Vodou: Vision and Voices of Haiti.

Vodou: Vision and Voices of Haiti

Phyllis Galembo; introduction by Gerdes Fleurant

Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1998, reissued 2005. 113 pp. 85 color, 10 b/w illustrations. Glossary, bibliography, discography, and index. $24.95, softcover.

If you missed the 1998 first edition of Phyllis Galembo's Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti, be sure not to miss the 2005 reissue. Galembo's visual documentation of Haitian Vodou priests, priestesses, spirits, and hallowed sanctuaries serves as a passport for entree into a multitude of sacred worlds to which most of us do not have easy access. Mainly through portraiture, Galembo captures the immediacy of Vodou with great respect for her subject.

The autobiographical and anecdotal preface, divided into five short parts, offers an important glimpse into Galembo's background and methods. To set the tone of the book, she begins by recounting a trip to Haiti planned specifically to coincide with the annual Gede celebrations honoring the spirits of the dead. However, her plans to photograph a ceremony during which the respected Vodou priest Sauveur St. Cyr appears as Gede needed to be readjusted on the spot. Once the ceremony was underway, Galembo was honored with the active role of "lifting Gede from the dead," which is a critical part in the ceremony when Gede (Sauveur) is resurrected from his liminal state of "death" to his equally liminal state of "life." With her cameras and lighting gear put aside for safekeeping, Galembo accepted the honor, grasped Gede's hand, raised him to his feet, and brought him back to life, signaling an auspicious moment for the celebration to pick up pace and intensity. The fact that Galembo was unable to photograph this event could be viewed as a great opportunity gone awry. However, this story exemplifies Galembo's preparedness to accept the unexpected. This openness to the vicissitudes of change is a necessary methodology for anyone working with Vodou, and an important means of gaining greater access to Vodou communities.

Galembo continues her preface by explaining that she has always been drawn to photographic portraiture, especially when her subjects' attire documents a metaphysical transformation. This interest initially led her to Benin City, Nigeria, in 1985 to document altars and ritual dress of Edo peoples, where she continued to work for close to a decade. Her experiences in Nigeria set the backdrop for her next project, in which she retraced--through the photographic medium--the paths traveled by Edo, Yoruba, Mande, Kongo, and Fon peoples in northeastern Brazil, resulting in her significant 1993 book Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia. It seems that Benin City and Bahia were the logical foundations for Galembo's next pursuit, which was to document the labyrinth of Haitian Vodou, resulting in the present book. As many of us who find our homes between transatlantic worlds, Galembo immediately recognized the indomitable African spirits permeating Haitian Vodou, which she had already experienced and documented in Nigeria and Brazil.

After describing her methods in finding Vodou temples and practitioners, Galembo addresses her own combined photographic/ethnographic processes. Galembo states that above all she tries not to be a "touristic voyeur," but rather a "sympathetic participant and documenter." She begins each new journey by hiring a local assistant who helps in anything from making contacts to arranging permissions from state bureaucracies. Her portrait shoots are always interactive in that she encourages her subjects to choose how they want to present themselves. She is very mindful of the ethical questions and community obligations that surround her role as a photographer. Due to her cultural awareness and her genuine effort to function within cultural guidelines, Galembo has developed long-term working relationships with her subjects-turned-friends.

Galembo notes that she is drawn to the incontestable beauty that exists in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world; beauty one does not see unless one knows how to look. I find her approach to "finding beauty" insightful in that it demonstrates that it is not necessarily the search for beauty that is important, but rather the ability to recognize beauty that is already there.

Following Galembo's preface and acknowledgements, Gerdes Fleurant's introduction presents a well-written, concise history of Haiti and the vital role Vodou plays in Haitian life. He summarizes the most critical events surrounding the Haitian Revolution, which resulted in the foundation of Haiti on January 1, 1804. Fleurant gives primary agency to Vodou as the galvanizing and cohesive force for Haitian people in resisting cultural oppression and surviving physical enslavement. Today, Vodou's basic teachings address similar issues, helping Haitian people deal with the very limiting (or repressive?) social conditions which surround them.

Not only does Fleurant address Vodou's synthesis of Catholicism with cultural, religious, and artistic practices from many African cultures, but he also addresses the Taino-Arawak and Carib elements in Vodou, often overlooked in both scholarly and popular conceptions of the religion. Fleurant's discussion of the contentious term "syncretism" is clarified with such examples. He examines the characteristics of each major lwa (spirit, divinity, deity of Vodou), accompanied by its associated Kreyol praise song, with an English translation. He begins with Atibon Legba, the spirit of the crossroads and the first lwa to be saluted before a Vodou ceremony can move forward. He proceeds with Danbala and Ayida Wedo, the two cosmic snakes representing fertility and flexibility; the Ogous, representing the principles of defense and war; the Ezilis, who embody love, feminine beauty, coquetry, wealth, and good luck; Marasa Dosou Dosa, the twins; Azaka, the deity of agriculture; and finally (and logically) the Gedes, representing the principles of life and death.

Fleurant ends his introduction with the important, forward-looking question: "What is the future of Vodou in Haiti and outside, in the diaspora?" Even though Haiti's 1987 constitution recognizes it as the national religion, Fleurant maintains that Vodou continues at best to maintain an ambivalent status, while at worst to endure continued attempts at its destruction. Nonetheless, the Haitian expatriate community numbers over one million, and musical groups, museum exhibitions, and conferences push to foster a better understanding of Vodou.

