Who, Why, How...

If you want to know who I am,

I would like to introduce myself through two photos

Photo One: Yes, these are drums.  Haitian drums.  Actually, voudou drums.  Haitian voudou drums that I brought back from Port au Prince in 1952 when I was 14 and my father was participating in a volunteer medical program. The designs on the drums are of the various loa, the spirits of the voudou pantheon.  I knew their names and images by heart:  Damballah, Papa Legba, Erzulie Freda, Agway ‘Woyo…

Sometimes, when I walk by these drums, now in our living room in Pine Plains, NY, I see the swaying dancers, feel the throbbing drums, smell the clarin, the smoke and sweat thick as a texture. I hear the chant  of the houngan inviting Damballah to take possession of one of the congregants as he calls out, “Damballah, Damballah, koté ou ye?”

The ceremonies started around midnight on Saturday into Sunday morning.  My parents would have me nap until around 11 PM and then let me go off — alone — in one of the peoples’ camionnettes for the half-hour coast down the mountain from Petionville where we lived. I would tell the driver I wanted to go to Telegraph Sans Fil, one of the poorest sections of Port au Prince, where he would drop me off to be guided by the compass of throbbing drums in the night,

Eventually dawn arrived and with it the Twentieth Century and Western Hemisphere.  I would share a public camionnette to take me back up the mountain, this time with the engine running, exhausted but fulfilled, while the others trudged to Sunday mass and prayed to the same spirits but with different names and images.

An American teenager was allowed by conservative Boston parents to attend voudou ceremonies in the middle of the night in one of the poorest slums of Haiti by himself because they knew it was safe. That’s what paradise is like. But that is only half the story.

During the following week, I would go back down to Telegraphe Sans Fil and search out the houngan whose hounfor I had visited. I was curious. He was curious, too, but he had the answers.  I only had my father’s Argus C3 35mm rangefinder camera,

This might be the strangest part of this story. Haitians did not want their pictures taken. 

A photograph was a ouanga, the voudou doll that held part of the subject’s soul captive and thus subject to manipulation. So here’s an American kid going around expecting to get pictures of a voudou priest? We are on the verge of weird here. 

The houngan must have sensed that the young American was genuinely interested in learning about his religion and sincerely curious to the point that he spoke creole and was using the camera as an aid to his learning.  The priest willingly drew the designs of the loa in the ground just the way he did during the ceremonies, dipping his hands in a bowl of corn meal and letting the white powder sift through his fingers like a brush and onto the dirt floor.

So I was not TAKING photographs; He was GIVING them to me as part of his answers.

I was learning the cornerstone of what would eventually be my career, taught by a voudou priest in the slums of Port au Prince. Through detours as a surgical technician at the Lahey Clinic, a researcher in the Neurochemical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, various experiences in professional theatre, training in Vienna, I found my life’s calling at WGBH in Boston as a documentary filmmaker.  A documentary, as I define it, is the exploration of reality with the intent to convey it to others.  I was recognized for being able to “get” at the truth — If Stan shot it, it happened. 

And it all started in voodoo temples in the slums of Port au Prince.  And I have the drums to remind me. 

Photo Two, One of many taken of the disorder and chaos raging in Haiti.  It is dangerous for anyone to walk those same streets that the 14 year-old American explored in the middle of the night some 70 years ago.

How and why did that dream-Paradise turn into a nightmare-Hell? That is the question!

Group behavior and culture became the focus of my careers both as an organizational consultant and as a filmmaker.  While Haiti was churning through dictatorships I was trying to unravel the dilemmas of group life at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, The Washington School of Psychiatry, and the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Columbia.  Fancy places, but only embellishing skills learned in voodoo temples in Haitian slums.

The who is Stan Hirson, a documentary filmmaker since graduating college in 1962. Yes, I have some mileage under me, but that year is important in understanding my interest in this project. The Sixties was a time of social change and activism. following John Birch Society, HUAC, McCarthyism, 

I put the question to an AI Google and got this response:

The 1960s was a tumultuous and divisive decade in world history. The decade was marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and antiwar protests. 

 The 1960s was also a time of counterculture, with a revolution in social norms. 

 The decade began with dreams of a new society, but ended with a rejection of the liberal agenda. 

The 1960s was a time of empowerment to fight social injustices such as racism and poverty. African Americans used sit-ins, freedom rides, and protest marches to fight segregation, poverty, and unemployment. Feminists demanded equal job opportunities and an end to sexual discrimination. 

The 1960s was also a time of counterculture, with a revolution in social norms. The decade saw a wide range of music, including popular music inspired by the Beatles, the folk music revival, and the poetic lyrics of Bob Dylan. The decade was also known as the "cultural decade" in the United States and the "Swinging Sixties" in the United Kingdom. 

To a young person entering the world beyond of school and family, the challenge was "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem". 

Revisit the Sixties here:   https://www.history.com/topics/1960s