his own home, called Le Peristyle
de Mariani.
[DRUMMING]
MAX BEAUVOIR: The Westerner is an arrogant person, by
definition.
And in his arrogance, he believes he can put his hands
on whatever he wants and possess whatever he wants,
including soul, including people.
This is why he made slavery.
This is why he made so many things.
Being a zombie is not something physical that
happened to you.
It is something spiritual.
A zombie is somebody who has misbehaved.
In fact, somebody that in any other society they would call
a criminal.
Most likely, in other societies, this person would
have been condemned to death.
Our society, like every society, has decided that
certain crimes are intolerable.
Vodou doesn't believe in killing people.
So in fact, this is why even that person considered a
criminal is not killed.
We move from him, or from her, that desire of
committing bad deeds.
And this is what zombification is all about.
HAMILTON MORRIS: Max Beauvoir's explanation of
zombification is unlike any other I've heard thus far.
What he describes sounds strikingly similar to the use
of antipsychotic drugs in Western medicine.
But unlike pharmaceutical antipsychotics, the knowledge
of the poison used to perform this sort of chemical lobotomy
is controlled by an ancient secret society
known as the Bizango.
MAX BEAUVOIR: Bizango and also Sanpwel maintain social
justice, maintain police and order in our society.
HAMILTON MORRIS: So how would we go about meeting people in
these societies?
If a foreigner wanted to go and learn about it, how would
they do that?
MAX BEAUVOIR: I am the head of the Bizangos.
HAMILTON MORRIS: Yes.
Beauvoir suggests I travel to the mountains to find rural
members of the Bizango society, who might be
intimately acquainted with the secret powder.
WADE DAVIS: All the time that I was working, both securing
the powders in various locations and trying to
understand what the nature of the zombie was, and so on and
so forth, I kept brushing up against what I later came to
understand to be the secret societies of Haiti, the
Bizango Champwell, and that Narcisse had actually been
brought before a tribunal of one of these societies and
condemned for any number of transgressions.
And in the end, I became initiated in these societies,
certainly, if not the only, certainly one of the first
outsiders ever to become initiated
in the Bizango Champwell.
HAMILTON MORRIS: Not long after vodou was recognized by
whites, they began to fear its power.
Slaves found practicing vodou were
harshly punished or killed.
Some slaves escaped their masters and formed colonies in
the mountains, where they could practice their religious
beliefs and live freely.
They're known as the Maroons.
It was the Maroons who organized the first
small-scale slave uprisings, which culminated with the Bwa
Kayiman vodou ceremony, in which all in attendance who
vowed to kill their white masters were anointed with the
blood of a slaughtered pig.
This ceremony sparked the beginning of the 1791 Haitian
revolution, led by Toussaint Louverture, and established
Haiti as the first independent black republic.
It was the Maroons who later became the
Bizango secret societies.
To some, the Bizango are a sort of benevolent spiritual
police force.
But to many Haitians, they are a feared band of cannibalistic
criminals who feast on the unsuspecting during midnight
expeditions.
It is here that we meet Tomas, the bokor.
A bokor is the Haitian equivalent of a sorcerer, or
which doctor, shaman, or medicine man, a retailer of
potions, a plant doctor, a man in direct contact with deep
metaphysical realms.
We enter the peristyle to find it's meticulously painted with
hundreds of images of white people being stabbed in the
neck by Satan, or being impaled by Satan while their
blood is consumed by tricephalous snakes.
There is also a Richard Avedon poster of Nastassja Kinski.
On the ground are three large piles of glistening rock salt
and an infant's coffin.
It is here that we meet Tomas.
Tomas is also the mayor of Ennery.
Hello.
TOMAS: My name is Tomas.
HAMILTON MORRIS: I'm Hamilton.
TOMAS: [INAUDIBLE].
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: He says he won't tell you that.
[SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: He said on Sunday he will make that for you.
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: He said $7,777.
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: He said Americans doesn't believe in Haitians.
[SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: He said he will make it for you.
[SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: So he said you have to give first.
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: So he said tomorrow night at the cemetery, he will
make a zombie ceremony.
And you will see zombie getting up.
HAMILTON MORRIS: Nice to meet you.
Thank you.
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
OK.
HAMILTON MORRIS: The next evening, we drive back into
the mountains to meet Mayor Tomas at our designated
midnight rendezvous.
We enter the peristyle dedicated to the malevolent
baron, and Alex walks in backwards to reverse any
spells cast upon him by Tomas.
He tells me Tomas is untrustworthy,
a man without morals.
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
TOMAS: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Tomas, now incensed, pulls off his gold
embroidered dashiki and puts on a baby blue gown with a
scoop neck and two-button closure.
As the associates of Tomas slowly gather around, Alex
begins to back away, telling me that it's no longer safe.
And we must return to our Mitsubishi Montero.
He then calls his friend to arrange a meeting with a
different bokor, deep in the rice fields of Artibonite.
ALEX: [SPEAKING CREOLE]
She just told me that she talked to the [INAUDIBLE], and
everything we need, they will make it happen to us.
So let's wait and see what happens tomorrow.
HAMILTON MORRIS: At night, I experience a feverish dream of
Jean-Claude van Damme, replete with hypnagogic
hallucinations.
He approaches me, knife in hand, and whispers in my ear,
flicking my earlobe with his tongue, urging me to remember
what Wade said about the cultural matrix.