Women


	S O S Y E T E D U M A R C H E , I N C


	M A M B O V Y E Z O S O S Y E T E D U M A R C H E T H E F O U R C I R C L E S H O U S E O F T H E W A L K E R

WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP IN HAITIAN VODOU
Karen McCarthy Brown

Karen McCarthy Brown is a Professor in the Graduate and Theological Schools of Drew University. She began research into Vodou in Haiti in 1973 and among Haitian immigrants in New York in 1978. She has written several articles on Vodou as a resource for North American feminists and is at work on Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn.

Vodou was born on the slave plantations of eighteenth-century Haiti. A creative blend of several distinct West African traditions with the Catholicism of the French planter class, Vodou makes its many "spirits" (each is conflated with a Catholic saint) available to the people through trance-possession. It is the leaders within Vodou who are usually "ridden" by the spirits. Women and men, priestesses and priests, lend their bodies and voices to the Vodou spirits in order that the spirits can address the problems of the people in powerful, intimate, and direct ways. The social control of' the patriarchal extended family, which reemerged after Haiti's successful slave revolution (1791-1804), recently has been broken in urban Haiti and in the growing Haitian expatriate communities. In contrast to those in most rural areas, religious leaders in the cities and aniong Haitians living abroad are women as often as men. A result of the breakup of the patriarchal family has been a dramatic growth in the number of multi-generational households where women are not only the main authority figures but also the major breadwinners. My impression is (there are no census data) that almost always women of this type-those who have both freedom and responsibility in large measures-are the successful Vodou priestesses. Furthermore, it seems appropriate to suggest that women's leadership may well have influenced the shape of contemporary Vodou.

Vodou, a deeply pluralistic religion, existentially and theologically, accepts conflict as an inevitable, intact essential, ingredient of life. As a result, the moral vision of Vodou does not assume a dichotomy between good and evil. Moral discernment is focused on the health and liveliness of fluid relationships, not on the essence of persons or their acts. it is fair to say that all Vodou is about healing and that all healing work is aimed at the relations between people as well as those between the "living" and the spirits. My contention is that women, who in Haiti as in the rest of the world devote a great deal of time and energy to the maintenance of relationships, enhance these key dimensions of the Vodou worldview when they are in positions of leadership. I will focus, in this essay, on certain aspects of Vodou that mesh with the social-relational skills that have been noted in women the world over. I hope this discussion will contribute to feminist analyses of women's relationality, a trait that has sometimes been mistaken for simple-minded selflessness. For the past ten years I have worked closely with Alourdes (I use only her first name to protect her privacy), a Vodou priestess in her mid-fifties, who was born in Haiti but came to New York twenty-five years ago. The analysis that follows is based on observation of her performance as a successful and highly respected leader of a sizable immigrant community in Brooklyn. The Vodou spirits become available to the members of Alourdes's community through her possession-performances. However, before any question can be raised as to whether Alourdes's successful possession -performances should be counted as evidence of her leadership capacities, some consideration must be given to the complex and contradictory indigenous understandings of the Vodou community.

On one level those who serve the spirits make a clear distinction between what the spirits do and what Alourdes does. Her role as chwal, "horse," of the spirits is officially understood as a passive one. The initial confusion that marks the onset of trance is said to arise from the struggle between the 9ro bon ant, "guardian angel," of the chwal and the Vodou spirit who seeks to displace it. Loss of the guardian angel leads to loss of conscious control, so the resistance is instinctive. Initiation into the priesthood begins a long process wherein Vodou technicians of the sacred learn how to manage this perilous ego-exchange. They learn how to summon the spirits; how to enter trance, and thus surrender control to the spirits more easily; and how to prevent trance when necessary. Alourdes, who is considered quite advanced as a manbo, "priestess," moves readily into trance states with a short, and more or less pro forma, period of struggle. She routinely claims to remember nothing of what transpired when the spirit had control of her body. 'These points are further ways of reiterating the Haitian belief that the spirit and the person possessed by that spirit are two separate entities. With this, however, as with so many things in Vodou, conflicting perspectives coexist. There are several aspects of Vodou ritual and Ianguage that would reinforce a reading o,f the spirits as more closely tied to the person. For example, Haitians might remark: "Have you seen Alourdes's Ogou? He is strong!" This tying of person to spirit goes even further in the belief that spirits can be inherited in a family. So when Alourdes dies and her daughter takes over, as she likely will, people may talk of "Alourdes's Ogou in Maggie's head."

