Musings On: Haiti Fascination

Notes on Haiti.

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Yéle Haiti posted some interesting numbers regarding the current situation today. The numbers are daunting, in so many ways, but they do drive home the fact that this will be a long-term effort.

Haiti has fascinated me since 7th grade, when I first stumbled across a Zora Neale Hurston book lying out on a table at the IUSB library (it was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, by the way). Someday, I would love to see the waterfalls at Saut d'Eau, visit the Citadel, and spend a week at a Vodou peristyle, feeling the drums and chants pound through my chest, and marveling at the delicate lines of a vévé drawn in cornmeal or rust.

It's sad that the artistry is almost always overshadowed by stories of corrupt politicians and our modern cultural myths about the depravity of Vodou. I always find myself pausing with envy when I come across sites featuring those amazing flags of the loas. I have a calabash decorated with Erzulie's vévé on my cabinet at work (one of the student organizations was selling trinkets from Haiti a few years ago, and evidently thought either the heart was merely harmless decoration, or chose to believe it represented one of the loa's many Catholic analogs). I also have a candle with Papa Legba's vévé on my shelf of treasures, although I can't remember where I got that. (Funny, about that -- I was actually looking for one dedicated to the Baron or Maman Brigitte, but somehow the gatekeepers and keepers of crossroads are always the ones I find first.)

Why the fascination with the culture inspired by what many see as a "primitive" religion? Haitian Vodou and it's diaspora cousins (Candomblé, Obeah, etc.) are living, breathing religions -- blood and bone and earth and spirit. They are ecstatic spirituality at their core, visceral, immediate and pervasive, and they have absorbed and adapted in ways that should (IMO) make the Big Monotheisms seethe with envy. (Well. I suppose some monotheists are seething, but most definitely not for the right reasons.) I strongly believe faith ought to be a mixture of learned information (from teachers, books, other practitioners, etc.) and personal experience. If I adhered to anything like a traditional religion, it would probably be one of these.

On a related note, I find the sheer arrogance and stupidity of Robertson and his ilk infuriating, to say nothing of the opportunistic scavengers scrambling to ship Bibles down to Haiti for all the poor souls "hungering for the Word of God," or putting together aid to be exchanged for conversions of convenience. I'm sure they think they're bringing comfort to those who need it, when they're only adding insult to injury -- literally, in this case. And yes, this is a particularly sore spot with me. My father's church made great use of convenient conversion tactics -- they were exceedingly proud that their "Feed the Hungry" program only fed Christian children.

So. Vodou gets a lot of flack and disrespect from the missionary contingent, but the reality is that it's a religion of hope, community, and honoring the spirits and those who have gone before. Contrary to popular belief, Vodouisants do, in most cases, believe in a single creator god; it's just that the loa are a few levels closer to us. They're the ones who actually Pay Attention to the little people down here on Earth; they're the ones dealing with the day-to-day work. Which is why their mapping of loa to Catholic saints seems to be pretty spot-on to this non-Catholic girl, IMO.

In any case. I continue to watch the coverage because I can't look away. It's heart-wrenching and sad, and yet ... there's a chance, here, for Haiti to remake itself. I sincerely hope they can do so, with the world's help, and still dance to the beat of their own drummers.