Vodou Culture 101: Self-Advocacy
The topic of self-advocacy could be its own series (and might be.)
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the majority culture is passive-aggressive as hell. A better way to put it is that any direct communication is considered violent, which is really funny when you look at what a bureaucrat can do with a form—a few cents of paper and ink can render a family homeless, take a father from his children and wife, and cause someone to die in jail.
No one yelled when the form was signed so it’s not violent, right?
Vodou culture is not passive-aggressive. We say it is a warrior’s culture because you are assumed to be actively advocating for yourself. Speaking up when something is causing a problem for you, magical self-defense, or avoiding someone who makes problems: if you are alive, you look out for yourself. You are assumed to be willing and able to defend yourself, even if you can’t ‘win’ or get what you want. If you don’t, you abandon your responsibility to yourself and the people around you, who should not be asked to advocate for you if you won’t do anything for yourself.
People who do not self-advocate are not trustworthy: can’t nobody know what you need or want as well as you do. People who expect others to guess what they want or need and then get it for them are exploiters. A community will meet you halfway because this is a communal religion, but you are responsible for you.
This is a problem for people whose experience is mostly in the majority culture. In the majority culture, you should not have to self-advocate because it’s violent: it might involve confrontation which the majority culture considers inherently violent, and the sort of thing that no one should have to do. It is assumed that if you are not being violent or aggressive, society has got you, so anything that involves confrontation violates society. If you violate society, you are sent to jail, which they think you deserve (since you can’t seem to just get along with others.)
The contrast often causes people entering vodou spaces to misunderstand or be frightened of what they see. Majority culture members don’t trust vodou people because vodou people loudly, shamelessly self-advocate. Vodou people don’t trust majority culture members because not only do they not self-advocate, but they label self-advocacy as the sort of thing that could and should make you die in jail.
If you are entering a vodou space from the majority culture, please know that you are assumed to be able to advocate for yourself. You are assumed to have agency.
Please also know that loud things aren’t inherently violent—calling self-advocacy violent is how the majority culture punishes people for being different.