A similar point is made in the initiation rituals that give persons access to, and to some extent control over, their protective spirits. In these rituals, equal attention is paid to "feeding" the spirits within the person and establishing repositories for the same spirits outside the person. In other words, the spirits are simultaneously addressed as "in there" and "out there." In the possession-performances of the spirits that occur in Alourdes's rituals, these two perspectives on the divine/human relationship coexist. In part, it is this dual perspective that lies behind my use of the term possession-performance. The term invokes a theater context in which the individual actor's interpretation of a well-known character is one of the key ingredients in artistic success. Yet I do not wish to signal that Alourdes's possessions are in any sense playacting or pretense. The trance states are genuine. What is intended by the use of theater language is a point with which all Haitians would agree: some of the vehicles of the spirits are better than others, just as some actors are better at capturing a character than others. Alourdes has a sizable and faithful following in the New York Haitian community for many reasons, and one of the leading ones is she is a good chwal. People feel they have encountered the spirits and have been addressed by them when "the spirits come in Alourdes's head." The interaction of a group of persons around someone possessed by a particular Vodou spirit is difficult to describe in language dependent on the assumptions we make about the nature of'leaders and followers in Western, European-based culture. Our understanding of what it means to be a strong individual hinders our ability to comprehend a ritual scene such as the one that will be described below. In order to guard against importing such assumptions into the discussion, I have chosen to work with an interactional niodel indigenous to Haitian Vodou culture.

This model is Vodou drumming and it will provide the means to analyze the complex exchanges described below. However, before quoting the relevant passage from my field notes atid comparing it with a music model, it will be necessary to say a few things about drumming. Vodou drumming is thoroughly African in character. In fact, some researchers claim that rhythms can still be heard in Haiti that have fallen into disuse in the areas of West Africa where they originated. Because of this close relationship between Haitian and African drumming, John Miller Chernoff's fine study of the structure of African drumming' can be put to full use in our analysis without fearing that it imports aesthetic values foreign to the Haitian Vodou context. Chernoff argues that the context and the content of African music are identical. In other words, the content of the music is the community that performs it. In support of this point, he quotes a Takai drummer from Ghana. Chernoff asked, "What is music?" lbrahim Abdulai replied, "Music is something which does not conceal things about us, and , so it adds to us. Such a claim may also be made for Vodou ritual and, as we will see, Vodou carries on its socially revelatory work using many of the same interactional dynamics that Chernoff finds in African drumming.

African drumming is polyrhythmic. There are always at least two rhythms and often several more. The various rhythms, each carried by a separate drum, interweave in complex ways. Evidence of this complexity is illustrated by the fact that the music of African druniming ensembles cannot be reduced to Western-style notation without assigning different meters as well as different rhythms to each of the drums in an ensemble. Polymetric drumming creates the impression ot' different rhythms clashing and conflicting with one another. Furthermore no one, not even the drummers, can listen to all the rhythms simultaneously. So what is, technically speaking, a simple repetition of the same patterning of sound is actually experienced as changing because the listener's focus shifts from one rhythmic line to another. The resulting dynamic and unresolved character of African drumming leaves ears trained to Western harmony thoroughly confused. Western listetiers, at least those of us who are white, become confused because we try to listen the way we listen to our own music, passively. The only way to make sense of African music is to participate in it. When Africans are asked if they understand a certain type of music, Chernoff reports "they will say yes if they know the dance that goes with it."' In this context, dancing is not simply an accompaniment to music but a crucial ingredient in the process of music making. Exactly where listeners accustomed to Western harmonic structure would expect to hear the most emphasis in this music, we hear the least. What we would call the main beat is missing.' The main beat in African music is supplied by clapping hands and Pounding feet. It may also be supplied in the mind of the listener.

