"The secrets of Ayou"

( traduction google translate ) During a mission with a ngo in Ayou in Benin, a small rural village, I realized my total inadequacy. It was at this moment that I began to doubt the world I saw, the dirt roads which serpentinely winded through the forest, and which surrounded the hamlets, among which, in small courtyards, the indispensable tools for Life were carefully dispersed, so that they were found when needed. So also that it forms such a harmonious whole that it was not necessary to find these things elsewhere without it spoiling. There were the mysterious little altar-houses, often covered with frescoes. Memories of rituals left along the way: dried tea leaves, broken ceramics, intertwined baskets, ropes, wax, traces of fires, pebbles, ossicles, scrap. If someone from the corner accompanied me in those moments, she liked to roll her shining eyes and slip into my ear "Voodoo, Voodoo". By revealing to me the secret, it became for me the link between the two worlds; The Earth and the Cosmos, and obviously it pleased him. And I liked that it made him happy. But I decided not to go further in my introspections. The week I had to spend in the village would not teach me anything. I simply went to meet people, my eyes tinted with these mysteries. Through this report, I did not try to show or explain a cult, but to follow my paths through the encounters, perhaps crossing without knowing the lines of force of this invisible, telluric and parallel world, in Making every careful attention, at each step, not to commit an incorrectness that could ruffle the force, causing the wrath of the deities on the community. I deliberately made humanistic portraits (on?) Loaded with magic, intensity and doubt. Of my doubts also, for I have no answer to their certainties, any more than I have at home, in my quest for understanding. I represented people, as hanging between these two worlds ...