When I Begin to Practice Voodoo Again Translate to Haitian Creole
H aiti, the saying goes, is "lxx% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou". Vodou is everywhere in the Caribbean nation, a spiritual system infusing everything from medicine and agriculture to cosmology and arts. Yet it is virtually nowhere to be seen: ceremonies are not only expensive, merely targets of hate crime. Present, some say, Vodou is in danger.
In the heart of remote Île-à-Vache of Haiti's southern coast, however, the faith is live and well. Completely off the grid, the isle has only two medical clinics for 14,000 residents and so Jeom Frichenel Sisius, the island'south principal Vodou priest, is a spiritual leader, doctor and midwife all at one time.
His remedies, which he claims can ready everything from diseases and haunted houses to career and love problems, are kept in a carefully locked shed in a room adorned with skulls and an nzambi (zombie) painted on the walls.
"If someone has a headache and the doctors cannot heal it, I can," he explains, taking swigs of herbal rum from a gigantic canteen every bit he speaks. "The only things Vodou can't exercise are radiography and mammography." Vodou is necessary, he stresses, and the only people who neglect to empathize that are the Christians.
On top of this noesis and divine healing powers, Sisius likewise happens to throw the all-time parties.
Hither, Vodou defies cliches of zombies, pins in dolls and black magic. There are none of the cornflour drawings, creature sacrifices or rattles that characterize orthodox Haitian Vodou ceremonies: but a lot of dancing and ecstasy fuelled by rum, drums and divine presence. It's well-nigh full moon, and lured by the music and beauty of it all, the spirits – lwas – begin to arrive.
Simply weeks after Sisius's ceremony, a peachy mapou tree savage. Not literally, of course. In local sociology, the sacred species (silk-cotton tree in English) is the apotheosis of someone heroic and Haiti was mourning the decease of Max Gesner Beauvoir, the supreme chief of Vodou.
Beauvoir, who stumbled into spiritualism later on fifteen years as a biochemist in the U.s., worked tirelessly to protect vodouisants from defamation and persecution. At his home in Mariani, he drank coffee with scholars, seekers, journalists and fifty-fifty Christians, patiently explaining what Vodou was ("the soul of Haitian people and a way of life") – and what it was not.
At a fourth dimension when Republic of haiti withal had tourism, he held spectacles of entranced women, legs akimbo and bitter heads of chickens, even staging a honeymoon ceremony for the Clintons.
While perhaps creating some stereotypes of his ain, few did more than Beauvoir in battling distorted horror-flick cliches still associated with Haitian Vodou.
"The well-nigh popular Haitian word in the globe is zombie," explains Richard Morse, a musician and owner of Port-au-Prince's Hotel Oloffson (who insists he never met an undead creature). "And that'south a reflection of the earth more than than it is of Haiti."
At a time when "world music" was all the rage, Morse came to Haiti in 1987 for musical inspiration. Growing up in suburban Connecticut to a Haitian female parent and American father, Morse never expected to get into Vodou beyond the glimpses of folklore he'd seen at home. In 2001, he was officially initiated.
"I only came for the rhythms initially," he recalls, seated on the veranda of the hotel that became his livelihood and permanent home. "Then I found out that the rhythms don't walk lonely. The rhythms walk with trip the light fantastic toe steps, with colors, with spirits, with prayer. The rhythms walk with God."
Every Th for the past 23 years, Morse'due south thirteen-member roots band – which includes his married woman and son – plays fiery, upbeat interpretations of traditional Vodou prayers. Aid workers trip the light fantastic next to local hipsters, elderly couples next to a local LGBT chapter. This is his role in dispelling myths near the practice.
"Most Americans don't know that they don't know what Vodou really is," explains Elizabeth McAlister, scholar of religion at Wesleyan University, specializing in Haitian Vodou. They think Vodou is most sorcery, possibly love magic, unremarkably some sort of sinister practise."
The 1920s and 1930s cinema – the heyday of B-films like White Zombie and pulp fiction – helped reinforce caricatures of Africans as hypersexualized, superstitious and demonic.
"The best affair that e'er happened to racism is Vodou," explains Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist, Vodou arts collector and former aid worker originally from New Jersey, who has lived in Haiti for over 40 years. "They made up their stories about it and their stories confirmed every prejudice of every white person in the globe. It tells that person from Ohio that they're right about black people as scary and dangerous … you tin actually run across on a screen your ain racist beliefs justified."
