Voodoo Man: Gamba Shema Lana!

[bcholmes]

So, I mentioned that I was playing around with comics that had fallen into the public domain. And that I was pretty shocked by just how racist they were.

I kept reading them, mostly for two reasons: first, I'm likely to take another cartooning course in the summer -- Cartooning 5 -- and I'll need to define a class project. I was half-thinking about reproducing one of these stories with more modern sensibilities. Second, I've been looking to play more with developing software for the Mac, and I've been playing with some of the open source comic book viewer software.

Recently, I've discovered Voodoo Man. And ugh. Fucking ugh.

Voodoo Man is the name of a back-up feature that appears in about a dozen comics produced by Fox Features, starting around 1940. It also seems to be the name of a villain that appears in most of those stories.

Here's a capsule summary:

The stories centre around Dr. Bob Warren, an American doctor who travels to Haiti. He tells another passenger on his boat: "Yes, I am going down to set up a practice and do a little investigating into this Voodoo business."

Sure enough, before long, Dr. Warren has a run-in with Voodoo Man. The brother of Dr. Warren's servant, Petro, has recently died, and Voodoo Man is going to reanimate the corpse as a zonbi.

"Gamba Sema Lana!" This is apparently what one says to raise a zonbi. When he's not speaking this kind of faux-African babble, Voodoo Man speaks pidgin English: "They wound me slight -- me have revenge!"

An oddity of this first story is that the colourist seems to have mostly failed to realize that many of the figures in the story are Haitian. Voodoo Man, himself, is vaguely tan coloured, but other characters, including Petro and other background Haitian, are coloured as if they were white characters. After the first story, the Haitians take on a more clearly brown skin tone (except Petro, who, strangely, becomes an old white guy for the second story).

Most of the stories are about Voodoo Man's various zonbi minions:

Although what kind of voodoo story would be complete without mentioning the awesome power of the voodoo doll! Forget that voodoo dolls have never been a part of Haitian voodoo. Facts have no place in these stories!

Every once in a while, you get a real place name, for a bit of flavor, such as when Dr. Warren goes to Jakmèl.

It's also noteworthy, that average Haitians are often depicted as nearly naked, with grass skirts and the like. Every once in a while, someone will have a bone tied in his hair.

As for the depiction of Vodou, itself, it's full of common clichés and pure invention. In the later stories, one of Voodoo Man's main powers is to capture someone's spirit and then possess that person's body with his own spirit. Okay, whatever.

But, of course, Voodoo Man makes deals with Lucifer's Goat Men. 'Cause, hey, Vodou is Satanic, amirite?

And then there are strange claims. "That puff toad symbolizes an evil spirit in the voodoo superstition!"

Despite all this, every once in a while, Dr. Warren and his associates sometimes resort to fighting fire with fire.

And learning tricks of the trade, such as how to trap Voodoo Man's spirit when he's out of his body:

Although some of those tricks are downright sketchy:

If not out-and-out eye-rolling:

The stories are pretty bad. Between the racism and the inaccuracy, there's not a lot of like. And yet, part of what's interesting about these stories is the historical context. The stories started in 1940. Six years earlier, the US departed Haiti after having occupied the country since 1915. The US's interest in Haiti was partially a shipping interest (the passage between Haiti and Cuba was an important shipping route to the Panama Canal) and partially a Great War thing (German's had been moving to Haiti, marrying their way into citizenship, and starting to amass enough wealth that they were wielding considerable economic power). By 1934, the occupation was too expensive to continue, and so Roosevelt finished the withdrawal that Hoover had begun. It's worth noting, however, that even though US troops had left the country, the US still, essentially, controlled the finances of the country until 1947.

A couple of things are interesting about this period. First, the US had suddenly become fascinated with stories of the zonbi. A guy named W.B. Seabrook had written The Magic Island in 1929, the first book to discuss the tradition of the Haitian Zonbi. Zombies suddenly became trendy. Bela Lugosi starred in 1932's White Zombie, the grandpappy of all Zombie flicks. Zombies were everywhere!

So, I suppose it was only a matter of time before comics would want to depict the Haitian zonbi tradition.

In Haiti, itself, the U.S. occupation had exacerbated the already-existing racial tensions in the country. The occupiers would only ever work with the Haitian mulatto class (to this day, Haiti still uses the word "mulatto"). The key government figures of the time were light-skinned: Louis Borno (president from 1922 to 1930), Sténio Vincent (president from 1930 to 1941), and Élie Lescot (president from 1941 to 1946). The US helped to stoke the frustration of the black majority, who began to reject the Europeanization of Haiti. During the post-occupation period, a large-scale movement existed among dark-skinned Haitians to take pride in the country's African heritage and African-derived religion. The Haitian term for this was Noirisme. Haitian intellectuals openly advocated embracing their African past, the Vodou religion and called for an authentic black leadership.

The unfortunate outcome of Noirisme is that it is what helped to propel Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier into power in 1957. Duvalier's platform was all about black nationalism and the trappings of Vodou.

Of course, Voodoo Man never shows us the Haitian intellectuals arguing in favour of black nationalism. What we see pidgin-English speaking people in grass skirts.

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