15449: (Hermatin) Miami Herald- Vodou's Veil (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Posted on Sat, May. 03, 2003

Vodou's Veil

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@herald.com

Word-of-mouth leads you to Clotaire Bazile's mission-style house on a
nondescript corner in Little Haiti, somewhere off Northeast Miami Avenue.

The door swings open, and for a split second, the living room resembles a
blessed sanctuary. Flowers, flaming candles and various depictions of Jesus
and the Virgin Mary adorn an altar. A child-size statue of St. Lazarus
greets you at the threshold.

As you stare at St. Lazarus, a kindly old man with crutches, something
catches your eye. Just below the table bearing the Catholic saint, lies an
oversized Smirnoff bottle, partly shrouded in a flaming red rag. Inside is
the Haitian moonshine, kleren (cane liquor), steeped with weeks-old red-hot
peppers.

''It's food for the spirit,'' Bazile, 52, says of the concoction. The
spirit, he is referring to, is Papa Gede, the shameless trickster and
cemetery guardian who is sometimes invoked in Haitian vodou ceremonies for
his healing powers.

With his bald head, bubbly personality and big brown eyes, Bazile looks like
your average couch potato. From the outside, his modest home is plain and
unsuspecting. But step inside, and you're in the complex, mystic world of
Haitian folklore where vodou spirits masquerade as Catholic saints. Here the
spiritual secrets of the African ancestors are called upon in ceremonial
ritual to console troubled souls -- those searching for answers to marital
woes, unexplained illnesses and financial distress.

''They come to me for everything they go to church for. Spanish, Jamaican,
African American. They all come,'' Bazile, a vodou priest since age 11, says
just as his third client for the day, a young, distraught-looking black
woman, walks through the front door.

``Even ministers come asking for their churches to work better, to get more
members. They come through the front door and leave out the back.''

VODOU IN HAITI

It's newly decreed `an essential element of national identity'

In much the same fashion vodou was born in Haiti among African slaves, it is
practiced here in South Florida: Shrouded in a veil of secrecy in
hidden-away temples that double as private homes, and storefront religious
stores known as botanicas.

Sensationalized by Hollywood, dissed by American presidents (remember Ronald
Reagan's ''voodoo economics'') and demonized by religious leaders, vodou
only recently got sanctioned as a religion in Haiti.

Last month, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic
priest, issued an executive decree recognizing vodou as an ancestral
religion and ''an essential element of national identity'' among Haiti's
eight million people. Aristide invited vodou chiefs and temple officials to
register with the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs to perform
legally-binding marriages, baptisms and funerals.

Although many question Aristide's motives at a time when Haiti is
experiencing political turmoil, both the president's foes and supporters
say, he is simply stating the obvious in a country where vodou is still the
most popular religion. It is a gesture, some say, that should have come long
before Europe's hostility, fueled by Haiti's successful independence in
1804, led to an anti-vodou bias in the country. And long before Christian
missionaries, in cooperation with the Haitian government, led an
''anti-superstitious'' crusade in Haiti in the 1940s, destroying temples and
religious objects and imprisoning vodou priests.

Locally, Aristide's measure will have little impact, and opinions vary about
its practical effect in Haiti, where most Haitians have little or no contact
with the state. Nevertheless, Haitians and scholars alike say it's a
''symbolically wonderful'' measure that will help lend a sense of legitimacy
to vodou and perhaps help erase its negative stereotype as black magic,
where animals are killed and sacrificed, and humans are turned into zombies,
the walking dead.

Terry Rey, an assistant professor of African and Caribbean Religions at
Florida International University, says it's impossible to know with any
precision the percentages of Haitians in Haiti or here in South Florida who
practice vodou.

''Nonetheless, if we take as a measure -- initiates who regularly carry out
devotional services to spirits and/or ancestors -- my estimation is that in
Haiti such believers comprise the majority of the population, but no more
than two-thirds. The figure is certainly much lower among Haitians in Miami,
some of whom convert to Protestantism once here,'' says Rey, who has studied
vodou among Haitians and believes many have no knowledge of the practice.

NEGATIVE VIEWS

Practice is blasted as Satan worship in some quarters of U.S.

When it comes to Haitians and vodou, the question is not whether one
believes. Rather, does one practice.

