On a trip last year to New Orleans, I wanted to learn more about a tradition with deep roots there: the one whose West African root is called Vodún, became Vodou in Haiti, and in New Orleans is always known as voodoo. The book I read is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, which focuses on the Haitian version, so I’ll use the “Vodou” spelling. Any introductory discussion of this tradition always begins with an obligatory disclaimer about Hollywood stereotypes: very little of it is about zombies, and even less is about sticking pins in dolls. But the real tradition is fascinating in its own ways.
As a philosopher, I’m nearly always most intrigued by cultural traditions in their philosophical or theological aspect: what sorts of thinking and reflection they have about the universe and how to live in it. But that’s not all such traditions have to offer, and if I confined all my interest to the philosophy, I would have to have found Vodou a disappointment. Mama Lola, the Vodou priestess Brown learned from, would regularly tell her “Karen, you think too much!” or “You ask too many questions!” Brown gets excited when a discussion between Mama Lola and another Vodou expert starts to turn to the theological, but they quickly drop the subject and never return. The tradition is all about interactions with the loa or lwa, supernatural beings with the ability to possess people in ritual trances. But neither in Mama Lola nor in anything else I’ve read or heard on the tradition, do I see Vodou practitioners think much about what exactly those beings are – even though there’s a lot to wonder about, since most Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholics, and the relationship of the loa to the saints and angels they’re identified with, let alone to any singular God (bondye), is hazy at best.
But in spite of all that, there is one element of the tradition that absolutely fascinates me and calls to me. And her name is Ezili Freda.
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