The Tree of Forgetting

These numbers are not arbitrary, and that is what makes the act so cold. In Fon thought, nine is the number of the masculine and seven that of the feminine, each referring to the orifices of the body and to what, through them, binds a person to their lineage. To make someone turn around a sacred axis according to their own number was to claim to unscrew what held them to their land and their ancestors. The ritual borrowed its grammar from the local cosmogony in order to turn it against those it protected.

No eighteenth-century archive proves that one particular tree served this purpose, and historians of the trade invite us to read the episode for what it was: not a real amnesia, but a psychological operation. To convince a captive that an irreversible rite had just cut them off from the protection of their Vodun and their dead was to prepare them not to revolt. The oral tradition of Ouidah places the consecration of the tree under the reign of Kpengla or of Agonglo, at the end of the eighteenth century, at the height of the traffic.

The tree visible today is a commemorative one: the original did not survive. What the place documents, however, has remained intact.

For the forgetting did not happen, and that is the irony this place carries. Those deported from Gléxwé took root again with their deities on the other side of the Atlantic. In Haiti, the spirit of the iroko, Loko, stands in the poto-mitan around which people still turn while singing in the Fon language. In Bahia, the Jeje nation keeps the Fon liturgy and the cult of Loko under the name Iroko. In Cuba, the Regla de Arará carries in its very name that of Allada. Linguists, musicologists and ethnologists, from Pierre Verger to Roger Bastide, have established these filiations.

This is one of the most charged points on the memorial route of Ouidah, and one of the rare places where history proves those who wrote it wrong. Our guides take whatever time is needed here, never less.