McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Ezili.” In Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, 219-58. University of California Press, 2010.

This book was found through articles on JSTOR. The title was mentioned in many of the articles I found on Ezili Dantò. I read the chapter on the three Ezilis, focusing on the section about Ezili Dantò. The main idea of the section on Ezili Dantò was that above all else she is a mother. She is a healer, a protector, and a warrior. The chapter had stories about what the Vodou priestess Mama Lola and her family have experienced with Ezili Dantò. Altars for the goddess usually have money, clothes, and dolls on them and none of the items are ever used by anyone in the family. The chapter gave background on the goddess and what she stands for. Ezili Dantò fought in the Haitian slave revolution alongside her children (the Haitian slaves) and during the revolution she was wounded ending up with two parallel, vertical scars on one of her cheeks. Ezili Dantò also cannot speak because during the revolution her people believed that she wouldn’t keep their secrets so they cut out her tongue. The chapter stressed the fact that Ezili Dantò is a mother, she is always depicted with a child and she will drop everything to help her children in times of trouble. These characteristics are extremely helpful in teaching me about who Ezili Dantò is and what represents her.

The author herself does not show much bias in her writing. The book is more of a first person narrative about the experiences she had with Mama Lola and what she learned from her. McCarthy Brown’s purpose in her writing is to educate through the voices of those who practice Vodou. She doesn’t actually argue anything due to the writing style but the emphasis on Ezili Dantò being a mother above all else is clear.

Daniels, Kyrah Malika. “The Undressing of Two Sacred Healing Bundles: Curative Arts in the Black Atlantic in Haiti and Ancient Kongo.”Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 3(2013):416-429.

I found this source while looking through articles on JSTOR. I found the name Kyrah Malika Daniels repeated and looked her up and found a research paper she did on Haitian pakèt kongos on Project Muse. In this article she talks about how pakèt kongos are used for healing and how problems like a broken leg aren’t just treated as physical, but as spiritual too. There is a belief that whatever ails the patient is both a physical or mental and spiritual problem and the patient may have fallen out of sync or that there is an imbalance in the cosmos. A pakèt kongo follows a basic shape with an orb at the bottom and a stem coming out of the orb. The orb contains soil from a graveyard, essentially trapping a disembodied spirit within it. The fabric wrappings on a pakèt kongo are not just to keep the soil from getting out but also to keep the spirit in so that the pakèt kongo will work for ritual healing.

The author’s goal with this article is to educate on the pakèt kongo and how it is used in Haitian Vodou. She talks about her own experience with it but also about research she did on it. There is no bias in this article, mostly because it is not an opinion piece and mostly consists of facts and research. The author is a practitioner of Haitian Vodou so may be biased in terms of how she talks about the pakèt kongo but it is not very prevalent in the article. The information in the article is extremely relevant to me and will help a lot with my analysis of the object.

McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, 1-25.

This article was one of the class readings. The author talks about the basic beliefs in Haitian Vodou. She goes into detail about their ideas and beliefs on healing and personhood. She talks about spirit possession and goes over some of the details of Haitian cosmology.

The goal of this article is to go over the basics of Haitian Vodou while not leaving out any of the most important details. There is no central focus on one idea in Vodou, it’s more of an overview of the religion. This article is helpful to me because it gives a lot of information on personhood, healing, and other aspects of Vodou that I need to know about in order to write my object analysis.