In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.
Around her, the other voodoo worshipers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.
In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead — one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps — and is thus, in a way, blessed.
When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.
Instead they embrace her, even kiss her. And in that way they are blessed, too.
But for all the fervor and favor being shared in this back-alley corner of Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that was badly smashed in the quake, the voudouisants, as practitioners of voodoo are known, feel beseiged.
Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations as the cause of God’s anger in smiting their country.
“They say we’re the ones who caused the earthquake. But we know ourselves that we didn’t cause the quake, because it was a natural catastrophe,” one of the priests, or houngans, leading the voodoo ceremony, Willer Jassaint, said.
Matters came to a head on Feb. 23, when a group of Protestant Evangelicals attacked a Cite Soleil voodoo ceremony with a hail of rocks.
Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, said two days afterwards that a repeat of the violence would lead to “open war,” with his followers told to meet aggression with aggression.
So far, that has not happened.
But in the streets and packed churches of Haiti’s capital, muted animosity is felt towards the voodoo worshipers.
Some of its stems from the fact that voodoo is more assiduously followed by the poorest strata of Haiti’s population — a stigmatized majority in the poorest country in the Americas.
Some of it also is explained by the lingering fear generated by the use of voodoo by Haiti’s notorious dictators, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier during their rule from the 1950s to mid-1980s.
In front of one church, several Christian Haitians said they agreed that blaming voodoo for Haiti’s ills was as akin to superstition as voodoo itself.
Nevertheless, one woman, Vilherne Petitfrere, said the quake had stirred the faithful to greater devotion.
“When you’re afraid, you pray to God, that’s just nature. You don’t go to anyone else except God. That’s why the church has been full these past days,” she said.
Back in the voodoo shed the houngans laid out their plans for bigger ceremonies to come.
They owe the spirits of the dead that release, they say — and they owe themselves that show of defiance.
“We have to maintain our religion now... Because our religion is our soul, it’s part of us,” Jassaint said.
‘THEY KILLED HOPE’: Four presidential candidates were killed in the 1980s and 1990s, and Miguel Uribe’s mother died during a police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot at a campaign rally, his family said on Monday, as the attack rekindled fears of a return to the nation’s violent past. The 39-year-old conservative senator, a grandson of former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982), was shot in the head and leg on June 7 at a rally in the capital, Bogota, by a suspected 15-year-old hitman. Despite signs of progress in the past few weeks, his doctors on Saturday announced he had a new brain hemorrhage. “To break up a family is the most horrific act of violence that
HISTORIC: After the arrest of Kim Keon-hee on financial and political funding charges, the country has for the first time a former president and former first lady behind bars South Korean prosecutors yesterday raided the headquarters of the former party of jailed former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol to gather evidence in an election meddling case against his wife, a day after she was arrested on corruption and other charges. Former first lady Kim Keon-hee was arrested late on Tuesday on a range of charges including stock manipulation and corruption, prosecutors said. Her arrest came hours after the Seoul Central District Court reviewed prosecutors’ request for an arrest warrant against the 52-year-old. The court granted the warrant, citing the risk of tampering with evidence, after prosecutors submitted an 848-page opinion laying out
STAGNATION: Once a bastion of leftist politics, the Aymara stronghold of El Alto is showing signs of shifting right ahead of the presidential election A giant cruise ship dominates the skyline in the city of El Alto in landlocked Bolivia, a symbol of the transformation of an indigenous bastion keenly fought over in tomorrow’s presidential election. The “Titanic,” as the tallest building in the city is known, serves as the latest in a collection of uber-flamboyant neo-Andean “cholets” — a mix of chalet and “chola” or Indigenous woman — built by Bolivia’s Aymara bourgeoisie over the past two decades. Victor Choque Flores, a self-made 46-year-old businessman, forked out millions of US dollars for his “ship in a sea of bricks,” as he calls his futuristic 12-story
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
RSS