all of this autofiction anticipating the pleasures of a normal life was supplanted by the images that were rushing in from the outside to stab me in the chest. I was no longer free in my daydreams. I was no longer the subject even of my own fantasies. I was being inhabited by a woman I had never seen. Or, to borrow the word of a Senegalese man who once told me he was being possessed by an enemy, I was 'maraboutee.'