First Embrace, Ma x Zoe
Exphanded Photograph
Exphanded Photograph
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. - Audre Lorde
This image documents the first time Ma embraced me. I don't remember when this photo was taken. My first memory of her is many years later. I walked toward Ma after years of being apart. She was sitting on her chair and as I approached her I said, “Remember me?” She laughed because of course she did and because she may have been thinking the same question to herself. At that moment, we shared an awareness of each other that was unconcerned with linear orders of time. Ma was born in Georgetown Guyana and migrated to the united states as a senior. She was orphaned as a baby and was raised by her community there. She became a wet nurse, nourishing many children. She mothered her children and grandchildren who became her community. I don’t remember her telling me any jumbie stories, but there are some stories now that when I listen, I fondly imagine her and her life in Guyana.
The Ole Higue is a tale shared throughout Guyana. In Trinidad and Tobago, they refer to this character as the Soucouyant. The tale goes that there exist women, usually old women who live as humans by day. At night they shed their skin and hide it inside a calabash. The woman’s body transforms into a ball of fire. In this form, she passes through keyholes or below doorways, into children's rooms while they sleep. She sucks their blood, leaving purple marks on their limbs. In the effect of Ole Higue stories, the figure has been abused to stereotype seniors, leading to pranks and even crimes toward older women, a kind of witchhunt. While I would not wish this form of antagonism on Ma, I wonder in what ways her identity conflicted with her environment. I wonder what pains and pleasures she felt when leaving the place she had spent her whole life. I think about how I feel here living in the Caribbean now, an inverse and continuation of her movement through space, motivated by relation.
The horror of the Ole Higue reflects the horrifying times that fashioned her story. Her tale expresses periods in which the Black Body is subjected to the containment of forced transportation, labor, and living conditions. Her Black Body endures observation by colonial minds and the corporeal consequences of race science which asserts that her subhuman status is a physiological fact. It was a sociohistorical environment that necessitated her transformative flesh –shedding her skin – as a means of breaking her containment. Yet, there are stories about obstructing her efforts to morph and free herself. In the story of Gang Gang Sarah, Sarah is a descendant of Africa and a Soucouyant who climbs atop a silk cotton tree to fly and reunite with her home. It was then that she fell as she could not shed her skin because she had eaten salt. Salt is a recurring vulnerability of jumbie characters. It is known that Soucouyants hide their shed skin in a calabash and if one salts the skin, then it will make her itch and she will not be able to return to her body.
There is a historical precedent for the presence of salt in the story of the Soucouyant. For a time, the Caribbean held status as the greatest exporter of salt to Europe and the United States. The production of this “white gold” started off the coast of Africa and extended to generate Salt pans across Bermuda in the late sixteen hundreds. The industry of salt in the Caribbean had an extensive impact on the bodies of enslaved Black people in the Caribbean. In the autobiography titled The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, She describes the conditions of this forced labor.
This was very hard work; and the great waves breaking over us continually, made us often so giddy that we lost our footing, and were in danger of being drowned. When we were ill, let our complaint be what it might, the only medicine given to us was a great bowl of hot salt water, with salt mixed with it, which made us very sick. If we could not keep up with the rest of the gang of slaves, we were put in the stocks, and severely flogged the next morning. Yet, not the less, our master expected, after we had thus been kept from our rest, and our limbs rendered stiff and sore with ill usage, that we should still go through the ordinary tasks of the day all the same.—Sometimes we had to work all night, measuring salt to load a vessel; or turning a machine to draw water out of the sea for the salt-making. Then we had no sleep—no rest—but were forced to work as fast as we could, and go on again all next day the same as usual. Work—work—work—Oh that Turk's Island was a horrible place! The people in England, I am sure, have never found out what is carried on there. Cruel, horrible place!”
