“Ou libéré?” ‒ Vodou and Haiti: Speaking the Language of Resistance, Remembrance and Freedom in the Writing of Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

In Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz S (ed.) Translating Wor(l)ds: Christianity Across Cultural Borders. Collectanea Instituti Anthropos, 51. Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag, pp. 283-304. Full text is available at: https://doi.org/10.5771/9783896657954-283 2 This paper analyses how vodou is embedded in the history of Haiti; it is central to the language, literatures, and narratives of the 1791-1802 Saint Domingue revolution. Referring to the writer Edwidge Danticat and scholar of religion, Brent Plate, it engages with the ways in which a new language of religiosity, which prioritises the senses, can be creatively transcribed. This language of religiosity is in contrast to a European and Christian use of the term ‘religion’ which has a tendency to segregate the political and the religious, the spiritual and the material, the body and the mind. The language of religiosity used here is instead guided by a female historiography of Haiti and the goddess Erzulie.