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After God Is Music: Affliction, Healing, and Warfare in Haitian Pentecostalism

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After God Is Music: Affliction, Healing, and Warfare in Haitian Pentecostalism AFTER GOD IS MUSIC: AFFLICTION, HEALING, AND WARFARE IN HAITIAN PENTECOSTALISM Lenny J. Lowe A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Todd Ramón Ochoa Laurent Dubois Laurie Maffly-Kipp Yaakov Ariel Brendan Thornton © 2017 Lenny J. Lowe ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Lenny J. Lowe: After God is Music: Affliction, Healing, and Warfare in Haitian Pentecostalism (Under the direction of Todd Ramón Ochoa) This dissertation explores a version of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Haiti popularly known as Lame Selès (Fr. L’Armée Celeste), or “The Heavenly Army.” Within Haiti’s Protestant population more broadly, these independent Pentecostal communities are often viewed with suspicion and accused of being charlatans or practitioners of Vodou in a Christian guise on account of their combinatory ritual practices and musical styles. Based on data drawn from fieldwork among some of these communities in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, I argue that these independent Pentecostal communities are an important site of the kind of religious combination that has long characterized religion in Haiti and the Black Atlantic world. Drawing on resources within the “hot” and combative Petwo style of Vodou and combining it with “spiritual warfare” discourse drawn from global Pentecostal and charismatic Christian culture, these communities use music and divine healing to engage and attack spiritual sources of affliction common among the poor majority in contemporary Haiti, ranging from bodily and mental illness to anxiety and officially sanctioned injustice. In the years following the 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s Protestant population has grown dramatically and continues to grow, leading some to speculate about the disintegration of “traditional” Haitian religious practice. These communities of independent Pentecostals, however, illustrate the vitality iii of Haiti’s religious culture and its productive combinatory practices. Through their engagement in an explicit spiritual war with the spirits of Vodou, independent Pentecostal communities forge a symbiotic relationship with Vodou and provide new bodies, spaces and discourses for the spirits to inhabit, even if radically revalued within them. iv To Sè Claudette and Sè Henri, the prophetesses, whose wisdom, kindness, and strength sustain so many and far exceed the words contained herein. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not exist outside my imagination without the help and counsel of many others. Firstly, I want to thank the communities in Port-de-Paix, who trusted me enough to let me participate, take notes, take photos, take video, and even occasionally dance with them. In particular, I would like to thank the leaders of the communities of La Famille de Reconaissance en vers Jesus Christ and La Piscine de la Délivrance for taking care of me during my fieldwork and for sharing their world with me. Secondly, I must thank my wife, Allison, for all the evenings that she suffered our children alone during the writing process. She has sacrificed more than will ever be acknowledged. I would also like to thank the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for supporting my research and writing during my final year there. The list of faculty who have encouraged me, counseled me, and corrected me along the way is long, but I must make note of a few in particular. Thanks to Zlatko Plese in UNC’s Department of Religious Studies for being a friend, a mentor, and for allowing me to use his lovely office. Thanks must go to Laurie Maffly-Kipp, who is now (sadly) at Washington University in Saint Louis, for remaining involved even when it would have been easier to move on. I want to thank Laurent Dubois at Duke University for his expertise and endless generosity. Finally, I want to thank Todd Ochoa for reading every word of everything that I ever gave him, for his patience and encouragement, for his incredible coaching during the writing process, and for introducing me to new ways to think about religion and the world. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….……..1 The Problem of Religious Mixture……………………………………….……….2 Intimate Enemies………………………………………………………………….5 Lame Selès as Global Pentecostalism………………………………….………….7 Spiritual Warfare…………………………………………………………….…...11 The Discourse of Improvement………………………………………………….12 Theoretical and Methodological Orientation: Analyzing Spirits...