Would an author dare to take a voodoo potion to overcome writer's block?
Dayan (1995), Nwokocha (2023), and Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert (2017) noted that Creole spiritual traditions had exerted a 'profound and pervasive creative influence' on Latin music, art, and language.
By Miguel A. Reyes-Mariano
Previously:
The young American author, Leu Seyer, who had fallen prey to writer's block, disappeared into thin air. He left everything behind in his rental room in Haiti. Soon, his vanishing act became a viral internet sensation, spawning many speculative theories, including supernatural ones.
CHAPTER TWO: A STRANGE DOOR OPENING
Two weeks before the disappearance of writer Leu Seyer in a hotel in Haiti, he was coming back from Pistachio Cafe Bistro, and he heard it… a whisper. It was so faint at first that he thought it was the rustling of the trees and bushes… but once in his room, he heard clearly… "L E U S E Y E R ... We finally have found you!"
He spun around. The room was empty. It could be that someone came in and left a hidden recording device—he thought. Paranoia took hold of him, and the next day, he ordered security window bar grilles for the glass window that opened directly onto the street. Additionally, he paid for the installation of security bolts for the door, which were fixed to both the floor and ceiling. Later that night, at his monthly literary Zoom meeting, he told the group about what had happened, but no one believed him.
The very next day, the whisper called to him, now in a softer tone, like paper crumpling in the distance. Another voice joined the first, deeper and more melodic, and began to open up inside him, pouring out words of language woven through him as if each utterance were a piece to be woven with vibrant filaments. His sure hand moved over the keys. A few phrases emerged from between his fingers. Then a few more. Somehow, he managed to transcribe the whispers.
"The potion is working! But for how long?"—he thought. Thus, maybe buying another bottle, against the Voodoo priest's advice. It is important to emphasize that voodoo is a religion in Haiti. (Brown, 1991).
For Leu, in this new stage of his life, reality seemed to have blurred into nights. He was barely eating the minimum to survive and slept a lot less than needed. He wrote feverishly, his candle burning down to wax puddles during the prolonged power outages—entire chapters formed in a single sitting. Characters arrived fully fleshed, demanding to speak. Entire landscapes unfolded before him—cities he had never seen, dialects he had never studied, became familiar and easy to translate, the histories he could not have invented alone.
When exhaustion claimed him, the whispers carried on, reciting stories like lullabies in the dark. He would wake with new ideas to complete the plots already pulsing in his head, rushing back to the laptop to release them before they dissolved back into thin air.
By the end of six months, a complete novel of more than one hundred thousand words lay before him, all coherent—an epic fantasy laced with wit, philosophy, and heart. His prose shimmered with life. Critics later called it "visionary, surreal, otherworldly."
Within months, he was a darling of literary circles. But, unable to socialize as the whispers in his room (in reality, in his head) kept him working nonstop on his next novel. His reviews appeared in magazines, journals, and scholars started to notice him. Audiences hailed him as a genius, a prodigy who had come from nowhere to redefine storytelling.
Leu Seyer, once a desperate young man staring at a blinking cursor, was now untouchable.
Or so it seemed.
By the completion of his second fiction book that year, the voices shifted. What had begun subtly started to take another tone. While still editing his second book, he noticed the whispers growing louder. Where once they had murmured—suggesting dialogue, hinting at turns—they now barked. New voices of impatient spirits (perhaps those who just passed away shortly before finishing their novels, with all the ideas still fresh in their memories). On the one hand, a subtle voice: "Leu Seyer, tell my story! You still owe me." On the other hand, a demanding voice: "No, mine! You have to fulfill your contract!"
The voices overlapped, arguing, their tones sharpened with demands. He tried to block them out, but when he closed his eyes, faces appeared in the words on his screen—hollow-eyed, mouths open in silent cries. The potion, it seemed, had not only unlocked creativity. It had opened the door wider, and now the flood appeared hard to contain.
At the beginning, when working on his first assisted novel, Leu felt that exhaustion was to blame. Now he was able to grasp reality better as some voices grew sharper—mocking threats of his failures, hissing whenever he deleted a line: "Every word is ours. You have no right," one spirit said. He fled, but the further he went, the louder they seemed to be. He thought of a psychiatrist, but as it dawned upon him that he would have to disclose his situation—his rising fame, his adoring readers, his newfound stability—he convinced himself that it was not an option.