Galembo's breathtakingly intense photographs follow, divided into chapters and punctuated with passages from the well-known, well-published Vodou literati (including Karen McCarthy Brown, Donald J. Cosentino, Harold Courlander, Maya Deren, Marilyn Houlberg, Laennec Hurbon, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth McAlister, and Alfred Metraux) and complemented by excerpts from interviews with Vodou priests, priestesses, artists, and musicians (including Mama Lola, Manbo Camille, Sanba Gregory [Azouke] Sanon, and Boukman Eksperyans, among others). A nice balance of practitioner to artist to academic is thus represented and maintained throughout the book. After the photographs, the book ends with a useful glossary, bibliography, discography, and index.

Due to the inherently complex nature of Vodou, it is a challenge to organize a large selection of Vodou-associated photographs into definitive categories. Part of the beauty of Vodou is its incontainability. Nonetheless, the very well-conceptualized divisions of photographs appear seamless and flow beautifully from one to the next. The first section, titled "Lwa (Spirits)," elucidates the same lwa discussed by Fleurant in the introduction. The second grouping of photographs is titled "Repozwa (Sacred Spaces)," and features indoor and outdoor active shrine settings, often with painted wall mural backdrops and sometimes accented with chromolithographs, other ritual paraphernalia, as well as painted messages and/or other pertinent information. The next section, devoted to "Afe Vodou (Symbols and Ritual Objects)," features contextual photographs highlighting ason (rattles), govi (ritual pots), paket Kongo (spirit bundles), drapo (flags), veve (ritual drawings), tambeu (sacred drums), imaj (Catholic imagery), and pope (dolls). The final section, devoted to "Sevite (Practitioners)," spotlights the people themselves who maintain the centuries-strong traditions of Vodou. Ranging from oungan (priests), manbo (priestesses), and ounsi (initiates) to boko (sorcerers) and zonbi (zombies), each photo attests to the human participation in serving the spirits. Each section is narrated with excerpts from Vodun scholars, practitioners, and musicians, and each photograph has a descriptive caption, including the names of people in the photo.

Undeniably, the most important part of the book is Galembo's photographs. Although the organization of the photographs and the excerpts that accompany them are useful, Galembo's photographs can stand on their own. The old adage of how many words a picture speaks is apt here in in reference to Galembo's exquisite Haitian oeuvre. Galembo is an artist of the first order. Through her art, however, she captures many other art forms and other revealing information, which permeate her photographs. Although many of her photos are portraits, the subject of the photo is only part of a larger whole. The synechdotal nature of each color, article of clothing, and object captured in a photo expands their meanings exponentially, in both time and space. That is, an object on a shrine or a painting on a wall can represent an event and/or the problems and solutions surrounding that particular event. Multiply that process in a photograph of an overflowing shrine, located in a room whose walls are covered with paintings and chromolithographs, within which is seated a Vodou priest or priestess wearing particular colors and holding ritual paraphernalia, and the full content of the photo becomes hard to fathom. With a basic knowledge of Vodou (supplied in the text), a reader can learn the favorite colors, foods, symbols, likes, and dislikes of the lwa, and apply this knowledge to other photos. On page 19, Bawon Samdi (the head of the Gedes), sporting a purple shirt under a black suit, wearing dark sunglasses, and donning a black hat sequined with a skull and crossbones, perched in front of large wooden cross painted black, attached to which is a silver crucifix under purple sunglasses, offers enough visual information for a viewer to recognize a Gede spirit with little trouble. The same holds true for Azaka wearing denim, with his ever-present straw bag (p. 23), or Ezili wearing pink and sitting next to an altar filled with perfumes, her favorite gift (p. 7).

Each and every photo is rich, but there is one I would like to focus upon in particular. At first glance, this photo is not the most striking. In fact, I did not examine it closely until a particular and apparently insignificant detail caught my attention. The photo is of Manbo Iguelida as Ezili Danto and her husband Lemaire Ridore as Ogou (p. 11). Not surprisingly, Danto wears her typical blue and red, and holds a bottle of Barbancourt rum, while her husband (both mortal and celestial) holds a machete, has an unlit cigarette in his mouth, and wears pieces of red cloth, immediately identifying him with Ogou. Around his neck is a red scarf, secured by an empty yellow matchbox which has been reconfigured as an ersatz scarf-slide. After noticing the match-box, I have been unable to erase its significance from my mind as a symbol for the mechanics of Vodou: innovation, renovation, bricolage (or problem-solving with miniscule resources), irony, certitude, and interminable strength.

Galembo's Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti serves as a visual feast to art lovers, as well as an excellent source for those with a general interest in Vodou. Because most of the text consists of excerpts from previously published works, I recommend the book predominantly for its photographs. It is timely, even in its second printing, in that it shows the beauty of Vodou existing and surviving in a country portrayed as perpetually in crisis. This book is useful to academics of visual culture for use in teaching, as well as to religious specialists themselves in the ever-growing urban phenomenon of Vodou as a world religion.

I dedicate this review to Michel, my good Port-au-Prince friend who guided me through Haitian Vodou in 1997. May he now be peacefully resettled in Guinee. Ayibobo.