The westward'south romance with a misguided understanding of Haitian folklore just happened to coincide with the US occupation of the country – which set out to modernize Haiti, while attempting to systematically erase Vodou.
The religion was born with institutional slavery. Ripped from homelands and heritage, thousands of those who would become Haitians were shipped across the Atlantic to an island, where the indigenous population had already been wiped out, for arduous labor in cane plantations.
"They were treated as cattle. As animals to be bought and sold; worth naught more than than a cow. Often less," says Lowenthal.
"Vodou is the response to that. Vodou says 'no, I'grand non a cow. Cows cannot dance, cows practise not sing. Cows cannot get God. Not only am I a human being – I'm considerably more human than you. Watch me create divinity in this earth yous have given me that is so ugly and and so hard. Watch me get God in front of your eyes.'"
And then Vodou, unlike eastern spirituality which is often focused on the mind, begins in the human mankind: Haitians dance, rather than call back, their way to ecstasy; a transcendence into a more beautiful reality.
Divine possessions are reserved for Haitians, who inherit their spirits through bloodlines, explains Lowenthal, who attended endless rituals in mountain villages during his enquiry. Foreigners can never exist vehicles – chwals ("horses") – to exist ridden by the divine.
"That power is stunning. It's not scary. Information technology's stunning. It shows you what a human beingness tin can do. And what nosotros can't practice. White people lost their spirits centuries ago. We lost information technology all. The Haitians believe we used to have spirits, only nosotros were too stupid to keep them."
Without the lwas, Republic of haiti might never have become a nation at all.
On the dark of xiv August 1791, slaves from nearby plantations gathered deep in the woods of Bois Caïman, of what was and so the French colony of Saint-Domingue. By the fire, a young woman possessed past Ezili Dantor, the warrior-mother lwah frequently iconized as Black Madonna, slit the throat of a large black creole pig and distributed its claret to the revolutionaries, who swore to kill the blancs – white settlers – as they drank it.
With otherworldly strength, the legend goes, the world's richest colony was overthrown and the commencement black republic proclaimed. Haitian Vodou became a religion with rebellion and liberty at its heart.
Perhaps these are the roots of the west's fear of Vodou, Lowenthal speculates: it is an unbreakable revolutionary spirit threatening to inspire other blackness Caribbean republics – or, God forbid, the United States itself.
"These people will never be conquered over again," Lowenthal emphasizes. "They volition be exploited, they will be downtrodden, they will be impoverished – but you can tell non a single Haitian walks effectually with his head downwardly … They're more than human than the people who enslaved them. They were better than their masters, able to live in another realm. In that location'due south no other more than articulate response to oppression than that. And that's why Vodou is here – because Vodou is the soul of Haitian people."
R icardo Marie Dadoune (known to friends and worshippers equally "Bébé") has known he was homosexual since he was eight years old. He's now 26 and has a beau, though he doesn't broadcast information technology: several gay men he knows accept already been killed.
In a bustling neighborhood in Port-au-Price, his peristyle (vodou temple) is tucked away between colorful barbershops and vendors hawking barbecued chicken. On a table in a windowless room, plaster saint statuettes are lined up adjacent to African dolls, perfume bottles, candles and a ram's skull, horns nonetheless attached. Ricardo shakes a beaded rattle in all four directions and so pours rum on the cement floor 3 times: showtime to his left, so to his right and finally right in front end of his orangish flip-flops.
"This is a safe identify," he explains. "When we take a ceremony hither, nothing happens. People like the states hither, and then we're not afraid to come and savor."
He may be in a Justin Bieber T-shirt and jeans at present, but the peristyle is the only place Ricardo can dress the way he really prefers: with lipstick, earrings, a textile on his head the fashion women do in the countryside, and a dress.
While homosexuality in Republic of haiti is not illegal, it is non socially acceptable. To avoid discrimination, violence and even murder, many gays and lesbians lead double lives.
"In other countries the gays are free," he says. "They can wear what they want to wear, but not here in Republic of haiti. Later the ceremony I take to take off the dress because I tin't walk the street dressed like a woman here."
Today, peristyles across Haiti have become makeshift religious gay clubs, safe havens where the LGBT community isn't merely tolerated simply actively welcomed.
