Good Friday And The Rara Celebration In Haiti

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Change, While Usually Necessary, Is Often Equally Unwelcome, And Challenging.

As we commemorate Good Friday and without my intending to be unnecessarily provocative or be deliberately controversial, I want to advance the proposition for an idea and an argument for a change in Haiti; a cultural sea-change, which might possibly create a tsunami of cultural high tides!

Good Friday or God’s Friday, as it was known in ancient times, is the day dedicated by Christendom as remembrance of the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ. His death is seen as part of the plan of Redemption, by which to redeem Adam and Eve, and their progenitors from sin.

Good Friday is thereby also set aside as a day for fasting and penance, during which, from my experience, most Christians take time off to reflect, pray and ponder God’s love for humans; a love whereby Jesus consented to the ignominy of being nailed, accused as a usurper, to the Cross, between two gangsters.

More specific to Haitian tradition, on this day, on Good Friday, there is yet another observance. It is Rara, a rural type of Carnival that starts on Ash Wednesday and, exactly at the time on Good Friday when Christ was put to death, comes to its climax.

Here is my proposition. It is that the traditional practice of Rara, in spite of its cultural significance coming to an end on Good Friday should stop. I do not mean that it dies in any way, but that it is removed instead to another day or time more appropriate to its raucous mood and rowdy practices.

Such a move might, for example, be to the Monday after Easter; a time that is a holiday all over the world -- except in America. Rara, given its mood is more aptly suited for such a period of celebration.

I have good reason for my proposition. It is said that Haiti is 80% Catholic laity and 100% Voodoo practitioners. In the vein of Catholicity, Good Friday brings for me fond memories of a choir child running the streets of my home town with castanets. These are two pieces of wood linked with leather straps, used to remind the villagers of the time for the afternoon religious service. The castanets were needed because, so solemn were Good Friday observances over the crucifixion of Our Lord, that even the very bells of the church remained silent, and so too, did the organ and every other instrument.

From my vantage point of critical and objective insight, I consider it a true sacrilege or a sin of the Spirit to allow on this solemn day on the periphery of the town, the raucous Rara celebrations with its drums and trumpets; trumpets made with bamboo and its high- decibel conch shells. Since these Rara celebrations vary in size, the sacrilege can also vary thereby. Therefore, break your heart and weep for Souvenance, a hamlet near the city of Gonaives where not only does the largest fiesta occur, but also where voodoo practitioners come en masse and annually for far and wide, from hither and thither to enliven Rara’s rituals.

And to make bad matters worse, these Rara practices on Good Friday have moreover been exported by Haitian migrants to the Dominican Republic. All that is has undergone is a name change from Rara to Gaga. Regarding name changes, Rara may have its origin in the Hebrew term, Rarah; one initially associated with an evil act to reproduce or mimic the whipping of Jesus by Roman soldiers. However, the name, Rara once also applied to a musical instrument made with wood and tin cans and played by children celebrating Easter in rural Trinidad.

While the Rara celebration is a protest against the social order in the country that kept the peasants disfranchised, it is also an anti-Christ manifestation rebelling against a God that allegedly makes their land another version of hell. A Haiti that shall become hospitable to its own people will also benefit of a new Rara celebration devoid of the insult to Christianity.

To continue on the theme of solemnity as associated with Good Friday, near the city of Ganthier a border town with the Dominican Republic, yet another religious demonstration takes place. Devotees flock from all over the country to climb on their knees the hill leading to the giant cross on top of the mountain towards Calvaire Miracle. There is a mixture of deep Catholic religious fervor sometimes mixed with a voodoo veneer, in which the women wrapped in their embroidered white dresses pray to the Holy Cross so life on this earth might become a little more bearable and hospitable; a little more hospitable; a little less hostile.

Within the context of Good Friday, the historical importance and significance of the Cross is not questioned. It was, according to good evidence, discovered by St Helena in Jerusalem around 326 AD. It is, without doubt, at the heart of the Christian faith. Therefore, today in Haiti where during Good Friday observances, a celebration, Rara, in which Judas, the traitor who facilitated the arrest of Jesus, is the main actor is unwarranted and an affront to those who are firm Catholic believers or plain Christians.

The fact that the practice is accepted and indeed promoted as a tourist attraction does not suit well with common sense and good cultural values. My empirical enquiry has revealed that the practice is more common in the center and the south of the country but fortunately less so in the northern part of Haiti. Not surprisingly, this area is the theatre and the point of entrance of several protestant denominations such as Baptists, Adventists and Wesleyans.

In conclusion, cultural values that result in and encourage wholesome practices are the bedrock of a nation’s ethos. Because of such values, unwholesome practices, such as incest, rape, honor killing are repugnant. While not Rara itself as a celebration, but that it occurs, as it does on Good Friday, makes this practice fall, in my opinion within this untenable category. Why it thus continues to be a staple of the Haitian panorama defies, in my opinion, an unbiased, critical mind?

Finally, in making this, my proposition to remove from the solemnity of Good Friday, the inappropriate practices associated with Rara, I am humbly honored to be the first to send this shot across the bow of Rara in this context, a cultural windjammer tacking into the wrong wind.

As a cultural celebration it should be moved to the Monday after Easter. It can rightfully play its part in the repertory of artistic, and tourist activities that makes Haiti a special destination where the visitor is assured, the emotion will be at its peak, the cultural scenes will be unrehearsed and the memory will be stamped for ever -- as Verna Gillis, an authority on Voodoo and Rara put it -- in one of the most culturally richest countries in the Western Hemisphere.