March 7, 2018 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Doctor James Bihar collapsed to the floor while performing surgery to save the life of prisoner, Dezrie Mandah. He had stopped breathing.
Dr. Bihar floated out of his physical form as James Bihar, without the doctor’s title. The human form became the body of Dr. James Bihar and not the doctor himself. His spirit looked like transparent liquid-gel.
The Operating Room nurses and the anesthetist abandoned the prisoner to
They transferred Dezrie onto a stretcher and rolled it out of the room before lifting James’ body onto the operating table. The surgeon arrived and started operating on James’ body. When James’ heart started working on its own, a magnetic force drew him toward his physical-form. A split-second before re-entering his body, another liquid-soul burst through the wall and bumped his free-floating spirit away. The invading soul jumped into his body, shutting him out of his own physical-being.
James Bihar hovered above his body when they transferred it to the Intensive Care Unit to heal from the surgery.
Liquid-beings like him and small bright sparking orbs passed through him on the trip to the ICU. Each split-second encounter with the other entities gave him complete details of their life’s experiences and cause of death. He learned that the gels floated in an indeterminate state, while their bodies completed the transition from near-death to actual-death. The bodies belonging to the orbs had already died. One of the orbs identified itself as Dezrie.
To protect themselves, the police had fabricated evidence to show that Dezrie had murdered her police-detective-husband.
Her husband had uncovered massive corruption that threatened members of the justice department, police department and politicians. Fear of reprisal had forced the pathologist to make a false report in favor of the police.
Dezrie had entered the hospital as a gel-being hovering over her body. She had left her body when a violent female serial-killer on death-row dubbed, ‘The Fox’, had killed a guard and had stolen his gun. The psychopath had inflicted a severe beating that brought Dezrie to death’s doorstep. With skills developed from multiple murders, The Fox had choked Dezrie until she had stopped breathing.
As Dezrie had approached death, the killer had shot herself through the heart and had collapsed beside Dezrie, moments before the prison officers had arrived to render CPR on Dezrie’s body.
Before Dezrie had a chance to return to her body when the wardens revived it, the killer had bumped her out of the way and had jumped into it.
The Fox had endured the excruciating pains Dezrie’s body had suffered but this inconvenience had served a larger purpose. The evil member of a satanic cult had mastered the art of prison escapes by discarding old bodies and leaping into new ones destined for the hospital on the brink of death.
The Fox did not have to follow her usual method of lying on a hospital bed and waiting for a patient’s monitors to bring the medical staff rushing in to resuscitate a dying body. Doctor Bihar had provided a short-cut for the process of body jumping.
James had to find an immediate solution. A serial-murderer using his body and authority as Chief Surgeon could potentially slaughter dozens of people in operating rooms.
Each minute away from his physical body caused his gel-structure to start drying out. After all the moisture evaporated out of him, he would shrink into a sparking orb and cross over into permanent death.
The hospital’s PA system alerted the medical staff to a code blue. It gave the location of a patient suffering from cardiac-arrest.
James zoomed through the walls at lightning speed. He arrived at the instant the soul left the patient’s body. He passed through the eighty-nine-year-old’s gel-form. She identified herself as Wilma Shapely and gave James immediate approval to occupy her body. Wilma wanted to die. She had become tired of living alone with debilitating arthritis. She longed to reunite with her deceased husband.
James thanked Wilma and launched himself into her body when the resuscitation team restarted her heart. He suffered the unbearable pain that racked her body. After resuscitation staff left, he slipped Wilma’s body off the bed and scurried as fast as the sore joints allowed. Each step sent jolts of agony throughout the body.
He arrived at his own body and summoned up every ounce of effort to choke his own neck with Wilma’s knuckle-swollen fingers. He left the anaesthetic attached to his body to keep it powerless and unable to use larger muscles than the eyelids.
From within James’ body, The Fox flipped the eyelids open and sent a razor-sharp laser beam into Wilma’s eyes, blinding them. She fell to the floor. James cried out in anguish.
James searched for the bed frame to pull Wilma’s weakened body up. Wilma’s fingers clutched the throat once more and squeezed.
James forced Wilma’s shaking hands to outlast The Fox’s frantic resistance to being evicted. James’ body sagged, and Wilma’s heart stopped. She slumped to the floor. James leapt out of Wilma’s body and entered his own.
The Fox’s victims joined Dezrie and other innocent orbs like herself who had been falsely accused and died in prison for crimes they had never committed, to destroy the killer.
Over a hundred sparking orbs entered the killer’s gel and singed her to charcoal-dust that fell to the floor and passed through it, destined to an eternity of suffering in the dark moldy torture-chambers below.
With body and soul reunited, Dr. James Bihar recovered over time and added ‘Pathologist’ to his duties. He teamed-up with Dezrie’s lawyer to appeal wrongful convictions, starting with Dezrie’s. They subpoenaed court records and gained permission to exhume bodies. He vowed to exonerate Dezrie and all the other wrongly-convicted inmates.
As a human, he no longer saw souls but felt their presence. He heard a heavenly chorus each time he righted a wrong.
