Book Reviews Karen Mccarthy Brown. Mama Lola
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Book reviews Karen McCarthy Brown. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berke- ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. ix + 405 pp. ISBN 0-520-07073-9. $13.00. This biographical work presents the reader with an intimate view into the life of a Brooklyn-based Vodou priestess, Alourdes (called "Mama Lola"), and her family. Karen McCarthy Brown's understanding of Vodou is based upon her research in urban Haiti and from her relationship with Alourdes where Brown found insight into both rural Haitian ritual beliefs and current practice in New York. A Professor of the Sociology and Anthropology of Religion at Drew University, Brown has published articles using Alourdes as a case study example since 1987. Brown provides not only a steady stream of data and insights based upon her anthropological training in fieldwork and research, but also contributes fictionalized stories in the style of Haitian oral tradition to expand our understanding of characters, the historical context and the practice of Vodou in both Haiti and New York. What Brown offers is a multi-dimensional view. Brown argues for a feminist style of interpretive anthropology where rela- tionship, and here even close friendship, between researcher and subject has its place in allowing women's voices to be heard. Basing herself less on a traditional ethnographic model than on ideas in Clifford - Marcus (1986), for instance, Brown gives an experiential view of Vodou grounded in the life of the priestess Alourdes and her extended family that includes Brown herself. Mama Lola has twelve chapters which alternate in style and approach. All six odd-numbered chapters are fictional stories written by Brown to create ambience and to relate the story of Alourdes' matrilineal family tree through five generations. As Brown explains in the book's Introduction, she does not hesitate to create characters who never lived, and insert them into the fictional chapters (19). She defends her decision to write Alourdes' genealogy in this fashion on the various grounds of feminist methodology, creative impulse, the need for three-dimensional portraits of people, spirits, and simple necessity. 74 By placing fiction as Chapter One, Brown begins the book with her own storytelling and entices a reader into the unfolding story of Mama Lola. Brown uses other rhetorical techniques to advance the biography of Alour- des. Her writing style combines biography and ethnography. The voices of Alourdes, and her extended Vodou family are joined with Brown's own voice. However, Brown actually utilizes three distinct voices: personal, descriptive, and analytic. The entire book is informed by the bonds of friendship, trust, and sharing that developed between Brown and Alourdes. All six even numbered chapters, in which Brown does "no inventing" (19), are structured to reflect and examine a single major Vodou spirit who possesses Alourdes: Azaka, Ogou, Kouzinn, Ezili, Danbala, Gede. Brown offers this organization to the reader as a method to reveal how the distinct characteristics of each spirit impart their imprint on Alourdes' way of living. Thus, Vodou is empowering for people by providing images that "explore all the potentialities, constructive and destructive given in a life situation" (112). A pattern of alternating biographical story and ethnographic narrative is com- bined with analysis that continues throughout the even numbered chapters. The methodology applied by Brown is explained for her readers in the In- troduction. Her research techniques evolved, along with her friendships and the abundance of material, from tape recording to writing down after the event what Alourdes said and how she said it. Brown devised a number of techniques, such as memory tools, and using Alourdes' mnemonic devices, she repeated refrains from her stories as condensation points from which she could construct accurate but selective accounts of their conversations (11-12). These reconstructed conversations were combined with contextual descriptions and other traditional elements in an ethnographic journal which included Brown's personal responses. She is openly reflective and reflexive on the process of working with Alourdes. Brown openly describes her own initiation into the religion. The first step was her marriage ritual to the warrior spirit Papa Ogou. "That this was the best and perhaps the only way to move my understanding of Vodou beyond external description into the deep places ... of an actual life." (134) Her second-level initiation, called kouche, occurred in Haiti in 1981. She sug- gests, from an insider's perspective, that Vodou can successfully share its wisdom and its healing techniques with a larger body of people that includes non-Haitians (308). That Brown has written the book in an alternating fashion is partially determined by her view of anthropology. She positions herself within "a tra- dition of interpretive anthropology" (14) and quotes Clifford Geertz (1973: 5) to support her statements that .