Souvenance

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By the Friday before Easter the road north out of Gonaïves fills with people walking. They come on foot and in the beds of the tap-taps, in white headscarves and white dresses, past the dry Artibonite scrub toward a settlement whose name, in Kreyòl, means remembrance. Inside the compound the old mapou trees throw their shade across a swept earthen floor, and under the roof of the peristyle the drummers have already taken their places. One of them raises two heavy sticks and brings them down on the Katabou, the lowest and deepest of the Rada drums, and the beat that answers is slow — slower than the drums of the capital, older than the road anyone walked to get here. It is Good Friday. The service opening now will run about a week, and before it ends it will draw thousands. What is kept at Souvenance is a memory, carried across an ocean and set down here whole: the drums of Dahomey, its songs, its ritual language, and its spirits, still served on the day the Christian world keeps its own.

A Rara musician with his drum in Haiti; Rara bands walk the Lenten roads toward the sacred lakou. DEMA Jay-Huss, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The lakou that keeps the name

Souvenance — Kreyòl Souvnans — is a lakou: an extended-family compound, the rural social form that the enslaved and their descendants rebuilt in Haiti on a West African model, a cluster of houses and small temples gathered around a common sacred ground and held by a lineage across generations. It sits in the settlement of the same name in the plain of the Artibonite, roughly eleven kilometers north of the port city of Gonaïves — northeast of the town, not south of it, a point the gazetteers fix near 19.48° north and 72.62° west. It is not a museum and not a monument. It is a living village and the temple at its heart, and the two cannot be pulled apart.

The documentary record dates the founding to 1815, and in 2015 the lakou kept its own bicentenary. Oral tradition reaches back further and lays the origin at the feet of one man: Jean-Baptiste Bois, called with affection Papa Bois, remembered as a founder who established a spiritual refuge in the first years after independence — in one telling a Dahomean freed from a captured slave ship put in on the nearby coast, in another a man who withdrew into the plain in the years of the great insurrection that began in 1791. The two dates, the revolt and the deed, are held together in memory rather than reconciled, and the tradition does not pretend otherwise. From Papa Bois the leadership descends by blood. On the earthly plane the lakou is directed by a grand serviteur, a “chief servant” of the Bois line who carries the ritual authority of the house; but the true masters of the compound, in the reckoning of the place, are the lwa themselves, and the serviteur serves them as much as he governs anyone.

What the Bois line has guarded for two centuries is a rite. Haitian Vodou sorts its spirits into nanchon, “nations,” and the nations reduce in practice to two great rites, the cool and the hot. Souvenance is the preeminent Haitian house of the cool one: the Rada rite, whose name almost certainly descends from Allada (Arada), a town of the old kingdom of Dahomey in what is now Benin. Rada is the dous register — the word means sweet, and the spirits it serves are the sweet-tempered, familial, ancestral lwa who came out of the Bight of Benin, saluted first and served with white and with water. Here that inheritance is not an abstraction reconstructed by scholars. It is a working liturgy: the Fon-Dahomean drums, the songs, the dances, and the sacred speech of the eighteenth-century crossing, preserved at Souvenance in a form as close to unbroken as anything in the Haitian religion. The continental root is a subject in its own right — the Fon and Ewe vodun of Legba and Dan the serpent and the creator pair Mawu-Lisa (see West African Vodun, the Fon, and Fon cosmology and Mawu-Lisa) — and Souvenance is where that root breaks the Haitian surface and is called Rada.

