Vodou Spirits Battle the Yankee God: Myth, Sacred Violence, and the American Invasion of Haiti

In 1915, the United States invaded Haiti for reasons that on the surface level are unsurprising for the twentieth century—supporting a regime friendly to American political, military, and economic interests and promoting projects conducive to American financial and cultural penetration. But, on a deeper level, Haiti was a site of deeply conflicting mythologies. On one extreme was American progressive imperialism, represented most forcefully by the American president, Woodrow Wilson; on the other were the sèvitès--rural, Haitian, practitioners of a powerful and coherent syncretic worldview, Vodou. Straddling these two very different spiritual worlds were elite, metropolitan, Francophone Haitians as well as voices from the burgeoning, global, Pan-African movement. This paper combines historical and anthropological methodologies to demonstrate, for one, that the Yankee imperialists and Haitian vodouisants lived out worldviews that not only saw the composition of the cosmos, man’s place in it, and the notion of progress in entirely different ways but that also both called for the use of sacred violence under certain circumstances. Francophone Haitians, meanwhile, were in the same decade developing a new national mythos--part of the emerging Pan-Africanism that reached as far as Harlem and West Africa--that attempted to embrace Vodou as a source of folkloric pride while also endeavoring to position Haiti in the same internationalist order for which Wilson fought. Ultimately, this work seeks to give voice to Vodou as an inherently anti-imperialist discourse, to add complexity to our understanding of the anti-imperialism and imperial complicity inherent in Pan-Africanism, and to position the American-Haitian encounter in relation to the concurrent global mandate experiment.