Vodou Culture 101: Hope
I’ve heard the word ‘hope’ one too many times in the context of doing nothing in the US majority culture not to be a bit suspicious of the word and the person using it. Hopes and prayers for school shootings, hopes and prayers for things to go well. Hopes and prayers at funerals. It’s an easy enough word to say to someone at a time where they’re in pain, meant to offer the promise of something better, maybe. There’s nothing wrong with being polite, but wishing someone hopes or prayers tends to be a substitute for doing anything else.
Vodou culture has no use for hope, as you might think from a culture which so explicitly deals with slavery and racism. There is little point in hoping for a better tomorrow that does not come when today demands all your attention for survival.
We say of hope that it is a delusion, a fantasy that distracts you from whatever you need to do today. This is for several reasons, the first of which is that what we imagine never has much of a relationship to reality. We make ourselves feel better about today by imagining something that isn’t what’s happening in front of us. It might start there but veers off into something that is not, was not, and will not be, something that reflects our desires. The act of making ourselves feel better removes much of the incentive for change—our imagination functions as an opiate to us. We desire more without making the situation better.
A person can go their whole life without making any changes to its conditions, with the use of their imagination and the endless hope for something better.
For that reason, hope masks reality: the fantasy prevents you from responding to what’s happening and hides the things you could respond to from you, using your imagined scenarios. If in your fantasy about what’s happening to you, for instance, you imagine it to be a kind of heroes journey, you will not recognize things which do not fit that fantasy. It effectively blinds you to anything else. Hope, in particular, because it involves imagining a different future, easily masks whatever’s currently happening and wraps it in a narrative where whatever the person hopes for is possible.
We also say hope is a delusion because it takes energy from you without giving anything substantial back. The comfort that it gives is elusive, reduces over time, and requires more and more imagination (more energy, more emotional investment, more ideation) to get that comforting feeling. When a particular, hoped for scenario does not play out and is recognized as such, people will often hop to another and play the same dynamics out again, looking for that feeling of comfort.
In vodou, we prefer to deal more directly with what’s happening in front of us, taking action to change, reduce, or eliminate problems.
We prefer not to just live with them, wrapped in fantasy.
