Overview:
A Haitian American podcaster travels to Benin looking for long-held questions on Vodou. By way of household recollections, historic truths and encounters with Vodou practitioners, Baudelaire Ceus explores how colonial narratives, trauma and misunderstanding formed Haitian attitudes towards Vodou, and what reclaiming this custom may imply immediately for Haitians throughout the diaspora looking for connection to Haiti.
“You suppose you see the reality.
You suppose you recognize what’s inside.
However while you look once more — with open eyes — one thing completely completely different seems.”
So declares podcaster Baudelaire Ceus within the first episode of The Vodou Venture, an audio documentary three years within the making, to date. The pilot captures the impetus for the Boston-based audio producer’s deep look into Vodou and the journey towards solutions that has taken him throughout continents and centuries to grasp the faith.
At its core, the non secular exploration focuses each on the exterior forces which have formed perceptions of Vodou and on Ceus’ inward have a look at his Haitian American upbringing. That’s the place the magic of the present lives.
Like many youngsters of immigrants who start to look into their heritage as adults, Ceus, 32, reaches the purpose the place he should reconcile being introduced up in a family and society that portrays Vodou as evil and his precise experiences with the faith. His work coincides with an obvious thirst amongst youthful Haitians, at residence and overseas, to reclaim and reposition Vodou in an affirmative gentle of their non secular lives. For Ceus, the aim is to see Vodou accepted for its function in Haitian life with out the demonization.
“We’ve been so deliberately miseducated, in a whole lot of methods, that has led us to being petrified of ourselves,” Ceus mentioned. “My aim for the present is to at the very least trigger a decent-sized crack in that, for sufficient individuals to go down the journey that I’m on.
“It’s not essentially about them changing into Vodouisants. It’s a respect factor,” he added. “It will additionally serve a goal in our relationship with the remainder of the diaspora. We’re misunderstood by them identical to we misunderstood ourselves.”
Ceus makes use of the sequence as an open door to facilitate conversations along with his household, and to unearth unbelievable tales and secrets and techniques lengthy awaiting discovery. Now, he says, he’s in want of funds to proceed.
Like many Haitian Individuals, Ceus grew up steeped within the pleasure of being from the primary Black republic, immersed within the markers of tradition — soup joumou on New Yr’s Day, talking Creole at residence and Haitian espresso. But Vodou existed behind a locked door. Relations refused to debate it, warning him away, describing it as harmful or demonic.
In the meantime, he absorbed distorted portrayals of “voodoo” via cartoons, horror movies and jokes about curses. When the 2010 earthquake killed greater than 200,000 individuals, together with his half-sister, he watched right-wing Christian televangelist Pat Robertson declare that Haitians died as a result of their enslaved ancestors had made “a pact with the satan.” Grief sharpened into anger, and anger right into a query: If Vodou performed a central function in Haiti’s liberation, why did so many Haitians reject it?
To start answering that query, he turned to his mom — somebody who had averted the subject for many years. Sitting of their household residence, she revealed the long-buried experiences with Vodou, the nice and the dangerous. And in her retelling, her story displays the inherited silence and worry borne of trauma, colonization, missionary affect and Hollywood stereotypes, not from firsthand information.
As soon as pushed underground and demonized, Vodou is being reclaimed by students and younger Haitians as a supply of id, pleasure and cultural resilience
A gripping pay attention
To hearken to the pilot episode is to be transported by storytelling, very like the type youngsters in Haiti develop up with “krik, krak” nighttime tales. Ceus’ evocative descriptions, enthusiasm and wide-eyed strategy to discovery invite the listener all through the journey. His section about his first ceremony in Benin, for instance, means that maybe Ceus inherited the griot gene from the continent.
“It’s the day after Christmas. My household is contemporary off celebrating the beginning of Jesus, most likely consuming leftovers, bundled up towards the Northeast chilly, and I’m right here—5,000 miles from residence in Africa, in Benin, at a Vodou ceremony. I acquired a pair horns, a bottle of rum… It’s virtually 100 levels and already dehydrated and sweat is simply pouring off me. My head is spinning. The Vodou drumming is loud.
I look across the filth courtyard… That rustling sound you hear are these items referred to as zangbetos. There’s 4 of them spinning across the courtyard. They’re 6 ft tall, formed like little tents coated in overlapping layers of straw which were dyed completely different colours…
The Vodou priest appears to be like over at me. He lifts your complete zangbeto and ideas it on its facet within the filth. Proper on the middle, there’s a turtle. Not a human, only a turtle. In regards to the measurement of a small salad bowl. I freaked out.
My information translated the priest’s phrases to me. He mentioned, ‘That is the facility of Africa. It’s a matter of spirituality, so science can’t clarify that.’ ”
With the turtle reveal, Ceus provides the metaphor for the journey: what individuals suppose they see shouldn’t be at all times what lies inside.
Persevering with the journey
Earlier this 12 months, Ceus launched the pilot on Apple Podcasts and Spotify in hopes of drawing curiosity—and monetary help.
Ceus was capable of analysis, write, report, host and edit the primary episode on his personal, round his schedule as a full-time producer with a podcast studio. He cobbled collectively funds to journey to Benin, Milwaukee and New Orleans. In December, he plans to journey to Cuba after which to Haiti subsequent spring.
However now, as he finalizes episode 2—targeted on the lwa of the Vodou pantheon—Ceus welcomes support to complete the project. His goal is to produce all eight episodes in time to launch around the Bwa Kayiman commemorations in August 2026.
So far, he has a promising distribution arrangement and has received a modest grant from the state of Massachusetts. He has been sharing the pilot in audio storytelling circles in hopes of raising about $200,000, ideally. The Haitian Times and WBUR, a Boston-based public radio station, are providing support as media partners.
Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, professor emeritus in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is among the authorities on Vodou featured in the podcast. The houngan asogwe, a senior Vodou priest, has written several books on the belief system and hopes to see more projects like Ceus’ come to fruition.
“For too long, for the last five centuries, we have learned from our slave masters as well as from their descendants in the present time to despise ourselves, our religions, our languages, our physical looks,” Bellegarde-Smith, a priest for 35 years, explains.
“It is high time for people of African descent to feel pride and show pride in the cultural achievements of yesteryear as well as in the present,” he added.
“All efforts to undo the psychological damage are to be welcomed. Ceus takes this task seriously. [It’s] a serious and noble effort.”
For information about supporting The Vodou Project, send a message to Baudelaire Ceus via his website, bauknows.com.