Hey all. This is one of the longer pieces I've talked about writing. I'd like to edit it more and give it more context-- it's not perfect. But you should read it.
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Elien (our Haitian host who was a Brujo himself) told Pippen and I (Pippen was the nickname of my Dominican friend whose real name was Alberto and who goes by Glaem) that we were going to a Brujo party that day, at the house of the other Brujo (we'd met him before, and I'd left my hat and sunglasses at his house). Brujo is the Spanish word for voudou practioner.
He was giving people beer, said Elien, and food: a pig was to be killed for the occasion. The image I had in my head was something vague about drumming, free beer, and a pig roasting on a spit--basically a voudou barbeque. Early that afternoon, we walked down from our mountain (our neighborhood was called Montagne Noire), took public transport down through the city, and were soon walking down that familiar (I'd been there before) but still vertiginous path out over the valley, with the sheer drop to the right, over the bidon-ville (shanty town) and its unfinished houses. This time I noticed some PVC pipe poking out of the stoney dirt under my feat, carrying water from a source beneath the street into the concrete chaos of structures below, and leaking some.
There were some people near the entrance, chatting and occupying that space between the everyday sunlight and the excitement of the party inside. There were people in the dark stairwell too, to nod to, navigate around, and brush against as we ascended in the pupil dilating dark, single file behind Elien. I had that tickle of excitement you get when walking into any party.
The room still had smooth red walls and a rough concrete floor caked with dirt, but this time it was full of people, who sat in chairs along the walls, up the steps of an unenclosed stairway on the right, and in the doorways to adjoining rooms. A few were standing awkwardly around the edges with a cluster at the entrance, and some children sat on the floor near parents. These were the spectators, and they had the look in their faces of a bunch of people at a long church service on a hot Sunday afternoon, pacing themselves.
The spectacle in front of them was anything but church-boring, however. Facing me on the opposite side of the room were four drummers, backs against the wall and sitting behind gnarly traditional drums of wood and leather. The beats ranged from interesting in a jammy-folk-drumming way up to heights that would make a minimal techno fans' brain explode. No lie, it was usually the latter, but by now I was used to it so the music's intensity washed around and through me instead of welling up in my head and making my brain explode.
I recognized one of the drummers: he was the father of the family that was staying at Elien's house since they'd been evicted for lack of rent money, the ones with the baby daughter with the dangerously botched umbilical cord, and the mother whose milk may have been drying up and who walked with a limp. He'd left his troubles at the door or somewhere else, however; the man played on and on and on with an energy that always matched the musicians at his side, and sometimes seemed to lead them.
In front of the drummers sat the Brujo. I'm not even going to start on him yet; hold your horses a few paragraphs.
Immediately in front of me was a group of singer-dancers: four or five teenage girls, one teenage boy, and one man wearing matching outfits made of shiny green and red nylon that had a robin hood or Santa's elf aspect, pointy hats included. The women danced in a group, in a loose, low-key shuffle that could go on forever and still leave plenty of lungs free for singing. Compared to the drummers, they were just as relentless but less wholehearted. Like young people in your average exhibition of folk dance, they know what they have to do, and they'll put on the costume and go along with it, but they're not going to have too much fun, except maybe once in a while by accident.
The man elves wore similar uniforms but with pants instead of skirts, but they were more oriented around attending to the Brujo, especially the older of the two. He danced at a much higher energy level and attended to the shrines, lighting candles and pouring liquids from decorated bottles. He also kept bringing ceremonial bottles of hard liquor to the Brujo--yes, very important. The younger, probably 17 or 18, looked kind of cool and listless most of the time, like a kid standing in the background in a hip hop video; he was more a part of a group with the women, but (how classic!) seemed subject to fewer expectations.
The singing was all call and response: a leader would sing out a line, and the singers would echo back, usually repeating the phrase, sometimes returning something different. Others in the room sang too (some harder than others) and melodies bounced back and forth between leader and chorus (and walls) and swung up and down between stomachy lows and palatal highs. Of course every few moments a chord or a warble or a phoneme would slip by that I was sure I'd heard before (or more accurately "after"?) in a blues standard or a Timbaland beat. But again I was already used to it. When one melody lost steam, a new leader would jump in with a new one. Twice it fell to Elien, who was almost nerdily stiff in his delivery and dancing, but better than anybody else at whipping the crowd up to peaks of intensity.