The lwas, much like the Haitian ancestors themselves, travel far: underwater, from the centre of Africa all the way to Hispaniola.
While Haitians too worship an omnipotent God – Bondye in Creole – he is believed to stand up above little homo matters. The lwas, not so much. Each with its own surface area of expertise, lwas have individual tastes: some like champagne and perfume, others 5-star Barbancourt rum and animal sacrifices. Spirits only choose those they love, and some adopt to occupy non-directly chwals.
"Many, many gays and lesbians are valued members of Vodou societies," explains McAlister, who has devoted years to researching LGBT in Haitian organized religion. "At that place is an idea that Vodou spirits that are idea to be gay 'prefer' and protect young adults who then become gay."
"Vodou 'does gender' totally differently than the Christian tradition," McAlister explains. After all, Vodou has gender fluidity at the core: men might become mediums for female spirits, women for male spirits. "But Christians, especially evangelicals, have zero flexibility for this; they come across homosexuality as a sin, menstruation."
Stigmatized as a primitive, or even wicked religion, Vodou is inherently progressive and inclusive, McAlister continues.
"Vodou tends to be radically unjudgmental," she explains. "The alcoholic, the thief, the homeless, the mentally ill, all of these people are welcomed into a Vodou temple and given respect."
In reality, McAlister emphasizes, Vodou is far more like to a close-knit church community than most Americans could e'er imagine. Or as Morse puts it: with food-centered rituals to please spirits, it's sort of like Thanksgiving – just several times a yr. And it's feminist besides, advocating equal status for male and female priests.
For missionaries and churches already hell-bent on demonizing Vodou, the religion's progressive outlook may be just some other nail in the coffin. Throughout history, Christians have frequently identified Vodou as the root of all Haiti'south problems.
As 2010's earthquake killed perhaps 230,000 and displaced 1.5 million people, United states of america reverend Pat Robertson asserted that Haiti had brought information technology upon itself through a "pact with the devil", referring to Bois Caïman's uprising. The subsequent cholera epidemic, near likely caused by leaked sewage from a UN camp, was also blamed by some on vodouisants, triggering mobs to murder dozens across the country.
It is peradventure not surprising that a religion built-in out of colonial subjugation and the trauma of slavery would irk Christians – who also happened to exist the slave-masters. On arrival, slaves had eight days to catechumen – though their native faith was often later on on blended with Cosmic practices, resulting in today'southward wildly eclectic pantheon of African spirits aslope Catholic saints "creolized" to walk amidst them.
In fright of a rival power base, the church repressing Vodou became a recurring theme in Haitian history, McAlister explains.
"The Christians humiliate us past saying that Vodou is evil," Ricardo says. "It'southward not true. Vodou is not a bad thing. They have their faith, nosotros have ours."
Two days earlier, evangelicals came to his temple and interrupted his ceremony to preach the gospel. They told him he must embrace Jesus equally his personal savior, as he connected to perform his rituals, unfazed. This time, information technology didn't plow fierce.
For a long time, even Haiti itself shied away from a organized religion so quintessential to its national identity. While President Michel Martelly described Beauvoir'south passing as a "great loss for the country", the government itself wasn't always so sympathetic, with Vodou officially outlawed until 1934. Even though it became an official religion in 2003, no ane knows how many vodouisants Haiti has today.
Vodou is still something many Haitians, including the diaspora, keep underground. Peristyles, even sacred mapou trees, are regularly targets for vandalism and arson. Worshippers chance harassment and violence, with lynchings non unheard of.
Countless attacks against it have forged a newfound solidarity among priests and worshippers every bit they carve out a political voice. And slowly, things are changing: a new statute is assuasive Vodou leaders to perform funerals and weddings, and university courses are now researching the religion. While Beauvoir's successor is yet to exist appear, his legacy may be only the beginning.
Ricardo is cautiously optimistic: one day, Vodou may be a goad for a more inclusive Haiti. He's waiting to get abroad – anywhere – where he can open up virtually who he is ("This is my life, this is who I am and I volition exist gay forever").
But until then, he'll be in the peristyle. "There is a lot of love inside the Vodou: it is our heart and claret. So we will non back down. Nosotros have an important and stiff force with us. Without it, we could not exist today."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/vodou-haiti-endangered-faith-soul-of-haitian-people
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