Unseen Worlds is a spiritual memoir–the story of my spiritual journey. Its trajectory is traced from the beginning of life—my life interconnected with Haiti’s–and includes significant influences on me come from people, events, or my birth island’s history.
A memoir needs a focus–a life is too vast a universe. Not everything about a person’s life can be written without it ending as a hodge-podge. A memoir needs a theme. Once the theme is established, the writer can mull over elements of meaning revolving around that theme, be it in the past, the present, and possibly the future (and this particularly if the author is not at life’s end or nearing it).
In an effort not to be misleading, the subtitle of Unseen Worlds–Adventures at the Crossroads of Vodou Spirits and Latter-day Saints–evokes the main themes being examined and recounted here. This book, however, does not include all the spiritual experiences I have undergone. For the sake of conciseness, I have omitted some lesser spiritual adventures that would have been more like material for conversational chatter or fun gossip about my own life.
Since a journey involves a transformation, the latest experiences in the book are perhaps given more coverage. I felt a need to understand and remember for myself or explain to the reader the full scope of the intellectual analysis I performed and the vast spiritual-emotional episodes that have made enough of an impact for me to stick to that final adventure until now. Freud said that an unanalyzed life is not worth living.
I want the reader to see how my adventures were not mindless, what thoughts I had, what questions I grappled with, what loneliness occurs as one tries to redefine oneself, what different internal ways there are of living in exile, and why it was worth living and worth writing about. I trust the reader can keep an open mind, free of biases, be interested to move briefly in the world as if in my skin, see how the only gift worth giving is one wrapped in love, while love itself may come in many different wrapping. “Hell is having two arms, and not one to embrace.”
