Haitian Vodou

The Jamaican government reconsidering the Obeah Act in the summer of 2019 highlighted the legacy of prejudice and criminalization of Africana religious systems and practices left by colonization across ethno-linguistic borders and the broader Black Atlantic. It also highlighted how some traditions such as Béninois Vodun, Candomblé, Santería, and oriṣa worship in parts of Nigeria have successfully managed to combat state policing and prejudice to gain official recognition and legal protection. However, this article analyzes the way even the legal and conceptual success of Africana religions in the modern world places them in a Catch-22. Drawing attention to the fundamental differences between modern conceptions and assumptions of what constitutes “religion,” the article traces the history of how modern political and legal structures either exclude and oppress Africana traditions or exert subtle pressure on them to conform to conceptions of “religion” that are more intelligible and ac...

Pawòl Lakay is a complete first and second year set of Kreyòl materials designed for beginners and intermediate learners at the college level. It is the most comprehensive resource for the teaching and learning of Kreyòl available on the market. This textbook adopts a pragmatic approach to the teaching of language; emphasizing the value of communicative competence, functional language use, and conversational effectiveness. Pawòl Lakay takes into consideration the most recent research findings, new theories and methods in foreign language teaching. It is designed in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and the ACTFL National Standards for Foreign Language Education.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s first book, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti [Stirring the Pot of Haitian History] (1977), exposes the foundational role of Haitian Vodou and the Kreyòl language in Haiti’s Revolution (1791-1804). This essay analyzes selected passages from Ti difé boulé that explicitly incorporate Vodou songs, prayers, and terminology to show how Trouillot provocatively deploys oral sources of historical narrative and memory. The young activist, writing in Haitian Kreyòl from New York City during the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, powerfully contests official versions of Haitian history by emphasizing the Haitian people’s agency. Vodou and Kreyòl, born out of struggle within a repressive colonial framework, are the forces underlying Haitian resistance. Ti difé boulé examines neocolonial patterns of oppression emerging during the nineteenth century and critiques revolutionary icon Toussaint Louverture, revealing how Haiti’s predatory State harnessed Vodou to continue systematically subjugating the Haitian people.  Trouillot’s innovative yet understudied masterpiece offers contemporary readers “new narratives” (Ulysse, 2015) of Haiti. As twin pillars of Haitian resistance and cultural identity, Vodou and Kreyòl remain a vital and vibrant part of the American heritage. They merit more nuanced understandings within a cultural and political context where they have increasingly come under siege, inside and outside of Haiti.

Update: Article now available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00086495.2022.2105026

This article examines the queer narratives in Dominican author and singer-songwriter Rita Indiana's acclaimed La mucama de Omicunlé (2015, Tentacle [2018]) and Hecho en Saturno (2018, Made in Saturn [2020]). It reads these novels in conjunction with theories of queer time and space, heterocoloniality and nonnormative sexuality, and Afrodiasporic spiritualities in the Caribbean to explore Rita Indiana's representation and subversion of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity in the Dominican Republic and the wider region. Drawing on work by Jack Halberstam, Christina Sharpe, Kara Keeling, and Paul B. Preciado, among others, it focuses on Rita Indiana's use of fluid time and bodies, religious and spiritual practice, and the trope of Francisco Goya's Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn devouring his son) to interrogate notions of gender and sexual identity, colonial temporality, failure, and queer futurity.

Free e-print available (link in PDF).

For the latter half of the 20th century, the world’s best known Haitian was François Duvalier—popularly known as “Papa Doc”—a vicious, vengeful, dictator who remained in power through a series of unfortunate coincidences, popular disaffection, and most importantly, by remaining on the anti-communist side of the Cold War in a world where Cuba was considered a political threat to the United States.

Ebook available via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16kkxh9
Print copy available from your favourite bookseller: https://bookshop.org/books/santeria-vodou-and-resistance-in-caribbean-literature-daughters-of-the-spirits/9781781887028

(The attached file includes the introduction to the book.)

African-derived religious traditions like Santería and Vodou have long been a site of political, cultural and social resistance in the Caribbean. Through his focus on the body as the juncture between the physical and spiritual planes, Humphrey’s analysis of a number of Caribbean novels and plays foregrounds the complex nature of women’s negotiation of religious, social and political life as participants in these marginalized religious communities. Examining works from authors such as Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa (1936-), Haitian novelists Kettly Mars (1958-) and Marie Chauvet (1916-1973), and Cuban-Puerto Rican writer Mayra Montero (1952-), he demonstrates the manner in which the worldviews offered by Santería and Vodou permit the divisions within and between concepts such as gender, sexuality, womanhood, space and nation to be transcended. As a result, not only do these narratives resist and subvert hegemonic and patriarchal discourses, but also provide a means through which the voice of the marginalized can be heard.

