Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou

There are certain books that I’ve had on the shelves for years and still haven’t gotten around to reading. In some cases (The Hour of Our Death, The Graves Are Not Yet Full, Escape from Sobibor) it’s because the subject matter is a little ... heavy.

In other cases, as with my hardcover copy of A Suitable Boy, the book itself is too heavy. When I’m reading a book, I like to carry it around with me until it’s done. In fact, much of my reading is done while clinging to a pole on the C train. With certain books, like A Suitable Boy, this is awkward to do, and with others, like The Satanic Verses, it seems inadvisable.

I did finally accept the challenge of hauling around A Suitable Boy until I had finished reading it, and was glad I did. But I thought it would be a long time, maybe forever, before I read Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, the massive and beautifully produced volume created to accompany an ambitious museum exhibit mounted by UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 1995.

It turns out that the Christmas break is the perfect time to read this book. I have blocks of time to devote to it, and especially since a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow on the city, no reason to go anywhere. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou looks like a coffee-table book, and in fact it would be well worth having just to go through the photos and their captions. There are numerous images of vodou flags, sequined bottles, paintings, sculptures, and complete vodou altars from Brooklyn to West Africa to Haiti itself. But there are also in-depth essays by many authorities on Haitian vodou, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Laënnec Hurbon, and Donald Cosentino, the editor of the book.

I have a long-standing interest in Haiti, and in 1996 I traveled there on a vodou-oriented tour organized by Global Exchange. Halfway through this book I was regretting that I never got to see the exhibit it’s based on. Then I realized that I did see it. This was the same show that appeared at the American Museum of Natural History from October 1998 to January 1999, and that I made a special trip from Cambridge to see (about a year and half before Jenn and I moved to New York.)

The museum still has pages on its website devoted to the show, and for anyone who wants to plunge into the book and isn’t already familiar with the difference between the rada and petwo rites and the various manifestations of Ezili and Ogou, they make a useful introduction.