INCHOATE THOUGHTS
“VODOU: KUNST EN
MYSTIEK UIT HAÏTI” / “VODOU: ART AND MYSTICISM FROM HAITI”
Tropenmusuem, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
October 31, 2008 – May 10, 2009
(Previously at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, Geneva,
Switzerland. Also to be exhibited at the Varldskulturmuseet, Gothenburg,
Sweden; the Überseemuseum, Bremen, Germany; and the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2009-2011.)
Never have I felt so culturally
inadequate while confronting a group of tangible things as when viewing the
extraordinary Haitian Vodou objects currently on an extended tour of European
museums. The bewildering syncretism of American devotions that emerged from
African slave experiences is at least partially familiar from Santería and Candomblé, but in Haitian Vodou the art is
made of materials associated with poverty and improvisation to an even greater
extent than in those predominantly Cuban and Brazilian religions.
Using items ranging from stone carvings (such as caterpillars)
fashioned by the Taíno people (pre-contact indigenous inhabitants of
Hispaniola) adopted by Vodou adepts, to contemporary elaborately beaded and
sequined banners, houngans (priests)
and mambos (priestesses) honor over
four hundred lwa. Each lwa is chameleon, revealing a different
aspect of itself in different circumstances, including aspects that resemble
Roman Catholic saints. For instance, the powerful father figure lwa Danmbala is associated with snakes,
and thus with St. Patrick, and sometimes Moses. Unlikely as it may seem,
Erzulie Dantor, a mother figure lwa,
at times assumes the aspect of the Polish miraculous image, the Black Virgin of
Częstochowa. How does one explain such a strange cultural conjunction? It
is just possible that knowledge of the image was brought by Poles fighting in
the Haitian Revolution when Haiti—then the immensely productive French sugar
colony of Saint Domingue—violently procured its independence in the early
nineteenth century.
Each lwa consists of
seven esprits (spirits), and has
seven lescots (guardians), making for
an even more complex iconography than that of syncretic shape-shifting alone.
Each is complemented by its own graphic sign—vévé. The lwa are
represented in polychrome statues made of a variety of materials, from padded
fabric to concrete, and also on banners carried by hounsis (sacred dancers) who serve the lwa in rites of propitiation and possession at hounfors (temples).
As well as enacting rites, houngans
and mambos trap forces derived from
natural substances in a variety of containers—jars, pots, bottles—for a range
of uses. These pakes store forces
that have to be contained with great care and circumspection, so they are
sealed, wrapped tightly in fabrics, tied with twine, and embellished with
intimidating objects—a toy Godzilla, a human skull. We shall never know what
lurks within them. Unlike a Plains Indian medicine bundle, they are not
designed to be opened. Thank goodness!
Some hounfors function
openly, allowing even the uninitiated to witness worship around the Poteau Mitan, the sacred pole at the
center of the temple that the lwa
descend and souls ascend. Others are strictly secret societies, organized on
military lines that ostensibly date back to eighteenth-century groups of
escaped slaves and others who resisted the French colonial planter order. These
societies, such as the Bizango, harness forces associated with those lwa of the type known as Petro: hot, fast, and particularly
dangerous. Their pakes are wrapped in
predominantly black and red fabrics, and are protected by fragments of mirror
sewn onto them. The Bizango also employ life-size figures made of padded
patchwork fabrics, again mostly in black and red—some horned, some winged, some
mutilated—studded with protective mirrors, and reportedly containing human
bones. So potent are they that those seated in chairs are restrained with rope
or chains. In low museum lighting, emulating conditions of nighttime ritual
encounter when one might imagine them enlivened by flickering torchlight, they
exude intimidation. Equally unnerving are the mirrors used by houngans to make contact with the spirit
world. The exhibition contains an array of large baroque looking glasses in
gilded frames that have been turned from planters’ luxuries into portals of
otherworldly communion by embellishment with representations of lwa, such as a seven-headed serpent, and
accessories including a chain hung with gourds.
These objects are not on view to provide carnival frissons of
fear. The theology they represent is complex, sophisticated, and as capable of
evoking beneficence as it is malevolence. There can be no doubt, though, that
association with violent struggle and ecclesiastical as well as political
repression over generations has made Vodou practitioners self-protective. The
notorious Duvaliers, father and son, successive presidents of Haiti between
1957 and 1986, used fear of Vodou, and some priests’ knowledge of their
devotees’ attitudes and actions, to further their dictatorial interests, so
that following Bébé Doc’s fall Vodou suffered at least a partial reversal of
fortune.
It was in these circumstances that a Swiss woman, Marianne
Lehmann, who has lived in Port-au-Prince since 1957, began collecting Vodou
objects brought to her at first by representatives of houngans desperate to raise funds in difficult circumstances. She
progressively gained the trust of those who, for various reasons, felt the need
to relinquish their cult objects. The exhibition organized by the Musée
d’ethnographie of Geneva, touring Europe until 2011, is drawn exclusively from
her now enormous collection. Her intention is that this patrimony should not
leave Haiti, but be cared for in a necessarily privately financed,
purpose-built museum in Port-au-Prince. This is an admirable aim. And to the
relief of all, not least of those who take the sacred of whatever tradition
seriously, the religious objects have all been ritually desacralized. Although
they may no longer be used for the purposes for which they were made, they will
remain within the society that produced them, available to all who wish to
wonder at the ingenuity of desperation and numinous inspiration that occasioned
their fashioning.