In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.
Around her, the other Voodoo worshippers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.
In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead – one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps – and is thus, in a way, blessed.
When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.
Instead they embrace her, even kiss her. And in that way they are blessed, too.
But for all the fervor and favor being shared in this back-alley corner of Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that was badly smashed in the quake, the practitioners of Voodoo are feeling under siege.
Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations – evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Baptists – as the cause of God’s anger in smiting their country.
“They say we’re the ones who caused the earthquake. But we know ourselves that we didn’t cause the quake, because it was a natural catastrophe,” said Willer Jassaint, one of the priests, or houngans, leading the Voodoo ceremony.
Matters came to a head February 23, when a group of Protestant Evangelicals attacked a Cite Soleil Voodoo ceremony with a hail of rocks.
Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian Voodoo, said two days afterwards that a repeat of the violence would lead to “open war,” with his followers told to meet aggression with aggression.
So far, that has not happened.
But in the streets and packed churches of Haiti’s capital, muted animosity is felt towards the Voodoo worshipers.
Some of its stems from the fact that Voodoo is more assiduously followed by the poorest strata of Haiti’s population – a stigmatised majority in the poorest country in the Americas.
Some of it also is explained by the lingering fear generated by the use of Voodoo by Haiti’s most notorious dictators, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, to repress the populace during their rule from the 1950s to mid 1980s.
Today, Voodoo remains an official state religion, and it is estimated more than half of Haiti’s population practises at least elements of it, sometimes with Catholicism.
“I don’t like them,” said one 26-year-old Haitian women who declared herself a Protestant, as she stepped through a chaotic marketplace.
A vendor nearby said, though, that he could not see how Vodouisants, as they are called, could be held responsible for the nation’s disaster.
“It’s not Voodoo that caused the earthquake,” he said.
In front of one church overflowing during an hours-long Sunday service, several Christian Haitians said they agreed that blaming Voodoo for Haiti’s ills was as akin to superstition as Voodoo itself.
Nevertheless, one woman dressed in her best church-going clothes, Vilherne Petitfrere, said the quake had stirred the faithful to greater devotion.
“When you’re afraid, you pray to God, that’s just nature. You don’t go to anyone else except God. That’s why the church has been full these past days,” she said.
Back in the Voodoo shed, as the chanting and dancing and rum-fueled flames faded, the houngans somberly laid out their plans for bigger, more public ceremonies in the days to come.
They owe the spirits of the dead that release, they say – and they owe themselves that show of defiance.
“We have to maintain our religion now… Because our religion is our soul, it’s part of us,” Jassaint said.
Thank you to the Vodouisants for doing this service for the departed
For those of us not in Haiti ,we need to try to speak out. Vodouisants are being denied food and are dying inside of Haiti as the Christian are controlling the aid inside the country and how it is being distributed. I am trying to speak out and shed light on Vodou as a faith. If others could echo and repond to the hate words we see printed and the articles addressing aid, we might be able to save some of the people. It is a genocide based upon faith. I have written this reponse which I am trying to post in many places where I see the words of hate. Please help. In addition here is a link to the White House. It would help if we could reach out there are well.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Thank you and may the spirtis of our ancestors be with you always
Part of the problem is Aid organizations are not feeding all the people equally. Aid and relief is denied to those that practice Vodou based upon lies. Aid organizations within Haiti are controlled by Christian Organizations and the refusal to feed all is causing a genocide within the country as Vodouins die. If the groups could truly understand the faith in its purist sense and in its truth I think they would not react so strongly against Vodouins
I will briefly try to clear up some of the myths surrounding Vodou. Hollywood has promoted a faith that is so far form the real religion that the two are not at all similar. The Aid organizations are reacting to that image. The humfo or church group is the center of life and it operates also as a farm. On the farm, the people grow their own food and raise their own animals. When food supplies run low or at times when extra food is needed. Vodouins will hold a ceremony. It is like a Madri Gras as Sylvia Browne said on Sally Jessie Rapheal show some years ago. We give our animals a great meal, use perfumes on them and if they step forward use them in the ceremony. You see, we believe we are all leaves on the same tree as you take care of one leaf the whole tree does better. Animals as well as humans have a spirit and are a leaf .We give to that animal the choice, and if it chooses we kill them very quickly and humanely. We pray and give thanks to god for our blessings and to the animal for becoming our food. Christians have a similar practice. They raise their animals on a farm where they are often mistreated, kill they at times les than humanely and pick them up at a butcher. Christians often then pray over their meal as we do. In Haiti, they do not have grocery stores like we do in the west. The church farm is a natural evolution and it insures care and respect given to all.
We believe in one god.We believe in Jesus ,Mary and Joseph, the holy trinity and obvouisly what we call Good God. Vodouins hold that you must never hold a grudge nor should you act out of emotion. It is ok to feel it but not react out of it. That one can be hard especially when you get cut off in traffic or other silly things in our daily life. A priest must help all that come to him, no matter what. If one has no home or income ,the humfo becomes a source of hope and a chance for a new start. I read recently, one journalist say Vodou was actually more like Buddhism.We strive for purity of heart. Only those that have achieved self mastery over their own faults as well as joy can hope to reach up and touch the hand of a saint or angel. If you are cruel, unjust or still confined by your own faults then the angels will not work through you. It is through this interaction that Hollywood has promoted the image of possession. In truth it is very hard to strive to that level and earn the time with these divine beings. You cannot be cruel or hurtful or act selfishy and expect any angel to go near you as they wont. It must be earned.
I hope to bring light to the truth of how we live and dispel so many other Hollywood realities that are nothing like the true Voduin faith.
thank you for your time