We can say that the musicians play "around" the beat, or that they play on the off-beat, but actually it is precisely the ability to identify the beat that enables someone to appreciate the music. We begin to "understand" Afriican music by being able to maintain, in our minds or our bodies, an additional rhythm to the ones we hear. Hearing another rhythm to fit alongside the rhythms of an ensemble is ... a way of being steady within a context of multiple rhythms.

This capacity to identify and maintain the integrating beat is what Chernoff, following Waterman, calls "metronome sense.116 With this brief review of the structure of African drumming as background, I now turn to a selection from my field journals. In this passage Ogou, the somber warrior spirit, has possessed Alourdes and is just leaving. A chair is brought as her body collapses, signaling his departure.

JULY 2 1, 1979 - Before Alourdes's body has time to occupy the seat offered to her, Ghede arrives. He leaps from the chair with a mischievous laugh and a murmur of recognition and pleasure goes through the room. Ghede's tricksters' always lightens the atmosphere and tonight, after inore than two hours of Ogou, is a special relief. Ghede [spirit of death and sexuality, protector of small children and social satirist] calls for his black bowler and the dark glasses with one lens missing. Then he frolics and gambols around the room pressing his body against the bodies of various women present in his hip-grinding imitation of lovemaking. He remains a long time, passing out drinks of his pepper-laced tafya [raw rum] and joking with everyone. Ghede is merciless with one elegantly dressed young man. After directing him to sit on the floor in front of him, Ghede asks him over and over if he has a big penis. He steals the hat of another man; and when I try to take a picture, demands money. I give him some change. Later he comes back and tells me that was not enough. I give a dollar and take pictures uninterrupted....

Finally, Ghede leaves and the singing picks up. In only a few minutes, Ezili Dantor arrives like an explosion and we are all suddenly awake. Alourdes's ample body crashes into that of a man standing nearby. 'I'he spirit seenis to spread to him by contagion and he, in turn, goes crashing into the food-laden table. Dantor's eyes dart out of her head. She utters one sound over and over: "de-de-de." The pitch and rhythm change but the sound remains the same. A gold-edged, blue veil is brought and draped over her head madonna-fashion so she looks like the chromolithograph of Mater Salvatoris [the Virgin with whom Dantor is conflated]. She goes up to one man standing at the edge of the crowd. "De-de-de-de-de-de," she says softly. "Yes," he replies. "I will do it for you." She drags another to the elaborate table prepared for her and points to it emphatically: "De-de-de. Da-da-de. Da-da-da." A woman across the room yells out to the man: "She wants a table. She wants you to give her a party." "Da-da-da-da-da-da," she says to me, soothing, upbeat. Her hand brushes my cheek and she passes on. She strokes the belly of a pregnant woman next: "Dada-da-da-da-da-da-da," she almost whispers and then roughly grabs the hair of the same woman and jerks her head back and forth: "DE-DE-Da-DL-DkDt-Dt." "Your head washed," someone suggests. "She wants you to get initiated," another puts in. "That's right!" says a third, and heads nod all around.

To observe Ghede and Ezili Dantor with the distanced eye of scholarly objectivity as they interact with others is one thing. It is quite another to be one-filled with questions concerning life issues and surrounded by people with whom one has interacted for years-who awaits the attention of the spirits. As we saw, African drumming requires that a person supply the integrating beat that clarifies what would otherwise be a chaotic clash of rhythms. Similarly, the participant in a Vodou ritual must pour her or his own life content into the polymorphic interplay of images found there, otherwise nothing will have meaning. Because people niust bring their lives into conversation with this ritualizing to make sense of it, Vodou ritual, like the music Chernoff' describes, becomes "an occasion for the demonstration of character."

