I have changed the names of our hosts at the Vodun Palace.
ACT I
Failure at its finest: “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creative maladjusted.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
For about a year, I have been juggling various possibilities for Zazu and me to travel internationally. We need a break, badly—something to shake us out of our self-destructive parent-preteen dynamic; a deep shift from our daily arguments about screen time and mainstream-materialist values that conflict with our family's commitments. Zazu and I urgently need play and gentleness to repair what had been broken.
I meet Nadiakhe on a video call with sixteen other international artists preparing for our upcoming exhibition. She introduces herself as living in a Vodun (Voodoo) spiritual-divination community in Bénin, West Africa. Much of religious Vodun rituals (an extension of Haitian Vodou) focus on resistance to dehumanization—healing from generations of slavery, colonialism, and racial oppression. As with the intergenerational history of Crypto-Jews , Vodun enabled enslaved people to covertly continue their religious practices in resistance to dominating political factions.
Between hoping Zazu can experience a preteen rites-of-passage ritual connecting him to his African roots while intimately experiencing a community of children not bewitched by digital technology/ screen culture and wanting to explore African intersections with my own ancestral Sephardic (Spanish- Jewish/ Arabic-Jewish) mystical healing traditions, folk medicine, and spiritual pharmacopeias , I think, how perfect! Let’s go to Bénin! In my desperation to heal my relationship with my eleven-year-old son, I make the irrevocably impulsive decision.
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