Voodoo Fire In Haiti

By Richard A. Loederer

"A valuable anthropological artifact...readers come to realize Haiti's connections with Louisiana, especially the River Parishes." --L'Observateur
"A long-lost charmer about a trip within the Haitian interior of another era. . . [contains] very evocative woodcuts by the author that add to the total otherness of what and where he is, going from the wild 20's jazz scene in New York to the all-but-unbelievable scenes he was witness to in the cacophonous darkness of a voodoo ceremony." --The Courier-Gazette (Rockland, ME)
"The drums took on a different rhythm, rattling out a sharp staccato message, accompanied by the heavy pounding of the bass. Faster and faster flew the feet of the dancers as they whirled round the fire. Their smooth muscles writhed and cramped as under the blows of an invisible whip."
From his steamer voyage from Jazz Age New York to Cap Haitien to his punishing trek through the island's interior jungle to his rapt, yet fearful, attendance at an authentic voodoo ceremony, Richard A. Loederer captures the sights, sounds, and sensations of this mysterious Caribbean republic.
Originally published in German in 1932, Loederer's eyewitness account of his adventures in Haiti has long been out of print. The author's own art-deco-style woodcuts add to the exotic appeal of this volume, which chronicles the vanishing African traditions of the island's people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781455613687

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is indebted to John W. Vandercook for permission to adapt certain scenes from his book, Black Majesty, in the reconstruction of the life of King Christophe in Chapter IX of this book.

Other authorities consulted for historical and ethnological facts include:

Louis Gentil Tippenhauer—Die Insel Haiti, 1893

Sir Spencer St. John—The Black Republic, about 1880

Hasketh Prichard— Where Black Rules White, 1900

W. W. Harvey—Sketches of Haiti, 1827

Charles Mackenzie—Notes on Haiti, 1830

James Redpath—A Guide to Haiti, 1860

F. A. Ober—A Guide to the West Indies, 1914

Also, thanks are due a host of friends in Haiti who generously opened to the author doors to the vast storehouse of story and legend ordinarily hidden behind Haitian reticence.

Richard A. Loederer.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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FOREWORD

Not a single belief system—whether one calls it religion, philosophy, ethos, or cult—can compete with Haitian Vodou for the vast inventory of fantasies and cliches it has generated, particularly in the soul of the outsider. Let us begin by noting that the word Vodou, transformed in Haiti from Vodun (a West African term for mystery, ancestor, force of nature), mutated again to Voodoo in the southern United States, a haven for planters fleeing the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) with their property (i.e., slaves). This slight orthographic shift has become symbolic, for many, of the gulf that separates Vodou as conceived by its practitioners from Voodoo as conceived in mainstream North American and European culture.

A full century after the revolution that defeated the most powerful army of the time (Napoleon's) and established a singular independent black republic, Haiti found itself occupied by Yankee invaders. During the intervening years, Vodou had consolidated and rooted itself firmly in Haitian culture and society. Its omnipresence stunned the occupiers, who stayed from 1915 through 1934. Some capable writers numbered among the travelers, journalists, and military personnel who passed through Haiti at this time, and several produced travelogues and novels boiling over with Voodoo sensation. More than one generation of scholars has followed in their footsteps, refining our understanding of AfroHaitian spirituality and straining out much of the sensationalism. Why, then, the need to reprint Richard A. Loederer's Voodoo Fire in Haiti?

Before tackling that question, let's meet the author. Unlike most of the travel writers who produced literature on Haiti during the time of the North American occupation, Richard A. Loederer was neither from the United States nor was he a writer by profession. Born in Vienna in 1894, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in his native city, then the Schule Reimann in Berlin. After he had moved to New York, the federal Works Progress Administration engaged him for several of its projects, including murals for the Blue Ribbon Restaurant in New York City and Stoll's Tavern in Troy, New York. Aficionados know Mr. Loederer best for the books he illustrated in the 1930s and 1940s. Originally published in German in 1932, Voodoo Fire in Haiti featured not only his distinctive woodcuts, but also his own account of his long sojourn on what seemed to most outsiders a mysterious island. One woodcut in particular, captioned Endless slave caravans wound their mournful way through the African bush (page 13), attracted much attention and remains a collectors item on its own to this day.¹ During the 1970s Loederer collaborated with Kurt Werth to illustrate Edgar A. Palmer's collection G.I. Songs: Written, Composed and/or Collected by the Men in the Service. He returned to Vienna, where he died in March 1981.