Mary Prince’s account details the exploitation industry of salt in the Caribbean. For black people, this industry introduced associations of salt with exploitation. Salt is a divisive and inescapable substance that fills the growing gap between the care that Prince deserves and the abusive treatment that she endures. Through metaphor, the story of the Soucouyant amplifies the attitudes of repulsion toward the saltpans. To the Soucouyant, contact with salt makes her skin itch the way one does after hours in the ocean. The salt hinders her ability to return to her skin. Its presence in the body ruptures the bind between inherited ways of being and the pleasures of embodiment that grow herself and her community into the future. Salt in turn becomes symbolic of the torture of imperial enslavement and symbolic of the unrecoverable time that severs the return to her cultural body.
This was very hard work; and the great waves breaking over us continually, made us often so giddy that we lost our footing, and were in danger of being drowned. When we were ill, let our complaint be what it might, the only medicine given to us was a great bowl of hot salt water, with salt mixed with it, which made us very sick. If we could not keep up with the rest of the gang of slaves, we were put in the stocks, and severely flogged the next morning. Yet, not the less, our master expected, after we had thus been kept from our rest, and our limbs rendered stiff and sore with ill usage, that we should still go through the ordinary tasks of the day all the same.—Sometimes we had to work all night, measuring salt to load a vessel; or turning a machine to draw water out of the sea for the salt-making. Then we had no sleep—no rest—but were forced to work as fast as we could, and go on again all next day the same as usual. Work—work—work—Oh that Turk's Island was a horrible place! The people in England, I am sure, have never found out what is carried on there. Cruel, horrible place!”
Mary Prince’s account details the exploitation industry of salt in the Caribbean. For black people, this industry introduced associations of salt with exploitation. Salt is a divisive and inescapable substance that fills the growing gap between the care that Prince deserves and the abusive treatment that she endures. Through metaphor, the story of the Soucouyant amplifies the attitudes of repulsion toward the saltpans. To the Soucouyant, contact with salt makes her skin itch the way one does after hours in the ocean. The salt hinders her ability to return to her skin. Its presence in the body ruptures the bind between inherited ways of being and the pleasures of embodiment that grow herself and her community into the future. Salt in turn becomes symbolic of the torture of imperial enslavement and symbolic of the unrecoverable time that severs the return to her cultural body.
In the story of the Ole Higue, the calabash, and the skin both serve as vessels. Hollow and double-sided. The character moves in and out of her skin, like consciousness wavers between one’s internal and external climate. Her movement from embodied Black woman to a disembodied ball of fire draws from the necessity to exist and imagine herself beyond what is deemed physically possible in her imperial atmosphere. Her skin hosts her light as she moves ambiguously by day. She routinely unfastens her mask. She hides her identity in a reliable container that has been used by her ancestors for generations. The calabash stores her skin so that she may move privately and return to her body revitalized. The Ole Higue relies on a strategy of Re-fleshing to sustain herself. The ritual of shedding her skin and returning to it is a gesture that values her body and the freedom of embodiment despite the unfreedoms of enslavement. She takes breaks, shedding her skin to relieve herself of the unusual weight of being that her body carries. The skin of the Ole Higue reflects the navigation of Black women around obstacles cast within their bodies.
