The Fierce Mother of the Petwo Nation

Erzulie Dantor (Ezili Dantor) is the great mother-spirit of the Petwo rite of Haitian Vodou, and the fierce counterpart to the sweet Rada love-spirit Erzulie Freda. To understand her one must understand the Petwo nation to which she belongs. Where the Rada lwa are the cool, benevolent, ancestral spirits of West African (largely Dahomean and Yoruba) origin, the Petwo lwa are hot, quick and forceful, a family of spirits forged in the New World, in the crucible of enslavement, suffering and resistance, carrying the anger and the fighting strength that bondage demanded. They are not evil; they are the spirits of force and defence, served when hard protection is needed, and Erzulie Dantor is their mother. She is imagined as a dark-skinned working woman, a single mother who labours fiercely for her children, scarred on the cheek and able to speak only in a stammer, in one tradition her tongue was cut, or she was wounded, in the fighting of the Haitian Revolution, and she carries a child (her daughter Anais) on one arm and a knife in the other hand. She is the avenger of women and children wronged, the protector of the abused, and she is widely honoured as a defender of lesbians and of women who live outside men's authority.