Description
Book SynopsisMama Lola shatters the stereotypes by offering an intimate portrait of Vodou in everyday life. The author tells tales spanning five generations of Vodou healers in Mama Lola's family, beginning with an African ancestor and ending with Claudine Michel's account of working with Mama Lola after the Haitian earthquake.
Trade Review"Brown has written a life story that is full of feeling." * Los Angeles Times *
"Brown'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." * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *
"No other work about Vodou . . . can teach the uninitiated so fully what it means to know: how unassuming, contingent and matter-of-fact real
konesans (understanding) must be." * Women's Review of Books *
""This 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." * Political and Social Science *
Table of ContentsForeword to the 2010 Edition Preface to the 2001 Edition Preface to the First Edition Introduction 1. Joseph Binbin Mauvant 2. Azaka 3. Raise that Woman's Petticoat 4. Ogou 5. The Baka Made from Jealousy 6. Kouzinn 7. Dreams and Promises 8. Ezili 9. Sojeme, Sojeme 10. Danbala 11. Plenty Confidence 12. Gede Afterword Glossary of Haitian Creole Terms Bibliography Index
