Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn
Vodou is among the most misunderstood and maligned of the world's religions. Mama Lola shatters the stereotypes by offering an intimate portrait of Vodou in everyday life. Drawing on a decade-long friship with Mama Lola, a Vodou priestess, Karen McCarthy Brown tells tales spanning five generations of Vodou healers in Mama Lola's family, beginning with an African ancestor and ing with Mama Lola's daughter Maggie, a recent initiate and the designated heir to her Brooklyn-based healing practice....
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"Brown weaves together fictional, biographical, and ethnological narratives into a moving account of the life of a Vodou community and its leader, Mama Lola. This book belies the stereotypes that still distort the image of this ancient religion in the academic as well as the popular mind."—Albert J. Raboteau, Princeton University"An eloquent contribution to the emerging feminist paradigm of scholarship as engaged, embodied, and life-affirming."—Carol P. Christ, author of Laughter of Aphrodite"A riveting narrative, rich in detail. Karen Brown brings a rare, well-informed regard to her interpretation of Haitian religious life."—Lawrence E. Sullivan, author of Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to the Meaning of South American Religions Constance Casey Novelistic chapters, beautifully written, are alternated with a narrative of the present, including descriptions of the members of the Vodou pantheon and how Alourdes serves themÉ. She has written a life story that is full of feeling.
Preface to the 2001 EditionPreface to the First EditionIntroduction11Joseph Binbin Mauvant212Azaka353Raise That Woman's Petticoat794Ogou935The Baka Made from Jealousy1416Kouzinn1557Dreams and Promises2038Ezili2199Sojeme, Sojeme25910Danbala27111Plenty Confidence31112Gede329Afterword383Glossary of Haitian Creole Terms403Bibliography407Index415
\ Joan DayanI know of no other work about Vodou that can teach the uninitiated so fully what it means to know: how unassuming, contingent and matter-of-fact real konesans :understanding) must be.\ \ \ \ \ Roland LittlewoodThis volume is superb: a poignant account of a Haitian migrant to New York and how she appropriates and reworks her family knowledge of healing and ritual... Gently informed by her own life and by women's anthropology, Brown offers a sympathetic and vivid portrait of the lives of a group of women.\ \ \ Constance CaseyNovelistic chapters, beautifully written, are alternated with a narrative of the present, including descriptions of the members of the Vodou pantheon and how Alourdes serves themÉ. She has written a life story that is full of feeling.\ \ \ \ \ Eugene V. GallagherBrown's ethnographic short stories vividly capture the complicated personal history that is summed up in Mama Lola's full name and they also dramatize the larger social processes at work in Haiti's recent history... Mama Lola provides an engaging, detailed, and sympathetic account of the world of Haitian Vodou. Brown has used a variety of interesting, and even daring, techniques to make that world come alive.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers Weekly\ - Publisher's Weekly\ Brown befriends a Haitian vodou priestess who practices in her Brooklyn, N.Y., home. Photos. (Feb.)\ \
