Moongazer

Two o’clock in the morning on the old locomotive line, and the dogs will not stop barking. A cock crows hours before it should. Out where the road runs between the cane and the black water there is a shape standing that is too tall to be anybody, feet set wide on either side of the track, hands on its hips, head tipped all the way back. It has not moved since the moon cleared the trees. It will not move until the moon goes down.

On the Guyanese coast the word for a thing like that is jumbie, the Creolese name for every spirit that means you harm, and the roll call of them is a fair summary of who came to the country and when. Ole Higue sheds her skin into a calabash and flies as a ball of fire. Choorile is a woman dead in childbirth, crying for the baby she left. Massacooraman waits under the interior rivers for a small boat to tip. Bacoo lives in a corked bottle and wants bananas and milk. African, Amerindian, Indian, Dutch, English and Chinese threads all run through that list, and the Moongazer sits inside it as the odd one out, because every other jumbie on the coast wants something from you.

He is the tallest thing in the folklore and the least interested in it. The standard telling gives him the body of a big man scaled past all reason, standing with his legs bridging the road end to end. A competing telling, recorded in the same breath as the first, says that the Moongazer himself is invisible and that what people actually see is his shadow, cast enormous and black by the full moon across the road surface. Nobody fixes his face. Nobody gives him clothing, or a voice, or a name of his own beyond the thing he is doing. The name is the whole description: he gazes at the moon, and that is his entire biography.

The rule attached to him is short. Do not disturb the gaze, and do not walk between his legs. Both prohibitions have the same punishment attached and the punishments are specific. Pass beneath him and the legs snap shut like a trap, and there is nothing left of the traveller worth carrying home. Call out to him, throw something, do anything that pulls his eyes down from the moon, and he takes the brain out through the palm of his hand. That palm is the detail that has travelled furthest. It turns up in the Guyanese accounts and in the wider Caribbean ones, where the same enormous straddling figure is called the Phantome and is said to be known in Trinidad and in St Lucia, and it is the one image that nobody telling this story ever leaves out.

Rooplall Monar knew a different Moongaza. In his poem of that name, published in the collection Koker in 1987, the thing is loose on a sugar estate at two in the morning and it does not need to be provoked. A neighbour’s child dies of having seen it, blue in the belly. A watchman called Djoko drops stone dead on the line and is trampled and kicked by his own mule, and the reason given is that he took a shadow for the Moongaza. There is no palm in the poem and no bridged road. There is a refrain instead, four words long, that does more work than any description: Moongaza mouth wid blood.

Those are two different creatures wearing one name, and the difference is worth noticing rather than smoothing over. The newspaper Moongazer is a hazard with a rulebook, survivable by anyone who keeps his head. Monar’s Moongaza kills by being glimpsed, and kills again through the sheer panic of a man who thinks he has glimpsed it. The estate version is the older-feeling one, and it is the one that explains why the story was told at all on a coast where night work meant walking home along an unlit dam.

No source says where he came from. This is unusual and it is a genuine feature of the material rather than a hole in it. Ole Higue was a woman. Choorile was a woman. The Dutchman in the silk cotton tree was a planter who dabbled in things he should not have. The Moongazer has no death behind him, no curse, no bargain, no maker. He simply stands in the road on certain nights, the way a tree stands, and the tellings never once suggest he was ever anything else.

Guyana came close to losing him and did not, largely because of one man. Wordsworth McAndrew, born 1936, broadcaster and poet, spent five decades collecting the country’s folk material for the Guyana Broadcasting Service, and the Moongazer went out over the air alongside Ol’ Higue, the Dutch jumbie, Massacuraman and Kainaima. Ken Corsbie, writing in Guyana Folk magazine in 2002, called what McAndrew opened up the country’s mythscape, and said its figures carry many levels of meaning at once: what people were frightened of, and what their lives were actually like.

His powers all follow from the posture. The height is the weapon, because a man on a country road at night cannot go over him or around the far side of the cane, and the two ways past are the two ways that kill. The invisibility, where the tellings grant it, is worse than a visible monster would be, because the only warning is a shadow with nothing standing in it. The reach of the palm makes distance useless.

His limits follow from the same place. He appears only under a full moon and he is gone by morning. He is fixed to the road he chose and does not follow. Above all he is bound by his own attention, which is the single most exploitable weakness any Guyanese jumbie has: an Ole Higue has to be tricked with rice and hot pepper, but a Moongazer only has to be left alone. He is beaten by politeness. Step off the road, keep quiet, walk the long way round the outside of him, and the most dangerous thing on the coast never knows you were there.

In February 2014 the Burrowes School of Art built one and put it on the back of a truck for the Ministry of Culture band, for a Mashramani whose theme that year was Cultural Folklore. The photograph in the paper shows him waiting to go out into the street in daylight, which is the one place he has never been. Meanwhile University of Guyana students collecting oral literature on the Corentyne and the East Coast were finding that informants of every background told the same supernatural stories, and that most of them were reluctant to admit knowing any of it at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Moongazer in Guyanese folklore?

The Moongazer is a jumbie, or malevolent spirit, of the Guyanese coast: an enormously tall figure that stands astride a country road on full-moon nights, hands on hips, staring up at the moon. He is unusual among Guyanese jumbies because he wants nothing from people and attacks only when he is disturbed.

How does the Moongazer kill you?

There are two ways. Anyone who tries to walk between his spread legs is crushed when the legs close, and anyone who taunts him or pulls his gaze down from the moon has their brain drawn out through the palm of his hand. Both prohibitions are attached to the same rule: leave him to his watching.

Can you survive meeting a Moongazer?

Yes, and he is the one Guyanese jumbie who can be survived by doing nothing. The tellings agree that if you walk around him quietly and politely he will let you pass unharmed, because he never takes his eyes off the moon unless something forces him to.

Is the Moongazer only found in Guyana?

The Moongazer is the Guyanese name and the Guyanese telling, but the same figure, an immense spectre standing at a crossroads under the full moon with his legs across the road, is reported elsewhere in the Caribbean as the Phantome, including in Trinidad and St Lucia.

What does Rooplall Monar’s poem say about the Moongaza?

Monar’s 1987 poem Moongaza, written in Creolese and set on a sugar estate at two in the morning, describes a version that kills without being provoked: a neighbour’s child dies from seeing it, and a watchman is trampled to death by his own mule after mistaking a shadow for it. Its refrain, Moongaza mouth wid blood, gives the creature a bloodied mouth that the better-known road-straddling account does not mention.

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Massacooraman, Baccoo, Choorile, Bush Dai Dai, Fairmaid, Kanaima, Jumbee, Douen, Lagahoo, Soucouyant, Obia, Giant