A strange and enigmatic collection of myths, lyrical storytelling and fantastic folklore, Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica details Hurston's Caribbean travels and journey as initiate into Haitian Voudoun. My thesis engages Hurston's contact with Voudoun as a phenomenon of encounter which begins for her with the complex crossing of rumours, secrets, lies, myths and memories embodied in stories of spirit-possession, secret societies and zombies circulating in Haiti. As Hurston pursues the "truth" of these stories she is caught in an experience of possession which I call "the rumour of Voudoun." This rumour is contagious in that these stories pull her toward the scene of Voudoun ritual and permeate her consciousness. By retracing Hurston's own phenomenon of bodily possession back in and through Voudoun's historicity across the Middle Passage and as a "medium of conspiracy" among the slaves during the rebellious uprisings in colonial Saint Domingue, I will argue that the rumour of Voudoun is a contagious affect by which an insurgent communal consciousness is passed on. The rumour circulates in and through a non-national, affective community in Haiti which continues to survive amid the silent history of anticolonial nationalisms.

No description available.