Sailing at full speed, he finished the second book that year—a complete publishing success. Then came the night of the distortion. Leu sat hunched over his laptop, editing what was to be his third novel, when the words on the screen blurred. He rubbed his eyes. The text twisted, rearranging itself into symbols he didn't recognize. Then the letters stretched, bent, re-formed into faces—gaunt, screaming, pushing outward as though trying to break through the glass of the screen.
Leu shoved his chair back, heart hammering. The faces flickered, hollow mouths widening. A scream lodged in his throat, but what escaped was not sound—only a wet cough of black ink staining the printings of what he was reproducing at the time.
He stumbled forward, desperate to close the laptop, but the keys clicked beneath unseen fingers, lines appearing faster than he could blink. Then he decided to grab the second vial—three-quarters-filled with glowing liquid—a massive overflow should then bring calm when the dam bursts. Yes, he managed to get the second bottle and had only taken the first two sips. However, he tripped, and the liquid seeped into the floorboards, spreading as ink spilled on parchment. This careless handling of the potion altered the molecules of nearby objects. It opened a postern gate to another reality—a path shaped by the desires of the spirits influencing the chemistry of the elements in the real world. A phenomenon spilling into his contaminated body, almost intoxicated with this elixir. He should never have consumed more than one dose.
The voices fell silent for an instant. The silence was worse.
Then came a final whisper, colder than he had ever experienced before:
"You never listened, Leu ... Now, you are ours."
Before his ethereal disappearance, Leu was suddenly struck by the memories of how he had ended up there in a rented room in Port-au-Prince, Haiti—a tip he got from a fellow writer from New Orleans.
After arriving at Toussaint Louverture International Airport (PAP) in search of a solution to his creative block, he immediately rented a tap-tap to get to his first destination. As soon as the sun fell, neon gave way to candlelight. Alleys glowed with kerosene, and voices dropped to whispers. Leu Seyer drifted through them, chasing an address that felt like a riddle: a bar with no name, a single bulb, a courtyard door.
Hours later, he found it. The courtyard smelled of rum, sage, and sweat. A lone bulb flickered above a crooked frame. Inside, shadows clung to rafters. In the corner, a man in white linen and coral beads watched him with unblinking eyes.
"Priest?" Leu asked, the word slipping loose.
"Yes," came the rough reply. "Sit."
Leu laid a pouch of bills on the table. "I know what I've come for. I'm prepared to pay."
The priest smiled thinly. "Money buys rum. Spirits deal in sacrifices. What do you seek?"
"My real potential. To stop being… less." Leu replied.
"The truth," the priest said, "… is a knife. Are you ready to bleed?"
Leu didn't say anything; he just nodded.
The priest took the pouch of money. "Not enough. You must give yourself."
He gestured, and a tall man in a wide-brimmed hat stepped from the shadows.
"This is Jacmel. He'll take you to the mountain. What happens after—is up to you."
Leu hesitated… "The potion?"
"If you are worthy, she gives it. If not … she'll take."
Jaw tight, Leu followed Jacmel into the streets in the middle of the dark night.
He was ready to enter the edge of the unknown. At dawn, the city softened: vendors shouting fried plantains, buses honking prayers, murals of spirits watching with cracked eyes. The streets thinned to dirt trails toward the mountains. At a small cemetery, Jacmel stopped.
"This is where I leave you. Follow north to the river. Red cloths will guide you." Jacmel walked away, and Leu stepped into the jungle alone.
The trees fractured the moonlight into stripes of light and dark. On the jungle trail, insects screamed, and unseen things shifted. The air reeked of wet earth and sweetness. At the river, stones broke the current in a crooked line. He crossed, slipping once, heart racing, boots soaked. On the far bank, red cloths fluttered faintly.
Hours deeper, thirst burned, and his body sagged. He leaned against a tree.
An old woman appeared, stooped in front of him, draped in cloth, herbs spilling perfume from her satchel.
- - - - - - -
Do not miss Chapter Three: the jungle path that leads Leu Seyer to Madame Mambo. He wanted a door out of silence, and when the door opens, the collector steps through.
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REFERENCES
Brown, K. M. (1991). Mama Lola: A Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press.
Fernández Olmos, M., & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2017). Creole religions of the Caribbean: An introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo (3rd ed.). New York University Press.
Dayan, J. (1995). Haiti, history, and the gods. University of California Press. (Reprinted 2008 by University of California Press.)
Nwokocha, E. A. (2023). Vodou en vogue: Fashioning black divinities in Haiti and the United States. University of North Carolina Press.