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Karen McCarthy Brown 4 Systematic Remembering, Systematic Forgetting: Ogou in Haiti gou is a central figure in Haitian religion. While little known in some areas of rural Haiti, in others he is one of the most important spirits' of African origin who are venerated in the Vodou religious system. In cities he has a more prominent role, so that in Port-au-Prince, where no temple neglects him entirely, Ogou frequently is the major spirit of priests and priestesses. Among Haitians who migrate to New York City, those who have Ogou as their met tet, "master of the head," may well be in the majority.' Ogou in Haiti has his roots in the Gu or the Ogun of the Dahomean or Yoruba peoples, who (along with the Kongo peoples) seem to have contributed the largest concentrations of slaves to Haiti and consequently to have had the strongest influence on its culture. However, he is not simply a reproduction of these African deities. Certainly the Old World played a strong role. Large numbers of slaves were young men whose activities in the African homeland were often centered on the military, hunting, or ironworking-the areas where Ogun was a major patron (Barnes 1980:3, 17, 19-3°, and personal communication). It was only natural, then, that this preponderant sector of the incoming population should bring ideas of Gu/Ogun to the New World. In Haiti, however, hunting and smithing were no longer crucial to everyday life, while the soldier took on new guises and added significance. Thus the Haitian Ogou became important to men, and women, of all ages. He also came into contact with Roman Catholicism, the religion of the slaveholders . Indeed, the Catholic saints penetrated the whole world of Vodouits visual representations, where chromolithographs of the saints came to be used as images for Afro-Haitian spirits, and its naming system, where saint 66 Karen McCarthy Brown names and Afro-Haitian spirit names came to be used interchangeably. Also central to the development of the Haitian Ogou were several centuries of political and military upheaval, a historical legacy which transformed the African religious cosmos. It is important to emphasize that any understanding of the centrality of Ogou in present-day urban Haitian Vodou must include an understanding of the history and of the social and political structures of Haiti. Bastide has written that the slave diaspora had the effect of separating "the world of symbols, collective representations, and values from the world of social structures and their morphological bases" (1978:155). In his view, the process by which African religious systems moved into the New World consisted of a search for appropriate social structural "niches" in which symbolic representations could survive.' In some cases, such as the match between Ogou and the military in Haiti, such niches were found. In others they were not. When they were found, the fit between cultural image and social structure was never perfect , and therefore the process by which the two came together was one of continuous negotiation, so that, over time, both were changed by virtue of their interaction. The point I wish to stress about the continuation of African religions in the New World is that elements which are retained as a legacy from the past are subject to systematic and continuous redefinition and restructuring, and that out of this process new cultural forms emerge. The current Haitian Ogou is one such form. I begin by placing Ogou in relation to the two major pantheons of urban Vodou. I then turn to analyze his various manifestations, mainly through sacred songs. This discussion focuses on military power and its transformations in a variety of political and social contexts. Finally, I will place the Ogou in relation to another group of spirits, the Gede, who occupy a parallel but clearly contrasting place in Vodou cosmology. I conclude that the emphasis given to Ogou in contemporary Haitian Vodou can be attributed to the fact that he is able to mediate between two diametrically opposed forces in Haitian life. These forces, represented by the two major urban pantheons, have gone through many incarnations in the course of Haitian history, but they are perhaps most succinctly named by pairs of contrasting terms such as insiders/outsiders, family members/foreigners, slaves/slaveholders, oppressed/ oppressors. The Rada and the Petro Spirits The Vodou spirits, or lwa as the Haitians call them, were once divided into several nanchon, "nations"-Rada, Petro, Kongo, Nago, lbo, and so on. In most...

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