Jacmel of All My Dreams

A Haitian Ghost Story

The author in Ti Mouillage, Haiti, November 2002.

“At All Hallows Eve, the Guédé spirits of the dead overrun the countryside and towns,” wrote the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux  in his pioneering 1958 study Le Vaudou haïtien. “Clad in black and mauve, people possessed by them may be met not only in the sanctuaries but also in the markets, public places and on the roads.” 

The name given to a family of vodou lwa (spirits) that embody the power of death and fertility (and the interlocking relationship between the two), the pantheon of Gede (as it is spelled in Haiti’s native Creole language) also give their name to Fèt Gede, the time on 2 November when, as Métraux noted, the power of the spirits and those “ridden” (possessed, if you will) by them burst forth from the peristyles (temples) of Haiti’s vodou faith and into its cemeteries, streets and squares.

In November 2002, I was living in Haiti and the country was, as is often the case, in the thrall of a political crisis that would see the ouster of a despotic president a year and a half later. Various political factions stood, daggers drawn, waiting for the final dénouement. As the political situation deteriorated and Fèt Gede approached, a friend from New York came to visit me, and we decided that we would spent part of the weekend outside the southern town of Jacmel, where I rented a cottage by the ocean.