Lecture, Session 23

Vodou and History, Change, Migration

Rural-urban migration in early 20th century

Population Growth and Religion

Is the tradition of serving the lwa threatened by migration and the congregational style? 

If people do join peristyle or Vodou congregations in the host society is the particularlity of the lwa and their specific, intimate links to the ancestors going to fade with protracted international migration?

• In 1960, the Haitian population was 1/5 of what it is today.  The subsequent growth in demography has been linked to a similarly-drastic change in religious organization.  Formation of congregations began to be based upon contractual, voluntary association and membership rather than kinship.  Congregations came under the control of professionals.  Concurrently, religious rites have become more spectacular and expensive. 
• In the countryside, religious practice is still linked to inheritance and lineage.  Here, religion is not styled around congregations, but around the land-holding kin group.  Spirits are in the landscape of the family land, places or depots are where they and the ancestors dwelt or appeared.  Worship, therefore, typically involves saluting these places.  Their ceremonies are less spectacular. 
• Possessions by lwa connect people to their ancestors.  A lwa claims or loves only one particular member of the kin group.  That beloved member may occasionally become the “horse” for that spirit.  When that person dies, his or her memory is bound up with the immortal life of the spirit.  The next time the spirit chooses an heir, people will also remember the previous heirs they chose.  A possession is an occasion to get in touch with those now dead who have served that spirit.  It is as if your great-grandfather manifested himself to you every once in a while.  The powerful, intimate aspect of spirit possession is infrequently noted in the literature, which has wrongly associated the spirits with impersonal, universalistic nature gods.

Migration

• One out of every five Haitians lives outside the country.  The traditional religious practices continue because the person who joins the congregation is invited to “ranmase” their spirits, “pick them up, gather them” and serve them in a new setting.  The spirit maintains the “inheritance” and keeps the servitor linked to their inalienable family land, while maintaining mobility.  As such, they are a model of and for this mobile, transnational society.
• With one foot in each country--both the United States and Haiti--migrants have allegiances to both.  Their ancient, inherited, Ginen (but above all Haitian), Creole spirits can afflict them even in modern New York–can hold them–make them sick, make them lose their jobs, have accidents, cause their homes to get robbed.  They can appease their spirits, cajole them into letting them go, but they are worshiping them in peristyle here.  We watch Mama Lola, Maggie, and anyone else they can persuade or shame into helping them as they prepare for one of the feedings of the lwa.  The work of preparation is enormous–satistying each lwa’s individual and picky tastes for certain meats, desserts, beverages, toiletries.  We see Mama Lola exhausted, discouraged, complaining that she has to do it all herself.  We see her scheming to get a ride to Spanish Harlem to the Puerto Rican neighborhood.  She does not have a car.  She has to get some live chickens, and “you can’t carry no live chicken on the subway!”  The spirit demands live animals; the spirit is nourished by taking the life of the animal.  (Typically the spirit, riding a member, actually immolates, kills, the offering.) 
• There are other adjustments: all rituals are oriented to the earth; spirits dwell in the earth, libations are poured there, victims are killed there and their vital parts–symbols of their sexuality and fertility--are buried in the ground, vèvè are drawn on the dirt.  In crowded Brooklyn apartments, a basin of dirt must serve these purposes.  Thus, they have managed to serve their spirits by modifying their practices, adjusting them to the new setting.  The spirits accept their offerings; they agree not to afflict the members, they offer them protection and advice for navigating the dangers of living in New York. Yet, their center of morality is back home.  That link is symbolized and enforced through the lwa, who still prefer to be worshiped back home and occasionally demand that their devotees return home to do so in the proper manner.  The spirits are the means by which migrants are linked to their homes. 

Alourdes, Maggie and Philo

• Alourdes was held in New York with a spate of illness and bad luck until she acquiesced to the spirits’ demand to return home and serve the spirits there. 
• Similarly, Maggie’s last life-threatening trip to the hospital ends when she relents and makes the promise to take the ason, become a professional manbo.  But, she can only take the ason back home in Haiti.  Like her mother, she has to return to Haiti to get initiated.
• The pattern of leaving and facing repeated crisis–being “held” by a spirit--then returning to the source to gather up your spirits, occurs over and over again in their lives.  Philo makes a promise to “gather up” her lwa and, in exchange, the spirits come to her and heal her clients, building up her reputation as a great–though very poor–healer.

Alourdes' beginning in life

Ezili Dantò first claimed Alourdes when she was in her mother’s womb. Alourde’s beginning was indeed precarious:her mother repeatedly tried to abort her until 5th month–stopped by lwa who threatened her in dreams.  It was a woman spirit who pestered her.  Her friend identified her as Our Lady of Lourdes–Ezili Dantò.  When she was born, her mother fell ill with the black fever epidemic and nearly perished.  Baby Alourdes, named after the spirit who saved her in her mother’s womb, again survived because other women let her breastfeed.  She first nursed from a woman who was deranged, having just lost her 3 week-old infant, then with another woman who had recently given birth.

Alourdes survived her next major brush with death when Philo made a promise to return to her family land to sponsor a huge manje lwa for Dantò and all the rest of the lineage spirits.  Dantò  had made her daughter get bitten by a dog, temporarily go mad, and get lost for 3 days.  She was found after Philo promised to feed Dantò.  They held a big service lasting one week.

Dantò came in the head of her cousin.  Dantò lovingly takes syrup and rubs it over the child’s face in a blessing.  Tongue cut out–can only say “day, dey’dey.  Like charades–people have to guess, interpret what she means.  Finally a wise old uncle indicates that Alourdes is to succeed her mother as a healer, manbo.  A path she, too, would resist but ultimately accept.

The community I have studied for the past 20 years in South Florida differs from Mama Lola’s Brooklyn setting.  These migrants are from the countryside.  They came here directly from their land, whose landscape is not only the source of their livelihood but also the home of their ancestors and spirits.  They did not migrate to the capital, they did not join congregations.  In South Florida, they have not established any peristyle.  There are some healers among them, but when a migrant is “held” by a family spirit, the cure is on the family land back home.  Whether the migrant can personally attend is less important than that the group collaborated to propitiate, feed, the spirit–spirits–to get him/her to release his or her grip on the person so they can return to a productive life abroad.  After all, they are the emissaries of the family’s livelihood.  They all have a stake in the migrant recuperation. 

Ideally, the migrant will return home to participate in the group’s efforts to heal him or her.  But during the decade of the eighties, the boat migrants were in immigration limbo and could not return.  Their families back home organized the divination of their affliction and its ritual intervention on the family land back home.