Dr Ishtla Singh
The story of the Gasparillo family, the Mathuras, being harrowed by a supernatural presence has itself come to haunt the national, as well as the individual, psyche.
As the spectral buck has made his presence felt across social media, family tales of soucouyants and douens have stirred the dusty cobwebs of memory, the cloven hoof of LaDiablesse has slipped into view and the landscape itself has taken on the dark shimmer of a looking-glass of otherworldly menace.
Here in the frosty sunshine of an English spring, removed in so many ways from my one-time life in Trinidad, even I have felt the deep jolt of forgotten familial and cultural stories reanimating, and the shivery uneasiness of the familiar and every day once again made strange and unknowable.
In psychoanalytic terms, we have felt the seductive touch of the uncanny.
The Mathuras, on the other hand, allege that they are actually living it. In their telling, the buck, a demanding entity that both punishes and rewards, has unleashed disruption and upheaval in their household which remains, despite numerous and varied attempts, powerless in its wake. A family life that could once be taken for granted as relatively safe and protected has therefore been made vulnerable and fragile; significantly, from a source within. And it is here, in this unsettling notion of internal disturbance, that the very essence of the uncanny has been glimpsed.
The concept of ‘the uncanny’ in psychoanalysis is based on Freud’s ideas of Das Unheimliche, which is derived from the root word Heimliche, meaning “familiar”, “not strange”. Freud suggests that, just as the addition of Un-transforms the original word in both form and meaning, so too can the negating and strange be inserted into the everyday familiar, rendering it eerie and unnerving.
With this in mind, it is little wonder that the haunted house—and here, we cannot help but think of the actual Mathura house—is such a common trope in horror: the place we consider naturally safe and familiar turns out to conceal something supernaturally dangerous and alien.
In addition, the house is often a potent symbol of the self; something that we also like to think of as natural and known. But the work of psychoanalysis tells us that we also harbour an unknown, an unconscious—things that are repressed, that are felt rather than thought; things that are pre-verbal and perhaps even a-verbal. And when these and other unknown aspects emerge, in whatever form and duration, we, like the Mathuras, experience what the psychoanalyst Stephen Frosh calls the house of the ‘self-made strange’.
Such experiences, whether they surface in ourselves or others, typically cause distress and unease, but also engender fascination and curiosity. It is perhaps this unsettling, ambivalent feature of the uncanny that precipitates one of our common, and very ordinary, responses to stories such as the Mathura’s, namely, laughter and trivialisation; strategies which help us render difficult content more bearable while upholding our particular world views.
However, such reactions also direct our gaze away from the shadows out of which the original manifestations emerge. Instead, we scrutinise the human and non-human players of the drama, looking for pragmatic motives and containing the story within the safe confines of jokes and picong. But in doing so, we lose sight of a bigger question: why does this kind of story, this particular supernatural narration of fear, of violent acts, of destructive forces beyond our control, emerge in the first place?
Psychoanalysis attempts to hold such questions in steady focus. Here, ghosts and other supernatural entities are seen as, in Frosh’s words, ‘manifestations of personal injustice, lingering reminders of those that have been mistreated, displaced and left unrecognised’. As such, narratives of haunting can be seen as vehicles for expressing a sense of social, political and economic marginalisation, as well as a deeply-felt but unarticulated intergenerational trauma; one which is either personal to the family or endemic to the culture.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, the haunting of the Mathuras can, therefore, be seen as a projection of a troubled, traumatised internal landscape onto the external. We do not know enough about their circumstances and dynamics to understand the personal, symbolic significance of the buck and the meanings it carries for them. But we can acknowledge the valency of an external landscape which allows for easy mapping.
The spirits and demons that inhabit Trinidad are not just narrative relics of the many races and cultures that have walked it but are also the malcontent ghosts of conquest, invasion, exploitation, slavery, indentureship. They embody the horrors of previous generations, the inherited and destabilising trauma of existing on the margins as Other and as such, they invite us, as Robert McFarlane says, to glimpse ‘the skull beneath the skin’ of the land itself.
We, therefore, do not know exactly what is being imparted by the Mathuras' haunting story, but it is clear that something of importance is being raised; that something is being requested. In psychoanalysis, this in itself would be viewed as hopeful, as a way into an exorcism of the psyche, even if the overt text of the message seems strange or indeed, uncanny.
In this case, to respond to that attempt at communication, and to pursue it with any hope of success, would necessitate a deeper and closer engagement with the family; one that would allow not only a measure of insight into the significance of the buck specifically, and of haunting generally, in their internal world but also, into what tangible areas to address these symbolise in their external context.
Thus, a story such as the Mathura’s can be interpreted as a signal that there is work, both psychological and social, to be done. As Frosh says, ‘if a spirit haunts, then it is not fully lost; the opportunity for repair exists, for settling what needs to be settled and provoking change where that is what has to be done.’.
A haunting, particularly one such as this which asks for public engagement, provides an opportunity to bring the spectre into the light—to see what usually passes unseen, to hear what has been silenced, and importantly, to take action where there is need.
Dr Ishtla Singh is a Trinidad-born writer who has published several books on language and society. She was Reader in English Language and Linguistics at King’s College London and now works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She currently resides in the UK.
