Haiti's story is one of improbabilities and imponderables. Strategically located in global history at the flashpoint of modernity, this tiny island nation has long had an outsized impact, a staggering load of troubles, and an incomparable capacity for cultural production. Kate Ramsey's book is not about dance, per se, but the truth that there is no understanding Haitian dance without understanding Haitian lwa, which is to say, Haitian dancing is inevitably tied to both Haitian spirits and Haitian law. “Lwa” in Kreyol is a word whose meaning is double: both law and spirit are encompassed in this term, and both are mutually implicated whenever one of them is invoked. To serve the spirits in Haiti is to be vodouizan, a participant in the world and worldview of Vodou. As Ramsey deftly demonstrates, a great deal of Haitian law has been, either overtly or covertly, tied up with an attempt to regulate or eliminate Vodou; simultaneously, government, through the law, has often utilized Vodou imagery and invocation to its own purposes. Ramsey's research, which is stunning, draws upon an exhaustive survey of colonial documents. Her work is made poignant in light of the damage done to the national archives in the 2010 earthquake that savaged the Port au Prince area and killed nearly a quarter million people; it is likely that much of the material she consulted is now lost.
Since the colonial era, Vodou has been positioned as an unparalleled symbol of primitivity and backwardness. That tired trope, it seems, cannot be put to rest, and continues to roam the landscape of popular discourse like a zombie. For example, in a New York Times op-ed piece written in the aftermath of the earthquake, columnist David Brooks blamed Haiti's ongoing ills specifically on the persistence of “Voodoo” (Reference Brooks2010). Ramsey counters such claims, showing with precision and power how Haiti's panoply of problems has arisen not from Vodou, but from global politics and pressures: France, which demanded a king's ransom from the newly independent nation, blamed Haitian poverty not on its own avariciousness but on Vodou. Similarly, under the nineteen-year-long U.S. Occupation (1915–1934), Vodou was consistently invoked as a justification for military intervention, and the grotesque violence visited upon rebels was explained as a necessary response to native barbarity (142) (such violence included the public display of the bodies of rebel leaders). It is worth noting that Ramsey, herself, was instrumental in intervening in the ongoing process of denigration of Haitian religious belief. She helped lead the now successful effort to convince the Library of Congress to eliminate the term “Voodooism” as a reference to Haitian religious practice. Thanks largely to her efforts, the current preferred usage is now officially “Vodou,” which more closely reflects Kreyol orthography and pronunciation; in addition the word Vodou carries something of a different ideological load than the former term.
Haiti has never been a land of Cartesian dichotomies; just as lwa is both spirit and law, dance is both belief and body. To serve the lwa is to sing and to dance. Dancing, for its part, is a form of worship. Vodou itself is multiple and diverse (7), and while Euro-American analysis tends to identify Vodou as a discrete and consistent thing, in practice this is not so. Moreover, as Ramsey writes, Euro-American concepts of “voodoo” do not conform to Haitian distinctions between such practices as drumming, herbal healing, and spiritual engagement: “In Haiti the word Vodou has traditionally referred to a particular mode of dance and drumming, and has generally not been figured as an inclusive term for the entire range of spiritual and healing practices undertaken with extended families and through relationships with male and female religious leaders, called, respectively, oungan and manmbo” (7). This slippage is demonstrated throughout Ramsey's analysis in the ways that, under successive legal and governmental regimes, dance and dancing could be figured as either innocent or dangerous.
Colonial and imperialist powers both did and did not understand the meaning of dance for Haitians and for Vodouizan. The inseparability of dance and Vodou ensured that surveillance of dance and surveillance of Vodou were, essentially, the same thing. On the other hand, not all dance was an instance of Vodou practice. For the occupation, distinguishing between Vodou and non-Vodou dance was practically impossible. Much of the time that Vodou was under surveillance or outright ban, dance events were approved, sometimes overtly and sometimes on the sly. Such approval, then, was a form of implicit approval of religious practice, particularly when such approval served other political ends. For example, under the U.S. Occupation, a system of local policing emerged that appears to have worked hand-in-hand with Vodouizan. In exchange for serving informally as detectives, a cadre of men was allowed to hold cockfights and “dances,” which were most certainly Vodou ceremonies (152). Ramsey's analysis emphasizes the degree to which outlawing les sortilèges or les pratiques supersitieuses was never simple or clear. Because neither term specifically identified its object, many Vodou practices were able to persist. Moreover, as Ramsey shows, throughout the more than 150 years that some element of Vodou practice was under legal purview, enforcement of these laws seems to have required at least some measure of popular consent and support. This consent, for its part, often served specific social agendas, such as when individuals identified as lougawou (from the French loup garou, werewolf; lougawou are supernatural night creatures) were denounced to the Marines, who found themselves in the odd position of having to pursue sorcerers whose existence, from the U.S. point of view, was mere superstition.
