The great, pioneering Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti once said: “Music is a spiritual thing — you don’t play with music. If you play with music, you will die young. Because when the higher forces give you the gift of music—musicianship — it must be well used, for the good of humanity.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about Kuti’s quote as I watched Ryan Coogler’s horror masterpiece, “Sinners.” The movie — and if you haven’t seen it, this column contains spoilers — displays the dual power of music as a carrier not just of entertainment, but of power. The ability of the musically talented main character, Sammie, to summon both the living and the undead is a sign that music can create portals between the material world and the spiritual world. It’s why drums and singing in the West African traditional practices I follow are used to summon spirits and orishas, allowing them to temporarily inhabit the bodies of the initiated.
Yeah, you don’t play with music. You respect it, because higher forces are at work. Which leads to what I would argue is the spiritual power of the film: The overt references to African and diaspora spirituality are both subversive and affirming.
“Sinners” is intended to be a horror film, with all the hallmarks of a traditional vampire drama, set in the Depression-era Mississippi Delta. There are all sorts of indications that the main characters are in proximity to, and navigating around, life-threatening forces. Twins Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan, have tried escaping the South and settling in Chicago, which just turned out to be a Jim Crow town with skyscrapers.
We know that the twins have seen war, and have mixed it up with gangsters in Chicago. They tempt fate again by buying an old mill in Mississippi from white supremacists. But as is the American (male) way, they believe that guns and money will protect them. And this is the truth that even the vampires tell the living: that in White America, Black people will never be safe, no matter how many guns or dollars they have. Because the vampires, whether they represent colonialism or white supremacy, will suck the life force and the talent from whatever comes their way.
But we knew that, right? As white power rises again from the White House, we know that Black progress, joy — hell, having a Black president — unleashed a monstrous effort to purge Black people and other minorities from positions of power and influence.
As someone who grew up evangelical Christian in an African home, I was taught to fear anything related to African spiritual power — or to the ability of Black people to summon spirits. African spirituality was demonic, we were told. The film has overt references to hoodoo, rootworking and the spiritual power of Black and African women, represented in the character Annie, who sees threats before they materialize. She is the one who recognizes that the protagonists are up against vampires — hungry spirits. She is the one who gives Smoke spiritual protection in the form of a talisman around his neck. She knows how to kill the vampires — the ones that suck the life out of minorities, the environment and one another in a quest for enlightenment, the desire to live forever.
And Smoke and Stack are a direct embodiment of the Yoruba orisha force Ibeyi: Identical twins are believed to carry special forces. They are divine beings charged with protecting families and communities.
I’m not surprised to see many Black Christians online dismissing “Sinners” as demonic. It’s not the blood or the gore that is a threat to them. It’s that “Sinners” questions Christian conditioning and its role in the material plundering of the world: the colonization of Africa, of Ireland; the enslavement of Blacks; and the mandate to dominate the Earth itself.
Sammie’s ambivalence with the church, and with his pastor father, who teaches him to fear his natural musical gifts and powers, is closely akin to the increasing distance my generation of Black and African people is feeling with the White church. But leaving doesn’t always mean that Christianity’s conditioning completely leaves us. I consider myself one of those who have left the American evangelical church, unable to recognize as legitimate a belief system that doesn’t worship Jesus’ example to help the poor, the sick and the hungry. A church system that doesn’t recognize Jesus’ love and empathy, but rather worships money and power for money’s and power’s sake.
Sammie’s journey in “Sinners” is to follow his instincts, which draw him away from his father and into the full understanding of his musical gifts. That’s a metaphor for the very real distancing and awakening happening among Black people in the diaspora. There has been increasing interest in returning to African spiritualities outside the church, and more young Black people are identifying as agnostic or spiritual rather than Christian.
But at the end of the film, Sammie does return, haunted and scarred from the showdown with the vampires, his guitar broken, back to the white-painted church. Conditioning is hard to break, even after being exposed to the truth of Christianity’s tainted role in our own disempowerment.
And maybe this is the true horror — and triumph — of the film. If Black people could use their spiritual power to defeat the hungry spirits of exploitation, colonization and white supremacy, the world would never be the same.