The Portrayal of African-origin Religion & Spirituality in Film and Television
Part of our But Where Are You Really From? season.
Generally speaking, we are not in a bad era for portrayals of blackness in media. In recent years, film and television have made great strides in the portrayal of the authentic “Black" experience, tackling topics such as race, gender, sexuality and class with accuracy and sensitivity. However, religion is conspicuous by its absence and where it is portrayed, it is almost exclusively from a Christianity perspective. I have always felt that we have been starved of nuanced portrayals of African-origin religion and spirituality (“ARS”) and where we do see it, it descends into predictable stereotypes and tropes.
We are introduced to this in the 1973 James Bond film, Live and Let Die. This film is remarkable for being the only film in the otherwise totally secular James Bond Universe to show any inclination towards the supernatural. The fictional location of San Monique is clearly an allegory for Haiti (whose colonial name under the French was Saint-Domingue) and every trope and stereotype about voodoo is shoehorned into the film’s two-hour runtime. It is personified in the character of Baron Samedi, who veers between a smoke-and-mirrors charlatan and genuine supernatural being as the film progresses. The natives of the island are shown to be utterly terrified of his voodoo powers and this is how they have been made complicit in the villain (Dr. Kananga)’s nefarious schemes. The film reels off every negative stereotype from savage natives, sinister nighttime rituals, affiliations with snakes and most shockingly, (attempted) human sacrifice. This conveniently allows the audience to still see 007 as the good guy despite decimating the island’s political and religious infrastructure by assassinating Kananga and Samedi.
Even in settings where the supernatural or superhuman is canon, there is a still a tendency for media to lean on stereotypes of ARS, particularly when there is a desire to make a character appear mysterious or evil.
In Heroes, where the characters’ powers were firmly rooted in science, the character Rene was still deeply-mired in the Magical Negro tropes. He doesn’t speak until the end of Season 1 and is simply referred to as “The Haitian” until his name is revealed in Season 4. This is deliberately done to promote a sense of apprehension in the viewer whenever the Haitian appears on screen. He provides Claire Bennett with a wind chime that can summon him at will despite absolutely nothing about his powers suggesting he should be aware of these chimes. Despite never speaking, every character somehow knows he’s Haitian and the writers can leverage all the stereotypes viewers have absorbed about Haiti in the past to let our brains do the heavy lifting and view this character as “spooky”. The voodoo link is explicitly made in a truly excellent graphic novel detailing the Haitian’s origin and how his father possessed superpowers as well.
Even American Horror Story, which has traditionally been quite good at subverting or flat-out ridiculing stereotypes, falls prey to some of these tropes. American Horror Story: Coven’s whole shtick is that witches and witchcraft are not inherently evil, but the series is sure to let us know that the voodoo practitioners are the ”baddies”. Not only does the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau sell her own soul for immortality, she sacrifices an innocent soul every year as tribute to Papa Legba. Papa Legba has an evil souleater persona hoisted upon him that is totally inconsistent with his characteristics in Haitian lore so that we know any character that summons him is invoking the “dark arts”.
In the now-infamous Meet Joe Black scene where Brad Pitt portraying the Grim Reaper inexplicably combusts into a “Jamaican” accent, he does so to reassure an elderly Jamaican hospital patient who suspects him of being affiliated with Obeah, a Jamaican spiritual practice. Brad Pitt assuages her doubts by uttering the immortal lines “No obeah, sistah, no devil, no duppy. Everything gwan be irie". The implications are clear - Obeah is so evil that Death itself wants nothing to do with it.
The association between Haiti and voodoo is startling when you consider that approximately 2.1% of the population cite voodoo as their religion. For context, roughly 2% of Americans practice Mormonism. Any attempt to portray the United States as synonymous with Mormonism would correctly be viewed as bizarre, but through media we have been conditioned to believe that voodoo and Haiti are one and the same. Haiti is ostensibly a Catholic country, with an estimated 55% of Haitians identifying as members of the Catholic Church. Of course, religion in Haiti tends to be highly syncretic, with elements of voodoo woven into Roman Catholicism (similar to Santería in Cuba) and it would be remiss to suggest that voodoo does not play a significant part in the lives of many Haitians, whether they consider it to be their primary religion or not. However, it is hard to see any Haitian agreeing with the frequency at which their deities are portrayed as evil.