Serving the lwa through singing and dancing are acts that have long both implicated and called forth the force of law, in sometimes violent form. Ramsey notes that throughout the American Occupation, there was a “counternarrative of the marines' repression of popular religious practice, in which the lwa are consistently ascendant over the law” (156). Here, in response to American attempts to destroy and restrict Vodou, Haitians could assert that the lwa (as spirit) were in fact more powerful than the lwa (as law), rejecting the legitimacy of laws that had no right to impose upon spiritual practice. Perhaps more importantly, this counternarrative involved the “paradoxical tendency [of these laws] to affirm what they ban” (255), a kind of double negation through which the relevance of Vodou and popular belief were continually asserted: if U.S. laws sought to absolutely deny the lwa, they simultaneously had to recognize the lwa in order to police them. Thus, the occupation found itself locked in a conflict in which it policed that which it claimed did not exist at all.
With the end of the U.S. Occupation, Haiti moved into a period of intense nation building, in which the development and showcasing of national culture was central. Dance comes to the fore most directly in the book's final chapter, which examines the emergence of the Mouvement Folklorique in Haiti. With folklore so deeply tied to Vodou in the country, the emergence of folkloric performance was especially complex. Ramsey argues that the beginnings of an emergent folkloric performance can be linked to the establishment of an indigeniste and nationalist approach to folklore, championed most powerfully by Jean Price-Mars, author of the classic Ainsi Parla L'Oncle (Price-Mars Reference Price-Mars1973). In an ironic—and typically Haitian—twist, this indigeniste upsurge was strangely fuelled by President Stenio Vincent's décret loi of 1935, which, in legislating against practiques superstitieuses, simultaneously opened the way for popular dance to become legitimized (182). The 1935 décret loi made it possible to stage popular dance as a way to celebrate, rather than denigrate, Haitian culture. However, while the law attempted to define where dance ended and Vodou began, in practice such distinctions were virtually meaningless. Stagings of dance (and Vodou) as culture took place in complex ways. Ramsey demonstrates how the Vodou services witnessed by Melville Herskovits during his fieldwork in 1934 were, to a great degree, ethnographic performances allowed precisely because they were legitimized by the ethnographic gaze. The ceremonies had previously been denied a permit by the local authorities; Herskovits intervened and the ceremony went ahead, lasting four days (220–1). Were these, then, “real” Vodou ceremonies, or a kind of museum-like enactment of the real thing? How would one even make such a determination? Ramsey keenly observes that in the book resulting from this work, Life in a Haitian Valley (Reference Herskovits1964), Herskovits makes no mention of his role in how those ceremonies came to be. Yet from a contemporary perspective, Herskovits's own role in making the ceremonies happen seems crucial.
Beginning in the 1940s, Ramsey shows that dance, culture, and Vodou became increasingly important media through which Haiti sought to establish national and international legitimacy. At this time, the Bureau d'Ethnologie was established, and “the staging of ritual came to have a formalized place in Haitian ethnographic research and pedagogy” (222). Dancer Jean-Léon Destiné recalled that students at the Bureau learned from books, but also from watching demonstrations of dances and drumming by practitioners—yet another way in which Vodou came to be staged in the service of ethnography (222). Destiné went on to become the founder of Haiti's national ballet and one of the country's best-known folklore performers. Destiné's career began with his involvement in a group directed by Lina Fussman-Mathon. This group would go on to do a groundbreaking performance at the Eighth Annual National Folk Festival in Washington, DC, in 1941. For Caribbean and African nations, the establishment of folklore companies has long been an assertion of both nationhood and modernity. The inclusion of the Fussman-Mathon group in a major national festival in the U.S. was a testament to Haiti's emergence as an independent nation in relation to the U.S.; that the performance featured Vodou songs and dances was an assertion that Vodou and dance could properly represent Haiti before such audiences, demonstrating Haiti's richness (and, not incidentally, its attractiveness as a leisure destination) rather than its backwardness.
