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Haitian Vodou and Migrating Voices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2019

SABINE KIM
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Abstract

This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.

Type
Theatre and Migration Dossier
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 58 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank David Donkor and members of IFTR's African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group, from whose comments this work has immensely benefited.

References

Notes

2 The term ‘vodou’ is usually reserved for Haiti, whereas ‘voodoo’ indicates a related but distinct development in New Orleans. See Fandrich, Ina J., ‘Yorùbá Influences on Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo’, Journal of Black Studies, 37, 5 (2007), pp. 775–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 I am adapting Marshall McLuhan's concept of media in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar, but part ways with his technological determinism. Like Jonathan Sterne I understand media as embodiments of social desires; see his The Audible Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 Reflecting the adaptation are the warlike Petwo spirits, who first emerged in the New World.

5 Gordon, Michelle Y., ‘“Midnight Scenes and Orgies”: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy’, American Quarterly, 64, 4 (2012), pp. 767–86, here p. 772CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 François Duvalier was said to dress and speak in ways that evoked Bawon Samdi, the spirit of the dead. Vodou is entangled with Haitian politics both indirectly and more openly, with vodou priests and priestesses as members of government (see Michel, Claudine, ‘Of Worlds Seen and Unseen’, in Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick and Michel, Claudine, eds., Haitian Vodou: Spirit Myth and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 32–45, here p. 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar); candidates might court vodou shamans during elections (see Métraux, Alfred, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Charteris, Hugo (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 55)Google Scholar. Under Duvalier the elder, an informal system of vodou priests and priestesses who acted as police informers became formalized as the brutal paramilitary force Tonton Macoutes.

7 Brown, Karen McCarthy, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 5Google Scholar.

8 Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, pp. 4–5.

9 See Elizabeth McAlister and Karen Richman's research on Haitians converting as an act of rebellion against the demands of the vodou spirits, whose messages conjure the moral economy limiting individual greed and aimed at redistributing accumulated capital. McAlister, Elizabeth and Richman, Karen, ‘Catholic, Vodou, and Protestant: Being Haitian, Becoming American – Religious Pluralism, Immigrant Incorporation, and Transnationalism’, in Alba, Richard, Raboteau, Albert J. and DeWind, Joshua, eds., Immigration and Religion in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 319–52Google Scholar.

10 Concentrated in the Florida counties of Palm Beach, St Lucie, and Broward.

11 Brown, Mama Lola, p. 36.

12 For a description of ceremonies see Bellgarde-Smith, vodouisant Patrick and Tippet, Krista, ‘Speaking of Faith: Living Vodou’, Journal of Haitian Studies, 14, 2 (2008), pp. 144–56Google Scholar; the anthropological work of French anthropologist Métraux, e.g. Voodoo in Haiti, pp. 233–46; Brown, e.g. Mama Lola, pp. 49–68.

13 Brown, Mama Lola, p. 185 n. 5.

14 In contrast, Michel Chion's influential concept of acousmatic voice attributes an uncanny effect to cinematic voices whose bodies are not locatable on-screen, connected to an ‘interdiction against looking’, which reserves immateriality for the divine and or the powerful. Chion, Michel, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Gorbman, Claudia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 19Google Scholar. For an important critique of Chion's concept of the maternal voice see Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), esp. chap. 3Google Scholar, ‘The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Compensation’, pp. 72–100.

15 Bellegarde and Tippet, ‘Speaking of Faith’, p. 147.

16 Richman, Karen E., Migration and Vodou (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2006), pp. 215–16Google Scholar.

17 Richman, Karen E. and Rey, Terry, ‘Congregating by Cassette’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12, 2 (2009), pp. 149–66, here p. 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Richman, Migration and Vodou, pp. 247, 219.

19 Richman and Rey, ‘Congregating by Cassette’, p. 152.