【全英文读书笔记】Tell My Horse
Acknowledgement
I know there’s no one willing to read tons of English so I don’t want to write acknowledgement at all. After all it will not be read carefully. All you need to know is that all the quotes with quotation marks belong to the author. I’m only a vegetable dog with broken pieces of writing and summary.
This is a book rarely heard about by people. This is not an ethnography with the best methodology conducted, but with impressive usage of vocabulary to illustrate scenes and lifestyles of people.
Being a negro (which is what the author calls herself) in the USA, in 1936, the author Zora Neale Hurston went for Jamaica and Haiti, where most of locals were mulattoes (the mixed-race of black and white people). These two nations lie both in Latin America, and both have been colonized before. Jamaica was a colony of the UK until 1962 while Haiti was colonized by France in 17th century. The hierarchy set by France in Haiti had been observed by the author in the 20th century, that is, the white being the dominant, mulattoes in the middle and free black people at a lower ranking. There used to be black slaves that were freed as peasants.
So, to investigate such a nation as a black American herself, the author’s race This is the most interesting point for this book’s anthropological aspect: the researches on mulatto societies were often conducted by white scholars at the time, as a result, the issues of “being too prominent in crowd” occurred for most of time. But for the author, her race made this issue less likely to happen, also benefiting her research since it was more acceptable for her to ask questions than the white.
However, it also makes the book a satire to some degree-- the mulattoes desired for being white completely while the author, as a member of negro females literature movement, identified and took pride in her race and ethnicity. There comes the first issue that people in Jamaica and Haiti worried: the race.
Race
As mentioned above, both Jamaica and Haiti are countries of mixed-blood people, who have the memories of slavery before. However, “the color line in Jamaica between the white Englishman and the blacks is not as sharply drawn as between the mulattoes and the blacks.” The mulattoes are not typical ones with dual ethnicity who don’t seem to belong to either. The mulattoes even deny the black heritage of their own. “Black skin is so utterly condemned that the black mother is not going to be mentioned nor exhibited.” Why the black and mulattoes are not hostile to the white who have oppressed them for ages?
When the locals considered white people as naturally superior ones, the cultural hegemony of western culture in these regions had been successful.
Race is a social construction, as many contemporary sociologists claim. There are many biological evidences proving this perspective. However, if only from the appearances, the black and white and even mulattoes do have great differences. They are so likely to be distinguished.
It was not only race that led to the social inequalities in these nations. “The rich will be richer while the poor will be poorer.” For the well-educated, they have more opportunities of going to external world. But for the peasants, all they are able to do is to live a peasant-styled life. A second reason why the inequality gap is so huge is that, the governments of these nations are corrupt and often in need of reform.
Political movement
The author used four entire chapters describing the history and political movement in Haiti, which confused me with all the exotic names of national leaders and historical events. In a brief summary, the development of Haiti was attached with “blood and sweats”. Being a colonial country in 17th century, the impact of colonialism lasted in the ideologies of local people for long, even after the independence of the nation was accomplished.
The local people tried so hard to imitate the social norms of western world, but this is only for the upper class ones. Colonialism left them with the thought of “our traditions are feudal while Western style is the best”, and thus created a greater gap between different classes. “Haiti has always been two places. First it was the Haiti of the masters and slaves. Now it is Haiti of the wealthy and educated mulattoes and the Haiti of the blacks.”
There were similar problems like other post-colonized nations: corruption, social inequality, poverty in rural areas. There were also similar steps taken like the West: reform, revolution, and a repetition of them. In chapter 8 to 9, the author visualized the process of two revolutions— one took place of the national leader, and then he was taken by another.
Since I don’t have any background knowledge, the narrative didn’t impress me with much left. After all, the Wikipedia tells history and political system better than I, a student who doesn’t interest in politics at all, do.
Feminism
The book also talks about a little feminism. The religious belives there, no matter it is local Voodoo or foreign Christianity, did have influence on the social attitudes towards females. As the author described, “Of course all women are inferior to all men by God and law down there. But if a woman is wealthy, of good family and mulatto, she can overcome some of her drawbacks.”
Another source of oppression is the hierarchy system in these Caribbean societies. “A man is only obliged to women within his class.” It may seem primitive and feudal, so it is. It is not a surprise that a nation that is undeveloped and unwealthy as Haiti sees females inferior. What surprised me is that witchcraft practices in the society didn’t benefit women at all. Compared with the primitive tribes in New Guinea, where witchcraft also play a huge part and women, serving as the only ones who could use certain kinds of witchcraft, are more respected. Some of these societies are even matrifocal.
This is a good anthropological topic with many unanswered questions: Is the oppression of females universal in all societies without capitalism? If not, why women are valued more in some societies? Maybe because they can contribute to the society as much as males do, like using witchcraft. But what about those matrifocal societies without a worship of witchcraft? What about witch hunt in the medieval time in the West?
I have been long to writing an essay on the relations between witchcraft and feminism, and I feel this book provides me with a good cutting point.
