Voodou Pilgrimage

By Catherine Orenstein

15/8/95 - Micivih-Zen

In the heart of the waterfalls a woman holds her hands, trembling in the white jets descending from the sky, possessed by the snake spirit Dambala Wedo who lives in the floods. Around her others are bathing in the holy waters and letting their clothes float down the falls carrying away their sins. Next week clean and pure, they will bathe again -in mud.

July is the month of Voodou pilgrimage in Haiti, when hundreds of believers cross the lands to worship the loas -voodou spirits- and to give themselves up to the elements. It is a time of celebration, purification, and abandon, light years away from the Hollywood images of push-pin dolls and human sacrifice. For some the pilgrimage is only a holiday, but others come seeking favors or forgiveness from Catholic saints and African gods alike, and wait for the brief moment when spirits descend to earth to possess their worshipers, and man becomes divine.

The first pilgrimage fête culminates on July 16, the anniversary of a day over a century and half ago when Virgin Mary appeared miraculously in the leaves of a palm tree near a certain waterfall deep in the heart of the central mountains. Ever since, thousand of devotes have to come to site in honor of the Virgin, la vyej, and her voodou counterpart Ezili Freda, as well as for the great lord of the waterfalls Dambala Wedo and other water spirits that inhabit the spot. Nine days later and 60 miles to the north, the second pilgrimage peaks. On foot and on mule, or in bright caravans of painted buses, travelers weave through the mountains to the northern -Plaine du Nord. Just beyond the sea-side town of Cap Haitian lies St. Jacques' hole, a pit that each time at this time is filled with mud.

I came to the pilgrimage for the first time four years ago, during Haiti's first run at democracy. Ever thicker crowds pushed forward doggedly over mud and through a raging river, laughing through the heat and bursting into song, until at last they hit the town of Bonheur -"Bliss"- and burst upon the scintillating spray of the holy waterfalls called Saut d'Eau - Sodo. "Gade! Gade! Sou Bet!", the old ladies screeched as they navigated the final turns to the falls: "Out of the way! Donkey coming through!".

An old voodou priest told me, "this is it, the Lavalas!". The meaning of the pilgrimage had merged with that of President Aristide's revolution: a cleansing flood. At Plaine du Nord, drums rat-tatted in syncopated abandon while devotees made a human wall around the mud hole. Through the day and into the night they slide into the ooze with offerings of rhum and meat for the loas. Aristide electoral posters from the last year's election still flapped from the ceilings of local voodou temples.

But after the bloody coup d'état of 1991, pilgrims came in dwindling numbers. Military check points punctuated the passage from one town to the next, while under the embargo gas became scarce. The pilgrimage became an excursion for the privileged -and mainly catholic- classes. The waterfalls where once peasants doffed their rags were overtaken by youths in designer swim suits, adorned in gold. Likewise, at Saint Jacques' hole many faithful worshipers stayed home when rising gas prices drove the tap-taps to a standstill. In 1993, when even the water truck couldn't make it, the sacred mud hole became a pit of vicious slime. On a cross, someone had tacked a picture of the exiled

president; a soldier ripped it off.

This year, in the wake of Aristide's return, the fêtes once again promised to draw crowds. Port-au-Prince billboards of a light skinned lady in a red bikini languishing in the tropical waterfalls intrigued me: Ezili must have taken a turn for the richer! Would the telephone number on the billboards link me directly with the loas?.

This July, the pilgrims were oddly irreverent. Bonheur was crowded with tourists. Boom boxes thumped in the blokis. Even at the banks of the falls, where a small ceremony was being made around a tree, reggae and rap blared from the jeeps and nearly drowned out the traditional songs. I bought a souvenir, a leather band that said "Sodo 1995," and drank an imported beer. Of course, prices were inflated to accommodate the international attendance. An old lady in traditional dress riding on a mule looked sourly upon my car, and spat "Blan, ale! Sou Bete!" Amidst the line of jeeps, she looked somewhat out of place.

The festivals this July, as in years past, reveal something of the traditional mood. Trickling down from international and presidential promises to salvage the economy, the tourists and souvenirs of Saut d'Eau preview the future of a slicker, more marketable Haiti. As a sign at the airport declares: "Tomorrow belongs to Haiti because Haiti means business!" Ritual and religion may end up joining low wage labor as Haiti's hottest commodities.

Perhaps the loas' mystique will fade as Haiti modernizes; or perhaps they will adapt as the African spirits once did. In the 17th century the French colonialists converted their imported West African slaves to Catholicism with little or no exception: an ordinance of the 1685 Code Noir threatened penalty for the owners of unbaptized slaves. But in secrecy slaves continued to worship their own spirits, using the names of Catholic saints in order to avoid detection. Thus Ogun became St. Jacques.

The billboard Ezili: Is this where the loas are headed? How long before la vyej is selling diet coke from atop the Saut D'Eau trees? Before Ogun begins to look like Silvester Stallone, as he storms through the mud? Before the dollar has a place in the pantheon of Haitian spirits?