Vodou

I made a bad decision when I used the phrase "Voodoo Scientists" in the title of my post on Katherine Eban's latest article. I was picking up on a quote from Michael Rolince, section chief of the F.B.I.’s International Terrorism Operations, who said that US torture tactics are based on "voodoo science."

Voodoo as an adjective evokes classic mischaracterizations of the many thousands of years old religion as a grotesque form of black magic involving dark skinned witch doctors who preside over zombies and dolls and stick pins.

He is always a sinister figure with supernatural powers operating on temporal margins of normal society. His supernatural powers come from ancient, suppressed, occult traditions often of a non-western origin.

Add to this the African origins of Vodou (or Vodoun), and its deep roots in Haiti, and the racist overtones are all too evident. Many of the persistent racist tropes projected onto Vodou were spelled out in 1929 in The Magic Island by William Buehler Seabrook:

And now the literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, had such a one lurked nearby, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified: in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.

I really should have known better and I apologize.

More information on Vodou:

• BBC, "An Introduction to Vodou - a Traditional African Religion"
• John Cussans, "Voodoo Terror: (mis)representations of voodoo and western cultural anxieties"
• Joseph M. Murphy, "Black Religion and Black Magic: Prejudice and Projection in Images of African-derived Religions"
• Michael Rock, "Haitian Vodou: Serving the Spirits"
• Wikepedia, "Voodoo"
• World History Archives, The traditional religion of Vodun (Voodoo) in Haiti (links)