The power of orating our histories

Responding to Still We Thrive by Campbell X

Still We Thrive, 2021 (Film still)

Obeah defies any attempt at definition. It refers to a complex of Afro-Caribbean magical, medical and spiritual practices. In the final year of my English Literature degree, obeah – the focus of my dissertation – absorbed me entirely. When trying to explain it to those around me, I reluctantly used the clunkier, loaded term of “witchcraft”, but I wasn’t referring to the world of broomsticks and conical hats. 

Obeah veers between the physical and spiritual, and during the transatlantic slave trade of the 18th century, was feared by all, but admired by some. It was a tool of resistance against white colonists who wrought horror in the West Indies, and became enmeshed in a complex history of legislation designed to restrict enslaved people’s ability to congregate and uphold colonial power. 

My research into obeah and practising communities involved unearthing, transcribing and in turn, creating an archive of contemporary voices, and, by doing so, disrupting the dominant European narratives that sought to suppress them. 

Still We Thrive, written and directed by Campbell X, ensures we never look away from the past. It brings together contemporary Black actors speaking to camera with archive footage of Black history from the Caribbean, United Kingdom, United States and the African continent. As poet Elizabeth Alexander said, for so long, communities of colour have had to “carry around knowledge and stories in our bodies,” because resources were not devoted to preserving the spaces that held those stories and culture. Still We Thrive serves as a corrective to centuries of systemic erasure, elevating the perspectives of those who experienced it to the cultural archive. 

The film opens with the word “drapetomania”. The sound sticks to the roof of your mouth, almost incantatory. The word – meaning “a mental illness, a label for slaves who ran away” – was coined by the American Samuel Cartright, who spread the racist falsehood that enslaved people who longed to escape were gripped by a mental illness. Like those who felt empowered through obeah but were subdued and ridiculed by colonists, “ungovernable” Black people – as Cartright dubbed them – had their agencies stripped away by the insidious theory of drapetomania. 

And so, the journey continues – like a winding river that draws the surrounding landscape and trees into its wake. In Still We Thrive we hear recitals of the poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers, in which Missouri-born Langston Hughes traverses lands deep-rooted in the soul: “I have known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins”. This knowledge cannot be written down, or made to fit the parameters of western textbooks. It embodies ancient knowledge of the human sort. The sweeping footage of rivers is spliced together with videos of communities organising, underlining the intrinsic knowledge which connects souls with other souls. Within a few seconds, we move from public spaces to the home and to intimate moments between lovers and between mother and daughter. As Olive Senior’s poem Yemoja, which is also recited in Campbell X’s work, brings into being, the flow of our history is unstoppable: 

“Always something 

cooking in your pot

Always something

blueing in your vat 

Always something 

growing in your belly

Always something 

moving on the waters”

It is also a reminder that the journey to freedom cannot easily be mapped, and that there is no one coherent narrative that contains us. In both Hughes’ vision and the film, Black people are makers and orators of history. Still We Thrive issues a clarion call, as vibrant as the shimmering yellow feathers donned by a carnival goer: “Every time they try to destroy us, burn our histories… to the ground. We take the ashes and turn them into gold, with our black magic. And still we thrive.” 

The act of archiving is inherently political. The archive is a living being. In Still We Thrive, we see a kaleidoscope of people, causes, natural phenomena and faiths which, for me, resonated with the way obeah’s cultural force disrupted the colonists’ code in the 18th century. 

It cannot be pinned down. We will never know with certainty how obeah was used, and whether it did more harm than good, but recovering colonial archives means we can now interrogate and debunk the narrative pushed by the prevailing, aggressive authority of the day. Like the rivers that cut into the landscape, each of our community’s stories and contributions to culture form pieces of the wider archive that together enable our self-determination, as humans and storytellers. Still We Thrive is a powerful, stirring contribution to that effort.