Kyrah Malika Daniels

A common refrain in Haitian Vodou indicates that the lwa (spirits) hail from twenty-one spiritual nations. These spiritual nations (nanchon) reflect the African diversity present in early colonial Saint-Domingue, as devotees established a confederation of spirits in their formation of the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. Elsewhere in a companion essay (Daniels forthcoming 2023), I have examined the concept of Africana spiri- tual nationhood as a foundation built upon family and cultural inheritance, one’s relationship to land, and communally claimed religious belonging. In Pan-African traditions such as Jamaican Rastafari, now a global phenomenon, “Africans at home and abroad” recognize Africa as the home of “ancient high civilisations” (Chevannes 2011, 566) and as source of the divine. This chapter further expands on the concept of Africana spiritual nationhood, offering a religious genealogy of Haitian Vodou’s African nanchon. I examine West African and Central African origins of Vodou’s four most renowned nanchon (Rada, Nago, Petwò-Kongo, and Gede), followed by a brief exploration of lesser studied nations. These “multinational” lwa of Vodou offer insight into mythic and historical ethnic origins from the African continent. Moreover, Haitian spirits embody a veritable Pan-Africanism within their national religion, which dates to the inception of Haiti’s founding as a Black republic of self-emancipators. Ultimately, this essay reveals how devotion to an assembly of Pan-African spirit nations empowers Haitians and Africana religious devotees to connect meaningfully with the roots of their African spirits.

This study of race and religion examines the largest population converting to Haitian Vodou in the United States today: blan-foreigners. This article investigates the experiences of white western foreigners, who remain vastly understudied as devotees of "immigrant religions." As with many conversion narratives, white Americans report becoming initiates into Vodou to deepen divine connections, restore health, develop spiritual sensibility, and establish community. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in New England with white American devotees of United States Vodou temples, I explore westerners' feelings of belonging in the lakou, or ritual kinship system. I explore the tension between white practitioners' power and privilege and their desire to forge meaningful new spiritual communities, as the development of religious race consciousness for white initiates is not always a linear process. Ultimately, this work illuminates how foreign devotees must cultivate both religious maturity and racial consciousness as they work to acquire "religious citizenship" in Haitian Vodou, a Pan-Africanist tradition that requires all devotees to be dedicated advocates of Black liberation.

Religious devotees all over the world pray for long and healthy life, one hopefully filled with prosperity and purpose. However, the search for immortality is not a universal quest of humankind. In African and African Diaspora religious communities, few rituals aim to prolong life indefinitely, as this would disrupt the cosmic flow of new and returning souls journeying to earth. Instead, African-derived communities emphasize the quality of a vibrant and well-balanced life, one lived with integrity and intention to fulfill the destiny of the soul(s). This thematic essay highlights core principles of longevity, livity, and the vibrancy of life within Black Atlantic religions. These insights ultimately reveal how life's vital force is sustained through balance, ritual, and the fortification of souls and divine energies. Case studies explore other religious traditions with similar characteristics in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Haiti’s multi-soul complex proves a deeply enigmatic aspect of Vodou cosmology. This essay examines Haitian concepts of personhood and ‘plural soul’ philosophy in relationship to Vodou’s figurative mystic vessels, specifically the body-pot and head-pot. I introduce several African philosophies of multiple souls to contextualize Haiti’s multi-soul complex as a legacy of African indigenous thought regarding plural personhood. I argue that the physical body and head serve as primordial sacred vessels in Vodou, ‘filled’ with a collective of many soul-selves (i.e., gwo bon anj, ti bon anj, lwa mèt tèt, etc.). Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, I investigate a person’s ‘private souls’ and the ‘plural/public spirit pantheon’ to explain the dynamics between inner soul-selves and communal guiding spirits. Ultimately, a person’s sacred body-pot and divine head-pot reveal how Haitian devotees exist as a multitude of souls, as Vodou initiation harmonizes relationships between their private soul- selves and the community’s public spirits.

This chapter examines Haitian Vodou epistemologies and African-centered ways of knowing in Edwidge Danticat’s work, focusing on her collection of short stories Krik? Krak! (1995) and her travelogue narrative, After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002). Using Jacob K. Olúpọ̀nà’s (2011) theoretical lens of indigenous hermeneutics, I analyze her work as Africana religious texts drawing from the fields of Black Atlantic religion, visual art, and material culture.

The Haitian expression andaki or pale daki (“to speak andaki”) signals a secret code to discuss difficult or taboo subjects. I assert that Danticat’s representations of Vodou serve as pale daki, coded messages for readers to interpret Haitian mythic archetypes. Danticat thus emerges as what Nadège T. Clitandre (2018) calls the “daughter of a [divine] voice,” invoking powerful female ancestors who represent a quilted matriarchy of voices. Additionally, the presence of nature features prominently in Danticat’s work, as she unearths how environmental degradation is both a secular and sacred matter of grave concern. Her characters embody the presence of the lwa (spirits), zansèt yo (the ancestors), rasin yo (their roots), and anviwònman sakre (the sacred environment). I examine sacred space as hallowed ground and ritual objects as divine entities in six sites, including natural phenomena (forest, sea, sky, river) and human crafted sites/entities (stone, cemetery). Each sacred space is associated with a divine energy, and their respective lwa serve as our narrative guides. Ultimately, these sacred sites and mythic archetypes of spirit further illuminate the vibrant religious portraits of Danticat’s works.

