In Haiti the lwa or loa, the spirits of vodou, leave their home beneath the ocean, bas de l’eau to walk the earth and commune oh-so personally with us through the act of possessing. During a service, held often in a hougan or mambo’s (priests and priestesses of vodou) house in a room called the peristyle (vodou chapel) where music, dance and sacrifice swirl around a central post that represents the universe the lwa chooses and then rides a person like one rides a horse, taking the reigns and guiding them this way and that way to the beat of the drums; there they demand, promise and prophesise, dance and cavort, there they swear and say dirty crude things to offend and titillate. Joan Dayan wrote that from a Western vantage these gods of vodou might appear to lack a certain grandeur or transcendence, surrendering themselves to the “spectacle of ceremony with a kind of rough immediacy,” as the lwa of the dead particularly, not tied to a mortal coil nor suffer its tiresome consequences engage in animated exaggerated sexual behaviour, that is much comic as it is erotic, as the Gede (the dead) dance the banda, thrusting their hips to a staccato beat.
Sidestep:
Thus travelling throughout the transcendental realms of the multiverse in my search for a true gay lord I journey to the Caribbean and find an island deep in as much the violence of the past as it is the present. Haiti, a land shrouded in the myths of hollywood zombie movies and technicolour CNN television coverage of its violence and political unrest. Vodou has gotten itself a bad name, whether through the media and church attempts to discredit it, colonial and neo-colonial slander perhaps or maybe it’s sometimes close relationship with the island’s nastier side of sorcery for sale, I don’t know. Regardless vodou is a religion that traces its roots back to Western Africa and was brought to the Caribbean with slavery and thrived despite it or even because of it and is practiced often alongside the christian faiths, primarily catholic who consitutute about eighty percent of the population with little (if any) perceived contradiction with gods from Africa often portrayed using the same christian portraits they do the saints.
Well… it is not exactly the place you’d expect to find some homo-friendly god or religion; where priests and priestesses practice their faith and their sexuality with little moral prohibity. Mambo Racine Sans Bout, an initiated and ordained priestess of Haitian vodou writes that gay men and women though “rigorously excluded from Protestant congregations, and frowned upon in Catholic services” find in vodou an outlet for spiritual expression. Saying that there are a higher percentage gay people at vodou ceremonies and in the priesthood than represented in the general population, knowing of a few peristyles in Port-au-Prince that have congregations where being gay is an entry requirement. While not unknown the priestess continues, homophobic attacks in Haiti are not on the level that they are in other parts of the Caribbean, like Jamaica that have seen mob attacks and killings. Although male machismo is as high in Haiti as it is elsewhere in the region a high level of bisexual activity may point to why it doesn’t easily translate into violence against gay men (lesbians are another story).
Sidestep:
Erzulie Freda, a powerful and important lwa of the Rada nation who was born in Dahomey and brought with the boats that carried the slaves to the new world; Freda is portrayed as the epitome of grace and has the airs of virginal mercy that can be seen in the eyes of Mother Mary. She is fair skinned and very beautiful and is often seen wearing fine jewellery and is the lwa of ideas, hopes and aspirations and is often said to hold a special place in Her heart for gay men who inturn place Her as their met tet (ruling lwa). Yet She is also a woman says Bob Corbett on his Haiti page, who walks with “a saucy sway to her hips”, a lwa who is pleasure loving, taking delight dancing kissing and caressing men. Mambo Racine Sans Bout says that the gay men in Her sway dance wearing the fine colourful dresses that She loves. Thus like nowhere else in Haiti or in the Caribbean for that matter they may openly flirt with other men. Indeed it is in vodou ceremonies she says that gay men are above all prized as dancers combining their athletic prowess with the “voluptuousness of women.”
Contrasting the feminine Freda is that of Her Petwo sister Erzulie Dantor, a strong black woman who was born in the brutality of slavery in colonial Haiti. An enemy of Freda, it is said that the scars that adorn her black face were obtained battling Her pale and delicate sibling. With her Dantor carries knives that she willing to draw in the defence of the vulnerable, deploring violence against women and children and will seek vengeance upon the men who abuse them. While married with children she is said to lie with both men and women in her bed and is seen as something of a patron to lesbians.
Vodou is a religion born out of and in reaction to poverty, slavery and life times of suffering and as Joan Dayan argues, the lwa of vodou do not sit high, detached up in heaven but live, love, hate and suffer with their people. They do not stand above us in some glow of moral puritanism, nor is there a priest to stand in the way of communion simply because of the partner you sleep with... gasp.
Disclaimer
*I have not been to Haiti nor have a witnessed a vodou ceremony so my apologies if I have anyway misrepresented vodou, its believers or the lwa themselves. I promise you it has not been my intention.
References:
Websites:
- Richard Ammon, Gay Haiti 2003, Global Gays
- Mambo Racine Sans Bout, The Vodou Page:
Sex In Vodou
Homosexuality In Vodou
- Bob Corbett, Bob Corbett’s Haiti Page
NOTES ON CENTRAL LOA
- Kevin Filan, Ezili Danto: Single Mother with a Knife, Widdershins, vol 9 issue 5, 2006
- Wikipedia, Haiti
Essays:
- Joan Dayan, “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods”, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah and the Carribean, 1997, pp. 13-36.
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