Voodoo
The most attracting part for every reader who’s not Haitian must be the in-detailed descriptions of Voodoo, that is, the “primitive” local religion in Haiti. It is hard to illustrate the belief with words—it is far more complicated than its first impression. A local said to the author: “Voodoo is something much more spacious than the Congo dance, but most of white people or visitors only leave with the equation of Congo dance with Voodoo.”
Voodoo practices are typical sympathetic magic, according to anthropologist Frazer. The method of cursing and pinning with needles on the dolls representative for a person is believed to cause related harm on the body of him. This is a common sense of occultism because we call the dolls “Voodoo dolls”. However, I cannot find the author mentioning this in the book.
What is mentioned in the book is rather gentle, well, not that gentle. There are poinsons made out of Voodoo practices. The author testified that they do have scientific evidences which the local are not aware of— the raw materials of poisons may cause harm with the germs on them, especially the dirt near graveyard.
Most of people in Haiti believe in Voodoo, even for the upper well-educated ones. They don’t usually talk about it in public while the peasants do. That’s the only difference. The revolutionary leader mentioned above had a Voodoo priestess daughter, not influencing him being the national leader at all. But there were movements against Voodoo, maybe I need to read another ethnography of today to find out whether the new religions rise or not in modern Haiti.
(There is also a confusion of mine: are Hoodoo and Voodoo the same thing? They look so similar.)
Gods
We must talk about Gods in Voodoo belief if we want to know about it. Gods in Haiti were more referred to as “loa”, the native language meaning spirits. There are many gods and goddesses, each having their own responsibilities. There is a God above all the others, Damballa, “ the God of Gods”.
There are similar ceremonies in different regions of Haiti, always with an altar, in order to worship the Gods. Songs and prayers are included. Damballa is always the first one to be summoned or sung. Another god is the God of gate, Papa Legba. He’s the first few to be called as well, in order to open the gate to let other Gods exist. From where? We don’t know.
There’s another interesting Goddess. She’s “the woman of all Haitian men.” Being the Goddes of love, I don’t quite understand why she is really easy to envy other females. “Hundreds of wives have been forced to step aside entirely by her demands.” “To women and their desires, she is all but maliciously cruel, for not only does she choose and set aside for herself young and handsome men and thus bar them from marriage, she frequently chooses married men and thrusts herself between the woman and her happiness.” (She’s quite weird for me so no comments...)
The Gods are able to possess people and make them “tell out things that they at no reason would have known”. The priests and priestesses also let the loas possess them during ceremonies. It seems that the system of Gods is really mature and complete. All the gods mentioned are on the “good side”, where they have power but are slow in action. For those in need of power from the Gods, the Petro Gods are best choice. “The Petro gods on the other hand are terrible and wicked, but they are more powerful and quick. They can be made to do good things, however, as well as evil.” So people do search for them with exchange of their own valuables, or sometimes they are asked to work for them.
The Petro Gods are extremely strict. If the people who were helped by them cannot work for enough time, then they will get punished. Their family members will die first and then it’s their turn. Death is not the end in Haiti, because there are possibilities of being turned into zombies.
Zombies and taboo
To be honest, I believe in witchcraft deeply due to my personal experiences of foreseeing future. These cannot be explained by any sorts of science in the world. It’s not mental illusion nor memory distortion-- well, I suppose there won’t be any suspicions if everyone experiences the same as I did. Merely explaining anything with words cannot convince anyone. The issue is that we cannot make everyone experience the same.
It is the same with Haitian zombies. Many who go to Haiti won’t believe in it, not to mention those who don’t. The descriptions of zombies in this book seem so exaggerate that I wouldn’t have believed in them if I hadn’t known the honesty of author in writing the book.
Her definition of zombies is: the bodies without souls. This means that they cannot think on their own but only follow the orders made by those who woke them up from death. “From an educated, intelligent to an unthinking, unknowing beast.”
The zombies are always “living dead”. Most of them are summoned from the tombs. There are cases of alive people being turned into zombies, but they are relatively rare. As a result, in Haiti, the dead people must be taken great care of after they are buried into tombs-- they might be stolen to become zombies.
There is another point of view of zombies in Haiti being a special mental syndrome, similar to depersonalization disorder. I feel this does explain some of the cases, however, it doesn’t apply to the “living dead”. Those who have already dead are seen walking on the streets, not able to recognize any familiar people. Or is it just that those who are turned into zombies have to be “falsely dead” to be picked up by the houngans? I think this is an interesting topic to discuss, but feel little possibility of it actually being researched. After all, a taboo has to have something serious to do with to become a taboo.
My own opinion is that why cannot the phenomenon of Haitian zombies be something that can be explained later, like a few decades or tens of decades? In medieval time people could not explain the Dark Death, which turned out to be caused by germs that could not be seen. Nor can we see the process of how dead people are turned into zombies, or how tarot cards work to give prophecies of the future. The unseen still exists.
I have searched for zombies of Haiti on Youtube, and there really are a range of videos that I dared not to watch alone. Maybe when the day came when I am able to accept the concept of zombies and watch the videos of them as any other occultism or witchcraft video, can people really rethink witchcraft and acknowledge there are some things out of “science superstition”.
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