Beyond being annoyingly inaccurate, why do these oversimplified portrayals of ARS matter? Television and film are often the only media through which people interact with African religion and as such, it tends to be disproportionately influential in shaping our perceptions of it.
Media such as the ones listed above have successfully managed to convince us of two things; 1) ARS isn’t religion, but merely a collection of uncivilized beliefs and practices and 2) these beliefs and practices are inherently evil or sinister. The second is predicated upon the first, as generally when we consider religions, we tend to do so with a certain amount of nuance. In belief systems we consider to be highly formalised religions, supernatural occurrences are “miracles”. When we don’t consider the belief system to be a religion, these occurrences are “magic”. This is how Voodoo, Juju and Obeah have become shorthand for black magic in popular culture.
This perception as sinister has meant that when Haiti is struck with natural disasters, it is actually considered acceptable discourse to attribute this as “divine punishment” for the nation’s association with Voodoo. People are genuinely willing to overlook the punitive legacy of leading history’s most successful slave revolt, predatory lending from the IMF, successive kleptocracies under Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier and plate tectonics when opining why Haiti suffers more devastation from earthquakes than Japan or San Francisco. Despite being equally pagan by modern day standards, no rational person would ever seek to attribute Greece’s fiscal woes in recent years to the country’s dalliance with its ancient mythology. That is because we have grown up visualizing Greek mythology as heroic, noble and complex, despite it being at odds with our own modern religious sensibilities.
The negative perception is not just limited to Hollywood output and can even be observed in African media. A fascinating study on the impact of female portrayals in Nollywood films in Malawian audiences indicated how on-screen stereotypes can directly translate to real-life biases. A focus group of Malawian viewers opined that Nollywood:
“appears to stigmatise women as a category of people obsessed with juju to manipulate the situation in order to preserve their marriage…Most of the participants argued that this makes the viewers believe that women on their own cannot manage their relationships without juju. Thus, they detested the fact that in most Nollywood films if a man is shown loving his wife passionately the viewers would credit the initiative to juju.
Thus, they observed that such portrayal is selective and gender biased, arguing that men also use juju in African societies. Such gender stereotypes they said, are unfortunately becoming common in the contemporary Malawi. If a woman is seen loving her spouse openly in Malawi, the public makes no issue out of it whilst if the opposite happens everyone is tempted to conclude that it is juju at play”
https://twitter.com/renoomokri/status/1269932236582858752?s=20
In Jamaica, it is still illegal to practice Obeah under the provisions of the Obeah Act 1881, despite the Jamaican Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion throughout the country.
However, Obeah’s reputation as malevolent is so enduring that even as recently as 2019, talk of repealing the act was quashed. Jamaica’s Attorney-General staunchly spoke out against the practice:
https://twitter.com/MalahooForteQC/status/1136267723904868352?s=20
So we have a strange paradox where people who are of African descent are unabashedly exploring their history and culture, but are rejecting the religious aspect of this. The constant negative portrayal of ARS in media has been a contributing factor to this, however this influence is not totally a bad thing. It indicates that better, more balanced and accurate portrayals can make a difference, and is therefore a worthwhile endeavour to pursue. One such portrayal that I enjoyed was that of Mambo Marie in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. She was instantly recognizable as a practitioner of voodoo but the show steered clear of the usual tropes, often using her powers for good or protective purposes. The viewer’s first interaction with her is to be told that she is the real deal when it comes to voodoo.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cb0005dd-e6fe-4424-b06f-f581e6f2e9d7
There is still much work to be done in order to change attitudes, and this is an area in which beliefs can be tremendously entrenched (I know a startlingly high number of people who weren’t allowed to read Harry Potter growing up because of the witchcraft content). In religious/spiritual matters, one is less willing to budge when they believe their immortal soul is at stake. I could write a whole additional piece on the problematic origins of the Zombie horror genre. But with proper research and commitment to storytelling, we can begin to turn the tide. I hope I get to be in the cinema to see the day that happens.
Brett Lewis
This piece is a part of our But Where Are You Really From? season, made possible thanks to the BFI Audience Fund awarding funding from the National Lottery.
