Feast of Saint John the Baptist/Ti Jean

Last week, Haitian Catholics celebrated the feast of Saint John the Baptist. After work on Monday, Father Gaby took us to a town called Trou de Nord, to the Church of Saint John the Baptist, where they were having a big multi-day celebration.

This is Haiti though, so a major Catholic saint's day has a decent chance of also being a major voodoo holiday. Many of the voodoo lwa, or spirits, are identified with Catholic saints--in this case, the lwa is called Ti Jean. Voodoo and Catholicism have co-evolved in Haiti for hundreds of years. French plantation owners baptized their slaves but spent no energy on their religious education. The slaves kept their own beliefs and practices from their home countries in Africa, appropriating Catholic saints and images as a cover. For example, the symbol of the lwa Damballa is a snake, so he is often represented as Saint Patrick. My guess is that the slaves matched up the snake symbol on the saint's icon without knowing--or perhaps just not caring--about the whole banishing thing.

Today, from what I can tell, voodoo and Catholicism live comfortably side by side, with most Haitians practicing both. In the past, the Church has taken the "devil worship" stance on voodoo and attempted to do what it can to stamp it out. The State has vacillated back and forth--sometimes it courts the Church's favor (and power) by outlawing voodoo and destroying temples, and sometimes it courts the people by celebrating voodoo as an official religion. Today, Church, State and voodoo seem to have agreed to live and let live (although evangelical churches have taken up the voodoo-is-satanic mantle, forcing their members to renounce the lwa and even attacking voodoo ceremonies). Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the fact that we were being escorted to a voodoo festival by a Catholic priest. Father Gaby is always happy to answer our questions about voodoo or explain the voodoo-y reasons why Haitians do some of the things they do, though he maintains a respectable ignorance about many of the details (like, for instance, the name of the lwa that was being celebrated at the feast of Saint John. I had to Google that).

So yeah, about this festival. While there are many Churches of Saint John the Baptist in Haiti, the one in Trou de Nord is situated on the bank of a river, making it a prime convergence of Holy Spirit and holy spirit. The holiday is celebrated in every parish that carries the name, but people come from all over to celebrate the feats of Saint Jean and Ti Jean in this particular site.

As we drove to the town, the only crowds we saw were clustered around radios and TVs, hanging on to every play of a World Cup match. I was sort of concerned that no one would at the festival, since the green-and-yellow-decked fanatiks would all be exhausted after a day of prayer and worship at the altar of Brésil.*

But no, once we made it into town, the crowds had indeed turned out (perhaps to thank the saint/lwa for a Brazil victory). Father Gaby nudged the pick up through a human sea, jostling to bust its way into the courtyard of the church. In the sanctuary, people (in Catholic mode) were praying and singing worship songs. Outside the gate, many many more people (in voodoo mode), were pressed up against the locked gates, trying to get as close as possible to the church, where the spirit of the lwa also resides. A woman who slipped inside with the truck furtively lit a candle in a corner, conducting her own private ritual instead of joining in the Mass. The priest of the church said that last year, they left the gates open and the voodoo worshipers had come right up to the steps of the sanctuary. This year, they were trying to keep at least a little breathing room between the two Jeans. 

The real action was happening outside the church, on the river. Father Gaby led us down the street past vendors selling food, rum, and trinkets, some related to the festival (candles, icons of the saints/lwas) and some not (knitted rasta caps, used clothing). He took us to a bridge where we could look down and see what was going on. There were crowds of people clustered all up and down both banks, and sometimes right in the water. Many people had yellow scarves tied around their heads, yellow being Ti Jean's emblematic color (and one of Brazil's too, incidentally). At the center of each cluster was a voodoo priest, man or woman, conducting the rituals of the day. Each lwa has specific food that it likes to receive during ceremonies, so you could see dishes of roasted corn and several types of liquor placed on the ground. The worshipers, women mostly, stripped down and bathed themselves in the water, or let themselves be dunked and splashed by the priests. Libations were poured, cigarettes were smoked, ceremonial garments were donned. From up on the bridge we were too far away to hear anything the priests or the initiates were saying, but even up close their words would likely have been downed out by the sounds of loud drumming, music, and excited crowds.

We didn't see either of the two splashy things commonly associated with Haitian voodoo--possessions and animal sacrifices--but I felt lucky to see even this much. In my experience, when Haitians talk to you about voodoo, they phrase it as something that other people do. Few are willing to talk to blans about their personal non-Catholic beliefs and practices (the Catholicism they'll talk about no problem). It seems that much of the voodoo practice that gets shown to foreigners is in the form of shows put on for the benefit of tourists, trading spirituality for spectacle. Maybe we didn't get to see all the inner workings of "authentic" voodoo, but we did see actual people celebrating in a way that was real to them, which is good enough for me.

*A footnote on football in Haiti--Haiti does indeed have it's own national team, but it is so woefully bad that soccer fans cheer for Brazil or Argentina instead. Some say they would even cheer for Brazil against Haiti if Haiti ever made it to the World Cup, but pretty much no one thinks it would ever come to that. When asked which would happen first, the Haitian national team winning the World Cup or the election of a Haitian Pope, my coworkers barely missed a beat before saying "Pope."