An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

My grand­moth­er There­sa tells a sto­ry of an in­ci­dent that re­al­ly hap­pened over 70 years ago in a for­est a cou­ple hun­dred feet from where we live.A young cou­ple ven­tured in­to the woods to pick man­goes from a large tree, which still stands. With them was their four-year-old son.The boy wan­dered off in­to the for­est and was lost. His fran­tic par­ents searched un­til dark­ness fell and then has­tened to the con­stab­u­lary at Siparia two miles away and a re­port was laid.The po­lice called in ex­pe­ri­enced hunters who knew the high woods thor­ough­ly, and aug­ment­ed by towns­peo­ple, dozens of searchers combed the for­est high and low for a week. The search ex­tend­ed as far as the south coast on Quinam Beach, over sev­en miles away, since in those days the mighty for­est stretched un­bro­ken from Moru­ga to Erin.

The search was called off, and the griev­ing par­ents left with the in­con­solable void of hav­ing lost a child that those in sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances know too well.About three months lat­er, some vil­lagers were again in the vicin­i­ty of the man­go tree when they heard voic­es com­ing from a near­by clump of bal­isi­er.In the thick­et was the lost child. His clothes were in tat­ters, but he seemed healthy and well-cared for–not at all hag­gard and de­hy­drat­ed as one would ex­pect of a per­son wan­der­ing in the jun­gle. He was sit­ting in a cleared cir­cle and play­ing with bits of wood and stone.The boy was re­unit­ed with his over­joyed par­ents, but on be­ing plied with ques­tions about his or­deal he would on­ly re­ply cryp­ti­cal­ly that he had been cared for in his ab­sence by "friends."The boy lived to be an old man and is now de­ceased, but it has al­ways been be­lieved he was tak­en by douens.

The douen, like oth­er char­ac­ters of lo­cal folk­lore, is al­most a di­rect trans­fer of the sto­ries of West Africa, from whence hun­dreds of thou­sands of hap­less cap­tives from the Ibo, Da­homey and Yoru­ba na­tions were trans­port­ed to the West In­dies as slaves for the sug­ar barons. From the Ashan­ti coast they brought the tra­di­tion of the gri­ot (sto­ry­teller) and around their fires out­side their huts in bondage, the tim­tim grew and flour­ished. Br­er Anan­si, the tricky spi­der­man and his love­able an­tics found root in the Caribbean soil along­side oth­er folk spir­its of a de­cid­ed­ly more sin­is­ter na­ture.Lost some­where in our myth­i­cal past, the Eu­ro­pean vam­pire–Nos­fer­atu, like Bram Stok­er's Count Drac­u­la–came to these is­lands with the French planters and cop­u­lat­ed with the in­yan­ga (witch­es) of West Africa, who came from the Ra­da strong­holds deep in the Bel­mont val­ley, and thus the soucouyant was born.

In near­ly every vil­lage of rur­al T&T there is a tim­tim of an aged crone who lived alone in a re­mote hut (very much like the witch­es of Eu­ro­pean ori­gin) and when night fell, shed her skin, which was placed in a wood­en mor­tar, while she burst in­to a ball of flame and flew off to suck the blood of the liv­ing.To ban­ish the soucouyant would mean find­ing her mor­tar and rub­bing salt and pep­per in the skin so that she would not be able to put it on again, send­ing her in­to shrieks of "Skin, skin, you nah know me?" In our haste to pur­sue what we term de­vel­op­ment, we have lost our an­ces­tral spir­its and the art of the tim­tim. Nev­er­the­less, if you jour­ney deep in­to the coun­try­side, you will find the be­lief in the su­per­nat­ur­al alive and well.In the Irois For­est they tell of douens that have been seen. Many a hunter will weave a sto­ry of hav­ing been led astray by the kind­ly wood­man, Pa­pa Bois. I my­self have wan­dered alone in these high woods and have nev­er man­aged to shake the feel­ing of be­ing close­ly watched at every step.

A friend jok­ing­ly said that elec­tric lights have ban­ished the douen, Pa­pa Bois and la di­a­b­lesse, but if you go in­to the pri­mal wood­land where si­lence clos­es in on one like prison walls, you will soon re­alise that the be­lief in the denizens of the for­est can­not be eas­i­ly for­got­ten.Folk­lore char­ac­ters live deep in the in­deli­ble sub­con­scious of our peo­ple. From the artis­tic ex­pres­sions of LeRoy Clarke's Douen­dom to yarns told around a dim kerosene lamp on a dark night, we ex­plore the sur­re­al realm of what lies just out­side the pale of re­al­i­ty.These are the sto­ries hand­ed down through gen­er­a­tions like cher­ished heir­looms where­in the echoes of Africa emerge with flit­ting, shad­owy fig­ures in the in­di­go blue of the Caribbean twi­light.