RED BLACK & MOONLIGHT
@2000 Marguerite Laurent; Windows on Haiti special edition
a) Much like here b) Bwa Kayiman
e) Vodun Woman i) Rolling on j) Beyond 2004
l) Self-Defense
BWA KAYIMAN
Hundreds of years ago, Africans in the plains and valleys, forced to be passive every second of the day in order to survive the European planter's lashes, would sneak out in the dead of night, up the rocky maroon's mountain roads to secret forest caves and hidden clearings, for the Vodun ceremonies, where they would watch their kinfolks practicing the art of war, productively sloughing-off impacted rage to the Vodun drum's syncopated beats... Haitian children learned in Vodun ceremonies the uses of cutting and slicing a chicken and goat's throat, early on in life, for the time when the Petwo nations would come and mount them, so they would stop being the sacrificial lambs, the scapegoats whose blood was being lapped up by the white settlers. So, in Vodun, there is the time before the Petwo nations arrived to the war dance to unify the cocktail of multilingual African tribes - and the time after. The more temperate nations that were there before, subduing Petwo were called Rada. Originating like Petwo, from West Africa's peoples. But the Africans who became Haitians in the land of the Taino/Arawak Amerindians had to pull hard for the psychic energy within themselves that would allow them to kill the current of negative European energies swallowing them whole.
And when these Blacks, on a hilltop at a wood clearing called "Bwa Kayiman," had reached back, past their divisions, past even the God making impulses that creates dictators, way back, past self-gratification, past giving any one particular element - spirit or thought abstraction - omniscient sovereignty; way past these twilights and a thousand eternities, then this, this spiritual consensus, this, a new psychic wave, was reached. The differing African groups in Haiti were then so quickened, that together as one PSYCHIC FORCE, they had passed Babylon's babbling towers, setting a new watercourse beyond forever: transmuting mental spasms and a cacophony of noises into ONE TONGUE, one powerful action - swearing to God and the Devil to be free or die. And when Agaou's thunder clapped next, the cosmic sea - home of the ancestral deities, of all the lwas who had become abstracted over many generations - that sea opened; Africa's sacred abstractions had come to life. A new nation called Haitian was formed, where unity lives in veins reaching the cosmic center - that nexus between the spheres of the living and dead, between action and reflection. Then, the Haitian Revolution came, beating back Napoleon's forces, then the English, Spanish and French again. Twice. This, Petwo's multination red force and strength, works when Rada is its base. Rada and Petwo, they spewed forth together as one, each making way for the stronger. They are the Lovers-of-Liberty, economic democracy-in-action. And their strongest symbol was Ezili Dantò - the feminine principle who carries a dagger. I didn't know what i was, how i came to be created Kreyòl or much about Vodun until after i had returned from Haiti and started feeling the tones of Red, textures of Black and cold distance of the Moonlight. But, it is the unified Petwo/Rada nations, living within my psychic heritage, that call to me with this vision of a world that's reached past its divisions, angers, hatreds and envies to where many "nations" coexist. I’m practicing remembering that the amalgamated Africans in Haiti had no money to bribe or amass and wield power with; no gun arsenals for shows of force to control or subjugate the masses and classes with; no laws to shoot hope and dreams, forever deferred. No. The Africans who became Haitians in the land of the Taino/Arawak Amerindians expected the tools of combat to crawl from their bodies and mind, and they did. Their veins are the vortexes for a unified African PSYCHIC FORCE: and they surrendered to that.