From birth, our consciousness develops between the internal and external world, a visceral co-evolution that impacts one’s self-image. Franz Fanon offers the term Racialized epidermalization, bringing to light that the schematics of environments, images, and language are reflected in the structure of how we understand ourselves. In an environment materialized through white supremacy, obstacles in Black life are a result of psychological anti-Black corporeal schemas, webs of meaning that aim to position Blackness at the bottom of a hegemonic system of power. It is an oscillation between our internal and external atmospheres that our consciousness forms the body from the flesh. The Black Body is policed through the scrutiny of the white subconscious, engendering violence as it proliferates into material surroundings. This imperial architecture was built inward as colonial institutions developed race sciences to validate their pretend superiority and to deny value to pre-existing civilizations through colonial enslavement. Lamarkian eugenics was a theory in hereditary sciences, adopted as a social philosophy that argued that indigenous and Black cultures could be erased by curating inherited traits through miscegenation. Lamarkian eugenics aimed to construct Black women’s bodies as physiologically inferior and to deny her a future. This pseudo-science further mobilized settler colonialism towards the whitening of Black cultural identity through attempts at the dilution of complexions and features that signify Blackness and inherited ways of being. Despite the construction of the Black body as a physical restraint, the Soucouyant represents the transformative abilities of the Black Body, a resistance to the confines constructed around it by colonialism. The Soucouyant is a jumbie character representing the radical refusal of self-image imposed by anti-Black corporeal schemas. Lamarkian eugenics demonstrates the white supremacist intention to make Black bodies and Black culture an incontestable contradiction to whiteness and its schematic relation to lightness, humanness, and being. The polarization suggests that the construction of Blackness does not only rationalize labor exploitation but also serves the white mind as an anchor to distance one’s self from darkness, subhumanness, the fear of death, and the ontological fear of not Being. The Soucouyant is a character who can maneuver beyond the restrictions of the skin, suggesting that she can exist beyond the limited ways of being assigned to her body. She can be an old woman who lives among others, she can shape-shift into another figure, or she can refuse to be anything at all.
The Soucouyant is untouchable and in turn, is deemed an outlaw. She rejects her assailants and the limits they cast onto her so that she may draw power from within. Yet, as much as she is untouchable, she is in touch with her desires and in touch with herself. My Great-Grandmother Ma was in touch with herself even at the expense of being considered inconvenient. Ma was known for her matter-of-fact attitude and as I grow and navigate the obstacles cast upon my body and my life, I have come to understand that the fact of the matter is that if I do not decide what I believe for myself, someone will try to make that decision for me and at the cost of my wellbeing. Ma and the Soucouyant share empowerment that lies in their decisions to experience themselves and their desires unapologetically. For the Soucouyant, her dynamic transformations and refusal to dim her internal light oppose common philosophies throughout her time. She is illuminated by her own philosophy of being. By investigating the philosophical landscape from which the light of the Soucouyant emerged, a deeper understanding of the women that she represents is possible.
The Ole Higue’s transformation and movement as light communicates a philosophy distinguishing itself from the metaphors and axioms of European enlightenment. European enlightenment philosophy drove the pursuit of the scientific method as a means to explain human nature and culture, parallelling the timeline of Caribbean colonization. Light’s significance in European enlightenment draws from Greek philosophy. In Plato’s Cave, those who pursue true knowledge must discard their environment of shadowy artificial light and look toward the sun, symbolizing a light of original knowledge and truth. In European enlightenment, however, light is not a climate that one can step into and find truth but rather an ideal nature of knowledge that emits from the white man in his transformation of environment. This light argues for a universality of true knowledge that opposes superstitions deemed ignorant in an unobservable darkness. This dichotomy of light and dark foregrounds modern metaphysics. Philosophies of metaphysics contend with reality, being, space, and time. These institutions of thought began exclusively for white men and their ideations are consistent with the colonial harms and marginalization of women, especially enslaved Black women. The unfreedoms of Black women throughout European enlightenment did not curb Black philosophies and systems of belief but rather segregated and condemned their existence in contradiction with the philosophical binaries of enlightenment. While institutions of philosophy value themselves as exclusive, philosophy itself is an innate element of human life and culture. Black traditions became knowledge exchange methods where philosophies of existence were privately shared. Folklore is imbued with artifacts of Black thought that inevitably engage with and beyond the polarization of European philosophy. Here, metaphors of light hold antonymous significance. Jacques Derrida referred to philosophy itself as photological. He suggested that the recurrence of light metaphors in the history of philosophy is especially significant because light is a foundational metaphor for the knowledge systems of western metaphysics itself. The Ole Higue and her story express a distinct philosophy and notion of light which is not a result of distant observations, but rather from embodied experience. The Ole Higue’s light does not emanate through the transformation of her environment but through the transformations of herself. The light of the Ole Higue does not oppose her Black Body, her embodiment is the embrace of both. Thus, her story and its metaphors of light express metaphysical philosophies that contradict those of enlightenment, foundational to western metaphysics.