Hallucinant roman de la quête de la victime expiatoire par les hérauts du malheur, explorant entre catholicisme et vaudou les insondables croyances et les ténébreuses angoisses des paysans, et devant au créole son rythme, son phrasé et sa puissance apocalyptique, La Montagne ensorcelée est sans doute le texte le plus vertigineux écrit par Jacques Roumain. Happé dans un tourbillon d'images par une prose d'une stupéfiante puissance d'évocation, le lecteur plonge dans un univers dont il parvient à s'extirper.
Mais de cette plongée, il ne ressort pas indemne ; lorsque ses yeux se détachent de la dernière ligne, il halète, suffoque. Frappé de mutité, il étouffe un cri, comme ensorcelé et en proie à une indéfinissable torpeur.

« Il s'agit d'une thématique saisissante. Ce qui fait l'intérêt de la démarche obsessionnelle d’Hervé Fanini-Lemoine, c'est avant tout son intégrité. C'est avec un total dévouement qu'il aborde un sujet d'une telle ampleur et d'une telle actualité récurrente. Servi par un prodigieux savoir, il reprend incontestablement le mode de réflexion critique du Dr Jean Price-Mars afin de secouer notre société de névrosés et d'impotents (culturels) ? »

Pierre-Raymond Dumas

This essay is co-authored between Dasha A. Chapman, Yonel Charles, Jean-Sebastien Duvilaire, and Ann Mazzacca. The text accompanies and extends a collaborative performance project the authors developed in December 2015 at the 4th Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An assemblage of description, reflection, performance writing, and theory, this  piece writes/performs alongside the authors’ dancing in ways that mobilize a Kreyòl Vodou rasanbleman, a collective ritual gathering that incites and provokes.

La littérature est hégémonique, dans sa propension à englober dans son orbe des savoirs que d'autres discours ou disciplines - la philosophie, l'histoire, les diverses sciences humaines - aimeraient à distinguer clairement d'elle. Elle est aussi démonique, dans l'emprise qu'elle exerce sur nos esprits.
Les travaux de Laurent Dubreuil ont montré comment l'écriture et la lecture avaient, dans la modernité occidentale, constitué un des ultimes refuges pour l'expérience de la possession. Ils ont aussi exposé comment la domination coloniale s'était elle-même déployée à travers une " phrase de possession " dont les échos continuent de résonner fortement dans les productions langagières et littéraires contemporaines.
"L'empire de la littérature " dit ainsi trois phénomènes imbriqués : un domaine, une puissance, et la capacité qu'ont l'un et l'autre de renaître de leurs propres faillites. Comment s'est littérairement édicté l'empire, comment peut-on s'en sortir, la littérature peut-elle échapper à la politique et la parole esquiver ainsi la parlure ?
Conçu dans un constant dialogue avec Laurent Dubreuil, qui signe ici plusieurs essais et entretiens inédits, cet ouvrage collectif aborde la question de l'indiscipline littéraire face aux différents régimes de savoir, face à la possession coloniale, et dans son rapport à l'histoire. Centré sur les littératures francophones, en particulier africaines et antillaises, il offre une contribution originale aux réflexions contemporaines sur l'apport des théories postcoloniales, et sur les relations entre littérature et pensée.

This chapter examines Haitian Vodou epistemologies and African-centered ways of knowing in Edwidge Danticat’s work, focusing on her collection of short stories Krik? Krak! (1995) and her travelogue narrative, After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002). Using Jacob K. Olúpọ̀nà’s (2011) theoretical lens of indigenous hermeneutics, I analyze her work as Africana religious texts drawing from the fields of Black Atlantic religion, visual art, and material culture.

