The Haitians

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Before dawn on the first of January, in kitchens from Jacmel to Miami to Montréal, a pot goes on the fire and the smell of it fills the house: giraumon squash cooked to gold, beef and vegetables and a little pasta, cloves and scotch bonnet and lime. The soup is soup joumou, and on this one morning of the year no Haitian household is without it. Under the French it had been a masters’ dish, cooked by the enslaved and forbidden to them. When the colony declared itself free on the first day of 1804 the new Haitians ate the soup they had never been allowed to taste, and they have eaten it every New Year’s Day since — a bowl of independence, ladled once a year, that in 2021 UNESCO added to the heritage of humanity. Down the lane from that kitchen there may stand a small temple, a peristil, where the same family will drum and sing and set out food for the spirits they serve. The doubleness is the point. To be Haitian is to hold two things at once and call them one — Catholic and Vodou, French and Kreyòl, African and American, a bowl of soup and a nation won by war.

A steaming bowl of soup joumou, the golden Haitian squash soup eaten every New Year’s Day. Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

From the belly of the slave ships

The island the Haitians live on was named before they ever came to it. Its first people, the Taíno, called it Ayiti — “land of high mountains” — and within a few decades of Columbus’s landfall in 1492 they were all but gone, worked and killed and sickened into near-extinction by the Spanish. Into that emptied land, and above all into its western third, which France took from Spain and called Saint-Domingue, came the ships. By the late eighteenth century Saint-Domingue was the single richest colony on earth, a machine for turning cane into sugar and coffee and human beings into money, and it ran on a scale of death that demanded constant replacement: the enslaved died faster than they were born, and so more were always bought. Two-thirds of the roughly half a million people held in bondage there on the eve of the Revolution had been born in Africa; many had crossed the Atlantic within the previous five years.

They came from everywhere along the western coast and its interior, and the colony sorted them by their ports of embarkation into what would become the nasyon, the “nations,” of Haitian memory. From the Bight of Benin came the Fon and Ewe of Dahomey — the “Rada,” from the kingdom of Arada, or Allada — and with them the service of the spirits they called vodún, and the whole Dahomean cosmos of paired and ordered powers. From the Yoruba country to the east came the Nago, bearing the worship of the orisha. But the largest single stream, by the end, poured out of West Central Africa, from the ports of the Loango coast and the mouth of the Congo: the Kongo people, the Bakongo and their neighbors, whose cosmology of the crossroads and the water and the bound charge of spirit would mark the new religion as deeply as Dahomey did. Mandingue and Igbo, Kongo and Nago and Rada and dozens more — the enslaved of Saint-Domingue were not one people. They became one.

What they made first was a language. Thrown together with no common tongue, a French master’s vocabulary all around them, they built something that had never existed: Haitian Kreyòl, whose words come largely from the French of seventeenth-century sailors and planters but whose grammar and much of whose bone belong to the Gbe languages of the Fon and Ewe and to Kongo, with Taíno and other traces surfacing in the names of things. Kreyòl is the one tongue every Haitian shares — all of them speak it, where French remains the language of the schooled few — and since the constitution of 1987 it has stood beside French as an official language of the republic, with over ten million speakers at home and millions more abroad. It is the clearest proof of what happened on this soil: not the survival of Africa, and not the adoption of France, but the forging of a third thing that was neither.

Some refused the plantation altogether and fled to the mountains, and the world of those maroons kept alive both a memory of freedom and, some say, the harder edges of the religion taking shape below. But the great majority stayed, and endured, and out of the endurance came a people and a faith that were one and the same.

Sèvi lwa

Above everything is Bondye — from the French Bon Dieu, the Good God — the creator who made the world and then withdrew from it, too vast and too far to be troubled with a single life. One does not petition Bondye directly. One deals instead with the lwa: the served spirits, near and reachable, each with a name and a temperament and a domain, who stand between the living and the remote God much as the saints stand between the faithful and heaven. To be Haitian in the fullest sense is often to sèvi lwa, to serve the spirits, and service is the exact word, for the bond is one of reciprocity — of feeding and being fed, of obligation kept on both sides. It is not sorcery, and it is not the worship of the lwa in the place of God. It is the keeping of a relationship.

The lwa come by mounting. In ceremony — under a roof, around a post, to the sound of drums and of song in Kreyòl and in langaj, the old African ritual speech whose words are half-remembered and wholly sacred — a lwa may descend into the body of a devotee, displacing for a time that person’s gwo bon anj, the greater of the two souls, and speaking and dancing and eating through the borrowed flesh. The one mounted is the chwal, the “horse,” and the spirit rides. To the served community this is not a trance to be explained away but a visit to be received: the lwa has come, in person, to counsel and to heal and to be greeted, and when it withdraws the horse remembers nothing.