The room was sparsely decorated, but three shrines more than compensated for the absence of other decoration. The first was on a table immediately to my right, and was mostly covered by a sheet-- I'm not sure why, maybe it didn't fit with the occasion. The only thing visible on top of the table was a crucifix a couple feet high in a delicate balance; it got knocked over a couple times and it seemed the thing to do to stand it up again, so I did. Around the base of the table on the dirt covered ground were elaborate designs traced in a yellow powder, which I guessed and later confirmed was corn meal. A google image search for "voudou symbols" would give you a better idea, but in the meantime just picture an excessively elaborate compass rose on a medieval map of the firmaments and you'll be close to the mark. The second shrine I don't remember well; but vaguely it was a small volcano of colors and bottles and candlewax in the corner of the room, sitting, that's right now I remember, under a thick bunch of hanging animal skulls. A bunch of skulls together don't look like much until you think about each one of them as a skull, if you know what I mean, and there were a ton of skulls. At least thirty. Elien pointed out that these were the skulls of all the animals that had been sacrificed there, but for some reason my impression that our pig was off roasting on a spit somewhere remained intact.
And now for the Brujo.
In his general appearance and demeanor he was a full faced and big bellied black man of medium height, with the sensual swagger of a consummate performer. His clothing changed through the course of the afternoon (his attendant helped him in and out of different shirts) but it was soft and loose-fitting and looked indulgently comfortable over his soft and loose-fitting body. He also had the sensual swagger of somebody in the process of getting or (eventually) already very hammered.
Then there was the handshake. I could call it an awesome handshake but really I should go farther and say I've never met anyone who was better at physically greeting people, and I doubt that any exist in North America (though one dimension of the experience, and it should be obvious which as you read on, recalled to me an encounter with Wesley Willis on a Chicago street in 1999).
It began with a violent, almost wrenching double armed shake: shake the left hand, cross over, shake the right hand. The tug on each hand felt strong enough to either dislocate my shoulders or tip me over my tiptoes into the Brujo's ample lap (and perfectly calculated to bring me to the verge of both but do neither). While his hands were flopping out to snatch mine his eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that seemed to say "Fuck up this handshake and it's your ass" but also "Precisely how much you feel out of place is how welcome you are in my house". Then he pulled me in close for an intimate headbut-- the kind where after making contact you roll your heads around just a few millimeters to make it sink in. What an embrace. And even though the combination of handshake was so precise and authoritative it felt like "the" voudou handshake (codified centuries ago, taught to kids in voudou catechism, etc.) Elien and Pippen got completely different ones. So either the Brujo had a deep, deep arsenal of sublime handshakes or he was freestyling each time, and I'm not sure which possibility would make me esteem him more.
Then there was the way this king held court. He was a bacchus, lord over the slow building feast. He sat on a throne; he made the chair he sat in a throne. He passed bottles of liquor around but drank as much as he shared. When he danced the floor shook. Sometimes he was singing or shouting instructions, other times he sat eyes half closed not moving a muscle in the stifling heat. But he was always demanding something, even if it was just complete engagement. As a master of ceremonies he was a tyrant.
And he had a queen. She was big too, round too, with cropped hair not much longer than his shaved round head, in a yellow satin suit, boozing like he did, dancing just as he did: intensely focused, but lazy with supreme confidence. Much of the time she sat tending to a small boy in her arms; their son perhaps. There she seemed almost like another spectator, but then she would drift into his wavelength and be transformed.
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The singing and dancing continued, and the Haitian environment started to get to me. It was extremely hot; we'd been there for two hours, it seemed. The music hammered on. I shared a chair with Tami or Elien until my but hurt and then stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from foot to foot as they got sore, in a corner of the room where a hot smell of urine dominated my senses. Everybody else was hot and sore on their feet or in their chairs, but they all seemed like they were in church, and pacing themselves. I did something that always worked in church, I started looking around the room. First I scanned the people: some were dressed like urban professionals, with cellphone holsters on their belts and sunglasses that didn't look fake. Others looked more typically roughed up by Haitian life.
