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The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora by Giselle Liza Anatol (review)

The pale, bloodless, ethereal vampires of European origins are familiar tropes in literature and popular culture. Less well known are the female bloodsuckers, the soucouyants, of the circum-Caribbean. Giselle Anatol’s The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora focuses on these lesser-known vampire tales, which appear in African diasporic and contemporary Caribbean diasporic fiction. Anatol’s first chapter, “Conventional Versions: The Soucouyant Story in Folktales, Fiction, and Calypso,” introduces these supernatural figures, women capable of shedding their skin, flying through the night, and consuming the energy and blood of others, by tracing their diasporic connections to “Flying African” and North American old hag tales. In Anatol’s survey of extant soucouyant narratives, she reads the figures as representations of female otherness, women on the periphery of communal life and outside Western rationality. Their associations with blood, bloodletting, and excessive investments in the flesh channel anxieties about female sexuality, mobility, and independence. Whether represented as the beautiful, dangerous young seductress or an old woman living on the fringe of the community, these figures flout social convention; their ability to shed the signifier of oppression and privilege (their skin) and fly through the night to pick off victims with impunity expresses a transgressive subjectivity capable of disrupting discourses of race and gender. As Anatol states, the soucouyant “arouses the ambivalent repulsion and fascination associated with the ‘unnatural’ border crossings of her repeated transformations” (27). Anatol reads these vampiric figures in the context of colonial and postcolonial racial discourses. They combine stereotypes of Blackness as “inhuman” and pathological with representations of rebellious women as signifiers of the proprietary failures of heteropatriarchal systems of colonialism. As a way to push back at exegetical models that depend on structures of center and periphery or origin and adaptation, Anatol uses the term “network,” gesturing toward Irad Malkin and Kamau Brathwaite, to describe a cluster of narratives that deploy the black female vampiric figure as a central trope in Caribbean literature. In doing so, Anatol is able to focus on the narratological ligaments connecting these tropes throughout the circum-Caribbean and