The Haitian expression andaki or pale daki (“to speak andaki”) signals a secret code to discuss difficult or taboo subjects. I assert that Danticat’s representations of Vodou serve as pale daki, coded messages for readers to interpret Haitian mythic archetypes. Danticat thus emerges as what Nadège T. Clitandre (2018) calls the “daughter of a [divine] voice,” invoking powerful female ancestors who represent a quilted matriarchy of voices. Additionally, the presence of nature features prominently in Danticat’s work, as she unearths how environmental degradation is both a secular and sacred matter of grave concern. Her characters embody the presence of the lwa (spirits), zansèt yo (the ancestors), rasin yo (their roots), and anviwònman sakre (the sacred environment). I examine sacred space as hallowed ground and ritual objects as divine entities in six sites, including natural phenomena (forest, sea, sky, river) and human crafted sites/entities (stone, cemetery). Each sacred space is associated with a divine energy, and their respective lwa serve as our narrative guides. Ultimately, these sacred sites and mythic archetypes of spirit further illuminate the vibrant religious portraits of Danticat’s works.

The word vaudoux or vaudou, found in French-language accounts of colonial Saint-Domingue in the late 18th Century, was borrowed by Anglophone writers from the 1850s, and eventually domesticated as voodoo by the 1880s. As an exercise in political etymology, this paper explores the pre-history of voodoo in English and suggests how far it might have a bearing on the continuing debates over what form to use when referring to Afro-Haitian religious beliefs and practices.

In her 2015 novel La mucama de Omicunlé [in English: Tentacle, translated by Achy Obejas (2018)], Rita Indiana combines science fiction and African-derived religious practices of the Caribbean in a narrative that traverses boundaries in time, class, and identity politics within the context of environmental disaster. This essay examines the use of the sea as a space of unity and division, death and regeneration, and analyses the multiple sexual, gender, and religious identities that the protagonist embodies. In so doing, it details the complex cultural and religious tapestry that Indiana weaves throughout her novel, a framework that centres on the multivalent nature of the many bodies—of water and people alike—that both join and divide the islands of the Caribbean.

En su novela publicada en 2015, La mucama de Omicunlé [en inglés: Tentacle, traducida por Achy Obejas (2018)], Rita Indiana une la ciencia ficción con las prácticas religiosas afrocaribeñas para escribir una narrativa, localizada en el contexto de un desastre medioambiental, que atraviesa las fronteras dentro de las nociones del tiempo, de las clases sociales y de las políticas identitarias. Este ensayo examina el uso del mar como espacio de unidad y división, de la muerte y la regeneración, y analiza las múltiples identidades sexuales, culturales y de género que encarna el protagonista. Así, detalla la rica complejidad del manto que teje Indiana en su novela con hilos de varias culturas y religiones, que juntos forman un marco narrativo que se centra en la polivalencia de los diversos cuerpos—tanto de agua como de personas—que conectan y separan las islas del Caribe.

In the latest iteration of the event, the organizers of and participants in Haiti's Fourth Ghetto Biennale have attempted to identify, address and rectify some of the major issues at stake, including concerns related to cross-cultural artistic agency, themes of disaster and crisis, the tourist "gaze", and Haitian art history. By examining four of the arts projects executed during the two-week event in downtown Port-au-Prince, this article analyses the shifts and adjustments between the Second Ghetto Biennale in 2011 and the fourth in 2015, and how the biennale's artists and curators have attempted to address and account for points of contestation.

In 1983 Wade Davis embarked on an ethnographic and toxicological expedition to Haiti in order to study two cases of zombification that had been confirmed by authorities. While Davis believed that he had uncovered the exact chemical compound used to create a state of zombification, not all of the samples he sent to be tested yielded results. On a theoretical level, Davis' argument was sound: he witnessed pufferfish being used in nearly every instance, and puffer fish poisoning was extremely similar to the effects of the zombie compound. Moreover, some who tested his samples were able to theorize the correct dosage needed for this compound to work. The debate continues on today, as both toxicologists and folklorists try and put the Haitian zombie under a microscope.

This work, using a structurationist approach to consciousness constitution, focuses on how and why the purposive - rationality of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou diametrically opposes that of the African American Civil Rights
movement and the desires of the Affranchis of Haiti. The author concludes that the antidialectical intent of the originating moments
of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with
whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the African American civil rights movement under the purposive-rationality of liberal bourgeois black Protestant men. Instead, it was a clarion call, which emerges out of Vilokan/Haitian Idealism,
for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure “enframed” by an African linguistic and spiritual community, Vodou and kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and “enframing,” liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism,
on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its economic growth and accumulative logic within the finite
space and resources of the earth.