Like I was in a hot last period history class, I started looking out the windows. Through the window on the left I could see a house up on a hill, stuccoed and painted yellow, shining out among the raw landscape of cinderblock and re-rod. Many of the houses had a level above in some stage of construction. The re-rod stuck up in the air at the corners of the structure and cinderblocks followed, as time and money allowed. I supposed that there was no cost to exposing concrete construction to the warm dry air, so you might as well slowly build skywards as your children grew up. Through the windows straight you could see the power lines that spanned the valley, tangled with homemade kites. Perpendicular lines of different colors and gauges ran down to feed the houses below. I'd looked out the same windows before, and I'd looked out at the valley from the street, but I hadn't seen the kites.
Elien might have figured we needed a break, because he took me and Pippen back up to the street to get water pouches. These particular pouches were the coolest looking of any I'd seen; the logo was a big smiley face with sunglasses on, and the brand had the words "cool" and "local" in it, I think. Maybe it was "Local Cool"; it sounds to good to be factual, but the more I think about it the more I convince myself that's what it was. The back of the pouch was tiled diagonally with the sunglassed smiley face.
We got back inside refreshed, but I could feel myself slowly sliding back into sleepy doggedness. Soon after, I heard a long, loud squeal coming from the entrance. "Ah," I thought, "that's the pig" and the "Brujo BBQ" notion collapsed into something that made a lot more sense: they were going to kill this pig right now or real soon, right in front of me.
The large pig appeared at the doorway with dark matted brown hair and a heavy hemp rope around its neck. A youngish man in jeans and a blue golf shirt dragged it into the room. It squealed again, it did not want to come into the room. But with a few tugs it was in the center of the room, nervous and looking around as the singing continued. The Brujo now had a machete.
In just a couple mental clock cycles after that first squeal I'd moved miles closer to knowing what the fuck would unfold, but I wasn't all the way there. I now pictured the killing of the pig, but I pictured it as an open and shut thing. That is, I thought they'd kill it more or less like a farmer facing the facts of life, with solemnity but equanimity too, equanimity in imitation of nature. So the moment I realized the nature and destination of the train I was on (all aboard!) was the moment when the brujo grabbed one of the pig's ears and with one flourish of the machete sliced it off.
A smooth, red line ran down one side of the ear the brujo now held in his hand. A matching red line ran down the stub of the pig's ear, marking the first step in its transformation from pig to meat. The pig had squealed and strained at its rope, and it squealed again when the brujo took its other ear. Turning, he displayed the ears to the room, and then placed them a dish by a shrine.
The singing steped up.
Up until now I've been using the Spanish word "brujo", but (or becasuse) the Haitian word is so much bettter. In Haitian, voudou priests are called "Papa Kriminel". Yes, "Papa Kriminel". As if the first Brujos built a time machine and took their name from the most bombastic phrase they could find in 2012 street slang. And the similarity to the word "Criminal" is not coincidental, and therefore I think it's entirely kosher to draw the vague impressions of badassness (without expicit reference to crime as such) that you'd get from hearing the word in modern slang.
So imagine the effect, of a room full of people singing "Ooooh Papa Kriminel Kriminel Kriminel Papa Kriminel Wooooah..." over and over again to their own Papa Kriminal who is, as we say in Massachusetts, bombed out of his gourd and yikes waving a machete around as sliced pig pants and shuffles panicky at his feet. "Woooah! Papa kriminel!"
The brujo took in his hand a dagger about a foot long with a red tassle on the end. Uh oh, kriminel. The man holding the rope pulled in, reducing the pig's range of movement. Then the brujo straddled the pig and stuck the dagger deep into the pig's back, entering near the shoulder blade and, I imagined, piercing the lung on that side. The pig squealed, and began to pant, but it was unsettlingly clear that this wasn't the death blow, it was ornamental. Moments later the brujo drove an identical dagger in near the opposite shoulder blade. At some point the pig had shat on the floor.
