Cherel Ito
Forfatter af Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
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- 1
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- 404
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- #60,140
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What she found in Haiti was what a lot of her bright, restless, arty friends in the US were looking for – a complete, ‘authentic’ spiritual system, unburdened by the baggage of Western religion, and one that put physical movement and personal contact with the divine at the heart of the spiritual process. Her project thus shifted from being about dance to being about her integration into vodou society.
If Divine Horsemen had been written today, it would be written as a ‘personal journey’, undoubtedly with one of those enormous subtitles that the American publishing industry loves so much, like Divine Horsemen: How I Uncovered the Secrets of Voodoo, Met God, and Learned to Love My Inner Zombie. Instead, what we get is something – ironically – altogether more dispassionate, a meticulous description of a religious practice and its associated worldview. Though Deren clearly participated in a lot of vodou ceremonies over many years, the first-person pronouns are refreshingly rare, and she limits herself to talking about the religion per se rather than how she was drawn into it.
The one exception to this is her account of when she was mounted by a lwa – that is to say, when she was possessed by one of the vodou deities. It's an extraordinary passage, and Deren wisely withholds it to the final section, by which time she has set up the overarching philosophy so well that the reader is ready to accept what she is saying (even if, like me, you are inclined to interpret the experience in psychosomatic terms).
Other moments are harder for Deren or her reader to explain. At one point, Ghede, a spirit of death and misrule, possesses a mambo (roughly, a priestess) during a ceremony to heal a seriously ill child. Deren relates the following exotic incident (male pronouns are used when a male lwa is inhabiting a body):
He took the blood of the goat and, undressing the child, anointed her with it. Then, singing fervently, he reached down between his legs and brought forth, in his cupped palm, a handful of fluid with which he washed the child. It was not urine. And though it would seem impossible that this should be so, since it was a female body which he had possessed, it was a seminal ejaculation. Again and again he gave of that life fluid, and bathed the child with it, while the mambos and hounsis sang and wept with gratitude for this ultimate gesture.
The child survived. Moments like this make you aware of the extraordinary flexibility with which vodou can endow gender: there are also regular sacred marriages, for example, between a woman and a male lwa who, during the service, happens to be mounted in a female body.
But such bizarreries aside, Deren's real value is in elucidating the more everyday aspects of practising vodou – the physicality of it, the centrality of rhythmic movement and the deep spirituality that can be induced through repetitive dance; she is very sensitive to these matters, and makes several perceptive comparisons to the different moods brought about by dancing a waltz rather than a rumba.
By the time she left Haiti, Deren had, during some quick but productive trips home, picked up husband number three, who would eventually edit the rushes of her Haitian trip together into the film of Divine Horsemen (1985), which was released more than twenty years after Deren's death. She was a remarkable person and this is a remarkable book – creative, self-effacing, generous, full of something that feels a lot like wisdom.… (mere)