I’m going to tell you some stories in honor of Ezili Dantò, the Lwa that is the mother of my house. Her birthday is coming this Wednesday on July 16th, and we’ll be having a small celebration for her and Papa Ogou (whose birthday is on July 25th) on the 24th.
Vodou is complicated. There is a lot to learn. It varies from house to house, from godparent to godparent, from lineage to lineage. As a non-written tradition that is transmitted through conversation, song, ritual, dance, and physical actions, it is highly subject to the “telephone game” effect. It relies on the vagaries of selective memory, interpretation, and dreams. Its resilience is in its flexibility, adaptability, and in a certain sense, its ability to wriggle out of any set definitions. It cannot be communicated all at once, in a book or a blog post. What it IS must be understood collectively, as a whole that encompasses everyone who practices it, everywhere, and in every moment of history. It is kaleidescopic. This is what makes it a living tradition.
The words you see on this screen, when exposed to the Western materialist mindset, have the potential to become dead. You read my blog, and you either take it as the literal truth, or as factually incorrect. I ask you humbly to walk between these worlds and understand that I am telling you stories. A story, though perhaps not literally true, contains truths. It may contain details that are subject to debate between lineages, or that can not be proven to be factually true. But no one can argue that it is not a story.
Dantò is the fierce, urgent force of motherly love, a love that will do anything to protect her children. She will rain nourishing, gentle mists down to soothe their pain. She will send a torrent to drown anyone who threatens their safety. She is towering, all-powerful, all-encompassing, as a mother appears to an infant. She works hard, ceaselessly, for her children, knowing no one else can be relied upon to do it for her. Every day, from the crack of down and deep into the night, she dedicates herself to them. Lovers may come and go, sometimes leaving yet another child to care for in their wake, but the moments of union, pleasure, and vulnerability they provide are ephemeral compared to the physical, practical, essential love of she gives to her children. Though her love for them is unconditional, she will not stand for disrespect, because she is the pillar on which everything rests. She is the cosmic Mother, cosmically creating, cosmically sustaining, cosmically devouring.
Every year in time for July 16th, the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pilgrims from all over Haiti flock to the towering, thundering waterfalls of Saint D’Eau, called Sodo in Kreyol. These waterfalls are sacred to Dantò for their ability to cleanse, nourish, pound, and purify through the power of water. Like her, they are very tall. Like her, they are indiscriminate in their powerful love.
As the single, one and only Mother, Dantò must contain all genders. She is infinitely tough. She loves and defends women who find themselves in the same position, of having to be everything to their children, because they are the only ones who did not opt out. Because of the depth of this love, some say she is a lesbian.
Ezili Dantò’s ferocious, loving, trauma-deepened eyes stare out of the stern face of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, a Polish icon of the Mater Salvatoris. This particular icon returns to black no matter how many times she is scrubbed clean or painted over. Persistently, stubbornly, defiantly black. Her cheek bears two scratches, scratches that reappear no matter how many times they are repaired. Persistently, defiantly battle-scarred. She gestures across her own heart toward the child she holds in her left arm, a serious, small adult who, in turn, gestures toward her face. This is her daughter, Anaïs. They are frozen forever in their exchange of love, and judging by their expressions, the love is no laughing matter; it is not the cloying love one sometimes sees in modern images of virgin and child. It is deeply practical. Each is everything to the other, and that is a matter of survival.
The Polish mercenary soldiers that the French sent to defeat the uprising brought this image of their virgin to San Domingue, and then switched sides and fought alongside the slaves and maroons when they witnessed the horrors of slavery. Since those times, Dantò has been inseparable from this image.
It was Ezili Dantò who killed the black pig at the Vodou ceremony that began the Haitian revolution. She fought alongside her children for freedom and justice, she won Haiti its sovereignty. During the war, the French cut her tongue out for leaking their plans to her people. Now, when she comes down in possession, she can only speak in short, gagged, repetitive sounds, gesticulating with her dagger in a pantomime that her children must interpret.
The Creole black pig, a staple of Haiti’s independence and sovereignty not only historically but also nutritionally, was killed off by USAID during the 1980s, an economically damning action justified by an outbreak of swine flu. This very real, modern action weaves into the stories of Ezili Dantò and the pig as a symbol of resistance. To continue the symbolic thread, despite the efforts to eradicate it, Haitian families in the mountains are secretly raising these pigs; not to slaughter and eat, but simply to replenish the population. One day there will be an army of them, raised in the secrecy of the mountains that once protected the maroons (communities descended from those who escaped slavery) that descended ruthlessly upon the French colonizers.
Dantò, too, is from these mountains. The food she eats is rough and hearty: deep brown cakes, black beans, griot (fried pork), bannann peze, pikliz. She is given a beautiful jeweled dagger; sweet, dark drinks that vary depending on the house and the occasion; a blue veil edged with gold. Care is given not to give her the dagger when she is angry. She is treated with the respect and caution due to a powerful mother.
Happy birthday, beautiful mother. I hope I’ve done you justice with these stories.
