Asema

Also Known As: also spelled Azeman in the older Dutch material; Sranan Tongo asema
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Caribbean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: It comes out of its own skin after dark and travels as a flickering blue light that passes through a shut house to drink the blood of sleepers.
Role in Mythos: In Afro-Surinamese belief it is the household predator, the neighbour who is also the killer, and its name doubles as one of the worst insults in the language.
Relation to Humans: An asema passes the day as an ordinary elderly man or woman and feeds at night on the people around it, returning to the same sleeper until that person dies. The defences against it are domestic rather than heroic, a handful of grain behind the door and the sun coming up.

The washerwoman had been to church, and within about a minute of sitting down with the men she had called the gold-digger an asema. Paramaribo, a Sunday afternoon in 1904, everyone still in their good clothes, the heat lying over the yard like a hand. He gave it straight back. Look at her, he said. Red eyes. Toes pointing at the ground. You know what that means.

Pressed to say what an asema actually is, he stalled. A person who can take the shape of a man, he offered, which is no answer at all. Asked again, he got short: you should not pick everything apart so finely, you are going too deep with me. Only when it was clear the questions were not going to stop did he describe one, and he did it flatly, the way people describe a disease. Most of them are old. Their eyes are red. Their toes point down. Men do it as well as women.

There is something cruel folded into that list. Red eyes and downturned toes are what age and cataracts and a lifetime of barefoot plantation work actually look like. It is not really a description of a monster. It is a description of the oldest person on the street.

What an asema can do is get out of its own skin. The body comes free the way a hand comes out of a glove, and what is left over has the power of a yorka, one of the returning dead, which is how it enters a locked house without touching the lock. It does not need a window open. It does not need a gap anyone could see.

A blue light crosses a yard at an hour when nothing should be crossing it, low and unsteady, the colour of a flame burning the wrong fuel. It finds the room where the sleeping is. Then it is inside.

The feeding is gentle, which is the ugly part. The asema puts its lips to the skin and the place goes numb first, and the Surinamese woman describing it that Sunday reached for the strongest comparison she had: the tongue of such a thing is like chloroform. Then it drinks. If the blood is bitter it brings the mouthful back up and leaves. If the blood is good it comes back the next night, and the night after, until the person dies. That is the whole arrangement.

Knowing one is near is a matter of light. She named the blue flicker, and then she went straight past it to what she had actually seen, which was the point she had been building to all along. It happened when she was still enslaved on a plantation. One of them came for the wife of the basia, the driver, a man named Kofi. Another time an asema crossed the river in plain sight in front of plantation Morgenstond and began shouting abuse at her party, and her party shouted back. That one was taken afterwards, up the Commewijne, by the piai men, the Amerindian shamans, who are held to have the knack for it. She could remember another being caught at Brouwerslust when she was a girl. Sani de, she said. There are hidden things.

Where it came from, the gold-digger had no doubt at all. The Africans brought it. They had no churches and were not baptised, they knew nothing and they did harm, and they brought in the bakroe and the asema and the afrekete and the leba. It is a Christian man disowning his own inheritance, and as history it is also roughly right. Afrekete and Leba are names off the Gbe-speaking coast of West Africa, carried to Suriname in the holds of slave ships, and the asema came over in the same company. Trinidad tells of the soucouyant and Haiti of the loogaroo, and the family resemblance is not subtle.

Against something that can pour itself through a shut door, the countermeasures are strikingly domestic. Raw rice goes behind the door, or abonjera, sesame seed. The asema is compelled to pick the grains up one at a time and cannot pass until the floor is clear. Mixed in among the grain go the claws of a mangrove owl, and every time it takes hold of one the counted grains drop and the count begins again. It is still crouched there picking when the sky goes pale. The sun does the rest. Daylight touches it and it falls down dead.

The word never stopped being a weapon. To call a neighbour an asema in 1904 was to accuse them of murder while pretending to lose your temper, and both parties to that quarrel had spent the morning singing hymns. Suriname’s dictionaries still carry it, glossed with a flatness that gives nothing away: a witch in the shape of a vampire. In 2023 the Surinamese youth horror series Sranan Folktales built an episode around it, directed by Loelle Monsanto, in which a ten-year-old boy comes to his grandmother for the holidays and is told not to go out after sunset, because the old woman down the street is said to be one, and after dark she steps out of her skin and goes over the roofs as a ball of light.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an asema?

An asema is a blood-drinking witch from Suriname, known in the older Dutch spelling as azeman. It lives among people as an ordinary elderly man or woman during the day, and at night it comes out of its own skin and travels as a flickering blue light. In that form it can enter a closed house and drink the blood of anyone sleeping there.

How does an asema attack someone?

The asema numbs the skin with its lips before it drinks, which is why the sleeper does not wake. One Surinamese account from 1904 compares its tongue to chloroform. If it finds the blood bitter it brings the mouthful back up and goes away, but if it likes the taste it returns night after night until the victim dies.

How do you stop an asema?

Raw rice or sesame seed is scattered behind the door, because an asema is compelled to pick the grains up one at a time and cannot pass until they are gone. The claws of a mangrove owl are mixed in with the grain, so that every time the creature grasps one it drops everything it has counted and has to start again. It is still there at dawn, and daylight kills it.

Where does the asema come from?

Surinamese tellers place its origin squarely in West Africa, naming it alongside the bakroe, Afrekete and Leba as things carried across in the slave ships. Afrekete and Leba are Gbe names from the Slave Coast, which supports that account. The asema belongs to the same Caribbean family as Trinidad’s soucouyant and Haiti’s loogaroo.

How can you tell who is an asema?

The signs given by Surinamese informants are advanced age, reddened eyes and toes that point down toward the ground. Its presence at night is betrayed by an unsteady blue light. The accusation was serious enough to work as an insult, and calling a neighbour an asema was a real charge of killing people in their sleep.