Night of the Dancing Dead

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Voodoo Day of the Dead celebrations in a cemetery in Port au Prince, Haiti.

It is nearing midnight, and we are driving down narrow streets as potholed and bumpy as the back roads of rural Canada after winter.

"This must be it," our driver and Creole interpreter, Sebastian Petion, murmurs as he peers out the window of the four-by-four.

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A skull in a cemetery in Port au Prince, Haiti. (CANWEST NEWS SERVICE)

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(CANWEST NEWS SERVICE)

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Voodoo possession ceremony with male priest and female priestesses during Voodoo Day of the Dead celebrations in Port au Prince, Haiti. (CANWEST NEWS SERVICE)

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A man wears the ritual colour purple and paints his face white to honour the Ghede, the family of spirits that rules over death and fertility. (CANWEST NEWS SERVICE)

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Haitians stream into the cemetery, which is laid out like a small, overpopulated city, with narrow paved streets. (CANWEST NEWS SERVICE)

We are deep in the heart of Carrefour, a slum in Port-au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti. Today is Jour des Morts, or Day of the Dead, and we are here to attend a vodoun, or voodoo, possession ceremony.

Jour des Morts is when the Ghede, the family of spirits that rule over death and fertility, make a pilgrimage to the corporeal world, lured by voodoo priests and priestesses, music and fetishes.

We disembark in total blackness — electricity is a rare commodity in Haiti. In the distance, a sickly green light, created by a chugging generator, emanates from a low-slung concrete structure that is normally used for cockfighting.

Inside, about 150 people cram on one side of a makeshift stage: heavy twine wound around thin, crooked posts driven into the uneven dirt floor. The ceiling is festooned with flashy bunting, which hangs alongside crudely drawn cut-outs of the male phallus. Thirteen mambos, or female priestesses, pace about the tiny corral. They are clad in long purple dresses or skirts, their heads covered in tight black scarves, the favoured colours of the Ghede.

One mambo carries a five-gallon glass jug of dark rum with pale habanero peppers floating at the bottom like dead fish. A bulky, round-faced male priest, called a houngan, dressed in a black T-shirt decorated with a stylized white skull, intermixes with the women. Some of the mambos light cigarettes, another way to lure the Ghede, says Haitian journalist Chenald Augustin, the local Le Matin voodoo reporter, who explained the proceedings in his native Creole as the ceremony progressed.

Jour des Morts is a two-day national holiday that begins Nov. 2 in the small Caribbean nation. It is a rum-fuelled homage to the ethereal world, with possession rituals that take place not only at midnight but at cemeteries all over the country. Fallaciously portrayed by Hollywood as an evil zombie cult, voodoo became an official religion in 2003 in Haiti. Catholicism — the official religion in Haiti since colonialism — and voodoo have borrowed extensively from each other, and the crucifixion of Christ is a common image during Jour des Morts.

In the makeshift stage area with the mambos are a handful of musicians, with tarnished trumpets or worn, wooden congas, the animal-skin drumheads lashed down tightly with twine. The music must be highly evocative for the Ghede to deign to appear. The drumming begins, pounding and intense. It increases in tempo and volume, yet never loses its melodic overtone. The drumbeats are absorbed by the body like oxygen, and hair sparkles with beads of sweat, which run down the back and saturate clothes in the stifling heat. The mambos sing, a meditative, rhythmic chanting. When I glance at my watch, I am startled to see that 45 minutes have slipped away.

But the mambos are becoming impatient, and they chastise the drummers, blaming them for the Ghede’s failure to appear. The mambos splash rum in front of the drums and chant louder while the musicians increase the pounding. Suddenly, one mambo jerks and flies forward as if she has been pushed. She flies backwards, then falls forward once more, like a puppet controlled by a sadistic puppeteer. Her face has gone blank, and the invisible assailant throws her into the other mambos. They encircle her and throw her back and forth like a ball, their faces full of glee.

The Ghede have arrived at last.

The mambo spins, nearly falls and is caught by another woman whose expression, too, suddenly glazes over. A Ghede has passed into her and she spins and crashes into the others. The madcap dance, called banda, intensifies as Ghede take over more and more mambos, until all are falling into one another in an ecstasy of possession.

The spectators scream with laughter, clap and sing salacious songs that my interpreter primly refuses to translate into English. The ultimate gesture to the Ghede occurs when the mambos, as they feel the spirit leave their bodies, hoist the jug of rum and pour it over their heads. They catch several of the habanero peppers as they fall out of the jug, and shove them up their skirts. It is this heat, explains Augustin, which the Ghede crave, and it is the mambos’ final gift of surrender in this stylized enactment of sexual ecstasy.

Incredulous, I inquire why the mambos aren’t in agony from the habaneros. These chili peppers contain capisum, the main ingredient in pepper spray. The possession, Augustin says, leaves the mambos impervious to pain. Indeed, none of the mambos show signs of discomfort, just sated expressions on their sweat-streaked faces.

A polytheistic religion, voodoo was brought to Haiti in the 18th century by West African slaves who enriched France’s economy by toiling in the sugar cane, tobacco and coffee fields. Jour des Morts is not only an opportunity for Haitians to laugh, sing and dance, but also allows them to engage directly with the Ghede speaking through a hounsis, the Creole word for someone possessed. Ghede are believed to have the power to tell your future and lift voodoo curses; however, the predictions of these capricious tricksters cannot be trusted.