Map of the Gonaïves arrondissement in the Artibonite department of Haiti, where the three great sacred lakou stand. Own workbased on work by User:Rarelibra, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

That it stands where it does is itself a map of the religion’s genealogy. Souvenance is one of three great sacred lakou clustered around Gonaïves, the “sacred trinity” that a survey by The Haitian Times describes as a single spiritual and historical inheritance divided three ways. Souvenance keeps the Dahomean Rada. A short way off, Lakou Soukri Danache keeps the Kongo rite, its own great pilgrimage falling not at Easter but in August (see Lakou Soukri) — the Central African world of the Kongo, whose cosmology of the crossed water-line (see Bakongo cosmology and the dikenga) and whose old Atlantic kingdoms (see the kingdom of Loango) fed the “hot” Petwo rite that Souvenance is not. A third, Lakou Badjo, at the northern edge of the town, keeps the Nago rite of the Yoruba, the orisha religion transplanted, from which the iron spirit Ogou comes. Three African religious worlds — Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba — set down within a few kilometers of one another and kept apart on purpose, each in its own compound, each with its own drums and its own season. To stand in the plain outside Gonaïves is to stand inside the anatomy of Haitian Vodou.

A week in white

The great service opens on Good Friday and runs, in the fullest observance, through the following Friday — a week of prayer, song, dance, sacrifice, purification, and the descent of the spirits, timed to the deepest days of the Christian calendar and answering them with a liturgy of its own. According to the Institut de Pluralisme et de l’Imaginaire Haïtien, the first afternoon is given over to receiving the Rara bands — the roving Lenten processions of drums, bamboo trumpets, and dancers that walk the Haitian countryside through Holy Week, and for whom Souvenance is a chief destination on the roads. Through the days that follow the pilgrims, many robed in white, keep the round of the rite; a Tuesday is devoted to the dance of the asòtò, the tall sacred drum of the Dahomean tradition that is at once an instrument, a means of speaking with the spirits, and a spirit in its own right. Thousands come, from across Haiti and from the diaspora that returns for the week, and the gathering is often named the largest of its kind in the country.

Devotion at Souvenance has its fixed places. There is the peristyle, the roofed ceremonial ground where the drumming and the dancing turn around the center post through which the spirits come down. There are the sacred mapou trees, the great silk-cotton giants that in this religion are dwellings of the lwa and not merely shade. And there is a sacred basin, Basen Athiassou, the pool whose water serves the purifications that run through the week — the ritual bath that opens a body to what is coming. To move among these is to move through a made cosmos: the trees, the water, the swept ground, the post at the center, each a station where the far side of the world touches this one.

The music is the argument of the place, and it is unmistakably Rada. The drummer and scholar Markus Schwartz, describing the Souvenance repertoire, notes that its rhythms — carried on names such as Akbadja, Wanndjale, Agoni, and Kavalyè Hountò — run at a slower pace than the drumming of other regions, and that the drums themselves are pitched deeper than the Rada drums of Port-au-Prince. The lowest of the three, the Katabou, is struck with two heavy sticks and lays down the off-beats beneath the whole, a bottom so low it seems to come out of the ground. This is the “cool” that dous names, made audible: a Dahomean pulse deliberately unhurried, the sonic opposite of the fast, driving heat of the southern Petwo rite. The slowness is not a lack. It is the temperature of the ancestors.

The spirits it calls are the Rada lwa, the sweet-tempered nation. First among them, opening every service because nothing passes without him, is Legba, the old man at the gate of the crossroads who unlocks the way between the living and the world of the spirits (see Papa Legba). There is Danbala Wèdo, the white serpent whose arc is the rainbow, and his wife Ayida Wèdo, served with the immaculate white the Rada rite prizes (see Damballa). There is Ezili, the whole force of love and grief and wrath (see Erzulie); and the Nago Ogou, the fire of iron whose anger armed the Revolution, served here in the Dahomean house though his root is Yoruba (see Ogou). They are not the “hot” Petwo spirits of the Kongo-derived rite that governs the southern country and the neighboring lakou at Soukri; they are the cool ancestral lwa of Ginen, the mythic African homeland toward which the tradition orients its whole moral life.