''Haitians are very ambivalent about talking about vodou,'' says Archdiocese
of Miami Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Wenski, who served as pastor of Notre Dame
d'Haiti Catholic Church, 130 NE 62nd St., one of Miami's first Catholic
churches in Little Haiti.

''You get some intellectuals who see it as national folklore. But then you
get people, especially from the fundamentalist Protestant sect, and some
older Catholics, who see it as Satan worship. But basically it is another
religion and alternative belief system,'' says Wenski.

A system that, Wenski concedes, die-hard Haitian Catholics sometimes lapse
into, especially in times of crisis, which is the prevailing reason someone
visits a vodou priest (oungan) or priestess (manbo) whose job is to
interpret the spirits' message.

Case in point: An informal survey done in February by Little Haiti's Sant La
Community Center found there were at least a dozen botanicas or religious
stores located between North Miami and Northeast Second avenues and 54th and
84th streets.

For Haitians who felt their ills were more than physical, the botanicas were
the first stop for ''consultations,'' surveyors found. Though botanicas are
a Latin concept, they've been adopted by the Haitian community here and in
Haiti. With no countryside to go to in search of herbs or other vodou
paraphernalia, Haitians now travel to the botanica where they will find
religious relics, ritual canes, a perfumed-type cleansing potion known as
Florida Water, love potions, even machetes.

''All Haitians have a vodou spirit,'' says Marie Joseph, 48, Bazile's
sister, who notes she is as much a believer in the power of the spirits as
she is in the Catholic faith. ``Don't let them fool you.''

While some Haitians may debate Joseph's statement, it's a fact that vodou is
ingrained in Haitian culture. It influences everything from music and song
to literature, to even Haitians' world view.

''Vodou is more than just a religion. It's a way of life,'' says Jude
Thegenus, 38, the owner of Miami's Jakmel Art Gallery, 2301 Biscayne Blvd.,
who opens his art exhibitions with a vodou ceremony in his gallery's
colorful, vodou-inspired backyard.

Thegenus is more than just a painter and mixed media artist. He is also an
oungan and has the gift, he says, to see things.

''We've been brainwashed and tortured mentally,'' says Thegenus, who bears
the name ''Papa Loko,'' the spirit who teaches the secrets to those called
into the vodou priesthood. ``Vodou is not evil.''

In vodou, individuals like Thegenus believe there is a supreme, but distant
God. The spirits -- African tribal gods often identified by worshipers under
the cover of Roman Catholic saints or symbolic drawings called vv -- serve
as a bridge between humans and the divine. One summons a spirit with
offerings -- a favorite drum rhythm, a libation, a color.

One of the more controversial offerings involves sacrificing goats, chickens
and cows to the spirits. Vodou worshipers say the animals are not killed in
vain -- they feed the flock during ceremonies. A 1993 U.S. Supreme Court
decision recognizes animal sacrifice as a religious sacrament, though the
law forbids cruelty to animals.

''We don't kill animals for sacrifice,'' says Carol de Lynch, a Miami vodou
priestess. ``When we kill the animals, it's an offering we make for energy
and we make food for the people with the animal.''

The spirits are grouped into families or nations, divided by different
rituals, and take on various manifestations. Each ritual carries its own
dances, ceremonies, rhythms and offerings. A spirit announces its arrival by
''possessing'' a worshiper, briefly using the believer's body to express
itself.

The use of Catholic saints within vodou, and other derivations of African
religions such as Cuba's Santeria, is the result of enslaved Africans trying
to avoid persecution by slave masters, who forbade them to practice their
ancestral religion. Though many vodouists today continue to use the saints,
others have shunned them. But make no mistake, when vodouists look at an
icon of the Virgin Mary, it's not the mother of Jesus they see, but rather a
manifestation of the female vodou goddess Ezili.

Such syncretism -- the marriage of two beliefs in ways that seem mutually
exclusive -- is neither accepted nor approved of by the Roman Catholic
Church. But the Church has been more tolerant, recognizing that certain
aspects of Haitian culture must be infused within the church service, such
as the drum, an instrument used in vodou ceremonies.

`WE ARE AT WAR'

You can't tell the `enemy where you are located'

Yet vodouists say they cannot completely come out of hiding in South
Florida.

