Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture pp 79-99 | Cite as
“The Jew” in the Haitian Imagination: Pre-Modern Anti-Judaism in the Postmodern Caribbean
Abstract
Each year in Haiti the Holy Week of Easter sets the stage for spiritual dramas of remembrance, performed in carnivalesque street theater throughout the country. While Catholics reenact the Passion of Jesus and enter with him into his tribulation and resurrection, some practitioners of the Afro-Haitian religion called Vodou organize enormous musical parades called Raras and take to the streets for the spiritual warfare that becomes possible when the angels and saints remove to the underworld, along with Jesus, on Good Friday. The cast of characters who have a hand in the week’s events include the deities of Vodou—especially Baron Simitye, the Vodou “Lord of the Dead”—the zombi (recently dead) who are his wards, and also Jesus, the two thieves crucified with him, a couple of Haitian army officers who secretly witnessed the resurrection, Pontius Pilate and the Romans, Judas, and “the Jews.” The week’s ritual events combine the plots and personae of the Christian narrative with the cosmology of various African religions and rehash them in local ritual dramas whose elements draw from the entire history of the Atlantic world, from the European Middle Ages to the contemporary condition of global capitalism in the Americas.1
Keywords
Saturday Morning Atlantic World Catholic Clergy Passion Play African ReligionPreview
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Notes
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