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
CHAPTER ONE: THE VANISHING ACT
Before Leu Seyer gained his bloom and the necessary insights to craft lengthy stories (like "My Buddy Bali"), he grappled with the challenge of weaving his fresh ideas. He struggled with spinning words that couldn't be woven together into a cohesive, gripping novel. His mind was a tumultuous sea, teeming with fragments of inspiration that ebbed and flowed. Yet none seemed to coalesce into a satisfying narrative. Yet, its transformation, rather than being gradual, was spontaneously explosive, ending in his disappearance.
The beginning of the ending started with a vanishing act. Thus, Leu Seyer's literary agent and all the others to whom he owed any money tried to break the windows of the room he was renting at the time. However, the landlord stated that they would have to pay for the replacements. Then they called a locksmith to open the door lock, but Leu had apparently installed a blocker embedded in the floor and ceiling to prevent it from opening with him inside. So, there were only two options: to break a window or to break the door into pieces to get access to the room.
Considering that replacing a window is cheaper than replacing a door, the group opted for the first option. Blackout curtains concealed the interior of the room. Without further ado and without hesitation, the literary agent, Ms. Lyons, wrapped a hammer in a towel and struck the glass. The towel-muffled blow did not ring initially like breaking glass but like a warning bell—an omen no one paused to hear.
However, an instant later, the unmistakable clink of glass shards falling to the floor echoed in the ears of everyone present. But now, as the agent attempted to enter the room, she found that Leu had installed a kind of metal grate securely embedded in the cement frame, a safeguard against late-night trespassers who might take advantage of this weak point. There was no other option but to break the door with the axe they had just purchased from a hardware store nearby. There was no more waiting; the group's patience had evaporated entirely.
Once inside, the incredibly deafening silence greeted them like the quiet of a predator on a tawny mound: no tipped chair, no half-packed suitcase, no evidence of a man fleeing or a suicide note. There was nothing unusual on the floor either. The sheets on the bed were decently covering the mattress (without any prominent wrinkles), as if Leu had merely slid through them and disappeared into thin air. Only the monotonous hum of the cooling fan of an old laptop open on the desk and its line of unresolved text offered the only physical evidence that a living being had been there:
"The promising writer, Leu Seyer, had always struggled with writer's block…"
That single line pulsed on the screen like a heartbeat. But Leu himself was gone. His wallet remained on the nightstand, stuffed with cash and his driver's license, his watch, his shoes, his sports jacket—all still there. The closet smelled faintly of cedar, with a bergamot and lavender scent of cologne. Not even his electric toothbrush was missing. It was as though he had walked out without his body.
The landlord stepped cautiously into the room after all the others had come out. He had rented this space for years, and tenants often left quietly in the night to dodge rent. But this was different; Leu had paid a year in advance. Yet, this room radiated a hollow pressure, as if the walls themselves had absorbed some terrible secret. Another strange odor lingered in the corner near the desk—a unique, crisp scent from brand-new books standing on the bookshelf, and the faint tang of rain-soaked ink from the printer. The landlord crossed himself, muttered a prayer under his breath, (something's fishy here—he thought), and backed away. Nothing to worry about, he could leave the room locked for a year; it was already paid for.
Soon, the mystery started to unfold. The disappearance of Leu Seyer became breaking news faster than wildfire. After all, by now, he wasn't just any common tenant. He was indeed one of the rising stars of the flourishing Caribbean Neorealism movement. In just a couple of years, he went from obscurity to public recognition in the mainstream, like the New York Times, The Guardian, and several literary podcasts. Aspiring writers applauded him as a visionary. Publishers courted him, conscious of his potential.
And now—gone. No note. No flight tickets. No bank withdrawals. His sudden silence was louder than any scandal.
Speculation bloomed. Some fans claimed it was a stunt, that his next novel would reveal the "truth" of his vanishing. Others muttered about exhaustion, paranoia, and drugs. A few—always whispered—spoke of something more supernatural. On forums, anonymous posts appeared: "The stories themselves took him." "I'd heard the whispers, too" (a rising writer named Norman wrote in a blog post.)
The rumors about the ancient "Haitian Whispers' Potion of Unwritten Stories" came alive. Some prominent writers said that those whispers were not metaphors; they were real. They were lingering in the thin space between imagination and reality. They were the disappeared ideas and voices of lost generations—the unpublished novels almost finished before a fatal accident or half-started and abandoned in drawers, the forgotten drafts eaten by hard-drive crashes, the poems never set down on paper. Such stories did not die; they trespassed the world of the living with their spirits. They fermented. They drifted through time like invisible parasites, waiting for someone desperate enough to give them voice.