Loederer wrote Voodoo Fire in the context of North American expansionism. Motivated by the same material interests that inspired interventions throughout Central America and the Caribbean, the invasion and occupation of Haiti nevertheless acquired additional raisons d'etre not unrelated to the nation's distinction as an independent black republic. During the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, a deep fear that insurrection would spread to other slave-holding colonies and states had led to diplomatic isolation of Haiti. Literature joined the discourse, isolating Haiti culturally with notions of inferiority and otherness. Sir Spenser St. John's Hayti or the Black Republic, published in England in 1884, related a murder and alleged act of cannibalism that had occurred in Bizoton, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, in 1863, but the text uncritically coupled the crime with Vodou. The narrative appealed to the outsider's preconceptions of dark Africa and her offspring in the Americas, and writers on the scene during the United States occupation some decades later picked up the thread and wove new tales. Apart from its role in promoting political and business interests, this literary genre tapped into voyeuristic fantasies that prowl beneath the consciousness of all. Where does Voodoo Fire fall within this genre?

A brief glance at representative works will help us to situate Loederer's. In 1929, New York Times reporter William Seabrook published The Magic Island. Seabrook opposed the occupation of Haiti and insisted on the freedom of a negro people ... to stand forth as human beings like any others without cringing or asking leave of any white man.² He called Voodoo a religion and claimed to be initiated by Maman Celie, a female priest. But Seabrook introduced the public to the infamous zonbi (zombie), a complex cultural phenomenon reduced to the walking dead in the horror-film genre that his book subsequently inspired. He also introduced his readers to Faustin Wirkus, a United States Marine who posted himself on the Haitian island La Gonave, then claimed that 10,000 inhabitants of the island had crowned him king. The spotlight that Seabrook aimed at Wirkus encouraged the latter to produce his own book in 1931.3 The White King of La Gonave characterized Haitians as simple, docile, yet prone to fits of irrational violence. Wirkus, who confessed to having executed Haitian dissidents, believed wholeheartedly in his country's mission to civilize the fallen black republic.

Occupation literature did not lack the feminine touch. In 1926, predating Seabrook, travel writer Blair Niles published Black Haiti, A Biography of Africa's Eldest Daughter. A well-seasoned traveler, Niles had ventured as far as Borneo, and she had already produced travelogues about Ecuador and Colombia. She nurtured a longtime interest in Haiti, and her bibliography lists seventy-six items, far outstripping most of her colleagues. Niles' husband traveled with her and supplied the sixteen photographs that illustrate the book. Together they simply drove out into the Haitian countryside (pacified several years before by the marines and no longer dangerous for outsiders) and followed the sound of the drums. Her writing yields rich sensual detail. In particular, she embroiders fine descriptions of Vodou song, drumming, and dance. Subsequent scholarship superseded her data but hardly presented them so imaginatively. Imagination, however, also limits her vision. Blair preconceived her subject through a hyper-romantic lens and explained Vodou rites as Haiti's mysterious dream self,*4 where, in the absence of language, savage rhythm expresses race memories.⁵ Niles typifies writers who celebrate the emotionalism of Vodou at the expense of its philosophy and its values. I shall say more about this below.

The genre likewise included the voice of Zora Neale Hurston, who ranks today among the celebrated female authors of black America. Hurston studied anthropology with Franz Boas. She produced two books of folklore along with four novels and more than fifty articles and short stories. One of the folklore books, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, recounts her fieldwork in both those countries in 1936-37.6 Originally published in 1938, Tell My Horse devotes more than three-quarters of its text to Haiti, part of it to the country's political and social life, most of it to Voodoo. An appendix presents about three dozen music scores, nearly all transcriptions of Voodoo songs. Hurston places her research (curiously lacking in notes and bibliography) in the context of what she has already learned about Voodoo—some of it shaped by her experience growing up in the southern United States, the balance by fieldwork in Harlem, Florida, and Jamaica. Her passion for revealing Voodoo as a proper religion is evident, yet contradicted by a curious undertow of conservatism. A digression on the inherent dishonesty and cruelty of Haitians troubles the reader.⁷ While Hurston's Harlem Renaissance colleagues condemned the occupation, she commended it as Haiti's white hope.⁸

Richard A. Loederer's Voodoo Fire in Haiti shares some of the spirit of these books. His narrative, told in first person by an artist obviously modeled after Loederer himself, opens on board the liner that will take the traveler into the harbor of Cap Haitien—a device used by several other occupation authors to mark the transition from civilization to the unknown. While still at sea, a fellow passenger introduces our narrator to Sir Spenser St. John's infamous Bizoton scandal, and Loederer relates it at length, as Niles had before him. In this way, the author presents the focus of his work (implicit in his title), although he will not meet it head on until the final chapters. His interlocutor's version of Voodoo includes the notion of religion, but minus the theology and ethics by which many of us know it today. He colors his presentation with sexual orgies, the terror of believers at the mercy of power-intoxicated priests, and cannibalism. Our narrator naively accepts this view and disembarks on Haitian soil with a ready-made prism for his artist's eye.

