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Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Champagne Lovinski (born 1936, Haiti)() commonly known as Mama Lola, is perhaps the most famous Vodou priestess practicing in the United States, rising to prominence in America following the publication of the anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown's ethnographic account of her life, ''Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn''. According to Brown, " ... Alourdes combines the skills of a medical doctor, a psychotherapist, a social worker, and a priest.” (5) Mama Lola is a prominent spiritual leader within the religious practice of Vodou in America, serving on occasion as a mambo for a cultural center in New Orleans, Louisiana. ==Biography== Alourdes was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is the youngest child of Philomise Macena, a mambo from Jean-Rabel. Her father, Alphonse Margaux, was a lawyer and absent for much of Aldoures early life. Alourdes became pregnant with her first child, Jean-Pierre, at the age of fourteen. The father's name was Abner. When his parents found out about Alourdes' pregnancy they sent him to Chicago and contact between the two eventually ceased (293). Alourdes's daughter, Maggie, was born weighing 17 pounds and 10 ounces. Alourdes remembered that she had suffered a lot when she had Maggie (267). The name of Maggie's father is Charles Desinor. He was a photographer she met while touring with the Troupe Folklorique (293). At age fifteen, Alourdes found her first job earning $62/month as a singer in Haiti’s Troupe Folklorique, a career which ended when she got married (164). She married Antoine Kowalski on December 30, 1954; her children from previous relationships, Jean-Pierre and Maggie sat in the front row with her father, Alphose Margaux (239). Kawalksi, although providing well for his family, was very jealous which contributed to their break up. After a brief period of marriage and a violent fight, which caused Alourdes to miscarry (during the fifth month of her pregnancy), she left Kowalski. After facing economic hardships on her own, Alourdes and her two children went to live with her mother, Phiomise (240). After losing her job as a tobacco inspector, she and her children were befallen with economic challenges (164). In order to buy food, pay for rent, and put her two children through school, "she was driven to sell sexual favors more directly and more frequently," and adopted the alias "Marie-Jacques" (164). When Alourdes was in her twenties, she made the difficult decision to leave Haiti for America in order to work toward creating a better life for her family. Thus in 1962, she left her three children, Jean-Pierre, Maggie, and William, with her mother, Philomise, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York (70-71). Her early years in the United States were tumultuous. In December 1963, she became seriously ill and was hospitalized twice (once at Jewish Hospital, once at Wycoff Hospital) (73). After her second discharge, she met a woman named Yvonne Constant, who would provide her with food and shelter(72-73); the two would become family friends (74) Soon after, Alourdes learned that Beatrice, her sister-in-law, had had a dream instructing Alourdes to return to Haiti; the messenger in the dream was suspected to be Kouzen Zaka, a ''Lwa'' (spirit) (73-74). In Haiti, Alourdes would discover the remedy for her illness. Through various means and with the help of Constant, she was finally able to gather enough funds to finance her trip back to Haiti; soon after arriving, the spirit of Ogou possessed her mother and revealed that she was to be a mambo (priestess) (75). During those two weeks in Haiti, she received instruction from her mother (77), who had also been a mambo (75). During the time between her first and second trip, she worked in the laundry section at the Brooklyn Hebrew Home for two years before quitting. After which, she began to employ the skills her mother had taught her and started making a living from home; it was also during this time that her relationship with the spirits grew stronger (77) In 1965, she was finally able to raise enough funds to bring her children to live with her in Brooklyn after establishing herself as a respected mambo among the Haitian immigrant community in Brooklyn (along with working several side jobs) (225). Because initiation into the Vodou priesthood is an elaborate set of rituals, it took a second trip to Haiti (and seven hundred dollars) before she was fully initiated into the priesthood (76-77). As Alourdes was preparing to travel back to Haiti for her initiation into the Vodou priesthood, a fire broke out and destroyed her home; for a while, Alourdes and her family lived with friends (127-8). In time, she would eventually be able to return to Haiti and complete her initiation. In 1978, she was introduced to Karen McCarthy Brown by Theodore B., who had met Brown on her first trip to Haiti in 1973 (1). Some time after the publication of'' Mama Lola'', Alourdes "made ''Ocha''" (initiating herself into the Santeria religion) (400). However, this did not mean she had given up Vodou; as Brown described it, "Lola wants more spirits" (400). She wants more protection for herself and her family ... and it keeps her far too busy to worry about abstractions like 'the African Americans" and 'the Latinos' in Oakland" (400). Currently, she practices three religions: Haitian Vodou, Puerto Rican Santeria, and Irish Catholicism (xii). As Brown described in her preface to the book, "Alourdes's approach is ... pragmatic:"You just got to try" (11). "See if it work for you." In 2007, Mama Lola resurfaced into the media when she made a guest appearance on Tori Spelling's reality TV show, ''Tori and Dean'', where we learned about the cleansing ritual that Mama Lola had performed on Tori back in 2005, when Tori believed that 'she had an evil eye on her', that was causing turmoil within her life. Also in this episode, Mama Lola and Zaar, a healer, taught Tori and Mehi how to assemble an ancestral altar in their home, by explaining the meanings of different offerings and significance of location, cloth colors, and pictures of ancestors. It is with social and media interactions like these, that ultimately shape the social perception of religions that are not fully respected in today's society. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mama Lola」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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