Telling a life: Race, Memory, and Historical Consciousness

This article is a story, a complex one about African and African American religions interacting, a story about history described in the book and inscribed on the body. In the midst of this narrative, I want to reflect on the process by which experience becomes memory; memory becomes narrative; narratives are collected to form text; and text becomes, in one moment, an event in the academic world significantly distanced from author and subject and, in the next moment, a reflexive tool used by author and subject alike to decipher past experiences, reconfigure memory, and reconstruct the self More specifically, my essay deals with the reverberations occasioned by the 1991 publication of Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn in Mama Lola's life and in mine, as well as in our relationship with one another.