African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 1010
vulnerability, and thus they share the dynamic of the bocio. They expose the private,
turning things inside out, and such exposure becomes the first step of the cure. Because
there is a certain deliberate confusion of the model of the troubled relationship with the
actual troubled people, the wanga also share the dynamic of Kongo medicine bundles. An
example drawn from the Haitian diaspora community in New York City illustrates these
dynamics.
When a person whose husband was sexually involved with another woman turned to
Mama Lola, a Haitian manbo and noted healer practicing in Brooklyn, Lola made a
wanga for her. First, Lola took a small piece of cloth cut from an article of the husband’s
clothing. With this, she made a male doll with a small bundle of cloth rolled tightly and
stitched to its crotch to represent his penis. Herbs and powders, plus the name of the wife
written several times on white paper, were placed inside the doll, which then was tied
into a small wooden chair with a length of copper wire. The wire, in turn, was secured
with a padlock. (The wife was instructed to throw away the key to that lock.) Thus
immobilized, the image of her husband was placed facing a wall on which a fragment of
mirror hung, a visual trope for the sea. While gazing on the mirror-calm surface of the
sea, those who serve the lwa are supposed to see reflections of ancestors and spirits who
dwell beneath the water. An image of Santa Clara was tucked behind the mirror “to clear
the man’s eyes.”
Making the wanga, an act in which the client often shares the labor, is not enough,
however. It is also necessary to “work the wanga” “Working” such a charm can mean
something as simple as keeping a candle lighted in front of it, or it can involve long-term
spiritual discipline. The troubled wife was told to keep an oil lamp burning, day and
night, in the space between the seated doll and the fragment of mirror on the wall. Mama
Lola then explained that, if she followed the instructions, her husband would “keep his
head down,” the way Santa Clara bows her head, and, all other women would disappear
from his view.
The Vodou practice of making wanga resonates with its West and Central African
predecessors. Yet there is one dimension of this ritual technology that Africans will not
experience in the same way Haitians do, namely, the capacity of wanga to articulate the
experience of slavery. The songs and stories that cluster around Haitian Vodou are
mysteriously silent about slavery. There are few songs that even hint at things connected
to slavery. What is said is indirect and disguised. There is, for example, one song that
voices resistance to unnamed forces and also complains of insupportable suffering, yet
the blame for that suffering is ultimately displaced onto the innocent heat of the sun.
This raises questions as to how ritual technologies interact with memory and history,
especially those dimensions of ritual that are channeled through the body rather than the
brain. Slave history apparently remains kinesthetically alive for Mama Lola. When she is
binding and tying wanga, her body engages a dense tangle of affect, a kinesthetic sense
of the control and confinement of enslavement. Every time Mama Lola makes wanga
with yards of string, rope, or wire, her body rehearses the dialectic of binding and loosing
central to the service of the Vodou spirits. So the practices passed on to her by
generations of healers in her family may, in this way, also function to preserve the story
of slavery in her family’s history.