16271: Karshan: Haitians Hail the 'President of Voodoo' (LATimes) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MKarshan@aol.com

August 3, 2003

Haitians Hail the 'President of Voodoo'
 By legitimizing the religion, Aristide has energized believers and his
popular support.

By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer

GRESSIER, Haiti — In a dark, airless temple decorated with paper flags and
moldering food, voodoo houngan Adnor Adely takes on the look of one possessed.

His eyes shut tight. His shoulders hunch. His hands leap up as if to ward off
danger, and his slim body begins to quiver.

It is not only the rapture of the spirit world that energizes Adely. He is
excited by the recent government decree giving the centuries-old practice of
voodoo the status of an officially recognized religion. Voodoo priests — houngans
— like him will soon be authorized to perform any civil service a Roman
Catholic priest can, officiating at births, marriages and funerals.

"Voodoo has done everything for Haiti. It gave us our independence, while the
imported religions held us by the throat," says Adely, wearing a T-shirt
bearing the portrait of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and a baseball cap
bequeathed by Christian missionaries from Southern Methodist University.

"We owe this to Aristide. He can be considered the president of voodoo,"
Adely continues, growing more insistent and animated with each adoring word.

"Aristide is the only president in our history who has done something for us.
We will stay with him forever and perform every ceremony necessary to keep
him in power. We will not negotiate with any country on this, no matter how much
pressure they put on us. We will eat rocks if we have to, as long as we can
keep him in power."

Legitimizing voodoo has strengthened Aristide's image as a man of the people
and has probably enhanced popular support for the rumored bid by the former
Roman Catholic priest to amend the constitution so he can seek a now-prohibited
third term as president.

Voodoo is deeply intertwined in the two strands that have shaped Haiti:
African slavery and French Christian colonization.

Practitioners meet to invoke spirits — called loa or lwas in Creole — who
give advice through the often frenzied voices of their worshipers. It is a
religion based on prayer, music, dancing and sacrifice, often bloody.

Voodoo followers have been able to throw off the secrecy and shackles since
Aristide's proclamation that as an ancestral legacy, "voodoo is an essential
part of national identity."

The religion and its rituals and herbal cures have been legal since voodoo's
recognition under the 1987 constitution. But decades of persecution within the
country and vilification by Christian missionaries from abroad compelled most
adherents to stay in the shadows or to shield their beliefs with attendance
at Roman Catholic or Protestant churches.

"Voodoo has always been practiced clandestinely, first by the slaves brought
here from Africa, but even after independence, because Catholicism became the
official religion in Haiti in 1860," says Jules Anantua, head of the Ministry
of Cults (Religions). "In order for voodoo to survive, it had to borrow
symbols from the officially recognized religion. Most voodoo spirits have their
counterparts in Christian saints."

Attending services of the Catholic Church and praying to St. Patrick for luck
or the Virgin Mary for love were means of addressing the relevant voodoo loa.
Individual spirits govern separate realms, from fertility to war to ocean
travel, each with its own symbol, favorite colors and preferred offerings.

Anantua's office is overseeing a council of religious, health and education
members charged with drafting uniform standards for voodoo practitioners to
conduct documented civil ceremonies such as marriages and baptisms.

Voodoo has no formal structure, no hierarchy or geographic center. At least
half its houngans and mambos (priestesses) can't read or write, Anantua notes,
since they come predominantly from poor, rural areas in a country with 55%
illiteracy. To allow voodoo practitioners to officiate at civil rituals, the
houngans and mambos must be able to read and write well enough to sign the legal
documentation. Because it is the religion of the poor and downtrodden, voodoo
has a special power for Aristide, who has the same political base.

By bestowing legitimacy on the African-origin religion, which is embraced by
the vast majority of Haiti's 8.1 million residents, the beleaguered president
of this poorest of Western countries has signaled to his people that they
should be proud of their African heritage, not forced to subvert it under the
religious practices of the European Christians who once repressed them.

Bestowing of official sanction has also had positive social consequences,
according to some outside of political circles. A recent international
development conference on combating the spread of AIDS included delegates from the
emerging voodoo community, which has a more open and tolerant view of homosexuality
than does the Haitian public at large.

"Voodoo is the only environment in which Haitian gays feel accepted and free
to talk about issues," says Laurence Magloire, who last year produced a
documentary film on voodoo and its embrace of sexual outcasts. "We live in a country
where homosexuality is taboo."