The narrator's first adventure takes the form of a safari. He arrives at Fort Liberie, a town that borders on the Dominican Republic near the estuary of the Massacre River, so named for the carnage wrought by Spanish and French colonists battling for possession of the land in the seventeenth century. Today Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the river, which defines segments of the border. Haitian author Edwige Danticat recently characterized the Massacre as a tiny braid of water . . . which I could easily traverse even without wetting my knees.9 This observation, along with the fact that Haiti has long been without most of its original woodland cover, casts the narrator's chronicle of his journey up the river into the realm of the imagination. Possibly inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (originally published in 1902), Loederer's third through fifth chapters recount the trials of his narrator as the Massacre winds him through the Haitian jungle. Chapter 3, perhaps more than the others, provides the key to Loederer's purpose. Following the lead of a long-ago conquistador who had vanished up the river in search of a gold mountain, our narrator sets out in search of mystery itself.

The rich imagery to which Loederer treats the reader demands notice. For the rest of my life, his narrator confides on page 64, I shall be haunted by the memory of that cross-country journey. His artist's vision paints lilac orchids in slow bloom, iguanas in little dramas of love, brilliantly striped toucans, and little land crabs waving their claws like stockbrokers during a boom (page 68). Dark imagery, however, outbalances the light: endless nights, hanging shoots that twined around the traveler's neck like a hangman's noose, odors of decay from rotting vegetation, and impenetrable walls of jungle that took days to hack through. The narrator falls victim to malaria on the shores of a native village, but is saved when a fellow European emerges from a cluster of natives and takes him into his home for care. One can easily see the eccentric Hickman, a refugee from civilization, as a twist on Conrad's Mr. Kurtz. I shall return to Hickman.

When his narrator has recuperated, Loederer shifts the novel's attention away from the mysteries of the forest. He calls chapter 7 Polychromata, a Latinized plural of polychrome, a work of art made of or decorated with several colors. In this chapter the narrator transcribes from his artist's inner eye fourteen Haitian cities and towns, from Cap Haitien to Port-au-Prince to Jeremie. These literary sketches provide anecdotes on daily life in Haiti during the occupation, but the reader must maintain an awareness of cultural bias. In writing of Bizoton the author avoids mention of the town's historical scandal and paints instead a picture of a nightclub-brothel, where a hyper-erotic performance of the meringue culminates in his narrator's subsequent surrender to a Creole woman. Loederer returns north in chapters 8 and 9 for a visit to the ruined palace and fortress of Henry Christophe, the revolutionary general who declared himself king. Stories of Christophe's cruelty and insanity abound in literature about Haiti. The narrator camps out in the Citadel (the fortress) despite warnings from his guide that the ghost of Christophe, who ended his life there, still haunts its galleries. "I had to prove to him ad oculos the superiority of the white man," he explains (page 227).

Bravado begins to crumble in the final two chapters, where the narrator finally views a Voodoo ritual.¹⁰ Why does he wait so long? Believers, he tells us, fear speaking of Voodoo, and the cult embarrasses educated Haitians. The narrator manages to elicit information from a cotton-factory worker. He learns of good gods and bad ones, of zombies, and of blood sacrifices that are one's only means to salvation. The narrator then meets Henckel, a German businessman who, like Hickman, bears some resemblance to Conrad's Kurtz. Henckel has lived in Haiti some forty years and has studied Voodoo in depth. He shares with the narrator Voodoo's magic, its sensuality, its power to heal and to destroy. For Henckel, Voodoo offers a necessary antidote to the sham morality of modern civilization (page 258). He claims to have crossed all boundaries but that of human sacrifice. By the time our narrator takes the plunge into an authentic ceremony, he is gripped with fear. I shall not go into detail about what he sees. That is for the reader to discover. Suffice it to say here that Loederer's Voodoo fire burns with blood and lust.

Let us return to the question, why reprint Voodoo Fire in Haiti? Scholars of Vodou, many of them initiates, would recognize a few elements of the rites in Loederer's book, but they would object to his manner of representation, and most would call it racist. They would point out such omissions as the theory of the soul, the theology and cosmology, and the liberating self-knowledge to which the Vodou priest guides his/her spiritual child. They would take the author to task for presenting nakedness and sex as standard practice in Vodou rites, and some would accuse him of dishonesty and fabrication. So why return this work to the shelves of bookstores?

