Haiti: Voodoo and the Western Imagination
Drive the pin into the doll. Wait for the witch, the victim and the scream - or maybe turn the football on instead. It’s film fodder, and as an audience we’ve learned to associate Voodoo with all sorts of awful things. Zombies, puppets, locks of hair - a pact with the devil, I’ve seen that too - they might make for a late-night flick, but haven’t got much basis in belief. Whatever we see on TV, the reality of Voodoo is altogether more interesting.
While the stereotypes start on screen, Voodoo (or, strictly speaking, Vodou) begins in West Africa. The Yoruba and Kongo people, many of whom were abducted as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade, brought its core beliefs to Haiti in the eighteenth century. Though many were coerced into Catholicism, some retained their belief in an all-powerful, non-interventionist creator. Known as Olorun, this creator soon gained a new name, Bondye - from the French ‘Bon Dieu’. His servants, the Ioa, govern daily life, each with their own personality. Relationships are established between follower and spirit through music, dance, and offerings. For all the efforts of the French, these ties began to supersede those of the slave and master, and a revolutionary religion was established.
As Saint-Domingue became the most valuable colony in Caribbean, the Spanish looked to destabilise Robespierre’s France. Fomenting revolt amongst African slaves, who made up more than 90% of the island’s population, Vodou quickly took on prominence. Second only to racism in uniting revolutionaries, French forces became convinced the success of former slaves was supernatural - rather than, say, strategic. Superstition spread as fast as Yellow Fever, both securing victory for the revolution, and cementing the myth of the ‘Voodoo curse’. In 1804, Haiti was declared a republic, and to this day, ‘hoodoo’ remains slang for ‘black magic’ in the Cajun south.
Enter the United States, whose African-American population was thought so vulnerable to Vodou that, in the years following Haitian independence, those same myths were pedalled by the powerful. Even now the stories stick. Playing to the trope that Vodouisants (followers of Vodou) are devil-worshippers, Pastor Pat Robinson blamed the 2010 Haitian Earthquake on divine retribution. ‘True story,’ he said on his CBN talk-show, The 700 Club, ‘and the devil said, “okay, it’s a deal.”‘
But associating Vodou with black magic isn’t just for shock-jocks. The myth surrounding ‘Voodoo Dolls’ remains, despite playing little part in ritual. Zombies - corpses controlled by Vodou sorcerers - were studied extensively in the 1980s, with ethno-botanist Wade Davis claiming to have found the chemical source of reanimation. The fact that his work was later discredited is, by and large, irrelevant. It’s enough to have heard his conclusions - that Vodou priests use toad-poison for mind-control - to think you’re back watching a film.
The scale of the myths has left some, notably Claudine Michel, convinced that Vodou was deliberately discredited. Academics stress that the religion is no throwback; on occasion, it pre-dates Europe in its tolerance. Homosexuality in Vodou has long been accepted, with gay men considered to be under the protection of Erzulie, the Ioa of beauty and love. Both Olorun and Bondye are considered genderless, breaking the binary that defines European sexual discourse. Perhaps, then, we’d be better considering Vodou as the heritage of a proud period of history: the establishment of the Haitian Republic. Put all those thoughts of dodgy films aside. It isn’t the dolls, it isn’t the pins. It’s the religion of a nation whose history became that of the nineteenth century - the struggle for national identity; then that of the twentieth - an attempt at unity; whilst seeking to solve that great problem of twenty-first - the blowback of imperialism.
