Read American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World Online

Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (44 page)

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gangs, AIDS, linguistic isolation, unemployment and crimeeverything that was bad in Miami seemed to be doubly so in Little Haiti. It wasn't a place you'd live unless you had to. But there was something in the people's spirit that jumped out at you.

I wondered if the bad rap on Little Haiti was yet another projection of racism. What ever else Little Haiti was, it was black. Maybe any part of town with that many black people who didn't speak much English and were very, very unlike African Americans, just seemed like it had to be bad news. What black section in any city in the United States didn't have that kind of reputation? I remembered my own anxiety about walking through Bedford-Stuyvesant. John Mason did it every day; just a couple of times set my nerves on edge. It wasn't that you couldn't get hurt there, and I'm not a Pollyanna, but half my fear was based on images propagated by white media and white society.

So as I drove through the dozen or so blocks of downtrodden housing, baseline businesses like tire stores, small grocers, fix-it shops, churchesand, of course, botanicasthat formed the core of the Haitian quarter, I tried to look for what held the place together instead of what tried to tear it apart. What I saw was that life was hard, but people went to church, sent their children to school, hung out their laundry to dry, took whatever jobs they could find, tried to make a life in America even if it meant starting on the lowest rung any immigrant population in this country has ever had to face. I saw in that tremendous courage and vitality.

But even the kindest view of Little Haiti had to come to terms with one of the major reasons the community even existed: life back home. If people in Little Haiti seemed determined to buck the bad odds of Miami's mean streets, they were even more determined to escape the horrors of the mother country.

Many times I had heard the plight of Haiti summoned as an argument against the power of voudou. The poorest country in

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the Western hemisphere, maybe in the world, Haiti had changed from an azure paradise with plenty of land for the people to an overpopulated and de-forested hell hole. The governments had gotten corrupt and stayed that way, usually with American help, ever since the revolution against the French coming up on two centuries ago. Haiti was a dangerous place to travel to and a dangerous place to liveeven voting could get your head chopped off. Even growing up meant negotiating a gauntlet of disease, malnutrition and despair.

I had noticed a tendency on the part of western journalists to try to explain Haiti's staggering problems by dragging in half-baked references to voudou culture, as though a mysterious curse lay upon the land. And it was a great angleit always had been. Why explain Haiti in terms of U. S. foreign and economic policy, of support for dictators just to keep out communists, and of the czar-like class suppression in the country when it could all be subsumed in the rubric of a fatal occult preoccupation? Maybe Haiti deserves its fate, the theory seems to say, since its people worship black gods. Maybe the black gods are fakes anyway. After all, what have those gods done?

There are plenty of responses to such voudou-baiting. One that occurs to me involves a simple turning of the mirror of religious accountabilty towards ourselves. If Haiti's gods have failed to deliver, what of our own? Does the presence of millions of homeless, of severe inner city racism, extermination of the farm belt economy, rampant militarism, bankrupt social services, creation of the instruments of world doom, funding of biosphere destruction (you think Haiti burns its resources!), and a virtual breakdown in national morality indicate the presence of grace from the white gods of the United States?

But that is a political response. The issue of the relation of voudou to the trauma of contemporary Haiti might be better understood through the lens of voudou itself. To priests of voudou, the country wasn't in trouble because of the failure of

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the loathe Haitian term for the orishabut for exactly the opposite reason. Haiti had lost its way because the loa had been abandoned.

In structure, such a critique is similar to that made by religious figures in many countries in crisis. Fundamentalist Christian preachers in America blame our social ills on a turning away from God; Muslims and Jews hear similar castigations from their mullahs and rabbis. It makes perfect sense to me that a voudou priest would view Haiti's plight the same way, as the result of what Catholics would call apostasy. The Oba of Oyotunji had expressed the voudou position on Haiti as well as anyone:

''Number one," he had told me one afternoon when the subject of Haitian poverty had come up, "the Haitian people got away from their culture. They wanted to be French. But after the country had been liberated by Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines, you had this king (Henri Christophe) who decided he wanted to be French. He wanted to wipe out the voudou. That brought in two different cultures which are almost diametrically opposedWestern culture and African culture. The result is a people half of whom want to be French and half of whom want to be African. It confuses the magic.

"Let me explain it this way. Haiti is like in a laboratory where a scientist has all his stuff. He can heal people, he can make animals die and come back to life. But even with all that power he's got in the laboratory, some fool can come in and wreck it all, just turn it into chaos.

"And you would say, how could that happen? These men are scientists. Well, what about Challenger? How could it blow up with all the geniuses that put it together? Every wire, every thinghow could it blow up? What happened? We're paying millions of dollars every year and we've got scientific genius that, can split atoms. How is it that Challenger could blow up? People were dumbfounded.

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"But even the most intricate experiment requires that by its nature the combination of energies are all working in harmony. If in Haiti, those energies are confused, it isn't going to work, no more than Challenger will work."

If the Oba's analysis was correct, the path to restoration of Haiti, and therefore of Little Haiti, lay in increased attention to the gods. But from what I could see of life on the street, and of hints of life behind closed doors, the loa were receiving plenty of care, and if you believed the loa were present even in the many storefront protestant churchesas the orisha were present in the black churches of New Orleansthe spirits were a singularly binding force throughout the community.

You couldn't drive a block on 54th without running into a church or botanica, or places that seemed combinations of both. One of my favorites was the St. Jean & Immaculée Botanic Store. The bright, hand-drawn mural on the front, depicting a lamb and a young St. Jean Baptiste (John the Baptist as St. John the Infant) perfectly represented a fusion of the two faiths that have been Haiti's legacy since slavery. The store's owner, Immaculée Calitixé, a voudou m'ambo, said the image had appeared to her in a dream. She named her storefront for St. Jean just as Lorita Mitchell had named hers for St. Lazarus and Ernesto Pichardo had named his for Babalu Aye.

If St. Jean was the prettiest, Botanica D'Haiti Macaya Boumba was perhaps the busiest on the street. Hand-painted lettering on the coral and yellow front of the store promised a lively inventory: "Religious articles, oil, ensense all kind, perfums, statuettes, variety items, bath. American Specializing in West Indian Produces." It wasn't a botanica, it was a botanica supermarket. Nor was it limited to voudou products. Catholic and Protestant needs, from Bibles to candlestick holders, full stock. Or if you didn't need things of the spirit, you could get bargains in loose-fitting Caribbean shirts, dresses, umbrellas, clocks, cassettes and LPs. Or anything.

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