Afro-Cuban culture
By Romeo Kaseram
Lydia Cabrera was born in Havana, Cuba, on May 20, 1899, the youngest of eight siblings. Born into a Cuban family of social and financial privilege in pre-revolutionary Cuba, her father, Raimundo Cabrera, was a writer and lawyer; he was also an advocate for Cuban independence. Her parents were also prominent members in Cuban society, with her mother, Elisa Marcaida Casanova, known as a respected socialite. Raimundo Cabrera was also the president of the first Cuban corporation, La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, which was founded in the 18th century. The family also owned a popular literary journal, Cuba y America. It was here where Lydia had her introduction as a writer, when at 13 years old she began contributing a weekly anonymous column to the journal covering community events as wedding announcements, childbirths, and obituaries.
At an early age she was introduced to African folklore, stories, tradition, and religions by the family’s many Afro-Cuban servants and child caretakers. For her education, Cabrera benefited from the family’s wealth and its ability to afford private tutors, who during the 1900s were hired to come to the house. Later, Cabrera attended the private school, Maria Luisa Dolz. In Cuba at that time, it was not socially acceptable for women to acquire a high school diploma; however, Cabrera finished her secondary education on her own.
She began feeling the call of independence when she was 27 years old. Leaving Cuba in 1927, she traveled to Paris, where she studied at L’École du Louvre, majoring in religion, drawing, and painting with the theatrical Russian exile, Alexandra Exter. It was here where she wrote Black Stories from Cuba (1940), (Cuentos negros de Cuba), originally published in French in 1936, a collection of 22 folktales. Cabrera lived in Paris for 11 years, returning to Cuba in 1938. Following her graduation from L’École du Louvre, she did not follow a career as an artist, but chose instead to return to Cuba, where she began focusing on Afro-Cuban culture, its traditions, and folklore. According to Wikipedia, “Three factors influenced her decision to study Afrocubanismo as an adult. The first influence was her experience in Europe, where studying African art became very popular. Secondly, she was influenced by her studies in Paris, where she began to see the large influence that African art had on Cuban art. Thirdly she had as a companion Teresa de la Parra, a Venezuelan novelist and socialite whom she met while studying in Europe, and who enjoyed reading Cuban books with her. They often studied about the island together.”
Living on a ranch at La Quinta San Jose, in the suburb of Havana, Cabrera began conducting research on Afro-Cuban culture. She later wrote a collection of 28 stories in Spanish, Why? (1948) – ¿Por Qué?. In this time, she also set about collecting folklore from ex-slaves, and from rural and urban Cubans. Her stories were filled with personifications of animals and objects, supernatural beings, magic, and good and wicked Yoruba gods, presented in what were distinctively Cuban landscapes and attitudes. In 1957 she published Anagó: Lucumí Vocabulary – Anagó: vocabulario lucumí, which was a study of the Lucumí language and its adaptation into Cuban Spanish. In 1959 she was forced to flee the country during the 1959 Cuban revolution, where she lived in Spain and the US, settling in Miami, where she continued to work and write. According to Wikipedia, the real reason is unknown why she left Cuba: “Some claim that she left because of the lifestyle the revolution was trying to instill. For many years, Cabrera had stated her dislike for the revolution and socialist-Marxist ideology. Others claim she left because members of the Abakuás were hunting her down since she had made their secret society public.”
Cabrera is well-known for her 1954 work, The Wilderness (El Monte). In this book, she described the major Afro-Cuban religions: the Regla de Ocha (commonly known as Santeria) and the Ifa’ cult, both derived from traditional Yoruba religion; and Palo Monte, which originated in Central Africa. It discusses Santeria’s merging of Yoruban deities with Roman Catholic saints and its herbal pharmacopoeia. This text was among the first major anthropological study of Afro-Cuban traditions and became a main reference for the Santeros and their practice of Santeria, the blend of Catholic teachings and native African religions, which had evolved among former African slaves in the Caribbean. Cabrera later donated her research collection to the library of the University of Miami.
As Wikipedia notes, “Both the literary and anthropological perspectives on Cabrera’s work assume that she wrote about mainly oral, practical religions with only an ‘embryonic’ written tradition. She is credited by literary critics for having transformed Afro-Cuban oral narratives into literature, which is written works of art, while anthropologists rely on her accounts of oral information collected during interviews with santeros, babalaos, or paleros, and on her descriptions of religious ceremonies. There is a dialectical relationship between Afro-Cuban religious writing and Cabrera’s work; she used a religious writing tradition that has now internalised her own ethnography.” Cabrera is noted as one of the first writers to recognise and make public the richness of Afro-Cuban culture, and for the valuable contributions made in the areas of literature, anthropology, and ethnology.
In her later years, Cabrera published books such as The Abakuá Secret Society: As Revealed by Former Members (1969) – La sociedad secreta Abakuá: narrada por viejos adeptos; Old Black Men’s Proverbs (1970) – Refranes de negros viejos; A Congo Vocabulary: The Bantu Spoken in Cuba (1984) – Vocabulario congo: el bantú que se habla en Cuba; The Congo Doctrine: Monte Mayombe Sect (1986) – Reglas de congo: palo Monte Mayombe; and Superstitions and Good Advice (1987) – Supersticiones y buenos consejos. As an ethnologist, artist, oral historian and writer of folk tales, she produced 23 books about Cuba, among these being scholarly works and collections of folk tales rooted in Africa. Cabrera was awarded honorary doctorates from Denison University in Ohio, Redlands University in California, and Manhattan College in New York City. She passed away on September 19, 1991 in Miami, Florida.
Sources for this exploration: Encyclopedia Britannica; Wikipedia; New York Times, September 25, 1991.