Vodou’s rites and the sacred songs that are sung in the course of their services are in Haitian Creole but they contain many lexical items that stem from West African languages like Fon, Yoruba, Ewe, and Igbo, in addition to West Central African languages like Kikongo. Lexical items with an African origin in Haitian Vodou form a significant part of the religion’s lexicon. The identification of the African lexical sources of the religion allows for hypotheses about the origins of Vodou traditions, sheds light on the history of the French slave trade, and provides clues about the ways in which Vodou took form in colonial Saint-Domingue and independent Haiti. The presence of diverse African cultural and linguistic influences in Haitian Vodou demonstrates the religion’s emergence as a system that syncretized various African traditions into a cohesive whole. This African religious fusion is especially strong in the Asogwe Vodou (Kanzo) tradition, whose stronghold is the Department of the West (i.e. Port-au-Prince and Léogâne) in Haiti. I attempt a preliminary reconstruction of the history of the syncretism of diverse African religious traditions and argue that the “African syncretism” represents the fundamental process that gave rise to Asogwe Vodou in Saint-Domingue and Haiti. I will suggest that the phenomenon of spirit migration within the rites of Haitian Vodou sheds light on the Founder Principle (Mufwene 1996): a few important spirits served in the rites that originate in the Bight of Benin have migrated into the rites of West Central African origin, a process that seems to have taken place in Haiti but draws from a deeper African tradition of spirit-migration between neighboring cultures. This process provides evidence that the religion’s founders from the Bight of Benin exerted a central influence even if pan-African religious inclusivity is a dynamic element of the system they created, Asogwe Vodou.

El vaudou es una práctica religiosa que tiene sus orígenes en el lejano Dahomey, tierra ancestral de África occidental, donde dioses y genios eran venerados por sus fieles de la manera más absoluta que se pueda comprender. El uso consecutivo de pinturas ( como el kaolin, pintura vegetal de color blanco), muñecas, danzas, cantos, oraciones, danzas y tambores, constituyen el ritual para honrar a los loa (espíritus) del vaudou, una unión inquebrantable entre las etnias africanas y las establecidas en Haití, como nueva tierra de estos espíritus ancestrales.
La situación de esclavitud, sostenida en las tierras americanas durante el período colonial (a partir del siglo xv, con la llegada de Cristóbal Colón), trajo una cantidad bastante considerable de hombres y mujeres de remotos lugares de la llamada “África negra”. Pero con ellos vino también su cultura y su religión. En las tierras de Haití la situación cobra un mayor repunte que imprime una característica bastante significativa, pues la cultura (danza, música, cantos) africana se queda de una manera absoluta instaurando una supremacía prácticamente insoslayable. A esto se debe agregar un factor que nos parece muy importante: la figura del créole, una lengua obtenida de la simbiosis de palabras de idiomas africanos con el francés, ya instituido por los colonizadores en esta parte de la isla. El créole avanzó con el pasar del tiempo soportando los avatares de las restricciones y prohibiciones, hasta alcanzar un alto sitial aún hoy día, cuando es, junto con el francés, lengua oficial de Haití. Otro aporte africano a esta nación es sin lugar a dudas, el vaudou: práctica religiosa que, con el culto a los loa (de origen netamente africano), sus ceremonias y la profunda fe de sus fieles, marca la parte más preciada de los habitantes de esta nación de América que con gran orgullo se debe seguir llamando La Perla Negra de El Caribe.

Vodou is frequently invoked as a cause of Haiti’s continued impoverishment. While scholarly arguments have been advanced for why this is untrue, Vodou is persistently plagued by a poor reputation. This is buttressed, in part, by the frequent appearance in popular culture of the imagined religion of ‘‘voodoo.’’ Vodou and voodoo have entwined destinies, and Vodou will continue to suffer from ill repute as long as voodoo remains an outlet for the expression of racist anxieties. The enduring appeal of voodoo is analyzed through its uses in touristic culture, film, television, and literature. Particular attention is given to the genre of horror movies, in which voodoo’s connections with violence against whites and hypersexuality are exploited to produce both terror and arousal.

Contemporary actors and, later, historians and critics have long compared the Haitian Revolution to a tragic play. But the model of tragedy they invoke has changed over time. Today the best-known example comes from The Black Jacobins (1963), in which C. L. R. James narrates the events of the Revolution through the lens of a Hegelian definition of tragedy. David Scott has championed James’s “tragic mode of history” for political reasons, arguing that it is better suited to address the challenges of the postcolonial present. But a tragic mode of history can be of use for the postcolonial present only if it is firmly grounded in the world-changing events that it is supposed to illuminate. It should build on what tragedy was in the milieu of Toussaint Louverture and the slave rebels. To lay the groundwork for this critical shift, this essay traces how tragic performances and history intersected during the Revolution and shows how radicalized versions of Voltaire’s Roman-themed tragedies and Afro-Caribbean mythology and rituals played a prominent part in the fight for equality.