When one of them arrives, it arrives in a person. In the round of drum and song and counterclockwise dance a lwa may mount a devotee, who becomes for the duration the spirit’s chwal, its “horse” — the human body given over so the spirit can speak, move, embrace, and warn among the living. It is the central event of the service and the plainest proof of the religion’s claim: that the far world is not distant but near, and can be made present in an afternoon. And through all of it the lwa are served alongside the Catholic saints, not confused with them and not disguised as them, but held together in one faith — the day chosen for the great service is Easter itself, and the choosing is not concealment but a statement of how completely the two calendars have become one. This is a living religion holding two inheritances at once, as it has for three centuries. It is not a survival and not a confusion; it is a faith.

The deeper machinery of that faith is not on public display, and it is right to name only its outline. Vodou has its closed initiations — the kanzo grades by which one is consecrated, the lav tèt or “head-washing” that begins the making of a priest — and these belong to the initiated of the house and are described here only at the distance the tradition and its scholars keep, never as instruction. What a pilgrim sees at Souvenance in Holy Week is the public face of a religion that also has a private one, and the private one is not for the page.

The intact grove

Souvenance’s endurance carries a weight that only Haitian history can explain. The religion kept in this compound has spent much of its life under attack, and the fact that these particular drums and these particular trees are still standing is not neutral.

The gravest of the assaults came within living memory. Between 1939 and 1942, cresting in 1941 and 1942 under President Élie Lescot and led by the Roman Catholic Church, Haiti mounted the campagne de rejeté — the anti-superstition campaign, an “operation of cleansing” that pressed the faithful to swear oaths renouncing the service of the spirits and that put temples, drums, sacred flags, and sacred trees to the fire across the country. As the historian Kate Ramsey documents in her account of the campaign, ounfò were destroyed and ritual objects burned in autos-da-fé until the campaign collapsed amid urban unrest after it reached Port-au-Prince, denounced by Haitian ethnologists among them Jacques Roumain. Set that against the standing grove and unbroken peristyle of Souvenance, the intact Rada drums and the living mapou, and the survival stops being picturesque. In a country where the state and the church once set out to burn exactly this, a lakou that kept its trees is a lakou that kept its ground.

There is an older slander to name and refuse, though it belongs in full to the story of the Haitians: the “voodoo” of the pin-stuck doll and the horror film, an image built up during the United States occupation and sold back to the world as though it were the faith of a living people. It is not. Souvenance, where a Dahomean drum has kept a slow and dignified time for two hundred years, is the standing refutation of the caricature, needing no argument beyond its own existence.

What the wider culture now sees in it is closer to the truth. The lakou is celebrated as a patrimony of Haitian culture, a bastion of the African memory that the enslaved carried across the Middle Passage and that seeded the only large-scale slave revolution to succeed — the war of 1791 to 1804 out of which came, on the first day of 1804, the first Black republic in the world. The oath in the northern wood that is said to have opened that war (see Bwa Kayiman) and the marronage of the Africans who fled the plantations for the hills (see the Maroons) belong to the same current of remembered defiance to which Souvenance’s very name — souvnans, remembrance — is a monument. The land itself had held sacred ground before any of it: the Taíno who called the island Ayiti were gone from the plain by the time the Dahomean drums arrived, but the older Vodou pilgrimages of the modern country, the July climb to the waterfall at Saut-d’Eau among them, share with Souvenance the same insistence that a place can be holy and that the walking to it is part of the worship.

So the week ends as it began, with the drums. When the last of the Rara bands has come and gone and the pilgrims start back down the road to Gonaïves, what they leave behind them in the compound is not a finished event but a kept appointment — one more year in which the Katabou was struck with its two heavy sticks and the spirits of Dahomey were served on their own ground, in their own language, at the slow tempo that is theirs. The name of the place is a verb as much as a noun. Every Easter, under the mapou, Souvenance does the thing it is called: it remembers, out loud, and the remembering is the rite.

→ Related: Papa Legba · Erzulie · Baron Samedi · Damballa · Ogou · Lakou Soukri · Bwa Kayiman · Saut D Eau · The Haitians · The Maroons · The Kongo · West African Vodun · Orisha Religion · Fon Cosmology Mawu Lisa · The Fon · Bakongo Cosmology Dikenga · Taino