The book opens with a dialogue among the dead: a great Vodou priestess has died in Cotonou (Benin Republic).At Gléxwé, her native town,a young man unaware of the passing away of
“Grandma Xogbonouto”, sees her, recognizes her and prepares to salute her. At that moment the person whom Toinou (the young man) can only see from the back is conversing with Yaga, his own mother, Tãgni Bonin, his aunt, and Akpoto, his brother, all of whom dead for over thirty years; they welcome her and lead her to the ancestral home where they themselves were buried...
Toinou increases the speed of his motorbike and arrives in front of the house he has seen “Granny” enter. There the news has already been broken. People are stunned.
In France at the same time, Agblo Tchikôton, an African intellectuel and a son of the deceased is notified by a sign. In his head he hears the humming of one of his mother’s vodou hymns which had left their mark on him in his childhood and adolescence. He knew this ritual chant and many others his mother had sung for him, and which he had recorded on a cassette. He is about to reach for the cassette when the telephone rings; he picks up the receiver.
“Grandma is dead”, a voice from Cotonou tells him. It is a Saturday. On the Monday already,Agblo Tchikôton arrives at Cotonou and enter the bereavel family’s home where he is immediately drawn into the preparations based on the vodou ritual which had shaped both the spiritual and social life of his mother, a trader in cloth and wife of a polygamous husband.
The ceremonies leading up to the internent last four days.Agblo Tchikôton participates fully in them, in accordance with the wishes of his mother, who had asked him to do so during one of his vacations spent in Benin. He has nothing to do with the Vodou fraternity, but this is his birthplace, and he knows many things. Although he is a Christian, he is first and foremost the son of a High Priestess, and the grand-nephew of Tãgni Bonin, another High Priestess who was his mother aunt.
It is a serious responsibility. It is Agblo Tchikôton who will put his mothert’s corpse into the coffin and close it ; it is he again, assisted by his sister and some of their consanguineous brothers and members of the Vodou fraternity, who will lover the coffin into the tomb in the Ouidah graveyard, where in front of the mourners he sings the Vodou hymn which had rung through his mind at the moment of his mothert’s death.
A unique ritual unfolds before us. No writer has ever been able to depict the Vodou rites in this way because they are unaccessible to the uninitiated and locked in an esoteric, coded language.Thanks to his background, his upbringing in a traditional African environment and to the fact that he is himself the son of a High Priestess of Vodou, Olympe Bhêly-Quenum compresses the seventy years of the life-time of a Vodou priestess into the four days the ceremony lasts : her initiation, at which she had been “mounted and possessed” by the Vodou, her activities as a priestess, a chorus leader, and a High Priestess ; as a business woman, a mother and wife in the circle of her husband and her five co-vives.
We witness the meetings of the initiates in the convents, their processions through Ouidah, and their highly structured Vodou dances in which the language of the drums plays a compelling rôle. The shifts of scene from Cotonou to Ouidah, to Segboxwe and Aziouto, allow us to see a teeming crowd of characters, of scenes or sequences from daily life in Southern Benin. But the centre of the action is Gléxwé, i.e, Ouidah, the crucible of Vodou and an ancient slave port in the Gulf of Benin, which is described in minute detail and shown with its many Vodou convents squatting around the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.
THE CALL OF THE VODOUNU is a novel of some 465 typed pages firmly based on factual data in cultural anthropology from the Vodou environnent and on sociological data from its African background. By closely adhering to the actual workings of a Vodou ritual, the author shows an African town whose authentic daily life is safeguarded by the Vodou cult, while the country as a whole-i.e.the Republic Benin- evolves towards a modernity we see emerging before our very eyes.
This novel knows no military coups d’Etat, no drug problems, no sex machine or love machine ; no colonialism or neo-colonialism etc, none of the recipes that have gone into the making of a great deal of novels in the last two decades. We are in the heart of deepest Africa, the problems of whose (underdevelopment, joblessness, political exploitation, etc) traverse certain chapters of the book in a flash. Political consciousness and the revolt against social injustice are integrated into a hymn of sheer poetry. Agblo Tchikôton for the first time deciphers his mother’s chant, discovering in the process that not all Vodou hymns are tunes of gentle innocence.
Prof. Willfried F. Feuser.
University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
