The World is Unknown

“Everyone in Haiti seeks out Hougans and Mambos, Vodou’s priests and priestesses, but they laugh whenever Vodou is brought up. And yet, in moments of crisis and desperation, it’s the first place one turns. On a trip with my mother to visit family in Miami, I walked into a Botanica to see what was being sold and what healing services were being offered. My mother stopped at the door, refusing to go in. The stakes were too high, and what was behind the door seemed possibly too powerful to approach. Through her refusal, I came to understand the slippery ways that belief can operate. Our lives are made up of these myriad inconsistencies between what we believe and what we do.

While biomedicine reads the body like a text, there is something about possession that matches the illegibility of the body—its sensuousness, its reach beyond words and our own understanding. I don’t mean to suggest that the body is illegible so let it be poked and prodded until it releases some information. I am saying that we need a medicine that emerges from this sensuousness, a medicine that feels in a different language, maybe the language of dreams.”

Read more of Carolyn Lazard’s essay over at Triple Canopy!