Then the song changed and the Brujo himself sang the call to a silent room and was echoed back by--now it seemed like everybody. He began dancing facing the crowd. Then he pointed the machete at the pig, lowered his head so he could look at it with wide open earnest eyes and eyebrows raised, and continued singing repeating the same phrase with theatric intensity. I realized he was singing to the pig. The only words I could understand were "mange ou" ("Eat" and "you") and I sang along an imagined translation in my head, "We're going to eat you, we're gonna eat you. We're going to eat you, we're gonna eat you" and later confirmed that's more or less what it was. The singers and crowd continued to sing this to the pig as the brujo began preparing the machete for the final blows.
Now at some point something very ugly happened. I honestly don't remember if it was before or after the pig was pierced with the daggers, but it was before the pig was killed, so I'll describe it now. For some reason, the Brujo, who was drunk, became angry with one of the young women singing. He yelled at her, she cringed and said something, and then he smacked her on her bare upper arm with the flat of the machete. She cowered, and he seemed to reflect and decide this wasn't enough of a punishment because in a moment he grabbed her and pushed her into a side room and started hitting her more. The entrance to the room was right by my side, and though it was dark in there I could see him hitting her about the head as she cried and tried to protect herself. Most people had their eyes raised to the entrance of the room, though some stared straight ahead. At least one person approached the entrance to the room and watched, and at some point other people entered the room and the brujo left. The girl came out a few minutes later with some blood coming from her head near her ear. Her ear had been cut.
The reaction of the crowd was extremely mixed and complex. Most of the men put on a face of concern. Elien did this, and as soon as the girl came out of the room he went into doctor mode and jumped up to inspect her cut. I remember one man was more disturbed, and kept shaking his head. Looking at the people sitting around the room I saw a woman whose eyes filled with tears. She didn't cry, but she rubbed her face with her hands. There were a few other women who were very disturbed, but at least two women who looked at the girl and nervously laughed it off, almost jeering, and said something I didn't understand, probably telling her to buck up, or that she shouldn't have done whatever it was she'd done. I don't even remember what Tami and Joanne's reactions were; I think they were part of the grave and silent crowd. The other young women singing were startled, but they seemed to see the girl as the lowest in their pecking order, and seemed to feel pretty secure it wouldn't happen to them. The girl who'd been hit was still humiliated and in pain, but she gradually returned to singing and dancing. I meant to ask Elien what had happened, at one point I even said I wanted to know, but he didn't take me up on it and I didn't press him. Pippen thought it was because she wasn't singing or dancing enough. The brujo was a tyrant.
The singing continued for a bit and the nervousness and horror from of the girl's beating wore off. The brujo began inspecting the machete, and taking practice swings with it. I became preoccupied with whether or not he'd be able to kill the pig with one swing, more out of some strange desire for the aesthetic perfection in the ceremony than for the pig's sake. Something was wrong with the machete, and an attendant ran for another. The man holding the rope pushed the pig down on its front knees. It resisted, dropped as the pressure on its back became too much, but then staggered back on its feet. The brujo inspected the new machete, and started taking more practice swings, by now almost staggering. I thought, "He's too drunk to kill it with one swing," even though I had no basis for thinking it was possible in the first place. I was also tensing up, ready to shift position in a flash if case the machete got too close.
The singing died down and a circle formed around the brujo. He raised the machete a few times, and shuffled around with the man holding the rope to get the right position. Then he dropped the machete into the pig's neck. The pig squealed, but the machete had only gone down three inches, leaving a triangular split in the pigs neck that sagged open with the unsupported weight of the head. In the smooth, precise, primary colored cut cut against the pig's hairy living back, the inanimate claimed more territory. But the pig was still alive, and still standing. It even stopped squealing.
I started breathing shallow breaths into a tight chest when I realized it wasn't over. The pig was breathing shallow two. The machete came down again and sunk in another inch. The pig squealed but lived. Then, after a pause, the brujo chopped again and again in rapid succession. Three. Four. Five. Six. The pig was screaming and my eyes stayed on its neck as the blade drove deeper. The split was sagging open so much now it looked impossible that the pig could still be alive. Seven or eight and I seem to remember a different sound, a spatter of blood, and the pig stopped squealing and dropped to the ground in a seizure. Through the split in the neck you could see the spinal column, cut but not completely severed but enough. I looked down at my bright orange Haitian t-shirt and there were three flecks of blood from the final chop. The pig was still twitching on the ground and a pool of blood was forming, mixing with the urine and shit from before. The brujo's attendant brought a bowl from the base of a shrine to collect some of the blood.
