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rockofeye · 1 year

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The Charnel Ground

Note: when I write about Gede, I am always referring to the entire family of Gede unless I am naming particular Gede. I usually refer to Gede as a singular he, because that is easiest to write and Gede most often presents himself as male though there are Gede of all genders out there.

If the average person is going to be able to relate to anything about Haitian Vodou, they are probably going to relate to the idea of Gede; the lascivious dead man with a skull face and sunglasses and penis jokes. It's all true in it's own way, but when I write about Gede I keep coming back to the other ways I know Gede because that's probably the way I have come to know all of them best. It probably says a lot about who I am at heart, which, like so many things, I learn more about day-by-day.

The older I get, the more introspective I find myself becoming. It's a gift mostly; when I was younger, I was the exact opposite. I used to think a lot about what was happening to me and in my life but it was sort of like a car stuck in mud and spinning its wheels. My brain was busy getting dirty with anxiety and a lot of fear, but not a lot of thinking about the whys and hows of my life and what my part and my role in things were. It took a lot of time to break those particular patterns and get the car out of the mud, and the lwa really dug in on refining that. It's one of the biggest areas of change I can see in myself since they really got to work on me in the djevo. Most of the time I don't react or don't feel like I need to react immediately to something and instead take time to chew on it, usually while remaining in a place where I can seek to see the big picture from as wide a viewpoint as possible, versus being totally swayed by my own emotions.

Finding myself as an introspective person has really led me to looking for internal stillness, as much as is possible. I initially wrote 'internal peace' but peace is a missed opportunity for change.

My life is chaotic from the jump. I work in a high stress, high intensity field that can have very little room for error and carries a not insignificant risk of personal harm, whether because it is an essential service that doesn't close for pandemic or violence or anything in else. In the last week, I had one client descend rapidly in catatonia and be committed to a psychiatric hospital, another client who recently got out of a psychiatric hospital have a relapse of serious symptoms that put them at risk, and, for the first time in 15 years, a client took a swing at me (I am fine, not really significant). I work a ton because the staffing crisis is real, and like any good houngan/manbo/servitor, I hustle on the side and do what I need to do to make sure my ventures are successful.

That's a lot of vibrating wildly on a daily basis as the baseline for life. So, stillness. I look for it. I compartmentalize carefully and create distance so that I can come home from work and sit on my couch and watch Netflix without constantly re-running my day or carrying the heaviness that comes from carrying other people's heaviness or dreading going into work.

This is where I have found Gede in recent times, in the stillness that leaves all other happenings at the gate. For me, Gede is a hundred different things wrapped up in a funeral suit and crushed hat, but in this space he is my witness. There isn't anything to say and nothing to do, but he is there as I metaphorically sit and breathe and witness my own self. It has become how I often find I need him most now, though it is certainly not the only way he moves in my life.

This layer of my experience with Gede has had me really considering Gede in all his myriad faces. It would be hubris to say that I know Gede or understand Gede in totality, but I can understand the pieces he shows me and allows me to chew on, just like I chew on my understandings of myself. How it all tastes makes me feel kind of silly for not seeing it before and not pinning it down a little more for myself, but I also know that Gede's timing is impeccable and maybe I didn't need to see it before or wasn't ready to see it. Or...maybe everyone else has seen it and I'm late to the party?

We understand Gede to have been the most recently incarnate of all of the families of lwa who may have once had literal feet on the ground and with the deepest understanding of what it is to be human. For me, that means Gede also carries the heaviness that comes with being human. He remembers the joys and happiness of life but also the pains and moments of suffering and bitterness....and yet comes out with the gouyad. Why?

I believe that Gede really is most concerned with transformation. In all the ways I have known him, he has always been intimately involved in these processes of change that lead to something different. He takes the heaviness of life and kind of shrugs at it, because he is dead now. Being dead now means he doesn't have to hold onto the heaviness in the same way and so he can gouye in front of the drums and gouye on his people and gouye a new path forward when there was previously none. It is choosing to transform heaviness into sweetness without forgetting the the sometime bitter taste of life.

Gede tells a lot of jokes and says things that are funny, but in that and in the gouyad I have found him incredibly serious. For me, Gede speaks and acts how he does because it is of course part of who he is, but also because it opens the door for transformation. You can hear the deepest truth when he sings a song about having sex with your mother and then turns to you and strikes at your very heart with the message he has for you personally. His gouyad is work, in every sense of the word. Because it is portraying something we hold as private and (in some ways) as vulnerable, it makes us laugh to see him in his suit and his broken glasses and battered hat covered in powder hip thrusting at the drums and on the serious older Haitian man who came to the fet in church clothes and on the manbo who blushes and poking his baton-penis into the young man who looks like he wishes the earth itself would open and swallow him right up.

