Tag: history

Another New Year’s Day is upon us, and it’s time for soup joumou. (Why? You can read about that in a previous New Year’s post, here.) You can also sing the Joumou rap with Haitian Jonas, here. These two things always make me smile.

What also makes me smile, is the knowledge that I’ll be in Haiti again in a week’s time. It’s been ten years, even before the quake that changed everything. Some things of course haven’t changed much – suspended government and a “president” ruling by emergency decree, MINUSTAH still not taking a damn bit of responsibility or concern for causing a cholera epidemic. But I’m sure others have. All the little kids in the lakou will be teenagers now. I won’t get to see my godmother (who died in the quake) or my maman hounyo (who died later), and a few other people who have passed. Coming home is well overdue, bittersweet, but good. See you soon, Ayiti.

And I’ll be back to post about it sooner than I did last year.

Despite my attempts to have something smart and useful to say concerning current events most of the time, my friends and family have probably noticed my conspicuous absence of late on the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings.

I’ve not been quiet because I had nothing to say about it. Far from it; I have plenty of thoughts about many aspects of these horrible situations, from police brutality to systemic racism, from media coverage to our “justice” system in the United States. I’ve been involved in activism since my teen years, and most of that in the civil rights category. Not just letter writing or the “slacktivism” of the Internet either. I’ve chained myself to a door; I’ve been detained during a protest (though passing for white and being a girl were probably why I didn’t end up getting arrested, like the black girls or the men who were also part of those protests). I’ve been part of various protests and even led them on occasion. So I am no stranger to any of this.

What I am today, however, is cognizant that the last thing that anybody in Ferguson or on Staten Island really needs right now is for me to add to the pile on of white and white-passing people offering their “advice” or explanations or ideas on this. A big part of the way that systemic racism continues to do its invisible and devastating work is the ease with which black voices are silenced. This doesn’t happen just through the ranting of outright racists, or by the lack of response from white people whose silence is louder than any words. It also often comes from well-meaning people trying to talk about being “colorblind,” or making assumptions and statements about black life in the United States that are simply not theirs to make.

The only thing I want to say is that I am listening, and I will do whatever I am asked to do, to help. It may be that there isn’t anything I can do personally to help. It may be that there is. But I am listening, and waiting for direction from the people who are directly involved, instead of deciding that for them. As a mixed-race person and a woman, my experiences, varied and sometimes distressing as they might be? – will never be the same as those of young black men. I will not speak for them, nor will I speak over them.

I will only speak long enough to say I’m listening, and I am hoping that others will shut up and listen too.

A current trending topic among friends and colleagues is the discussion of sacrifice and its place in religious practice. Far more eloquent people than myself have said some excellent things. I’ve been asked to share my own thoughts, and I’d like to offer an excerpt on this topic from a book I wrote a couple of years ago as my response. It’s still as relevant now as it was then, or when I was asked to speak on a panel about the topic at PantheaCon last February. It’s a long read, but I think it will be helpful.

Excerpted from HAITIAN VODOU, Chapter 3: Sacrifices in Vodou

Getting back to Haitian Vodou, we address perhaps the largest confusion and/or controversy that outsiders to the tradition will confront: the nature of sacrifice, and particularly animal sacrifice. The Lwa of Haitian Vodou request, and are given, many things as offerings or gifts as part of their ceremonies and service. Some Lwa want special candles or tangible objects like perfume, mirrors, or drums. Some Lwa might demand various drinks, from cool water to fiery kleren (pronounced kleh-REN, a high-proof, raw rum). Still other Lwa want various kinds of foods including fruits, vegetables, fancy pastries, breads, candies, and specially prepared dinners. Very few of our Lwa are vegetarians, and most of our Lwa eat meat, just as most Vodouisants eat meat. Remember that the practice of vegetarianism, or other decisions about what to eat or not eat, are generally considered luxuries in a country where food shortages and famines are far too frequent.

It started with a text.

Hey there was just a bad earthquake in Haiti, is Mami Marie OK?

I was in the car that afternoon, waiting for my downstairs neighbor to come out of the appointment I’d driven her to. One of my initiate daughters, ti-Marie, pinged me with the text. Immediately I phoned my Vodou mother, Mambo Marie; I knew that she had returned from her trip to see the family in Port-au-Prince only a few hours before. I managed to catch her.

“I’ll call,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

I turned on the car, and the radio news.

None of the news was good. A massive, shallow earthquake had hit near Leogane, right before dinnertime. The only thing the reporters seemed to know was that the airport was “damaged” and that there were reports that the cathedral – and the palace – The Palace? – had fallen down.

That was when the panic set in. The family lakou is in a neighborhood very close to the Palace. And if that big, fancy,  well-built thing had fallen down…

My neighbor came out of the building. I drove home, went upstairs to the apartment I had two floors above hers, grabbed both my phones, and started making calls.

Two days ago, I talked to my Mami (she may be Mambo Marie Carmel to everybody else, but she’ll always be Mami to me), and I asked about how everyone in Haiti was. “Oh they’re fine, but they’re waiting for me for the soup,” she said with a laugh.

Two hundred and ten years ago, everybody was waiting for the soup in Haiti, because soup, at least this soup, is a big deal. It’s called soup joumou, or “winter pumpkin soup,” and it’s the best Haitian soup ever for more than culinary reasons. I give a recipe for soup joumou in my book, Haitian Vodou, but I didn’t have the space to explain why it’s a “lucky soup,” or what the big deal about soup is.

Haiti became an independent nation on January 1, 1804, after almost thirteen unspeakably brutal years of revolution and war. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the successor to Haiti’s liberating general Toussaint L’Ouverture, declared the colony of Saint-Domingue defunct, and renamed the island Ayiti (Haiti in French) after its original Arawak (Taino indigenous language) name.

There are any number of legends about that time. One of them states that soup joumou became a symbol of independence (as well as New Year’s Day) because the French slave owners had forbidden slaves to eat it, and so they shared it with each other as an act of freedom. Is it true? No one really knows anymore, but we do know that as long as people can remember New Years Day/Haitian Independence Day in Haiti, they can remember the soup.