''We are at war with the missionaries, the people who want to keep us in
mental slavery,'' says Thegenus, who now-and-again will treat the public to
an unusually open part of a vodou ceremony, like the drumming procession he
held down South Beach's Ocean Drive on Good Friday.

''When you are at war, you cannot say to the enemy where you are located,''
he says.

And where they are located here in South Florida, is often right before the
eyes.

During recent Easter services at Little Haiti's Notre Dame, a self-described
boko -- a vodou priest who works in the supernatural -- stood up in church
to declare that he had found God. The gentleman testified that despite
earning between $2,000 and $4,000 a day ''working treatments'' for people,
he was not happy, because he was doing the devil's work.

''You see how this church is full tonight,'' he said to the crowd. ``My
house was also full like this.''

In fact, the gentleman, named ''Ronald,'' said many of the church's
congregants were regular visitors to his home, singing Hail Mary in the
morning and calling on Papa Gede, in the evening.

This irony is not lost on many Haitians and the Christian religious
community, which preaches conversion and rejection of vodou to Haitians.

Instead of focusing on the good in vodou as individuals like Thegenus would
like, they often point to the negative side, telling how vodou is nothing
more than a quick fix, often imploring secretive folk medicine, trances and
''spells'' on behalf of selfish motivations that sometimes lead to bodily
harm.

This is the image that de Lynch, 52, desperately wants to change. A manbo,
or vodou priestess since 18, de Lynch preaches about the good in vodou every
chance she gets, and was among those in Haiti who fought for its
recognition.

De Lynch has turned her front yard into a Lakou, the vodou terminology
describing a family compound. To the untrained eye, it resembles a botanical
courtyard with large, overhanging trees and three oversized crayon-colored
dollhouses. But the trained vodou eyes immediately sees that the houses are
shrines to the spirits, distinguished by their favorite food and libations
that sit on an altar, decorated with each spirit's individual colors and
objects.

De Lynch, who has attempted to reconstruct what one would find in a
traditional vodou community in Haiti, even has a peristil, where the temple
oungans and manbos perform rituals.

Besides calling upon the spirits, vodou chiefs also have traditional
medicinal knowledge that has been passed down to them. It's this secret
knowledge of certain plants, often used to cure illnesses in the midst of
ritual, that is sometimes viewed as mysticism to the outside world.

''Every religion has their magic,'' says de Lynch, who charges $40 for a
card reading, more for dealing with more intense problems.

But it's up to the individual priests and priestesses, say vodouists, to
decide how they will use it. Like in all faiths, there are those who do
good, and those who do bad. There are those who work with their right hand
and there are those who work with their left. These individuals mix sorcery
or black magic and traditional vodou teachings.

''Black magic is not from Africa; it's from Europe,'' says de Lynch, echoing
the findings of some anthropologists who traced the practice, as it is done
in Haiti, to 17th century Europe.

Although he refers to himself as a boko -- the name most often associated
with those who work with their left hand and specialize in the supernatural
often for destructive purposes -- Bazile says he works only with his right
hand, for the purpose of good.

He charges $37 -- plus $1 for candles -- for an initial consultation and
reading. Special treatments cost more, he says. These treatments aren't done
in Bazile's living room, where the statue of St. Lazarus -- or in this case,
Papa Legba, the one who holds the key to the spirit world and must first be
called upon in all vodou ceremonies -- sits.

Bazile's ''treatment room,'' is a dark space at the back of the house.
There, you will find burning candles floating in aluminum bowls, and others
resting on a makeshift altar next to vodou dolls. The dolls are many. They
are mostly black, but there is at least one white one. There is a saintly
icon -- the black Madonna holding what appears to be the Christ child. She
is Ezili Danto and the child is one of her offsprings.

Hanging overhead in the odorless room are various unidentifiable objects,
which serve as charms. They are tightly wound with string and concealed in
plastic bags. Others are shrouded in colorful rags in a spirit's favorite
color. Bottles of Barbancourt rum rest by a door, while three dead fish sit
in a pink plastic bowl as shafts of light crack into the dark room. On a
table sits an ason, the sacred ritual rattle.

A few steps outside the door, Bazile's latest client awaits his
intervention: A teenage Haitian girl, who has arrived with her mother,
seeking the boko's help.





_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963