Haitian Tradition, Ritual, and Religion in Breath, Eyes, Memory

May 15, 2003
Last revised April 7, 2004

Recently, the Haitian government announced that vaudou*, a religion that developed among slaves in the Caribbean from West African beliefs and practices, is a religion "in its own right", with the same right as other religions to the government granted authority to perform ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. Vaudou, the dominant religion of Haiti, has always been at odds with Haiti's government, from colonial times into the present. The colonial powers suppressed vaudou because it was a way of resisting slavery. After the slave revolt and subsequent independence of 1804, vaudou continued to be in conflict with Catholicism and Protestantism, despite the eradication of those who brought those religions into Haiti. Vaudou has been a unifier of the Haitian people, but those hungry for power have exploited their unification--some of whom who have gone so far as to suggest that they are lwas in the vaudou pantheon. Vaudou's tumultuous history influences Haiti's present, and what Stuart Hall calls the Caribbean's "hybridized religious universe" is evident in the representation of vaudou figures with Catholic saints, and in the devout practice of Catholicism and vaudou alongside one another, with no conflicting feelings from practitioners.

Edwige Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory explores the importance of spirituality in Haiti, and the spectrum of beliefs in the supernatural that is manifest there. Vaudou has been historically widespread in Haiti, yet its existence has been, with some periods of exception, a subtle underline of Haitian culture and society rather than an immanent presence. Danticat's faint emphasis on elements of the supernatural and the religious in Haitian life reflects the people's nonchalant understanding and the routine of living a life affected by spiritual belief and practice.

Danticat has said that "everything is a metaphor or proverb" in Haiti, so naturally Breath, Eyes, Memory contains many Haitian myths, legends, and folk tales, spoken from the mouths of Haitian women characters. Metaphors are themselves language's magical tools that have the power to transform the actual into a symbol. Religion and the supernatural are components of all fairytales and folklore, and Haiti's tradition of storytelling emphasizes the lwas of vaudou. Mythology, folklore and ritual mesh with the variety of religion, and become part of the "hybrid".

The fairytale of the Tonton Macoute, a scarecrow with human flesh, is one of the many legends that mothers tell their children to "both thrill and terrify them." The real Tonton Macoutes, feared renegade policemen of the dictatorship, haunt the Haitian people through their merciless enforcement of power and unpredictable use of violence. The Macoutes are a reverse metaphor, in that they are the real entity that represents the imagined one; they are named after the bogeyman from children's stories. Their emergence from the stories into reality is a case of a symbol becoming manifest.

Like the Catholic saints immortalized by canonization and the vaudou lwas represented by the images of saints, the Macoutes are interchangeable with and indistinguishable from the monster of the country's collective imagination. Sophie and Martine both suspect that Martine's rapist and Sophie's father was a Macoute. Martine's memory of her rape is something inescapable. She relives it through her dreams every night where violence becomes her own bogeyman. Sophie especially fears the Macoutes, because she is half Macoute herself. She has the blood of a Macoute--both monster and thug--and probably even looks like the one who was her father.

Blood as a symbol of purity and renewal is a recurring image in Danticat's story. Blood is also an important symbol in religion. Sophie recounts the story of the woman from whose unbroken skin blood flowed. She turns to the goddess Erzulie for help. The woman, in order to stop her bleeding, must choose to become a plant or animal, as Erzulie cannot help her unless she commits to change. The woman chooses to become a butterfly, a symbol of the transformed.

In this story, where an extreme transformation follows an intense flow of blood, a woman escapes her torment by undergoing a change of identity, ability, and expectation. Danticat precedes Sophie's use of the pestle to break her hymen with this folk tale. When Sophie destroys her "maidenhood", it is an "act of freedom" from which blood flows heavily, leaving her damaged from her mother's perspective, but free, momentarily, from her own. Similarly, Martine's suicide is a scene where her blood stains white sheets, and her transformation is the most severe of all--from living to deceased. In Sophie's youth Martine sought to protect her from being bloodied by penetration, which would ruin her prospects for a respectable marriage and thereby change her life. It is ironic that Martine ends her own life with a bloody, self-inflicted penetration years after Sophie's self-inflicted wound thrust her into life as an adult.

