Vodou Culture 101: Community

This is another one of those huge topics that’s probably going to come back up.

My godfather is fond of reminding people that vodou is a communal religion. That’s an alien concept to most of us in the US, because the majority culture tells us we’re all rugged individuals who don’t need nobody. We especially don’t appear to need to give anyone else credit (or say thank you) for helping us with anything. We can take all the credit and none of the blame—after all, we don’t have a relationship with a community to hold us accountable for messing up.

It takes, as he points out with some sarcasm, good money to be able to ignore everyone else.

When you don’t have the money, you don’t get to pretend you don’t need anyone. Vodou comes from communities where there is very little. Very little food, very little space, very little clean water. The groceries may not be in the stores every time you go. There may not be electricity. Grudges, impoliteness, ignoring your neighbors quickly comes back to bite you because you, too, have very little. You may starve. Your children may starve.

You simply can’t afford to pretend you’re alone.

A vodou priest is a community resource. The priest distributes food, gives people a place to sleep, arbitrates fights, teaches life lessons, holds relationships together, teaches parenting, lends money, shows up for the critically ill, counsels the dying and their families, and sometimes holds the funeral. Vodou is a religion of the community, because the spirits work with the priest to do all those things for the community.

There is no isolation. Poor people have spirits, too: spirits that want them to get healing, eat well, etc. To serve the spirits often involves serving the community, and a priest serves the spirits.

Vodou comes from the understanding that if people don’t work together, they will die alone. There’s nothing I’ve learned so far which does not come from that understanding. It’s one of the problems that pops up the most with US vodouizans from the majority culture, who have been systematically taught to ignore the time, resources, and dependencies which make up a community. The majority culture actively shames the idea of considering the community, treating it like a moral failing (ya commie.)

Vodou is a religion of we, not of me.