Service has a house. The ounfò is the temple, and at its heart is the peristil, a roofed and open-sided court whose center is a single post, the poto mitan. Down that post the lwa descend; it is the axis where the world of the living touches Ginen, the mythic Africa-beneath-the-waters where the spirits and the ancestors dwell, and where Dahomey and Yorubaland and Kongo meet again on Haitian ground. Leading the service are the priests — the oungan, a man, and the manbo, a woman — who carry the ason, the beaded rattle that is the badge of the office. The deepest commitments run through kanzo, the closed initiation: a seclusion in the inner room, the djèvo, and the rite of the lav tèt, the “washing of the head,” that seats a person’s mèt tèt, the master-of-the-head lwa who owns them. Of what passes in the djèvo the tradition does not speak to outsiders, and neither will this account.

Some of the oldest service is not in the temples of the towns but in the great rural lakou, the ancestral compounds where a whole nation of spirits is kept by an extended family and served on a fixed calendar. At Souvenance, near Gonaïves, the Rada lwa of Dahomey are honored each year at Easter; at the nearby Kongo lakou of Soukri the Petwo and Kongo spirits are served in high summer; and every July tens of thousands climb to the waterfall of Saut-d’Eau to bathe where the Virgin — and Ezili — appeared. These are living pilgrimages, kept without interruption, and they are among the places where a Haitian goes to touch Ginen directly.

The lwa fall into nasyon, families, and the families divide along a fault line that is the memory of the Middle Passage itself. The Rada nation is “cool,” dous — righteous, deliberate, ancestral, its spirits carried from Dahomey and Yorubaland, saluted first and served in white. The Petwo nation is “hot,” cho — fast, forceful, born in the New World and drawing above all on Kongo religion, the register of fire and revolt and the harder work of survival. It is on the Petwo side that the Kongo inheritance shows plainest: the Simbi, the spirits of the springs and the marshes and the sweet water; the pwen, the “point,” a charge of spiritual force gathered and bound, which descends from the Kongo nkisi, the empowered object of the homeland; and the zonbi, whose very name comes from the Kikongo nzambi, a spirit of the dead. The zonbi is not the shuffling monster of the films. In the tradition it is a soul captured, or a body emptied of its soul — a thing feared, held at the ethnographic distance where its scholars leave it, and not a spectacle to be paraded.

Two more nations round out the great families: the Gede, the spirits of the dead — ribald, healing, unafraid — led by the top-hatted Bawon Samdi, lord of the cemetery, who decides whether the dead may pass; and the Marasa, the sacred twins, powers of doubling and of childhood, saluted early in every rite.

And every lwa wears a second face. Under a colonial Church that outlawed the African gods and baptized the enslaved by force, the served spirits were kept behind the images of the Catholic saints, and the pairings hardened into a theology Haitians hold to this day — not a confusion of the two, but a double vision in which the saint’s picture and the lwa’s presence occupy a single frame. Papa Legba, keeper of the crossroads and the gate, without whom no other spirit can pass, stands with St. Peter and his keys. Danbala, the white serpent whose arc is the rainbow, is served through St. Patrick among his snakes. Ezili Freda, spirit of love and luxury and inconsolable weeping, is the Mater Dolorosa; the Marasa are the twin saints Cosmas and Damian; Kouzen Azaka, spirit of the peasant and the hoe, is St. Isidore the farmer; and Ogou, the warrior, the fire of iron, the anger of the Revolution, is St. James upon his horse. This is why Haitians say of themselves that their country is ninety percent Catholic and one hundred percent Vodou. Most who serve the lwa also go to Mass, and they see no contradiction; the observers who filed the faith away as a mere African “survival,” or a “syncretism” that muddled two religions together, mistook a living synthesis for a broken thing.

The republic that was punished

The Haitians have been feared and slandered for two centuries for one unforgivable thing: they won.

On the night of the twenty-first to the twenty-second of August 1791 the enslaved of the northern plain rose. Tradition places the spark a few days earlier, in a wooded place called Bwa Kayiman — Bois Caïman — where a gathering led by the oungan Boukman Dutty and the manbo Cécile Fatiman is said to have sealed the insurrection with an oath and a sacrifice. The ceremony is revered as the founding moment of the nation. The historian must nonetheless say plainly that it rests on no surviving firsthand account: the earliest description was written by the colonist Antoine Dalmas and published only in 1814, and scholars from Léon-François Hoffmann onward have argued that much of the received story is legend grown around a real gathering. What followed is not in doubt. Within weeks the great sugar plain of the north was in flames, and the richest colony in the world had begun to consume its own foundations.

