“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”
Zora Neale Hurston
from Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
The title of this post is somewhat misleading, as I used the term Vodou, not Voodoo, in The Pair Dadeni. I used the better-known term for this post because I figured most people wouldn’t recognize vodou. I know I didn’t know the word existed until I first started researching the subject for my book. It wasn’t until I had searched for ‘Voodoo in Haiti’, and found very little, that I learned about Vodou. I’ll admit that it’s still a little confusing as to what the differences are. An abbreviated version is that Vodou is a religion practiced in parts of the Caribbean and New Orleans descended from the West African vodun religion. In comparison, Voodoo is an anglicized word mainly associated with some of its practices.
It took me a while to get to this level of understanding as Vodou was nothing like what I thought it would be. In typical human fashion, I rejected that which I didn’t understand because I went into the research thinking voodoo was what the James Bond movie Live and Let Die showed it was. How wrong I was.
Haitian Vodou is a cross between vodoun and Catholicism. Vodou adherents believe in one God and have adopted many practices of Catholics. They might pray to spirits, but it’s not much different from those who pray to saints.
When most people think of voodoo, they probably have Hollywood and their religion to thank for their beliefs. But the deeper prejudices go much farther back – all the way to the uprisings in Haiti in the late 18th century. Some of the fleeing white slave owners saw the Vodou ceremonies of the enslaved blacks right before they went into battle to free themselves from the tyranny of their oppressors. The fighting was ferocious, which gave rise, in the minds of the defeated, that it was a violent religion. From what I can tell, though, Vodou is a peaceful religion at its heart.
I thought it was fascinating that people stonewalled me when I tried to learn more about it on my trip to Haiti. Everyone we talked to either didn’t know of anyone practicing Vodou, or they refused to talk about it. It’s sad that there’s so much prejudice and misunderstanding in the world. What I couldn’t tell was how much of this reaction was due to their own beliefs and how much was it because of their fears of how outsiders (especially white males like me) would view their country.
I also included Marie Laveau in the book. I based her character on the mother and daughter voodoo queens of New Orleans. Their history is fascinating and one I encourage you to take a few minutes to read about.
As I noted above, I couldn’t take any pictures of Vodou shops or practices, but I’ve always liked the picture below. When I saw the crowd approaching us, I ducked into the van, leaving my daughter to the mercies of women selling trinkets in the tourist area below the Citadelle Laferrière. I included this scene in The Pair Dadeni, except that I had Alex leaving Diana to the mercies of the sellers.
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