Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies

Abstract

During my last visit to Haiti, I heard a story about a white dog. Starving, its eyes gone wild, it appears late at night with its tongue hanging out. Reclaimed by an oungan or priest who “deals with both hands,” practicing “bad” magic, the dog comes back to life in skin bloated with spirit. A friend called it “the dog without skin,” but this creature was not a dog. Instead, when a person died, the spirit, once stolen by the oungan, awakened from what had seemed sure death into this new existence in canine disguise. We all agreed that no manhandled spirit would want to end up reborn in the skin of the dog. Being turned into a dog was bad enough, but to end up losing color, to turn white, seemed worse. In this metamorphosis, the skin of the dead person is left behind, like the skin discarded by a snake. But the person’s spirit remains immured in the coarse envelope, locked in another form, trapped in something not his or her own.