Desir offers a testimonial rather than an analysis, explaining why an eleventh-generation Dahomean born in Haiti, of Cuban descent, embraced a tradition routinely vilified or written off as useless in modern cities. Writing as both scholar and initiated manbo, she is struck by how little the academic and interfaith worlds know of Haitian Vodou despite a substantial body of serious scholarship.

She sets out fundamentals. The word means holy or sacred and comes from the Fon of the Dahomean kingdom, now Benin; related practices run across West and Central Africa and reappear in the Americas under names such as Candomble, Lukumi and Palo Monte. Vodou takes in the detail of other cultures while holding its own shape.

Her title comes from the Pwye Djo, which asks how one kept the ways of the ancestors, how one held Alada, the sacred city standing here for the African motherland. Initiation, she notes, means years of fomasyon toward konesans.