Makandal escaping as a bird, a Macoute leaving jail as a dog, Cacos evading the Marines in animal form: shape-shifting has long served in Haiti as a story about sovereignty held onto under occupation. Derby asks where such techniques came from, and answers that they were not purely African inheritances. Sorcery, she argues, worked partly by capturing the aura of the foreign.

Two episodes carry the case. The lougawou or baka, usually traced to West African secret societies, also draws on French country lore about demonic animals; and the occultism circulating during the American occupation of 1915 to 1934 left its mark, up to and including US Marines installed in the pantheon as fearsome lwa. Built on shape-shifter narratives gathered in Haiti and the Dominican Republic between 2008 and 2013, the essay describes a traffic in otherness that sits awkwardly beside Haiti's official nationalism.