I’ve just finished reading a book called The Lamb by Lucy Rose, a folk-horror story from the perspective of a young girl growing up in a tiny toxic home. The ending really struck a chord with me, prompting me to think about all things horror and other-worldly. So spoilers from here on out – you’ve been warned!
It isn’t a traditionally satisfying ending. As the reader, you don’t get what you really want, there’s little justice, and you have to live with this uncertainty. The main character does not survive, and we explore the world through her lens in another dimension. We see the unraveling of the family’s secrets, the breakdown of the house, the death of other characters, the mourning and loss of others who were part of the story. It got me thinking about how comfortably we sit, in our western world, with that feeling of uncertainty. How things like the supernatural, life after death, the not-knowing, leaves us feeling distant, alienated, skin tingling, minds whirring searching for answers.
The Lamb reminded me of another story we tell so often in our Caribbean households, and that is one of duppies. Duppies are ghosts and we’ve told stories about them for centuries. They are intrinsic to our culture, and make me think how important that sense of opacity is to our heritage. We don’t try to explain away duppies, we thread them into our stories, life lessons, oral traditions, so much so that they become one with reality, part of our every-day. They teach us something and these duppies and their lessons become tangible. We sit with their right to be unexplained, and we build that opacity into our histories.
So I turned to a familiar book, my Story Telling Rundown I picked up from a supermarket when visiting my island home one summer. It’s a book written by Nasaria Suckoo-Chollette, recounting Caribbean short-stories. One of these, tells the story of young Limbert and the Duppies, riddled with humour and warnings for young children thinking of sneaking out in the night.
I read the story again, and redrew the story’s illustration with charcoal from a campfire we built recently – a traditional place to share stories and meet duppies.