The Ole Higue’s transformation into light offers a metaphor depicting the Black Body as the embodiment of light. The Soucouyant’s luminous form conveys a meditation on the spatiotemporal properties that light and Blackness share. In her story, her transformation and movements are as uncontainable as the materiality of light. Light is a strange material. It has a crucial and forgotten presence in our lives and yet we experience it unlike any other material or object in our day-to-day. Contemporary theories around optics and quantum light physics attribute the reflective, refractive, and diffractive properties of light to its duality as both a particle and a wave. Light can reflect off a surface and abide by the limits of classical physics. Light can also bend through and around an obstacle, its photons seeming to vanish and reappear. This quality is unique to the materiality of light. While the tools to observe light at a quantum scale are often reserved for laboratories of physicists, this phenomenon is observable at home through conducting a double-slit experiment or meditating on the peculiar passage of light through narrow space. The presence of light in the story of the Ole Higue exhibits profound observations of this phenomenon and a poetic relationship to it. The story offers light as an object and space to imagine the Black Body as inexactable. Light’s ability to bleed through a keyhole can be attributed to its multi-locality, being neither limited to the constraints of classical or quantum physics. Black bodies are also multi-local, a composition of geographies that survive attempts to negate origin and make assumable one’s non-locality. For a body bound to classical limits in physics, one’s location is predictable. One moves linearly through space, bound by gravity and delayed by obstacles. For a body mobilized through the multi-local properties of light, one’s location is only probable. The story of the Ole Higue details a poetic observation of the internal and external life of Black people, illuminated by the multiplicities of identity protected within, under the circumstances of enslavement. The Ole Higue is distinctly diasporic. She is not limited to a single fixed location but rather exists in multiple places at once, according to a timeline that only her body can measure.
The Soucouyant refleshes through a cycle of skin shed. Her carnal conditions are explored through a metaphor of light. This occurrence presents unique conditions in which her consciousness can travel throughout and beyond the skin. She cycles through existing as both flesh and fire, a way of being that is both familiar and fantastic. She rituals a paradigm of embodiment that allows her to isolate from her skin, and through this extraordinary act, her tale brings to attention the phenomenon of embodiment. Her sequence of privately surrendering and repossessing her skin makes complete an experience of embodiment that is otherwise ungraspable, the doubling of perception. Phenomenology philosopher, Merleau Ponty refers to this type of perception. He uses the example of his hands touching each other to examine what he calls reflexivity. To Ponty, the quality of perceptual reflexivity is possible through the reversibility of the flesh, the experience of being both a perceiving subject and a perceived object. The Soucouyant demonstrates the reversibility of her skin by stepping outside of it and weaving her light between its dimensions (flesh as both subject and object). Her wavering movements gesture to the perceptual quality in which people experience their extremities concurrently and in flux. It is not the feeling of two hands but rather the feeling created in the collision of them both, not the views of two eyes but the image they create together. Ponty calls this experience the Chiasm and in the text The Intertwining—The Chiasm, he details the mutability of perception as, “ the insistent reminder of a mystery as familiar as it is unexplained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source in obscurity.” The light that Ponty describes is corporeal and lends the significance of light to being lived. This corporeal light offers its usefulness in speculating the philosophy of embodiment that drives the story of the Soucouyant and the women she represents.
Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray takes an interest in the intimate perception generated through touch as a pre-primordial sense that foregrounds all others. In centering touch, Irigaray offers theories around embodiment that illuminate flesh through feeling. In meditating on the contact between two hands, Irigaray offers, “that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin of my fingers nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage . . . between.” Irigaray constitutes the body as a threshold rather than an internal and external space. She takes an acute interest in the interiority that continues beyond the existence of the body. In which touch mitigates the indistinguishability of proximity through the porosity of one’s skin. She challenges Ponty’s argument that the phenomenon of touch can be divided into the realms of subject and object to maintain a sensibility of the self. Rather, she believes that intimate touch, the caress, disrupts such binary realms and suspends the sensibility of a self divided from the other. To Irigaray, the caress is the touching of wonder, a regenerative illumination of shared carnality. Catherine Vasseleu draws from Irigaray’s work and names the source of this luminative quality of touch as Erotic Light. Vasseleu Characterizes Erotic Light as the giving/acceding of form. She details, “erotic light represents a break with an exstatic presence, or the dream of a being able to go beyond itself”
The light of the Soucouyant is ignited by a dream to go beyond the self. She sacrifices her flesh and accedes into new forms, sculpting herself with care beyond what her environment demands of her. The Soucouyant is motivated by an uncontainable passion to live intuitively and engage intimately with the world around her. Her transformation into fire emanates an erotic light that may be elucidated by Audre Lorde’s declaration, “ When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” The Soucouyant shines upon her environment a light vital to her survival as herself, so that she may connect with the world on her terms. Beyond the confinements cast into her skin, the Soucouyant’s ritual of refleshment affords her a profound admiration of her body and a refusal of internalized harm. Her transformation is a form of regenerative touch with herself and with the world. The caress illuminates the story of the Soucouyant. May it be the light emanating from her body or the hearth where her tale is shared, the Soucouyant offers a space of collective wonder. Her story constitutes a coherence within community relations and enjoins our flesh together.
From birth, our consciousness develops between the internal and external world, a visceral co-evolution that impacts one’s self-image. Franz Fanon offers the term Racialized epidermalization, bringing to light that the schematics of environments, images, and language are reflected in the structure of how we understand ourselves. In an environment materialized through white supremacy, obstacles in Black life are a result of psychological anti-Black corporeal schemas, webs of meaning that aim to position Blackness at the bottom of a hegemonic system of power. It is an oscillation between our internal and external atmospheres that our consciousness forms the body from the flesh. The Black Body is policed through the scrutiny of the white subconscious, engendering violence as it proliferates into material surroundings. This imperial architecture was built inward as colonial institutions developed race sciences to validate their pretend superiority and to deny value to pre-existing civilizations through colonial enslavement. Lamarkian eugenics was a theory in hereditary sciences, adopted as a social philosophy that argued that indigenous and Black cultures could be erased by curating inherited traits through miscegenation. Lamarkian eugenics aimed to construct Black women’s bodies as physiologically inferior and to deny her a future. This pseudo-science further mobilized settler colonialism towards the whitening of Black cultural identity through attempts at the dilution of complexions and features that signify Blackness and inherited ways of being. Despite the construction of the Black body as a physical restraint, the Soucouyant represents the transformative abilities of the Black Body, a resistance to the confines constructed around it by colonialism. The Soucouyant is a jumbie character representing the radical refusal of self-image imposed by anti-Black corporeal schemas. Lamarkian eugenics demonstrates the white supremacist intention to make Black bodies and Black culture an incontestable contradiction to whiteness and its schematic relation to lightness, humanness, and being. The polarization suggests that the construction of Blackness does not only rationalize labor exploitation but also serves the white mind as an anchor to distance one’s self from darkness, subhumanness, the fear of death, and the ontological fear of not Being. The Soucouyant is a character who can maneuver beyond the restrictions of the skin, suggesting that she can exist beyond the limited ways of being assigned to her body. She can be an old woman who lives among others, she can shape-shift into another figure, or she can refuse to be anything at all.
The Soucouyant is untouchable and in turn, is deemed an outlaw. She rejects her assailants and the limits they cast onto her so that she may draw power from within. Yet, as much as she is untouchable, she is in touch with her desires and in touch with herself. My Great-Grandmother Ma was in touch with herself even at the expense of being considered inconvenient. Ma was known for her matter-of-fact attitude and as I grow and navigate the obstacles cast upon my body and my life, I have come to understand that the fact of the matter is that if I do not decide what I believe for myself, someone will try to make that decision for me and at the cost of my wellbeing. Ma and the Soucouyant share empowerment that lies in their decisions to experience themselves and their desires unapologetically. For the Soucouyant, her dynamic transformations and refusal to dim her internal light oppose common philosophies throughout her time. She is illuminated by her own philosophy of being. By investigating the philosophical landscape from which the light of the Soucouyant emerged, a deeper understanding of the women that she represents is possible.