But it is also work. It transforms something that can come with stigma into something sacred, even if it is sacred embarrassment, and that transformation changes us. It relieves us of our own heaviness, even for a moment, and it interrupts the patterns in our lives and allows us to realign them just a bit, even if we don't see it or even consider it. How does that work? Let me tell you the story that kicked off the whole thought process that birthed this blog post.

Last year at this time, I wasn't working a regular job. I had taken a voluntary layoff from a position in the spring that I thought was my dream job working for my dream agency. It Was Not, and in fact was kind of a nightmare...the grass is not always greener in the end. It wasn't a bad move for me because it had increased my income in a giant leap at a time where I needed a lot of cash at my disposal, but it was clearly not where I was meant to be overall.

I was working some side gigs and collecting unemployment, and was having an absolute bitch of a time finding a regular job. My resume is solid and I carry a good reputation in my field, but I just wasn't getting call backs and was getting pretty desperate because the end of unemployment was coming and I had zero prospects. We were having our Gede fet, and I took just a moment to chat with him. I didn't even talk to him about work, but about another personal matter that was on my heart.

It wasn't a long conversation, and he waved off what I was trying to say to him, telling me that this other area of my life was basically doing too much. I wasn't thrilled to hear that and while I stood there sorting that out in my head, Gede is rubbing up on me with his hips doing what they do. For me, it was a moment of 'well, I guess I'm going to stand here and take it' because what the hell else was I going to do?

It took me about a month or so to really realize what he had done. He had worked some magic in that moment for me, and realigned the road to a new option. After the fet, I went back to the endless job search and found a temporary job listed with the agency that I had worked for prior to leaving for what I thought was going to be my last career stop. I applied for it and worried that I wasn't going to get a call back because they of course would have found a reason to hate me in the six months that I had been gone...but got a call back for an interview in less than 24 hours, had the interview scheduled within a day, and got a job offer at the end of the interview, two day before my unemployment benefits were up. That job improved upon the salary that had lost, brought me into something permanent, and has allowed me to become a subject matter expert on something that almost no one else does. It was the hail mary of all hail mary passes, and it hit.

I am not stupid, so once I signed the offer I threw myself in front of my table and thanked my lwa for helping me get this position and that when that first paycheck hit they would be getting some of what they had been waiting on. I am kind of dense sometimes, though, and presented my thanks in the way I often do when I have been up against it and get nervous and therefore sort of shriek my prayers at all of my spirits: I thanked all of them for their assistance and always taking care of me.

It was almost comical the way I felt the stare of the Dead Man, boney hands on hips, waiting for me to figure it out. I had that lightbulb moment and began thanking my Gede by name for their assistance in saving my ass. I got all the way to naming my husband's Gede, who I am quite close to, before I heard the dry voice in the back of my head say 'it was ME'. Gede was quite specific; it was the Gede that had rubbed all over me at the fet, the Gede of the lineage I was initiated in, who had gotten me this job and that gouyad where I stood there awkwardly probably looking unhappy as how he did his work.

As it has been almost a year since that happened, it's been on my mind and it's had me thinking about Gede and transformation. I've really been sitting with Gede in that place of him being the witness to who I am, who I am becoming, and what is becoming of me, and I keep thinking about the ways in which Gede knows transformation. He is the ultimate symbol of transformation in that he was born, lived, died, and then lived again when Bawon Samdi lifted him, and death has been the mechanism that has brought him to himself and ultimately to us...had Gede not died, he would not exist for us now.

My brain took a left turn with all of this and I started thinking about how death literally brings life. Like, our bodies decay because bacteria thrives on our flesh and transforms it into rot which in turn spawns a new cycle of life with bacteria, mold, etc. Gross, right?

And yet.

I've been sitting in a spot for awhile where I have felt that I am awaiting a process of transformation. It's disturbed my stillness. I'm not really sure what it is yet (I do know some of the things it's not), but I know it's kind of pulsing there in the background. I am waiting on it and it is waiting on me. My waiting is in the charnel ground, the place where the bodies of the dead lay to rot and become something different. I keep coming back to that imagery, of laying down among the dead so I can be something different when I get back up. There's kanzo imagery there, as the djevo is it's own kind of charnel ground, except without the gross dead bodies; we go to lay down and die and then get up as something new and transformed.

Me being me, I asked Gede if this was the message that I'm about to transform myself out of this body, and if a skull had eyes to roll... One of my favorite parts of my relationship with Gede is that he is will absolutely tell me when he thinks I am being dumb or am being a pain in the ass. I was being dumb.

He's my witness at the charnel ground, too. The field is the domain of a Bawon, but Gede walks where he will amongst what he once was, and he watches and waits while I become.

#real vodou #gede #fet gede #guede #ghede #gouyad #haitian vodou

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