The most prominent Ghede is Baron Samedi, a salacious rogue, smoker and rum drinker. Baron Samedi, who has the special role of escorting souls from the grave to the underworld, has influence over life and death, sickness and health. The presence of the Ghede reminds Haitians how tentative life is yet reaffirms the life force. Haiti’s maternal and infant and child death rates are the highest in the Western Hemisphere, according to UNICEF, and the country is gripped by poverty and violence. As I peer at the fetishes — the rum, the cigarettes, the purple and black garb and the hanging phalluses — it becomes clear that this celebration of death helps control the fear of death; it is a way to create order out of disorder.

Possessions are not just midnight affairs. At the four-hectare National Cemetery in Port-au-Prince’s Petionville district, Jour des Morts starts shortly after sunrise and continues through the day. Women and men stream into the cemetery, which is laid out like a small, overpopulated city, with narrow paved walkways dividing family mausoleums that maintain a genteel dignity despite advanced states of disrepair and disintegration.

It becomes obvious that most people are here simply to enjoy the carnival atmosphere. For the men, it is an excuse to drink too much rum and make lewd comments to women. To honour the Ghede, people have whitened their faces with chalk, imitating the pale mask of death. Many are in purple, while others have stuffed their nostrils with cotton, as is the custom when preparing a corpse for burial.

A brown mottled skull, minus its lower jaw, stares blankly out onto the revelry from its lofty look out on top of a mausoleum, and I can’t help thinking that it, too, is enjoying the celebrations.

Daylight doesn’t diminish the physical drama of being possessed by the Ghede. Two young men are in the throes of possession, heads jerking back and forth like fighting cocks, circling, then crashing into one another, impervious to injury. We push through the crowd and another possessed man, limbs jerking, eyes blank in his face, comes flying towards me. I can’t get out of his way, and steel myself for a crash. To my relief, he ducks at the last second, avoiding impact. The spectators seated high on surrounding mausoleums shake with laughter at the mixed look of horror and relief on my face.

The line between life and death is smudged within voodoo, and it is here at the National Cemetery that I can question people about zombies, a Haitian phenomenon that renowned anthropologist Wade Davis wrote about in his seminal book on voodoo, The Serpent And The Rainbow.

Voodoo is not only a religion but a way of life. Voodoo priests and priestesses have a vast pharmacological store of knowledge passed down from their West African ancestors on the healing and poisonous properties of plants and herbs. Davis concluded that zombies — people in a trancelike state that inspired the term "living dead" — could be explained by tetrodotoxin poisoning, a deadly nerve toxin derived from the puffer fish.

But, to some Haitians, zombies are a reality that cannot be explained away by scientific reasoning. Elmond Chery is a security guard at the National Cemetery, and I speak to him in the cemetery’s main office. Chery is convinced he has seen zombies during his past two years as a guard, one or two every few weeks, he says. They "terrify" him, he admits through my interpreter. It is important, Chery says, that they don’t see you, because "they were people who had very bad hearts, so the family has turned them into zombies."

However, he is unable to say what might happen to someone who encounters a zombie.

Any religion, be it monotheistic like Christianity or polytheistic like voodoo, has inexplicable elements of magic and superstition that, by the "gift of faith," become real to followers. What is common among these religions is that they exist to confront humankind’s eternal questions: What happens after death, where did we come from, and why are we here?

Jour des Morts, despite its grim subject, is a time to celebrate with joy and laughter the act of being alive, as well as being a ceremony that helps make sense of these deep, enduring questions.

— Canwest News Service

Haiti not  always friendly, but fascinating

The national holiday, Jour des Morts, is a time for Haitians to immerse themselves in the spiritual and magical and forget, if only for a short time, the banal misery of day-to-day life.

Last fall when my photographer and I were in Haiti, the country was relatively quiet following food riots earlier in the year. Kidnappings, which one Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) worker referred to as "Haiti's national sport," were also down.

Still, a journey into a Port-au-Prince slum at night to see a voodoo ceremony is considered dodgy. But we didn't want to miss something that few foreigners had seen, and trusted to the street smarts of our hired driver and interpreter, Sebastian Petion, to get us there and back in one piece.

When we arrived at the designated building there was no sign of life. Petion called over two children who were playing in the dirt streets. The place was shut down, the youngsters told Petion, because there had been a gang fight last week and many people had died. They waved vaguely in the direction of the new location of the possession ceremony and off we drove. Petion did find the building, which is normally used for cockfighting, and we spent several hours at the event, driving back to our hotel about 2 a.m. along deserted streets.

Haiti's poverty and political unrest have prevented the development of a tourism sector. There are places in Haiti that are magnificent: It has teeming coral reefs and there are a few hotels along the coastline that lead to the Citadelle Laferrière fortress. This UNESCO World Heritage Site was built in the early 1800s by rebel slaves to thwart a possible attack by sea from French slave masters.

However, Haiti's once-great beauty is marred by ecological devastation: less than two per cent of the country's glorious stands of mahogany remain and the torrential late-summer and autumn rains, unencumbered by trees, regularly flood the coastal cities.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 7, 2009 E6