………………13 Fieldwork and Method…………………………………………………………...14 Thesis and Organization…………………………………………………………15 CHAPTER 1: LAME SELÈS IN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL CONTEXT……21 Called By God, Or Maybe Not…………………………………………………..21 Catholic-Vodou Relations………………………………………………………..23 Parallel Power, Sorcery, Superstition………………………………………...….25 Protestantism in Haiti…………………………………………………………….27 Spirit-Filled America………………………………………………….……..…..30 Pentecostalism and Vodou…………………………………………………...…..32 Heavenly Armies in Haiti…………………………………………………..……33 Lame Selès and Spiritual Warfare…………………………………………….…37 Spiritual Warfare and the Haitian Revolution: A Case Study…………….……..40 vii Prophetess, Healer, Magician: Introducing the Field…………………………….47 Physical and Cultural Geography………………………………………………..49 La Famille: A House in Decline………………………………………...……….53 Piscine de la Deliverance: A House on the Rise…………………………………57 Economy in Independent Pentecostal Communities……………………………..61 Propriety, Musical Virtuosity, and Socio-Spiritual Prestige…………………..…62 CHAPTER 2: MUSIC………………………………………………………………...…66 Music in the Black Atlantic…………………………………………………...…66 Pastor Jean-Pierre and Les Après Dieu………………………………….……….70 Music Among Les Après Dieu…………………………………………………..75 The Ritual Center – Jeune………………………………………………………..78 The Morning Hours: Charting a Spiritual Geography………………………...…79 The Afternoon: Making War…………………………………………………….83 Climax: The Arrival of Sentespri………………………………………………...92 The Theology and Politics of Fòs Sentespri………………………………….….94 CHAPTER 3: DOCTORS…………………………………………………………..…...99 The Head of a Beast…………………………………………………………..….99 Transnational Medicine in Haiti………………………………………………..102 “White Doctors Don’t Believe Us”……………………………………………..103 Transnational Medicine in Contexts of Inequality……………………………...107 Affliction, Healing, and Efficacy……………………………………………….108 Health Seeking Among Independent Pentecostals……………………………..110 Becoming Konvèti Among the Spirits………………………………………….113 viii Afflicting Spirits in the Heavenly Army………………………………………..119 Social Power of Discernment…………………………………………………...125 Life in Public……………………………………………………………………126 Discernment is Healing…………………………………………………………128 CHAPTER 4: THE POLICE……………………………………………….…………..130 Pastor Jean-Claude……………………………………………………………..130 The Possessed Body as Mélange……………………………………………….134 Violence and Insecurity in Haiti………………………………………………..136 Violence and “Stabilization” in Haiti…………………………………………..139 Insecurity and the Invisible World……………………………………………...140 Performance, Efficacy, and Entertainment……………………………………..142 Efficacy: Possession as Double Authorization…………………………………143 Entertainment: Performing Real Violence……………………………………...145 Pentecostal Zonbis………………………………………………………….…..147 Undressing the Zonbi at Ofouno…………………………………………….….151 Blood and Nakedness……………...……………………………………………158 CHAPTER 5: JUDGES………………………………………………………………...160 Pastor Freddie…………………………………………………………………..160 Sosyete Sekrè and Lame Selès………………………………………………….160 Justice is Blind, But Blind Men Still Have Pockets…………………………….166 Afflicted by Injustice…………………………………………………………...168 Rape and Sorcery…………………………………………………………….…169 Spiritual Diagnosis………………………………………………………….…..173 ix Prescribing Prayer, Enlisting Labor.....................................................................175 The Immanence of Affliction…………………………………………….……..176 Assigning Blame………………………………………………………….…….178 Accepting Responsibility………………………………………………….……186 Systems of Secrecy……………………………………………………………..188 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………190 Idioms of Excess………………………………………………………………..191 Lame Selès Futures……………………………………………………………..193 All Three At the Same Time……………………………………………………198 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………201 x INTRODUCTION: MINGLING HOLY THINGS Several decades before the official start of the Haitian revolution in 1791, a one- armed fugitive slave wandered the hills around Limbé, just to the south of present day Cap-Haitien. He is remembered for allegedly waging a careful and covert rebellion using his skills in magic, medicine, and poison against the plantation owners and the livestock of colonial Saint Domingue. Alejo Carpentier’s novel, The Kingdom of this World, imagines this maroon, named Makandal, as an “houngan of the Rada rite, invested with superhuman powers as the result of his possession by the major gods,” and Carpentier even grants him the title, “the Lord of Poison.”1 Although more recent research casts doubt upon Makandal’s actual responsibility for the deaths of colonists and livestock, historical records confirm that he had in fact acquired a reputation very much like what Carpentier’s novel suggests.2 Whatever his actual role may have been, his alleged role is clear in the historical record. He was captured and burned at the stake for being a “seducer, poisoner, profaner.”3 He was labeled a “seducer” for having stirred the hopes of the enslaved that resistance might be possible. In the eyes of the French
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