Gede is the Vodou trickster associated with death and sexual regeneration. During his November celebrations, the Port-au-Prince cemetery becomes a national stage. This small space swells and shudders with the influx -- and sometimes animosity -- of all the city’s different social classes, religious persuasions, and affective registers, followed by reporters, film crews and photographers. This chapter asks how Gede ascended to the status of national sign. It traces Gede’s widespread popularity to early waves of urbanization in the first half of the 20th century, and new forms of masculinity that the city made possible. Through a close reading of ethnographic texts, the chapter maps Gede’s rise against the centralization of political and economic power in the capital.

Il existe dans la mythologie vodou haïtienne une croyance en un monde aquatique peuplé de sirènes et autres lwa. Par ailleurs, des Haïtiens assurent avoir été enlevés par ces esprits qui les ont entraînés sous l’eau afin qu’ils vivent à leur côté. Ces séjours durent plusieurs heures à plusieurs années. A l’issue de ces expériences, les concernés retournent sur la terre ferme et racontent à leurs proches leur vécu aquatique. Le présent article propose, après enquête en Haïti, trois de ces récits. Il donne également à lire deux interprétations du phénomène : l’une d’un prêtre vodou, l’autre d’un sociologue, spécialiste de la religion en question. Suit enfin un commentaire de l’auteur.

In the 1950s, Ukrainian American filmmaker Maya Deren traveled to Haiti and became initiated as a manbo (priestess) in Haitian Vodou. How did Deren become drawn to Vodou, and how did she cultivate relationships with fellow devotees? Further, what does her experience as a Vodouizan reveal about other North American whites converting to " exotic " religions practiced largely by people of color? In an exploration of race and religious belonging, this essay offers a theoretical framing of " whiteness, " and considers the history of North American conversions to Buddhism as a precursor to white initiation to African Diasporic traditions. The paper examines Maya Deren's identity as an immigrant artist, resulting in an alternate experience of whiteness, and allowing her to conceive of her journey to Haiti as a spiritual homecoming. Ultimately, I argue that Deren became enmeshed in a ritual kinship system whose bonds reached far beyond the boundaries of mortal geographies.

“Whiteness in the Ancestral Waters: Race, Religion, and Conversion within North American Buddhism and Haitian Vodou,” The Journal of Interreligious Studies, Special Issue: The Color of God: Faith, Race, and Interreligious Dialogue, Issue 23 (May 2018): 90-102. Eds. Axel Oaks Takács and Funlayo E. Wood.

Abstract.  This paper uses the language of Vodou doctrine to articulate its key tenets and speak to how the challenge of plurality or diversity in the twenty-first century has been and continues to be addressed among African and Afro Atlantic spiritual leadership. Following the slave trade and colonialism's aftermath, a pluralistic vision, reflecting the harsh new global order, permitted spiritual sustainability by reconfiguring African ontologisms. Embracing pluralism through annexation of non-native spiritual practices augmented the power of African rulers, providing them with other epistemes and access to spiritual forces they believed enhanced their position. The issue of preparing for the priesthood in a global or pluralistic society is examined in this essay through the historical and metaphysical framework that shaped the making of our societies.

En tant que principe religieux, il est évident, d’après la définition qui lui est attribuée que le Vodou d’un point de vue occidental soit la religion par excellence.

Animiste, dérivant du Latin « anima », signifie « âme, souffle », qui est « Le principe spirituel de l’homme conçu comme séparable du corps, immortel et jugé par Dieu […] ».

« La sorcellerie est une chose, pratique, efficace et incompréhensible ! » On peut dire par cette définition que les choses qui semblent être incompréhensibles sont donc de la sorcellerie.

La magie étant « l’Art de produire, par des procédés occultes, des phénomènes inexplicables ou qui semblent tels » s’est ajoutée dans le périple vodou.

Sans complexe, et avec ample d’aisance, il est prudent de dire que « le Vodou est le principe spirituel de l’homme qui pratique des choses efficaces et incompréhensibles possédant l’art de produire des phénomènes inexplicables ».