VODOU ROOTS: A Love Story
Musical (Régine Romain)
Delivered
to the audience as an original podcast, VODOU ROOTS: A Love Story Musical is an
amazingly beautiful personal, familial, historical and spiritual testimony that
pushes the boundaries of the medium. Régine Romain's voice heightens the
expectations of what is to come since most have come to associate Vodou more
with "Voodoo" - doll piercings, spells and backwardness. Ms. Romain
serves as a guide through levels of understanding and facets many have never
pondered and many will continue to ignore.
When an orator utilizes a medium, in this case a podcast, there are established norms yet there is plenty of room to add one's personal style. Ms. Romain is a gifted storyteller who in telling this story does a sort of multimedia experiment, a digital realignment of music where she repurposes a song's meaning to connect the shared history of African diasporic peoples. The journey is bracketed as "Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage", also a short film directed and produced by Ms. Romain in 2016.
For Vodou Roots, she provides
additional stops at locations - physical and other. Since this not a linear
narrative, the musical selections serve as gatekeepers welcoming the listeners.
The first song, “Ti Gason Lemba” by Racine
Mapou De Azor & Wawa, segues into a deeply reflective
tone where one can feel the movements of the ocean, as Ms. Romain explains the
spiritual calling that led her to return to Benin, West Africa where many of
her ancestors were taken. The next song used to bridge cultural divides is Bob Marley’s
“Roots Natty Roots.”
“What is Vodou? "It is the root
of our beginning," says Ms. Romain. The name has roots in the language from
the Ewe of Togo, and the Fon of Benin, formerly Dahomey. She details how the religious
systems has survived, its relationship to other African religions and the hope
for a full revival.
Ms.
Romain was born in Washington, D.C. to Haitian immigrant parents and grew up
in the suburbs of Maryland (USA) as a child. She saw how her parents become
strict practitioners of Christianity as Jehovah Witnesses. She resisted the
teachings and through seasonal visits of a favorite aunt, Tante Rose Marie, she
was introduced to the spiritual teachings of Vodou.
"Since
the 15th century, practitioners of Vodou have endured global religious
persecution," says Ms. Romain. Millions of prisoners of war endured
persecution. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade caused irreparable harm to the
people, their religion, traditions and culture. Vodou "was systematically
demonized...forcibly hidden...[yet] bloomed in the Americas and Caribbean."
Ms.
Romain highlights the spiritual aspects of Vodou, its "arts and healing
modalities" and provides an overview of its spiritual traditions, how
"spirit forces serve as intermediary to the Almighty (God)." Vodou
played an important role in The Haitian Revolution. At Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman)
on August 14, 1791, the Vodou ceremony and congress served as the launching
point for the first and lone successful revolt where enslaved peoples defeated
their captors and took the land, the country.
Vodou
is grounded in a monotheistic faith and the concept of "vo bon don",
which means "to draw energy from the source of creation fearlessly and to
always honor your God." Upon her aunt's death, she handed the baton of
responsibility to Ms. Romain to continue honoring the ancestors by learning and
preserving Vodou’s cultural traditions. She ends this love story with a song
from her father's record collection: Lou Rawls's "You'll Never Find Another
Love Like Mine."
I
implore you to take the time to listen to this "love story musical". It will undoubtedly free a part
of your mind, a part of your spirit.
Credits:
Regine Romain, BRIC 2018 Podcast Fellowship, Brooklyn Free Speech Radio, Mark
Pagan, Daniel Johnson, Atibon NaZaire, Zulu Fawohodie and Derek Johnson.
