Fictional Oungan: In the Long Shadow of the Fetish

My active encounter with the ritual arts of Haitian Vodou occurred in narratives of aggression and protection recounted by clients in a mental health clinic serving Haitians in the Boston area. However, the objects referred to were not the public forms, such as sequinned flags, painted drums and vèvè, or ground drawings, usually emblematic of the ritual corpus. What emerged in these sessions were descriptions of wanga--instrumental objects and materials associated with private "magical" work to transform human situations. Unequipped to counter the influence of such forms on their own terms when they were experienced as harmful, I resorted to the standard clinical repertoire, including psychological evaluation, counseling, and, in liaison with consulting psychiatrists, psychotropic medications. These professional strategies were often ineffective and even, occasionally, destructive. It was not simply a matter of my own ambivalence toward the Eurocentric theoretical foundations of my profession, or my limits as a non-Haitian therapist, which undermined my efforts. For several years after leaving, I continued to receive calls from other clinicians, both Haitian and non-Haitian, of varying theoretical persuasions, whose efforts to help the same clients had been similarly thwarted.

Compared to the interpersonally charged, antiaesthetic, and often concealed wanga that I had encountered through their impact on people's lives, the visually captivating and public Vodou flag, or drapo, a focus of my later doctoral work (see my "For the Flower of Ginen"), seemed easy. During the initial stages of my research, however, when I worked with the oungan (Vodou priest) and flagmaker Clotaire Bazile, it was the intimate and potent objects he assembled for travay, for private work with clients, not the shimmering sequinned drapo, that were in evidence. Described by Karen Brown as "reifications of problematic relational situations" ("Serving the Spirits" 210), ¹ these forms, such as hanging bottles, cloth figures, tied bundles, and mirrors, gradually became inseparable from my growing recognition of Bazile's talents as a healer and of the bitter trials undergone by many who consulted him, including people recently terrorized by the postcoup military regime in Haiti. However, these working objects also continued to trigger sorcery fears associated with my previous clinical work and internalized colonial and postcolonial representations of the oungan as the malevolent and/or fraudulent creator and manipulator of destructive wanga. ²

Unable, by virtue of experience, to contain the power of these objects exclusively within psychological, socioeconomic, semantic, or other explanatory models of Western social science, I was also aware of their resonance as fetish within the colonial discourse that legitimated conquest and slavery. As Suzanne Blier explains in "Truth and Seeing," the term, only recently abandoned, was used especially for the more potent, anxiety producing, less socioaesthetically refined African forms, such as Kongo minkisi and the bociô arts of Dahomê. Linking the irrational and the antiaesthetic, the fetish served as a quintessential designator of otherness in the service of colonial conquest and enslavement of the peoples of West and Central Africa. Haitian cloth-covered figures are said by Blier ("Vodun") to be possibly bociô-related forms. By granting them spirit-driven efficacy, I feared them. In my fear was not only respect but also the polluting legacy of the fetish and the debasing of their maker.

The long shadow of the fetish extends from depictions of "Guinea," or the coast of West Africa, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelogues written by European traders into the evolutionary theory of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers and beyond to the more familiar usages in psychoanalytic, Marxist, and modernist aesthetic theory. As William Pietz explains in a brilliant series of essays ("The Problem of the Fetish I," 1985; "The Problem of the Fetish II," 1987; and "The Problem Fetish IIIa," 1988), the pidgin term fetisso developed from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning objects or practices relating to witchcraft. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, who controlled West African maritime trade, distinguished between idolo and feitiço. The former...