In 2018, the Quai Branly Museum’s blockbuster “The Hells and Ghosts of Asia” caused a sensation. After the ghosts, the souls without bodies, give way to the zombies, the bodies without souls: this time the Parisian institution proposes a small exhibition as unique as it is fascinating, “Zombies. Is death not an end? », at the crossroads of field research, history, science and pop culture about other dead people who do not stay still: the original zombies of Haitian voodoo.
Unlike the Hollywood walking dead, which are its derivatives and are more familiar to us, the route offers an immersion in the anthropological roots of zombification. The zombie, the real one, is Afro-Caribbean, coming from Haitian voodoo, a syncretic religion that mixes those of sub-Saharan Africa, the west coast and part of central Africa with Catholicism. During the three months of capture, transatlantic crossing and sale of the slaves, notions of Roman Catholicism were forcibly instilled in them. Furthermore, crosses and saints are omnipresent in Haitian voodoo, but they are fetishized, sometimes even anthropomorphic, crosses.
We also find Native American objects in the voodoo sanctuaries of Haiti, associated with rituals for an effect of territorial anchoring. In fact, it was the indigenous inhabitants of the island, the Tainos, from the mother tribe of the Arawak, present in all the Greater Antilles, during the arrival of the Europeans, who transmitted the secrets of poisons and plants to the slaves. Called “chestnuts,” they escaped from the plantations. The voodoo temple rebuilt on a 1/1 scale at the beginning of the tour allows us to account for this syncretism of rituals: beyond the crosses and fetishes, we discover the “vévés”, those small footprints on the ground that come from a Taíno. tradition and that are used to summon the “loas”, the deities.
shadow army
Haitian voodoo is not witchcraft, but a religion structured in secret societies, including that of Bizango, responsible for questions of justice and, therefore, for the zombification of individuals judged guilty of crimes and condemned to wander as the living dead. Among the numerous objects and representations that support the exhibition, the bizango fetishes stand out, made of black and red fabric, human size and with mirrored eyes.
They are present during the trials, as we can see when entering the Bizango sanctuary called “army of shadows” – another reconstruction of a key place in Haitian voodoo rites, with the peristyle and a cemetery –, where these images of natural size. fetishes confront the accused. A scan of a fetish reveals that they are composed of objects, including a cemetery cross, the skull of an ancient Bizango, and bottles containing souls.
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