As Ramsey recounts, Fussman-Mathon's group performed traditional dances and songs, but with choreographed flourishes and adjustments that were carefully calculated to appeal to both Haitian elites and international audiences. On the one hand, such performances could be seen as commercialized or diluted; on the other, they could be seen as a surface capitulation to oppressive forces that nevertheless asserted Haitian identity. This two-sidedness, Ramsey reminds us, mirrors processes that had been taking place for centuries with regard to the perpetuation of the lwa in the face of the law. Certainly, Fussman-Mathon was criticized by those who advocated what they viewed as more “authentic” presentations of Haitian dance and music.
Meanwhile, at home in Haiti, the Rex Theater was a key site of cultural negotiation and theatrical performances. Katherine Dunham had presented a short program there in 1936. Her original intention had been to include people from the community in which she had done fieldwork, but instead she was asked to dance solo. Nevertheless, this performance was the first time that Vodou dance had been publicly performed on the Haitian stage. Ramsey's careful research on this point emphasizes that it was likely important and even necessary that the first foray in this vein was made by an American rather than a Haitian artist.
By 1941 the ground had been prepared enough that Clement Benoit, another folklore artist, was able to stage a theatricalized version of ceremonial sacrifice along with Vodou dances performed by Vodouizan who had until then remained sidelined as consultants to the performers. With Vodou dance now clearly acceptable as an emblem of authentic Haitian culture, the issue was primarily whether the depiction of the sacrifice denigrated proper ceremony, and whether it was appropriate for the theatrical setting in which art, rather than literal presentation, is the goal (241). Ramsey discusses this performance as a particularly powerful and complex challenge to the embedded contradictions of the 1935 law against practiques superstitieuses, which at that time remained in effect. Although these practices were illegal, “the state proclaimed folklore performance as an official national sign” (242). With the theatrical presentation of forms of ritual and dance, the state could hardly castigate artists for contravening the law.
Recent events have made reading and writing about Ramsey's book particularly poignant for me. Destiné died suddenly and unexpectedly early in 2013, and I found myself the bearer of this sad news to Kate Ramsey. He was an extraordinary man who had an extraordinary life, and I hope that Dr. Ramsey will write more of what she knows about him, as her friendship with him was both long and deep. More recently, I was in Haiti to conduct research of my own. Although I had heard that the Rex Theater had been destroyed in the earthquake, seeing the ruins of that theater at the edge of the Champs de Mars was unbearably sad. It will not be rebuilt. Not far from the Rex lies an empty lot where the Bureau d'Ethnologie was located. Nearly everything it contained has been lost.
Despite the devastation, Haiti, and with it Vodou and Haitian folkloric dance, remain as persistent as ever. In the days when the Bureau d'Ethnologie was established, many feared that ethnology in Haiti, particularly with regard to Vodou, was a salvage operation. Common knowledge at the time was that Vodou was destined to die out, much as early U.S. ethnographers feared the total extermination of Native American cultures. Today Haitian folkloric dance has strong centers in Miami, New York, Boston, and San Francisco, among other cities. In Haiti, dancing continues to flourish—in dance studios, in homes, fields, and religious spaces throughout the nation. In her book, Ramsey shows a keen passion for the rights of Haitians to live and dance as they wish, to embody their spirits as they will. Her profound respect for and deep solidarity with Haiti resonates through every sentence and chapter. As Haiti continues to recover from the earthquake, and continues to recover from the many failures of the international response to that earthquake, Ramsey's history reminds us (yet again) that Vodou has not held Haiti back: it is the very force that has allowed Haiti and Haitians to survive through the most terrifying disasters again and again. “Ayi Bobo!” is a Kreyol exclamation of approval and delight. A hearty Ayi Bobo! to Ramsey for this excellent book.