In both cases, the act of freeing oneself--however destructive the route--requires bloodshed. In Catholicism, it is the blood of Christ that cleanses the spirits of believers. Vaudou has a similar aspect of cleansing through blood, whereby being "washed in blood" and offering "blood sacrifice" are rituals meant to renew. Animal sacrifice releases life, which the lwas may consume. Outside of a religious purpose, Martine offers herself as her own sacrifice by releasing her life. Sophie hopes her own bloodshed will release her from the "tests".

Sophie and Martine both use the vaudou notion of "doubling" to overcome pain in their lives, particularly the pain of being penetrated. Sophie doubles (transports her mind to a more pleasant place with memory and imagination) when she is tested by her mother and, later, when the act of intercourse with her husband becomes a test of its own, of her dutifulness. In another way that Martine's life reflects Sophie's, Martine's trauma causes her to need the practice of doubling as well. Grandmother Ifé explains that the disgrace of a daughter disgraces her mother; in the same tradition of projecting one's experience onto another, it seems, Martine's painful life pains the life of Sophie. Sophie explains doubling in terms of the wicked, political use by would be preternatural, "part flesh, part shadow" leaders, who doubled to enable themselves to "murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives," whereas her own doubling, and her ancestors' long history thereof, is innocent.

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Sophie insists to Grandmother Ifé that one cannot "get used to" the testing, and that it is the most horrible thing that she's ever experienced. Ifé's religious adherence to social rules about purity, chasteness, and familial honor keep her from fully understanding the humiliation Sophie feels, even though Ifé underwent testing herself. The testing has religious significance-a woman's "purity" is important across many cultures and belief systems, where unlike the blood of redemption and salvation, the blood of lost virginity is a stain of sin on an unmarried woman. Sophie sleeps with a statue of Erzulie that Ifé gives her. The statue is a symbol of conflict between the desire for purity and the joy of fertility, as Erzulie is a goddess of nature-which includes growth, fertility and decay-ironically represented by the symbol of holy purity, the Blessed Virgin. Erzulie is a contradiction which all the women of Breath, Eyes, Memory can neither fully understand nor escape.

A large part of vaudou's focus is on the healing of its practitioners. Bloodletting and the use of leeches have their origins elsewhere, but in Tante Atie's present using leeches to suck the blood from the lump in her calf is thought of as a legitimate medical practice as well as a symbolic ritual. "It's only blood, bad blood at that," she tells Sophie. Again, the loss of blood is required to release both physical ailments and spiritual hindrance from "bad blood."

When Sophie seeks psychological help, she turns to a supernatural authority--a Santeria priestess--for therapy. The priestess suggests an exorcism for Martine to release her from the possession-like trauma of her past and her haunting pregnancy. Martine claims the fetus whispers things to her from the womb. The voice of Martine's pregnancy, like her recurring nightmare, is intangible but very real. In the climax of vaudou rituals, participants allow themselves to be "mounted" by the lwas, a desired effect of worship and offering that is like spiritual possession.

However, throughout the novel Martine is presented as a sacrificial figure whose possessions by loneliness, trauma, disease, pregnancy, and a strained relationship with her daughter are anything but desirable. Like Erzulie, Martine is rife with contradictions as enforcer of virginity and sexual, fertile being. Martine is aware of her own conflicting positions which torment her further. To the priestess, Martine's tortures are symptoms of demons. In Haitian folklore, they are a sign that, as the story goes, God has given her "a piece of the sky to carry on her head."

Sophie, too, has her own bit of sky to carry. At the time of Sophie's marriage, she looks forward to moving to a place called "Providence" because she believes in its literal meaning--direction from God. Providence was established hundreds of years ago as a refuge for those persecuted for their religious beliefs, and Sophie's attraction to it stems from her own feelings of persecution caused by her dissention from the religious-like traditions of chastity and "testing". Grandmother Ifé dreams of "Guinea", a symbol for paradise, and Sophie dreams of her own "Guinea" in Providence.

For the people of Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora there is an ever-present spiritual undertone in their lives. The permeating religious experience for Haitians, like all religious experience, is a search for hope through faith, tradition, and ritual. The religious search, however, raises questions and doubts, and exposes contradictions. Breath, Eyes, Memory brings Haiti's rich hybrid of spiritual belief and practice to the page, and represents it authentically in the lives of characters that exist across borders, where in both reality and super-reality, good and evil can never outweigh one another.

*I use the spelling "voudou" instead of "voodoo", "vodon", or other variations for no other reason than because Danticat does.

© 2003.chadofborg@yahoo.com

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