The Drum and the Hoe Life and Lore of the Haitian People by Harold Courlander

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good, Dust Jackets: Good-. 1960. University of California Press.

""Harold Courlander’s Haiti Singing (1939) established his reputation as a perceptive, friendly interpreter of Vodoun and as a social musicologist. Jean Price-Mars’ Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) and Melville J. Herskovits’ Life in a Haitian Valley (1937) had prepared the way for the discrediting of Vodoun as interpreted by a sergeant and a colonel of the United States Marines and other “authorities.” Magazine articles by George Eaton Simpson and by Alfred Métraux and the latter’s Voodoo (1959) buried, hopefully, Vodoun as a “dark saturnalia celebrated by ‘blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened’” Negroes.

But recent events in Haiti, especially the farcical “re-election” of President Duvalier, have revived beliefs about the saturnalia. Courlander has, in timely fashion, reminded readers that the Catholic Church has tolerated “by necessity” Vodoun while the Protestant churches have attempted to extirpate it. “Today,” he writes, “many a Haitian who participates in the rites of Vodoun on Saturdays worships in a Catholic chapel on Sunday” (p. 6). Photograph number 20 shows a Vodoun altar that “is scarcefuly distinguishable from a Catholic shrine.” This reviewer believes that this interpenetration of the two religions helps to explain why Duvalier has exploited his reputation as a high priest of Vodoun while at the same time having members of the Catholic clergy as Ministers of Public Instruction.

Courlander is a social historian as well as a social musicologist. He points out, for example, that slavery destroyed many skills brought from Africa. “Craftsmen with specialized knowledge in metalwork,” he writes, “were set to repairing wagons and hoes, or they simply wielded hoes in the field. Wood carvers found no patrons to encourage them to carve images and stools” (p. 5).

The 48 pages of documentary photographs, 109 pages of music for songs and drum rhythms make The Drum and the Hoe as definitive as any scholarly work is likely to be""