How I handle the intrusiveness of my camera; whether I try to buy my way into the community or pay appropriately and with humor; how I receive and how I am perceived as receiving the gentle acceptance of Ezili Dantor at a time (1979) when my presence in the community was a source of some contention: all these things become occasions not simply for me to demonstrate character but also for me to learn what it means to have character in that context. The way in which one demonstrates character in African music making is through relationships.' No rhythm, not even the inner one, makes any musical sense in isolation. "Meaning" in African music arises from the mutual responsiveness of different rhythmic lines. For example, the dancers respond to the drummers and the drummers respond to the dancers. Drummers may shift their rhythmic patterning to match a particularly gifted dancer, and then intensify it even further to urge her on to yet more energetic self-expression. The necessary involvement of all persons present and their interdependency in the process of music making provides the key to Chernoff's insight that the content of African music is the social context in which it occurs. Furthermore, Vodou rituals, like African drumming, usually occur in thickly-meshed social situations, situations where people know one another well, and this is one of the key ingredients in their functioning. In this situation Alourdes is like the lead drummer in an ensemble.

Her role is not to emphasize her own beat but to use her beat to call the others into dialogue. Like the lead drummer she is also responsible for introducing the subtle changes that realign that "conversation." The criterion used to judge the success of an African drumming performance is not the virtuosity of the drummers or their creative innovations, but rather whether the entire social event goes well.' Similarly, Vodou ritualizing is considered successful if everything comes together in such a way that what is going on within and among the people gathered there is expressed and clarified. This cannot be accomplished by one person alone, not even one of Alourdes's stature. That is why in the early dawn when guests leave Alourdes's home after she has staged an elaborate Vodou feast, it is not only they who thank her. She also thanks them profusely for their help in the drama. In the specifics of Ezili Dantor's possession-performance, we see even more precise parallels between Vodou ritualizing and African drumming. It is said that Ezili Dantor had her tongue cut out as punishment for participating in the Haitian slave revolution. That is why she cannot speak. Dantor's performance, like any single rhythm in an African ensemble, is meaningless in itself. Only as the spirit interacts with the group does her "de-de-de" become articulate.

As we saw in the passage quoted above, Ezili Dantor supplies the emotional tone and general context of her communications through body language and by varying the pitch and rhythm of the "de-de." Yet, the community, individually and collectively, actually supplies the specific content. It appears that the more conflict present in the message, the more the community is galvanized into offering interpretations. Such seemed to be the case when Dantor first soothingly patted the stomach of the pregnant woman and then roughly shook her by the hair. The interpretation of this message came from several sources and, in fact, drew the tacit approval of the whole group. Ezili Dantor is the woman-who-bears-children. Through the complex ritualizing for Dantor, the many possibilities inherent in the motherchild relationship are played out-from the mutually nourishing to the mutually destructive. This spectrum of possibilities is quickly reviewed in the reaction of Dantor to the pregnant woman. She first gives soothing approval to the life growing in the woman's womb and then aggressively reminds the woman of her responsibilities to the larger kin group, the shoring up of which can be said to be the main function of the initiation Dantor urges. Dantor's presence in the thick social weave of a Vodou ritual calls out meaning on many different levels and in many different directions. It would be impossible to describe all the ways in which persons present at that ceremony chose to bring their own life rhythms into dialogue with the "da-da-da" rhythm of the spirit. But I did note one woman who used the occasion of Ezili's interaction with the prospective mother to communicate, without words, to her own daughter that she hoped the young woman would get to work on providing her with a grandchild. Dantor's cross-rhythms, in this case played out as soothing approval (rubbing the pregnant woman's belly) and forceful discipline (grabbing her by the hair), echoed through the room creating a variety of meanings as they combined with the cross-rhythms of different life contexts. Thus the ambiguous nature of the spirits' communications deepens and enriches their potential.

