City Lights Booksellers and Publishers present one of their newest books about a personal and transformative journey into the world of Haitian Vodou: Nan Dòmi: An Initiate Journey into Haitian Vodou by Mimerose Beaubrun. With a preface by Madison Smartt Bell, who places the religion and Beaubrun’s memoir in a historical context, this book was translated from the French by D.J. Walker.

Well-known writer Julia Alvarez describes the book as “a valuable contribution taking us along into the world of Nan Domi, a dream state and stage in the initiate’s journey to mastery.” She adds, “Much in the spirit of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, Beaubrun follows the teachings, at times baffling, of her guide, Aunt Tansia. In the process the reader is introduced into a world that is far more than a religious tradition.”

Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier and Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, says, “For those looking for a first-person guide — and importantly, a Haitian guide — into the ways of Vodou, Mimerose Beaubrun’s Nan Dòmi is a unique, indispensable, and mysterious primer.”

Publisher’s Description: Like all the great religions Vodou has an external, public practice of rituals and ceremonies—and also an internal, mystical dimension. Before Nan Dòmi, works about Vodou have concentrated on the spectacular outward manifestations of Vodou observance—hypnotic drumming and chanting, frenetic dancing, fits of spirit possession. But practically all reports on Vodou are outsider accounts, which means that they are stopped at the threshold. Mimerose Beaubrun, educated as an anthropologist, set out to write another such work, but in the process she met the woman who would become her ultimate teacher and guide to the religion’s internal mysteries: Tante Tansia, whose knowledge, wisdom and spiritual power govern the text of Nan Dòmi. [. . .] Beaubrun has been a student of Vodou for half of her life, but she is also an adept, and in this uniquely valuable work, she divests herself of all scholarly apparatus to speak from Vodou’s purest heart.

Mimerose Beaubrun is a founding member and lead singer of the internationally popular Boukman Eksperyans. Politically and spiritually based from the start, the group is active in Haiti’s pro-democracy movement; its members were named Peace and Goodwill Ambassadors by the UN in 2002.

Also see: an interview with author Mimerose Beaubrun with Afropop Worldwide.

For more information, see http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100143800

For inquiries, please write to Chris Carosi (chris@citylights.com), publicist at City Lights.