The Ole Higue’s transformation and movement as light communicates a philosophy distinguishing itself from the metaphors and axioms of European enlightenment. European enlightenment philosophy drove the pursuit of the scientific method as a means to explain human nature and culture, parallelling the timeline of Caribbean colonization. Light’s significance in European enlightenment draws from Greek philosophy. In Plato’s Cave, those who pursue true knowledge must discard their environment of shadowy artificial light and look toward the sun, symbolizing a light of original knowledge and truth. In European enlightenment, however, light is not a climate that one can step into and find truth but rather an ideal nature of knowledge that emits from the white man in his transformation of environment. This light argues for a universality of true knowledge that opposes superstitions deemed ignorant in an unobservable darkness. This dichotomy of light and dark foregrounds modern metaphysics. Philosophies of metaphysics contend with reality, being, space, and time. These institutions of thought began exclusively for white men and their ideations are consistent with the colonial harms and marginalization of women, especially enslaved Black women. The unfreedoms of Black women throughout European enlightenment did not curb Black philosophies and systems of belief but rather segregated and condemned their existence in contradiction with the philosophical binaries of enlightenment. While institutions of philosophy value themselves as exclusive, philosophy itself is an innate element of human life and culture. Black traditions became knowledge exchange methods where philosophies of existence were privately shared. Folklore is imbued with artifacts of Black thought that inevitably engage with and beyond the polarization of European philosophy. Here, metaphors of light hold antonymous significance. Jacques Derrida referred to philosophy itself as photological. He suggested that the recurrence of light metaphors in the history of philosophy is especially significant because light is a foundational metaphor for the knowledge systems of western metaphysics itself. The Ole Higue and her story express a distinct philosophy and notion of light which is not a result of distant observations, but rather from embodied experience. The Ole Higue’s light does not emanate through the transformation of her environment but through the transformations of herself. The light of the Ole Higue does not oppose her Black Body, her embodiment is the embrace of both. Thus, her story and its metaphors of light express metaphysical philosophies that contradict those of enlightenment, foundational to western metaphysics.
The Ole Higue’s transformation into light offers a metaphor depicting the Black Body as the embodiment of light. The Soucouyant’s luminous form conveys a meditation on the spatiotemporal properties that light and Blackness share. In her story, her transformation and movements are as uncontainable as the materiality of light. Light is a strange material. It has a crucial and forgotten presence in our lives and yet we experience it unlike any other material or object in our day-to-day. Contemporary theories around optics and quantum light physics attribute the reflective, refractive, and diffractive properties of light to its duality as both a particle and a wave. Light can reflect off a surface and abide by the limits of classical physics. Light can also bend through and around an obstacle, its photons seeming to vanish and reappear. This quality is unique to the materiality of light. While the tools to observe light at a quantum scale are often reserved for laboratories of physicists, this phenomenon is observable at home through conducting a double-slit experiment or meditating on the peculiar passage of light through narrow space. The presence of light in the story of the Ole Higue exhibits profound observations of this phenomenon and a poetic relationship to it. The story offers light as an object and space to imagine the Black Body as inexactable. Light’s ability to bleed through a keyhole can be attributed to its multi-locality, being neither limited to the constraints of classical or quantum physics. Black bodies are also multi-local, a composition of geographies that survive attempts to negate origin and make assumable one’s non-locality. For a body bound to classical limits in physics, one’s location is predictable. One moves linearly through space, bound by gravity and delayed by obstacles. For a body mobilized through the multi-local properties of light, one’s location is only probable. The story of the Ole Higue details a poetic observation of the internal and external life of Black people, illuminated by the multiplicities of identity protected within, under the circumstances of enslavement. The Ole Higue is distinctly diasporic. She is not limited to a single fixed location but rather exists in multiple places at once, according to a timeline that only her body can measure.