The revolt became a revolution and threw up leaders the age had thought impossible. Toussaint Louverture, born enslaved, made himself the master of the colony and the ablest general France had to face; Napoleon’s answer was to seize him by treachery and carry him to a cold cell in the Jura mountains, the Fort de Joux, where he died of hunger and cold on 7 April 1803. The killing of Toussaint did not save the colony. Under Jean-Jacques Dessalines the black army broke the French in the field at Vertières, outside Cap, on 18 November 1803, and on the first day of 1804, at Gonaïves, Dessalines declared the colony independent and gave it back the Taíno name of the whole island — Haiti. It was the second independent state in the Americas, and the only one ever founded by a victorious revolt of the enslaved: the first Black republic in the world.

The Battle at San Domingo, an 1845 painting of the Haitian Revolution by January Suchodolski. January Suchodolski, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The world of slaveholders did not forgive it. France refused for a generation even to concede that Haiti existed, and then, in 1825, conceded it at gunpoint. Charles X sent a squadron under Baron de Mackau — fourteen warships and hundreds of cannon standing off the coast — bearing an ordinance that made recognition conditional on a payment: 150 million francs, to compensate the former slaveholders for the property they had lost, a “property” that included the very people now made to pay for themselves. It was an “independence debt” of roughly three times the young country’s annual output, and though it was cut to 60 million in 1838, Haiti borrowed from French banks to meet it and spent the better part of a century pouring its revenues back across the Atlantic to service the loans. As a 2021 investigation by NPR’s Planet Money, “The Greatest Heist In History,” set out, the ransom for freedom drained the Haitian treasury into the twentieth century, and helped fix the poverty for which Haiti would afterward be blamed.

The punishments kept coming, and each of them found the religion. From 1915 to 1934 the United States occupied Haiti outright, and the occupation — its raids on temples, its confiscated drums — fed a market back home for lurid tales of “voodoo” that in turn justified the boots on the ground. In 1941 and 1942 the Catholic Church, backed for a time by the state, mounted its harshest assault yet on the served spirits: the campaign of the rejete, the “renouncers,” in which peristyles were smashed and sacred trees felled and oaths of renunciation extracted, until urban unrest and the pushback of Haitian ethnologists — Jacques Roumain, founder of the new Bureau of Ethnology — brought it down. Then came the Duvaliers. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, president from 1957 to 1971 and followed by his son Jean-Claude until 1986, had been an ethnographer before he was a tyrant, and he turned the imagery of the faith to terror: he styled himself upon Bawon Samdi, in the dark suit and the top hat and the nasal voice of the lord of the dead, and drew some oungan into the Tonton Makout, the militia that killed for him. This was a theft of the religion’s symbols, not an expression of the religion — Vodou was as much the regime’s victim as its costume — and it has to be read as such.

Through all of it the caricature grew: the pin-stuck doll, the curse, the shuffling zombie of the horror film and the tourist stall, the missionary and evangelical slander that reads the oath at Bwa Kayiman as a “pact with Satan.” None of it is the faith. All of it is appropriation — a way of turning a people who defeated slavery into figures of dread — and both the served community and the scholars who take them seriously now write Vodou, keeping the older spelling “Voodoo” for the distinct Louisiana tradition it properly names and for the stereotype it does not. The religion itself came at last into the open: on 4 April 2003 President Jean-Bertrand Aristide decreed Vodou an official religion of Haiti, its clergy empowered to register baptisms and marriages, its standing as an essential element of national identity written into law.

Then the ground moved. Late on the afternoon of 12 January 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 7.0, its epicenter near Léogâne some twenty-five kilometers west of Port-au-Prince, flattened much of the capital in less than a minute. The Haitian government put the dead at between 220,000 and 316,000; independent studies later argued for a considerably lower toll, and the true figure is disputed and perhaps unknowable — but the catastrophe was vast, and it drove still more Haitians into the diaspora that had been growing for decades. That diaspora — well over a million people of Haitian birth or ancestry in the United States, hundreds of thousands more in the Dominican Republic, and large communities in Canada and France — carries the drums and the soup and the lwa with it, so that Ginen can now be reached from a peristil in Brooklyn as surely as from one in the Artibonite.

Every New Year the soup goes back on the fire. A people who turned the master’s forbidden dish into the taste of their own freedom, and the master’s forbidden gods into the spirits of a nation, has never much needed the world’s permission to know what it is.

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