Pouring to Return: Libation on the Other Side of the Atlantic

In Benin, you pour a few drops before drinking. In Haiti too. The gesture crossed over with the people who were deported. On the other side, it no longer served only to greet the ancestors. It served to bring someone home.

Jété dlo

In Haiti, water is poured on the ground to give the lwa something to drink. It is called jété dlo, and it is the gesture that opens every ceremony. In Benin, people poured atan, then sodabi.

The Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon puts it plainly: the deities travelled with those who were deported. From that came candomblé in Brazil, santeria in Cuba, vodou in Saint-Domingue.

They were said to have no ancestors

Under colonial law, an enslaved person had neither ascendants nor descendants. The Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson gave it a name: social death. Not being deprived of freedom, but being deprived of lineage.

The gesture became a road

Hurbon writes that the cult of the dead was not a simple African inheritance carried across. It took on a new meaning. Through the ancestors one rejoined, it was the deities of the lineage and of the place of origin that were being sought.

In Saint-Domingue, people believed they could return to Africa when they died.

This collection

Our ancestors are here. They walk with us, they open doors, they listen when we pour.

This collection is how we say it. Wearing these pieces is a reminder of the bond nothing managed to cut.

Jété dlo: pouring water on the ground to quench the spirits' thirst, at the start of a vodou ceremony in Haiti.