Erzulie Dantor

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.

Erzulie Dantor is served under the image of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the dark-skinned Polish Virgin whose face bears two scars on the right cheek, the very scars the lwa is said to carry. The historical link is concrete: copies of that icon reached Haiti with Polish soldiers sent by Napoleon around 1802 to help crush the Haitian Revolution, some hundreds of whom deserted to the side of the formerly enslaved and fought for Haitian freedom, and the image was taken up and remade as the face of Dantor. She is remembered in connection with the ceremony at Bwa Kayiman traditionally said to have launched the great uprising of 1791 that overthrew slavery and founded the first Black republic, so that her fierceness is bound up with the fight for liberty itself. Her number is seven, and she is offered the things of a hard-working woman, unsweetened black coffee, pork, rum, and served with the respect due to a mother who fights. Vodou is a living religion, and its Petwo spirits, born of a real and terrible history, are an essential part of it; Erzulie Dantor is among the most beloved of them, the scarred, knife-bearing mother who defends the wronged and stands for the freedom her people won.