The religion, which is closely entwined with nature, also offers some hope of
halting the rapacious harvesting of trees for making charcoal — a desperate
means of making a meager living that has shorn Haiti of most of its forests.

"If the country adhered to voodoo principles, we wouldn't have the crisis we
are now facing," says Evonie Auguste, a mambo from the Carrefour suburb of
Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. "For us, trees are living things that God
put here to be respected. Nature is the place where the spirits live."

Not everyone is so enthusiastic.

Haiti's Catholic clergy has reacted with alarm at the moves to empower voodoo
practitioners to conduct rituals with legal significance, especially
baptisms, which the church contends are an exclusively Christian domain. The bishop of
Port-au-Prince, Msgr. Joseph Lafontant, issued a statement shortly after the
government decree deeming the status accorded voodoo "excessive" and its
application to civil ceremonies "an obvious mistake."

The Roman Catholic Church has for years been losing its once omnipotent hold
over Haitians in the face of Protestant and other missionaries who flood Haiti
to proselytize while conducting development work. None of the more
established churches regard voodoo as a legitimate religion, but they have been more
circumspect in their opposition since the constitutional recognition accorded 16
years ago. From the cultural perspective, academics believe that the move to
bestow official sanction on voodoo is a rite of acceptance that should free
Haitians to practice their beliefs without fear of repression or censure.

"The elite have always regarded voodoo as superstition, as a form of magic or
mysticism," says Jean Yves Blot, head of the National Bureau of Ethnology, a
state academic office in the capital. But he regards it as the more natural
faith of Haitians, as the European religions were imposed by colonial occupiers
and fostered by missionaries. Slaves brought from Africa in the 17th and 18th
centuries believed their spirit world followed them across the ocean and
helped them throw off the chains.

"Voodoo was at the root of our independence and as such has an important
place in our cultural identity," says Blot, referring to the Bois Cayman ritual
staged on the eve of the 1791 slave uprising. The ceremony that found its place
in revolutionary lore was credited with inspiring the slaves to find the
courage and stamina to fight French forces for the next 12 years and for eventual
success in wresting Haiti's independence from France.

Much of the Christian world's fear of voodoo is thought to stem from those
revolutionary rituals, as the war for independence entailed a degree of savagery
and bloodletting never before directed at colonial masters. The religion's
adherents, though, contend that voodoo has been miscast as evil or subversive,
mainly due to exaggerated images presented by entertainment media.

Rituals do entail efforts to commune with spirits, which possess or "mount"
those seeking guidance or favor. Sacrificial offerings of slaughtered fowl,
leaves, baked goods or beverages are brought to the ceremonies to help summon the
desired spirits.

At Adely's temple in this seaside village an hour west of Port-au-Prince,
candle wax encrusts bottles, a loaf of bread and leaves left behind after a
recent ritual. Pigeons, which are also kept around for certain sacrifices, peck at
the food offerings strewn on the temple floor. In his "secret society"
enclave, a coffin-like box stands at the front of the room like an altar, a red
shroud showing the contours of the human skull and crossed bones that it covers.
Deep in the tropical tangle of chest-high weeds and banana trees, the temple is
the spiritual center of a traditional farming village known as a lakou.

A few miles closer to Carrefour, a more urbanized temple serves those who
stream in from the capital for seasonal ceremonies. Here, too, voodoo community
leaders applaud the political changes allowing them to take what they see as
their rightful place in daily life.

"Voodoo is a social action that we've been forced to conduct in shadows,"
says Elie Duverger, a houngan who practices with his sister at a converted bar on
a back road. "This decree allows us to emancipate our culture, to practice in
the open."

Duverger's temple, or perestil, fills a cavernous building flanked with small
chapels for private offerings to the spirits. The walls are adorned with
bas-relief images of Christian saints and their partner voodoo symbols, a legacy
of the years when Haitians' embrace of their African spiritual roots had to be
cloaked in the more accepted icons of the Catholic religion.

Like many voodoo practitioners, Duverger regards the absence of formal
doctrine as an asset, a simplicity that allows the religion to conform to local
needs and interests.

"There are no laws or rules, only a kind of lore that is passed from one
generation to another through the calling of the spirits," says the houngan.
"Voodoo is more flexible than other religions because it is whatever its believers
want to make it."

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