Read American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World Online

Authors: Rod Davis

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Page 193

A royal residence at Oyotunji. Ogun and Eleg-
ba implements left of the door.

Visiting Baptist group in the village bazaar.

Page 194

out in a true voudou village in Africa. Everyone was welcome to watch, and ask questions, and take pictures.

"I won't have nothing to do with no blasphemy," said one of the Baptist women who had not been amused.

"Amen," said a couple of others.

"We have no wish to offend anyone," Iya Ghandi replied calmly. "This is the way we worship here."

No one said anything else. The levee had re-formed. Seizing another opportunity, Iya Ghandi excused herself.

She had not said so, but the next time they would see her she would not be herself. Like an actor assuming a role, she would have transformed herself into her patron spirit. Only she would not be acting. Yemonja would inhabit Ghandi's body. Like Elesin, she would be possessed.

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The egungun began, hours later than scheduled, with the thunderous beating of the main village drum. The Baptists had long since gone away, but a half-dozen new visitors had driven in, some from as far away as Washington, D.C. As the procession finally started, we all joined as spectators, following the three drummer boys, now clad in scarlet tunics, toward the village center.

The rhythm of the saints echoed off the Afin and the forest, and Iya Ghandi re-appeared, this time all in white, save a blue seahorse embroidered onto her skirt. She carried a white staff adorned with blue spirals, and a white scarf was wrapped around her head. She was Yemonja: mistress of the oceans and queen of the witches.

Let the ceremony be late. It was Ghandi's patron orisha, and things would happen when and only when she was ready. Even the Oba yielded to her wishes regarding the pace and timing of events. And on the days when Yemonja seized Iya Ghandi like a

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rag doll and sank her into deep sullenness or paraded her bare-breasted in exultation, no one would cross her. She had grown up in the Caribbean and in her thirty-four years had become an initiate of all that came her waysanteria, palo mayombe, Shango Baptist (from her native Trinidad) and orisha voudou. You did not defy Yemonja, for she was the ocean, and ruled the fides of life. And you didn't mess with Iya Ghandi either.

As the drummer boys reached the first shrine, a phalanx of the other village adults appeared, each in priestly robes. Some wore the white tunic and head scarf of Obatalathe patron deity of the villagesome the yellow of Oshun. Iya Shango, the slender woman in her mid-thirties who ran The Horseman, donned the bright red of her namesakeoften a male deity but sometimes also taken by women of strong personality. A Shango

Iya Shanla, left; Iya Ghandi, center; Chief Elesin, right, in Elegba outfittings.

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Boys drumming during egungun ceremony, Oyotunji. Week of Yemonja fes-
tival. Egungun figure, hooded, at right.

Egungun visits the warriors' shrine.

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woman was like an Oshun woman but more macho. Both were considered to be extraordinarily erotic.

One of the celebrants was strikingly different. Compared to the classic simplicity of the priests, this one dressed out like something from Mardi Gras: red and white flapped breech-skirt, each flap with a symbolic emblem, and a full-sleeved shirt of silver foil. The head was completely covered by a mask, also of silver foil, and topped by a sea-blue head scarf. It looked like a fat snowman with a blue head, but it was the egungun, the dancing figure of the dead. According to tradition, no one was to know the identity, or even gender, of the person in the egungun costume, but the diminished population in the village made it merely a matter of counting heads to see who was absent, and from the size of the dancer you could tell it was a male.

The sun had come out between rain storms and the midday heat bore down. A few of the villagers had gone barefoot, and I started without shoes, too, but quickly hopped into themthe sandy white soil was blistering. The processional rounds of the altars that we followed for the next couple of hours was a microcosm of the spiritual journey a new initiate makes. Just as a yaguo receives the various gods that will guide and protect his or her life, so we broiled under the sun paying homage to them.

First, of course, was Elegba, as he is in every prayer, ritual, invocation or chantor gathering of Baptists. Elesin was back among us, whirling and singing praises in Yoruba, lobbing candy at the thatch-covered shrine next to the oil barrel drum. Next to the cone-shaped laterite head on the low wooden plank serving as altar were beer cans, gum wrappers, chicken feathers, dried blood and a goat's head. To some of my cohorts, it seemed completely non-holy, but that was probably the point.

The Warriors were next, and now Yemonja took the lead, grinding her hips, opening her legs to the congas before Ogun and Ochosi, whose side by side temples spilled over with iron pots, chains, arrows, metal implements, even a toy rifle. She was

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smiling, doing everything she could to cajole these protectors, without whom no believer can survive long. Watching her, smelling her as she passed close in her dervish seduction, some hidden door in my mind opened. I began to perceive in some visceral way what I had intellectually sensed as the brilliance of the long initiation rites and of the voudou life itself.

Classic reincarnationists, voudous believe that when you die, you petition god, or Olorun, to return your soul to the living. Your major responsibility at that point is to learn what Ifa, the god of divination, has spun as your fate. To learn Ifa's plan, you must of course make contact with him. The only way to do that is through Elegba, who as gatekeeper is the only one who can admit you to the world ruled by the other orisha. But Elegba is also known as a master trickster and arbiter of chancehe offers as many pitfalls as possibilities.

Sacrifice, or ebo, is one of the most important methods of cutting your downside risk. Also important is the intervention of the egunin particular your own ancestorswho are said to usher you through life according to the plans of Ifa. But even with sacrifice to placate Elegba and the help of your ancestors to align you with Ifa, you might not escape trouble.

Thus the Warriors. With their protection, you can move both through the spirit world and mortal life with assurance, especially in the vulnerable early period during which you seek your primary orisha: Obatala, Oshun, Shango, Yemonja, etc. and any secondary ones, especially in santeria initiations, where the "head" orisha is often supplemented by a half-dozen other santos.

When the process is complete, you possess not only a patron deity, but an infrastructure of spiritual links and armaments no less ritualized and active than those given an Arthurian knight. It isn't difficult to imagine the appeal of voudou to persons in difficult circumstances, from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Hialeah to Oakland to East New Orleans. Precisely that appeal poured

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through every plantation in the South and exploded in historic revolution in Haiti.

Voudou was the original Black Power.

I threw the change in my pockets to the Warriors as Ghandi came out of what had surely been a possession, gyrations slowed to a humble bowing and backing away from the shrine. She led us then back across the sandy lane to a pavilion of art deco yellow under huge droopy treesthe shrine of Oshun. Everything, all yellow. The cinder blocks and wooden beams of which it was constructed, the open wooden cabinet, filled with dolls, pots, fruits, flowers. The wicker chair in front. The porcelain cat, symbol of the Egyptian goddess Isis. All yellow. About the only things that weren't Oshun's favorite color were the surfaces of the two mirrors flanking the shrine, but the frames were.

I was seeing more and more of this, the voudou concept of reflection, linked opposites, pairings, duality. The Ibeji were perhaps the most dramatic representation, but in one way or