Haitian artist paints boat migrants as Voodoo gods
MIAMI (AP) – The officers on deck confront the Voodoo love goddess with broad shoulders and stoic faces, eyes darkened by sunglasses. She pauses on the gangplank, barefoot but resplendent in a gold crown and ruffled pink dress.
The goddess in Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie’s 1996 painting, “Ezili Intercepted,” is bewildered, bemused maybe, but not desperate. She seems to smooth her hair with bejeweled fingers. Ezili is notorious for charming the men in her path.
Duval-Carrie’s migrant deity is so different from the Haitian migrants photographed with U.S. or Caribbean authorities when their overcrowded vessels founder. Lying prone on boat decks or stretchers, they have no names, no power.
Thousands of Haitians attempt to flee their Caribbean homeland of more than 9 million by boat each year. Detained at sea or on U.S. and Caribbean beaches, they appear as blurry masses of refugees.
In painting after painting and a flotilla of sculptures, Duval-Carrie has depicted these migrants as vibrant Voodoo gods.
He has had many opportunities to reflect on their journeys – the U.S. Coast Guard has interdicted an annual average of 1,524 Haitian migrants for each of the past 15 fiscal years. The lucky ones who reach “the other side of the water” without notice find protection in an underground economy. The ocean swallows countless dead.
“The news is so dramatic that I’m pulled right back. When will there be a respite?” Duval-Carrie said recently in his studio in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. “I wish it would go away and I could concentrate on something else.”
But the migrants keep coming, and there are always victims to grieve. The bodies of three women who perished when their overloaded sailboat capsized off South Florida in May were buried recently in a Miami-area cemetery beneath plaques reading “Unknown.” None of the 16 survivors professed to knowing them, and no relatives came forward to identify them.
“It’s one way I can give them importance and respect,” Duval-Carrie said. “There’s a total disrespect here for them.”