Ecological Wisdom in the Marvelous Realism of Vodou (by way of Jacques Stéphen Alexis)

Abstract

Abstract: For three days Père Osmin’s escort of parishioners and police rooted through the village of Fonds-Parisien near the Haitian shore of Lake Azuéi, driven by a fevered mission to destroy every temple that served Haiti’s ancestral spirits. Along the way they puzzled over the sanctuaries for the ancestors and the spirits of Africa, now empty of their diabolic (to them) accoutrements. The anguished cries of nocturnal birds in broad daylight disquieted them as they passed. Nothing, however, had prepared the band of zealots for Oungan Bois-d’Orme Létiro’s temple, reduced now to ash and glowing embers at the hands of the Vodou priest himself. Through the thundering speech with which the oungan now greeted Père Osmin and his band, Jacques Stéphen Alexis in his novel Les Arbres musiciens (The musicians’ trees) was connecting the dots among the marvel of the real, Haiti’s ancestral spirits, and the violent consequences of closing one’s senses to nature’s mysteries.