Most writers hear them only faintly, in the half-dreams before sleep, or when staring at a blank page. Most shake them off. But Leu Seyer was different. He had invited them in. Every sip of the potion he took had opened him further, turning him into a beacon for those restless shadows.
At first, the spirits offered generosity: sparks of brilliance, flashes of dialogue, sudden twists that seemed divinely inspired. The completion of a couple of lengthy books in one year. But in reality, nothing is ever free. Leu would find out by the end of the year. He had not merely collaborated with them; he had stolen some plots from them—plucking entire chapters from the ether and claiming them as his own. And the spirits, like all celestial beings, do demand payments.
Those two literary gems of Leu Seyer came from the "Library of the Unwritten Books," a legacy of the spirits. A month after swallowing the potion the previous year (one couldn't say he didn't drink it because of its horrible taste), Leu actually stumbled backward. His pulse hammered in his chest. He tried to cry out, but when he opened his mouth, no sound came. Instead, black ink spilled from his lips, streaming down his chin and pooling at his feet. His very breath looked like a transcription of an unfinished book. Now, a year later, in limbo, he seemed to be paying his debt not to the living but to the spirits.
Meanwhile, in the world above his non-being state, the laptop in his rented room kept humming. For days, then weeks, yet the glowing line of text never changed:
"The ambitious Leu Seyer had always struggled with writer's block…"
Then, one night, a new line appeared beneath it:
"The ambitious Leu Seyer, who had always struggled with writer's block, now will never be without a story."
The landlord swore he heard keys clicking from behind the locked door every night. Others who later entered the room, family and friends concerned about his whereabouts, claimed the air buzzed faintly, as though whispering. No one could prove it. Yet online, rumors multiplied: that a manuscript was still growing inside the laptop, page by page, written by unseen hands.
Uncle Enrique said that after staring at the glow of the screen long enough, he could even hear the whispers. Not in complete pieces at first, but in fragments, some dialogues, orphaned scenes, pieces with neither beginnings nor ends--a dangerous temptation for any writer who was already starving for ideas.
Before his disappearance, just a week after he choked down the viscous, amber-colored voodoo potion that scorched his throat with the taste of burnt molasses and copper pennies, Leu's prose remained dead—or was it finally coming alive? He clawed at his phone, jabbing at the numbers, begging his agent for mercy, yet part of him hoped she wouldn't answer. The radio's cacophony erupted in laughter, a ghastly cackle that shredded his psyche. All these events left him wondering how many days past the due date they really were. He thought to himself that he still hadn't found his redemption. He sweated profusely, consumed by doubt as he stared at the cockroach infestation on the floor with disdain and curiosity.
Leu whispered to himself, "I have sacrificed all I have for this, and is it possible that's just what this art has been looking for?" The strain on his neck forced his head back up; his eyes stung yet felt clearer as he squinted at the screen on his laptop. The cursor pulsed with a slow, rhythmic beat against the empty page - no longer accusatory, but alive. Mildew dripped down the crumbling walls of his prison cell, yet within its decay, he could see patterns he would never have noticed otherwise.
He placed his hands on the computer keyboard, and it felt cold; it was made of plastic. The atmosphere in the room had become charged and electric, for every second that ticked away was a sign of his rejuvenated hunger for writing. The words, which had been nothing more than concepts and ideas, began to manifest as tactile sensations. An epiphany of ideas was clawing its way up from the bottom of his stomach, wanting to emerge into reality.
They tasted bitter and raw, like the first morsel of a harsh summer day. The smell of them was an odd combination of ozone and burned sugar, yet in some bizarre way, it made complete sense. As he touched each key of the keyboard below him, each key exploded into a sound of its own, and together they created a symphony of creation that he alone could hear. Words flowed across the screen, like a chaotic dance of letters that eventually took on a rhythmic quality. They ended up creating a pattern that, while he had seen before, was at the same time completely foreign to him. He was able to foresee the story unfold, not as static pictures, but as an alive event.
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Do not miss Chapter Two: the night the whispers finally said Leu's name. The locked room was the aftermath—the whisper was the beginning of the nightmare.
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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.