Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 178

rening back into the darkness, farther and farther away from the heartless glare. There they crouched in
the warm secrecy of their own sounds and spirits and joys and terrors, and, above all, with memories of
Africa which grew, with every passing generation, dimmer and more wonderful. It was the chère petite
grotte , the grand-fonds de Malampia of Melanie Bastian, Gide's sequestred girl of Poitiers, who, with-
drawn from the darkness and squalor of her prison to the blinding asepsis of a hospital ward, languished
for a day or two of homesickness for her grotto, and expired. They were not heading for but away from
something, and that is why I think Haitian writers are wrong to look any farther than the Lwas. It is also
why theories are so vague and conflicting about a higher celestial hierarchy, why Mawu or Schango or
le Grand Maître or Bon-Dieu-Bon , or any of their African alternatives, are so unreal, and Christ such a
misfit. It may also be the reason why so few of the Lwas have the actual names of African gods, and so
many of them the names of regions and rivers and towns, which slowly turned into gods as the nostalgic
generations succeeded each other. And so, as the child in his dark lair surrounds himself with corrobor-
ative detail to make his myth more real, the adjuncts and the gear accumulated. Initiation can only lead
deeper into the dark burrow, into the secret. The burrow led nowhere. It was being there that mattered.
So the point of Voodoo, and the whole of the religion, is its practice. If the drums and the dances and
the tonnelle were to cease, the whole vast structure would collapse into a débris of superstition, and of
vague memories that would soon vanish as they have vanished in America. It exists for itself. The ideas
that it represents—the memory of Africa; unity against a cruel and hostile world; survival; the enthralling
miracle of possession, the mystery, the warmth, the drums and the dances—are all part of the religion's
actual performance. No theory, not a written line, embraces them. I was at first mystified by its lack of
rules, of a code of ethics, of a logical hierarchy. It was as if, in the study of Christianity, the next step,
after the genealogy of Christ, were the function of a bishop's mitre. For in Voodoo there is nothing in
between. How could there be? But, to the masses in Haiti, it is far more than a philosophy, a dogmatical
or metaphysical system or a code of ethics. It is the past, the present and the future, the air they breathe,
the entire universe.
The weeks that followed were obsessed by Voodoo. It seemed impossible to talk or think or read about
anything else, and, as night fell, we would listen for the first faint roll of drums with the anxiety of dip-
somaniacs waiting for opening time.
Rodolfe accompanied us to our first few Voodoo sessions, but after a while we ventured out on our
own, visiting, sometimes, several in the same night. The poor quarter of Morne Marinette in the hilly
northern fringe of Port-au-Prince proved the most profitable region for our purposes, as the peristyles
here are as numerous as chapels in a mining town. Sliding quietly into the back row, we would sit in the
darkness for unnumbered hours, watching the development of the ritual, the evolutions of the dancers,
and the never-failing phenomenon of possession. The terrors of mendicancy that reigned in the street sud-
denly ceased inside these precincts. No kind of financial levy was laid on us in the way of a collection,
but after a while we learned to take half a bottle of rum to contribute to the common supply. In the ex-
citement of the events taking place, the presence of whites seemed to pass unnoticed and we were treated
with indifference or with shy hospitality. At some tonnelles the ceremonies continue for five or six nights
on end, the intervening days passing in a trance of sleep which is cast off at nightfall with the first rever-
berations of the tom-toms.
The adepts, all of whom belong to the poorer working classes, pass an attractively idle and bohemian
life. Army officers, and members of the bourgeoisie in collars and ties, would occasionally appear among