Bound by blood: new film highlights Jamaica’s outlawed obeah belief system

A new movie from award-winning Jamaican film-maker Sosiessia Nixon shines a spotlight on Jamaica’s enduring west African-based magic and spiritual healing tradition known as obeah.Nixon’s tense, feature-length suspense, Stew Peas, tells of the story of Jamaican detective Tessa, who is obsessed with an old murder case.Tessa’s life begins to fall apart when it becomes clear that her husband, Neil, has fallen under the spell of her new maid, Marcia. The story takes a dark turn with the shocking revelation that Marcia has been adding a secret ingredient to Neil’s food – her menstrual blood.“This film focuses on the persisting Jamaican obeah belief, that a woman could ‘bind’ a man in a relationship by serving him a meal of the traditional kidney beans and meat stew, which becomes a potent love potion when her menstrual blood is added,” Nixon said.Nixon hopes the movie will spark a dialogue about the tension between Christianity and obeah, which is rooted in the country’s African heritage and still practised today despite being outlawed by colonisers in the 1700s – and still illegal today.“The practice of binding a man with stew peas remains very much taboo in Jamaica, and I wanted to open a conversation. I wanted to look at this belief system in depth. Jamaicans often say that belief kills and belief cures, meaning that whatever you believe, that is what is going to happen. So, does this thing really work?” Nixon said.Coming from St Thomas, an idyllic coastal parish on the south-eastern tip of Jamaica, sometimes nicknamed the “obeah parish”, Nixon said she was inspired by actual experiences.“Growing up in St Thomas, I was very much exposed to a lot of obeah,” Nixon said.Producer and actor, Ava Eagle Brown, who created Jamaica’s Black River film festival, said the film will resonate with Caribbean people everywhere. “There is so much of us in this film, the things that make us Jamaican – especially if you’re in the diaspora … it brings you back home.”Brown, who is also in the film, added: “It’s probably going to now have some men looking at their woman with suspicion and asking: ‘What did you put it in my stew peas?’” she said. “But on a serious level, I told my son to make sure he doesn’t eat any stew peas from any woman!”Sonjah Stanley Niaah, a Jamaican cultural studies scholar and the director for UWI’s Centre for Reparation Research, said the stew peas belief is linked to the African view that natural elements, including blood from menstruation, has an inherent potency. The idea, she added, was that the red kidney beans will mask the blood so the man being charmed cannot detect it.Stanley Niaah welcomed the opportunity to explore forms of African spiritualities, which she said are often misunderstood, after being vilified and outlawed by European colonialists who had linked them to resistance and rebellions among enslaved Africans.“People in this part of the world are people of African descent and there’s a pantheon of African spirituality that we have in our blood, that we have inherited … But [today], African spirituality has no attention, no substance, it’s not being taught in schools, we are so afraid of ourselves, we are neglecting it,” she said.She added: “What we now have is this very profound, alive and longstanding tension between Christian practices and African spirituality. Enslavement was sanctioned by the church. So, some aspects of the legislative architecture in the Caribbean were certainly driven by the need to have enslaved people not assemble, or gather for any reason, whether to worship their gods or to plan rebellions. This legislative architecture is very much present even today, when you see the obeah Act still on the books in Jamaica.”Jamaica needs to keep making films that boldly represent the region, communities and cultures, even as it grapples with tough challenges such as rebuilding after Hurricane Melissa, Stanley Niaah said.Brown, who had to cancel this year’s film festival after Hurricane Melissa demolished parts of Black River, where the event is normally held, echoed Stanley Niaah’s sentiments, describing Stew Peas as “a ray of hope”, as Jamaica’s multibillion-dollar creative industry struggles to recover.“This year I had to postpone the Black River film festival, which was a real blow because it was part of how Jamaican creatives were starting to connect with the globe, including contacts from major networks like Canal+ and Netflix,” she said.She added: “The hurricane destroyed so much! It destroyed infrastructure, equipment and for some people it destroyed hope. And that is why we need projects like this that demonstrate the resilience of Jamaicans, and send a message to the world that we are still making music and movies and adding that quintessential Jamaican green, gold and black hue to entertainment.”Jamaica’s film commissioner Jackie Jacqueline Jackson said films such as Stew Peas are “a powerful testament to the resilience, ingenuity, and determination of Jamaica’s creative industry”.“It’s important to keep going and demonstrate that Jamaica is still open for business. By signalling this, it encourages international productions to return to Jamaica which positively affects jobs and film production expenditure,” she added.