This works in Haitian Vodou because the moral point in serving the spirits, like the aesthetic point in drumming, is not to strive toward an ideal form exterior to the context, but to ritualize, clarify, and balance the social forces already present within it. Ritualizing is essentially about balancing. In the Vodou context, the Creole word balanse refers, among other things, to a kind of ritual movement or dance. By keeping the metronome beat with her or his own body, each dancer finds "a way of being steady within a context of multiple rhythms."'O When this is happening-literally and figuratively-throughout a group, the situation "heats up," the singing and dancing become lively, many spirits arrive and stay long, and the rituals are declared successful. One further parallel between musical structure and worldview should be noted. The polymetric clash and conflict of rhythms has cosmological, social, and personal counterparts in the Vodou system. Chernoff notes the parallel between "multiple rhythms in music and the religious conception of multiple forces in the world."i' This point is extended to the social and personal realms by the Vodou system for describing the conflicting forces within and among persons according to the different spirits associated with them. In Vodou, each person is said to have one spirit who is the met tet, "master of the head." To some extent the personality of'this spirit mirrors that of the individual. For example, aggressive behavior can be explained by the observation that a person serves the warrior spirit, Ogou. Thus, because people have different met tet, there are somewhat different behavioral expectations around them. This is further complicated by the fact that, in addition to the met tet, there are two, three, or four other spirits who are also said to "love" each person. The character of individuals is consolidated by balancing in the midst of the polyrhythms of the different spirits "in" and "around the head." The neophyte who enters Vodou may be told: "You cannot pray to Ogou alone. He is too hot. Light a candle for Dambala too." A good and strong person is thus one who can balanse, "dance," in the midst of forces pulling in opposing directions without missing the beat. The moral person is one who has a strongly developed metronome sense, that is to say, a strongly developed sense of self.

Chernoff calls the polyrhythmic structure of African drumming "music-to-find-the-beat by." We might call Vodou "ritual-to-find-the-self-by." Yet individual rhythms only make sense in relationship. So, the moral wisdom of Vodou lies in teaching that it is precisely in responsive and responsible relation to others that one has the clearest and most steady sense of self. In European-based cultures we tend to oppose individual and group concerns. The two coincide in Haitian Vodou, where developing a strong sense of self does not lead to self-sufficiency but to stronger and more sustaining social bonds. The aesthetic sense that emerges from African drumming is one that delights in the skillful interweaving of rhythms that clash and conflict. The moral sense that emerges from Vodou is one that, if it does not always delight in life's conflicts, at least accepts them as somehow deeply and inevitably true. Vodou spirits are characters defined by conflict and contradiction. For example, Ghede, patron of the dead and guardian of human sexuality, wears dark glasses with one lens missing because he is said to see simultaneously into the worlds of the living and the dead. This double vision is, no doubt, also the source of his humor. To laugh is to balance, and like all balancing within Vodou, is achieved not through resolving or denying conflict, but by finding a way of staying steady in the midst of it.

In or out of trance, Alourdes enjoys and is accomplished at the organization of power, of life energy. This is the key to her leadership. Her skill as a priestess derives from a consummate sense of relationships (among people as well as between "the living" and the spirits) and of how such relationships may be clarified and subtly changed to achieve a state that is at once dynamic and balanced. But Alourdes could not have developed this talent without coming to terms with herself. From one perspective, the priestly role-the initiation rituals that prepare one for it and the daily practices required to sustain it-can be seen as an elaborate system for solidifying the self. Leaders are not essentially different from followers in Vodou, but, amid the suffering, poverty, and chaos of life in urban Haiti, or life in Brooklyn for that matter, they must have a stronger and more constant "metronome sense." Many times I have heard Alourdes say, "I got plenty confidence in myself!" Alourdes has developed this confidence through careful attention to the spirits, who are, in one sense at least, the constituent parts of herself. Having claimed the spirits through ritual and prayer, she can call them into the midst of a community where, like crystals dropped into a supersaturated solution, they cause the group to realign and coalesce.