The Soucouyant refleshes through a cycle of skin shed. Her carnal conditions are explored through a metaphor of light. This occurrence presents unique conditions in which her consciousness can travel throughout and beyond the skin. She cycles through existing as both flesh and fire, a way of being that is both familiar and fantastic. She rituals a paradigm of embodiment that allows her to isolate from her skin, and through this extraordinary act, her tale brings to attention the phenomenon of embodiment. Her sequence of privately surrendering and repossessing her skin makes complete an experience of embodiment that is otherwise ungraspable, the doubling of perception. Phenomenology philosopher, Merleau Ponty refers to this type of perception. He uses the example of his hands touching each other to examine what he calls reflexivity. To Ponty, the quality of perceptual reflexivity is possible through the reversibility of the flesh, the experience of being both a perceiving subject and a perceived object. The Soucouyant demonstrates the reversibility of her skin by stepping outside of it and weaving her light between its dimensions (flesh as both subject and object). Her wavering movements gesture to the perceptual quality in which people experience their extremities concurrently and in flux. It is not the feeling of two hands but rather the feeling created in the collision of them both, not the views of two eyes but the image they create together. Ponty calls this experience the Chiasm and in the text The Intertwining—The Chiasm, he details the mutability of perception as, “ the insistent reminder of a mystery as familiar as it is unexplained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source in obscurity.” The light that Ponty describes is corporeal and lends the significance of light to being lived. This corporeal light offers its usefulness in speculating the philosophy of embodiment that drives the story of the Soucouyant and the women she represents.
Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray takes an interest in the intimate perception generated through touch as a pre-primordial sense that foregrounds all others. In centering touch, Irigaray offers theories around embodiment that illuminate flesh through feeling. In meditating on the contact between two hands, Irigaray offers, “that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin of my fingers nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage . . . between.” Irigaray constitutes the body as a threshold rather than an internal and external space. She takes an acute interest in the interiority that continues beyond the existence of the body. In which touch mitigates the indistinguishability of proximity through the porosity of one’s skin. She challenges Ponty’s argument that the phenomenon of touch can be divided into the realms of subject and object to maintain a sensibility of the self. Rather, she believes that intimate touch, the caress, disrupts such binary realms and suspends the sensibility of a self divided from the other. To Irigaray, the caress is the touching of wonder, a regenerative illumination of shared carnality. Catherine Vasseleu draws from Irigaray’s work and names the source of this luminative quality of touch as Erotic Light. Vasseleu Characterizes Erotic Light as the giving/acceding of form. She details, “erotic light represents a break with an exstatic presence, or the dream of a being able to go beyond itself”
The light of the Soucouyant is ignited by a dream to go beyond the self. She sacrifices her flesh and accedes into new forms, sculpting herself with care beyond what her environment demands of her. The Soucouyant is motivated by an uncontainable passion to live intuitively and engage intimately with the world around her. Her transformation into fire emanates an erotic light that may be elucidated by Audre Lorde’s declaration, “ When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” The Soucouyant shines upon her environment a light vital to her survival as herself, so that she may connect with the world on her terms. Beyond the confinements cast into her skin, the Soucouyant’s ritual of refleshment affords her a profound admiration of her body and a refusal of internalized harm. Her transformation is a form of regenerative touch with herself and with the world. The caress illuminates the story of the Soucouyant. May it be the light emanating from her body or the hearth where her tale is shared, the Soucouyant offers a space of collective wonder. Her story constitutes a coherence within community relations and enjoins our flesh together.
No nourishment can compensate for the grace or work of touching. Touch makes it possible to wait, to gather strength, so that the other will return to caress and reshape, from within and from without, a flesh that is given back to itself in the gesture of love. The most subtly necessary guardian of my life is the other’s flesh.
(Irigaray, 1993a: 187)