To believe my take on the next thing that happened, you need to know that many parts of voudou practice adopt aspects of the slave's existence as symbols. There's the whip, for example. Exact replicas of the hemp whip used on slaves 200 years ago gets cracked in celebrations and ceremonies and as part of dances.
When the pig finally lay still, the man who had held the rope removed it from the pig's neck, slowly and solemnly. Many parts of voudou practice adopt symbols from slavery and the sugar trade. The bullwhip that Europeans used to beat the slaves gets cracked as part of dances and ceremonies. The houses of many Brujos have a column with a wide cylindrical base that symbolizes the central shaft of the machine slaves used to push in circles (while whipped) to crush the sugar cane. It's there to draw supernatural force from the memory of suffering, and in ceremonies people dance around it. So when they solemnly removed the heavy hemp rope from the neck of the pig once it was dead it was clear that the pig was the slave, and the gesture said to it, "You're dead; you're free now".
Then they dragged the pig off to cut up the meat. This would take a long, long time, and I sank from the adrenaline of the killing back into the stupor of the full room and the thick air in the hot afternoon, floating between the keen engagement with the music and grumpy physical discomfort. There was an awkward episode where Elien sent Tami and Joanne to get food and they came back with hamburgers. I apologized and said I couldn't eat meat, and she said it was a cheeseburger. I thought she meant she'd asked for just cheese, no patty, but it turned out it was a normal cheeseburger. Anyway, Elien got really intense and said to them in Spanish, which they didn't speak, "No, no come eso!" I felt bad and took a bite of the burger, and then felt paranoid it would make me sick (I was traveling the next day) and exasperated by the whole situation. To be fair, Tami had seen me eat a cheeseburger before, and my criteria for when I would and wouldn't eat meat were very instinctual and fickle, so much of the misunderstanding could've lay there. "No come eso!" became a running joke between Tami and Joanne for the rest of the evening.
This all might have happened before the pig was killed. But after the pig was dragged off, they brought out the cheeseburgers and ate. Once in a while somebody's cellphone would ring.
When the meat was ready the Brujo began passing it around to the people there, in chunky fistfulls. Most folks had brought bags, but some people were definitely improvising and wrapping the huge hunks of flesh in paper. Some people seemed to take the meat for participations' sake, while others took it as a quantity of protein and fat that mattered a lot. Elien said some people would eat the meat raw, but I didn't see anyone do that.
After the meat was passed around, the Brujo and his queen started seeming very, very drunk. He slouched in his chair with his eyes half open, and eventually dropped his chin down into his neck and fell asleep. The queen danced ecstatically, eyes drooped, and at one point collapsed in a frightening way that looked almost like a seizure. Others ran to help her back into her chair, and she stood up to dance more, staggered, fell again, and was helped back into her chair. Eventually, she slumped too. The singing and drumming continued, but Elien started getting ready to go, and in our funny group we vanished with our share of pig meat out into the twilight.
The walk home was eventful. It looked like rain, and we rushed to find public transportation since it would be impossible to get home once the rain started because public transportation went to shit. We found one and made it to the center of Petionville just as the rain was starting and people were scrambling to get themselves and their wares the hell home before they got soaked. The electricity was out so everything was either a car headlight or a silhouette. When the rain began we ducked into a restaurant and Elien ordered me tripe, but I ate Sprite and fried plantains, setting Tami and Joanne riffing "no come eso!" While Pippen and Elien were having a really loud conversation about the origin of reggae, a man had an epileptic seizure in the doorway. Elien looked him over and flicked water on him, but nobody had moved his head from where it had fallen on the edge of a concrete stair before we stepped around his body and out into the street. The busses had stopped working and taxis were gouging so we walked home, back up the mountain.
