Zomatchi, the flame that does not go out

The place was born of a need for repair. For centuries the chain of deportation in Ouidah ended on trauma: the auction, the disorientation of the Tree of Forgetting, the darkness of the enclosure, then the Door of No Return. What was missing was a place where something could be given back. Vodun dignitaries, customary authorities and local historians consecrated Zomatchi for that, within the movement of memorial reappropriation of the 1990s.

At the heart of the memorial stands a hearth where the flame is lit during ceremonies. It carries three things at once: the presence of the spirits of the deported, the survival of their songs, their rhythms and their knowledge of plants in the Americas, and the light that guides the return of their descendants.

This is not a passive monument. Officiants perform libations and the sprinkling of sacred water to appease the Nèssouhoué, the spirits of those who died at sea or in confinement without receiving the funeral rites owed to them. That absence of burial is precisely what the place repairs.

For pilgrims from Haiti, Bahia, Cuba, Martinique, Guadeloupe or the United States, Zomatchi is often the summit of the journey. It is here that mutual forgiveness is sealed: the forgiveness asked for the tragedy of captivity, and the alliance recovered between the mother land and her scattered children. The gatherings of the Vodun calendar give rise here to solemn processions.

If the Tree of Forgetting was the attempt to erase, Zomatchi is the proof that the erasure failed. The two stand on the same memorial axis, a few kilometres apart, and neither is understood without having seen the other.