The value of Voodoo Fire lies above all in the mirror it places before the twinned souls of Europe and North America. Let us dispense with the notion that one can learn about Vodou, Vodun, or Voodoo from this book. A diligent student will quickly find the scholarly works.¹¹ Voodoo Fire rather confronts the reader with an iconoclastic image of the so-called West. Loederer's characters swagger with the certitude of civilization, until they encounter Haitian spirituality. But is it Haitian spirituality that commands their interest, or is it a deep desire born of civilization's constraints? I have hypothesized that Loederer draws his inspiration, in part, from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.¹² His woodcuts, into which he carves Freudian angst, fantasy, and the primitive, suggest that he was a child of expressionism. Characters Hickman and Henckel, longtime residents of Haiti, both share facets of Conrad's Mr. Kurtz. Listen to Hickman: The jungle wins and, like a deceitful woman, it lures the white man. ... It absorbs him and transforms him (pages 93-94). And Henckel: In me too the subconscious primitive nature has been unloosed through constant association with natives (page 258).

In a recent essay, Haitian scholar Laennec Hurbon explores the nature of the outsider's fascination with Vodou.13 Allowing that even Vodou adepts experience a feeling of strangeness when possessed, Hurbon interprets the outside observer's feeling as one that leads to ambivalent attitudes of attraction and revulsion with regard to anything that is not yet known, and onto which the most diverse fantasies can be projected (page 181). Fantasy thus turns a tiny braid of water into a jungle river, and a drum and dance ritual into a picture of primeval Africa, driven by orgiastic frenzy. As a new generation of black writers has opened Heart of Darkness to postcolonial critique,¹⁴ let us investigate the force of imagination on outsiders' representations of Haiti's most brilliant—and most enigmatic—cultural jewel. Voodoo Fire offers a point of entry into that inquiry.

Lois Wilcken

1. Please visit http://art.goantiques.com/detail,1930s-etchingloederer,691651.html, one Web page among many that offer the piece for sale.

2. William Seabrook, The Magic Island (Paragon House, 1989), 282.

3. Faustin Wirkus, The White King of La Gonave (Doubleday, Doran, 1931).

4. Blair Niles, Black Haiti, A Biography of Africa's Eldest Daughter (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926), 21.

5. Ibid., 187-88.

6. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Perennial Library, 1990).

7. Ibid., 73-92. See the most damaging charges on pages 81-83.

8. Ibid., 72.

9. Edwige Danticat, A Brief Reflection on the Massacre River (unpublished manuscript posted to http://shs.westport.kl2.ct.us/ chia/Caribbean/handouts/krik%20krak/brief_refl.htm).

10. On pages 100-103, the narrator describes a ritual outside Hickman's hut, but it appears to have been a dream induced by malaria.

11. The classics in English include Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (McPherson, 1984); Leslie Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 2001); and Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (Schocken, 1972). See also the many fine essays in Donald Cosentino, ed., The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995).

12. I thank J. Michael Dash for this insight. See his discussion of Conrad's work in connection with other literary works on Haiti in Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (St. Martin's Press, 1988). Dash's work is one of the best sources on North American literary representations of Haiti and vice versa.

13. Laennec Hurbon, American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou, in Cosentino, 181-97.

14. See, for example, Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (The Massachusetts Review 18, no. 4, Winter 1977).

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VOODOO FIRE IN HAITI

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I. CONGO BEAN STEW

IN THE beginning it was like that—palm groves and thirsty white beaches and the shadowy dark mountains beyond. Lying in the clear pagan air, an unknown island untrodden by the foot of a white man, that was to be one of the great landmarks in the history of colonization.

Columbus was exploring westwards in search of a new continent. Months had passed and still there was no sight of land; the sailors were becoming mutinous, food was scarce, and then, one momentous day, came the welcome shout of Land ahoy! Their months of hardship were at an end.

And Columbus landed there; that much is known; but his records are not explicit as to whether he stayed much longer than to unfurl the Spanish flag and christen his new discovery Hispaniola. The great explorer was still unsatisfied. He knew he had not yet reached his goal, and so, despite the wishes of his crew, who, it is certain, felt their long search to be over, he set sail and headed still further westwards.

How wonderful it must have been—the white beaches and the green palms and the blue-gray mountains beyond. Well —it is still like that today, but Haiti, as the island is now called, looks back on the past few centuries of her history with a bloodstained face.