“She Wears the Mask: Black Atlantic Masquerade in the Work of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement Exhibition Catalogue, eds. Robin Lydenberg and Ash Anderson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press and McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2018, pp. 47-56.

In Haitian Vodou and other African-derived traditions, sacred art objects are often used to honor the dead, connecting the living with the spirit world. This study investigates the religious importance of Black Atlantic mirrors and reflective surfaces in mortuary rites. I begin by analyzing mirrors as symbolic of sacred waters and residence of spirits and ancestors. Secondly, I examine the use of mirrors on grave sites as portals to otherworldly dimensions, and consider mirrors as mystic "eyes". Lastly, I explore notions of "brokenness," offering a ritual studies analysis of shattered mirrors in a Haitian initiatory society (Bizango) and in commemorative earthquake art of 2010. As such, I highlight Haitians' "religious unexceptionalism" as they employ ritual arts to honor the dead. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the ritual use of mirrors as mortuary arts signal the omnipresence of ancestral spirits and the importance of sustaining lines of communication between visible and invisible worlds.

In the 1950s, Ukrainian American filmmaker Maya Deren traveled to Haiti and became initiated as a manbo (priestess) in Haitian Vodou. How did Deren become drawn to Vodou, and how did she cultivate relationships with fellow devotees? Further, what does her experience as a Vodouizan reveal about other North American whites converting to " exotic " religions practiced largely by people of color? In an exploration of race and religious belonging, this essay offers a theoretical framing of " whiteness, " and considers the history of North American conversions to Buddhism as a precursor to white initiation to African Diasporic traditions. The paper examines Maya Deren's identity as an immigrant artist, resulting in an alternate experience of whiteness, and allowing her to conceive of her journey to Haiti as a spiritual homecoming. Ultimately, I argue that Deren became enmeshed in a ritual kinship system whose bonds reached far beyond the boundaries of mortal geographies.

“Whiteness in the Ancestral Waters: Race, Religion, and Conversion within North American Buddhism and Haitian Vodou,” The Journal of Interreligious Studies, Special Issue: The Color of God: Faith, Race, and Interreligious Dialogue, Issue 23 (May 2018): 90-102. Eds. Axel Oaks Takács and Funlayo E. Wood.

Cleanliness has long served as a form of religious devotion—to be cleansed, purified and sanctified grants one access to sacred spaces and certain ritual experiences. At times, cleanliness may allow one to transcend earthly dimensions, freed from mortal messiness. Religious bathing rites include some combination of consecrated waters, blessed liquids and oils, and medicinal plants (e.g. flower blossoms, herbs and leaves). The practices in Haiti and Peru illustrate the bio-cultural phenomenon of using divine waters and plants in ritual bathing both for those who come in search of deliverance and healing, and for those who seek good fortune and protection.

Article can be accessed here: https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/coolness-cleansing-sacred-waters-medicinal-plants-and-ritual-baths-haiti-and-peru-0.

This study explores the role of material religion and healing practices of Kongo traditions in Central Africa and the Caribbean. Using Max G. Beauvoir's notion that "Illness . . . results from a breach . . . that engenders conditions of disequilibrium, disharmony, chaos, and disorder," I examine how AfroAtlantic ritual works conjure subversive histories and manage spiritual and social afflictions. Instruments of healing in the physical and metaphysical realms, Haitian pakèt kongo and Congolese minkisi reveal the intersection of aesthetic work and ritual curative, serving as healing bundles in the Black Atlantic (what Dianne Diakité identifies as "ritual technologies"). Consequently, these sacred art forms perform ritual work to mediate ruptures in the cosmos caused by human chaos. My work examines pakèt kongo and minkisi as modes of spiritual communion; as religious archive and curative art; and as active ritual agents of community, ultimately helping to establish new narratives of religious history in Kongo's many Diasporas.

Article can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/511832.

Few conversations with the renowned Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat have delved into the subject of religion in Haiti and the representations of Vodou in her fiction and nonfiction writing. This interview with Danticat explores her religious upbringing, Vodou and interfaith dialogue, and representations of Haitian religion in the media and in the world. Other topics discussed include Haitian sacred space and the environment, Vodou as a matriarchal religion, and divine archetypes present in her body of writings. Drawing from an Africana religion framework, the questions posed here consider the religious import of Danticat’s literary works as “sacred texts” of Haiti and the Haitian dyaspora.