Featuring: VOODOONVILLE by Paolo Marchetti
Posted by Graham Letorney in FV Features, 0 Comments »Monday, January 16th, 2012
Haiti, Port-au-Prince, at the end of Cite Soleil (the heart of PAP) is one of Haiti’s largest landfill, Here, a slum named Waff Jeremy was born, the final frontier of humanity for the Haitian people. There is no reliable census to calculate the exact number of the inhabitants of Waff, but the logistical support of many NGOs in recent years have counted hundreds of thousands of people living in precarious style, without any support from the state. The desperation and the great faith of this people reflect the value of life, a final bulwark in support of such suffering. The Voodoo is a religion with African American characters syncretic and highly esoteric, one of the oldest in the world. The current religion Vuduista combines elements taken from the bustling traditional African practiced before colonialism, with concepts drawn from Catholicism. Today, Voodoo is practiced by about sixty million people around the world. In Haiti it is practiced by almost the entire population. The Voodoo tradition has gone through three centuries of persecution and misinformation and has been strongly discredited, many rumors and misinformation have promoted a general vision that is very distorted.
Contrary to what is commonly considered simply superstition and black magic, Voodoo is a religion for all purposes, with deep moral and social teaching. Voodoo’s complex theology spread from Africa as a result of deportation of slaves between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To escape the persistent persecution by the church, the religion Vuduista began (around 1800) to acquire Christian like iconography masking the traditional gods with figures of saints and madonnas. The name Voodoo derives from Vodun, or vodu, denoting the mysterious spirit that permeates and fertilizes the cosmic matter, activating it and giving it life. In African languages the term literally means “sign of the deep.”
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