Vodou Culture 101: Healing

When people in the US majority culture talk about healing, they usually mean getting rid of the symptoms which trouble them: making the pain stop, reducing the discomfort. Implicit in this is the idea that you can, at best, manage existing illness. You don’t fix anything, you just add pharmaceuticals and routines that minimize whatever’s hurting you. This very much reflects our affluence: the idea that you can afford, one way or the other, the prescription medications, therapists, doctors, and medical staff to let you take a drug daily to adjust your attitude, say, and make you numb to the conditions of your life.

It’s also increasingly out of reach for the average US citizen, but we haven’t quite caught up to that idea.

In vodou cultures, this sounds crazy. The idea that you can simply rely on the government, insurance, and policy to ensure that you have access to expensive healthcare and continuous monitoring instead of trying to fix the underlying problem is bizarre. Why would you simply take a pill instead of trying to change yourself, your environment, or your circumstances? Why would you take a pill instead of change?

And more importantly, why would you wait for your body to start breaking down to do anything about the problem?

In the US majority culture, the poor, working class, and most of the vanishing middle class take for granted that they’re going to break down, that they’re going to still have to stay employed long after their bodies and minds are breaking down, sacrificed to an employer for the ability to pay bills and the virtuous feeling of doing what is “moral.” And if one thing breaks down, they try to rely on another, apologizing to their employer, boss, and coworkers for the sin of breaking down.

In vodou cultures, this is horrifying. While vodou people do have to work in regular jobs, they tend to lack the servile passivity that US majority culture members display, which can make it difficult for them to stay employed until they learn to lie well or accept the same terms. Fundamentally, your health is more important in vodou cultures than your employer’s bottom line, and the imbalance required to be willing to sacrifice health for profit is completely against vodou’s ideas about balance.

The US majority culture also tends to view things as isolated and separate, thanks to the influence of Abrahamic religions: the mind is separate from the body. If one breaks, the other can be used until it breaks. If one set of symptoms pops up, medicate it and rely on whatever’s impacted by the side effects of that medication to last for a little while until it, too, breaks and requires another set of medications. You will probably die on the job, taking a handful of pills which stress this, that, or the other body part (or your mind). Your job stress is why you started taking the medication in the first place.

By contrast, vodou cultures view things as being connected, affecting each other. The mind influences the body and vice versa. Anything which causes dysfunction in one of those is going to cause problems in the other. Vodou cultures, because of this and their active approach to self-advocacy and responsibility, emphasize holistic and lifestyle solutions—fix problems before things break down, and fix problems using more than one approach, actively seeking out better conditions.

The US majority culture thinks this is ‘uppity,’ and the use of the word is deliberate.

How dare these people think of themselves as being important?