In the coming week, Bengali 

Hindus around the world will 
begin Durga Puja celebrations. 
Durga Puja is an auspicious 
period where we offer our devo-
tion to Maa Durga, the Mother 
Goddess. 
Durga 
exemplifies 

strength and victory as the slay-
er of the demon Mahishasura. 
The days are filled with light 
and laughter, religious rituals 
and, of course, a million differ-
ent types of sweets and food. We 
worship our Maa Durga because 
of her strength, resilience and 
love for all of her children (the 
people of the world). In this way, 
Durga is an embodiment of the 
greater female representation: 
the supreme being we refer to 
as Devi. This year, I’m thinking 
about the way Devi exemplifies 
all of the women in my life.

When I was younger, my mom 

told me that Devi lives in every 
single woman on this earth. I 
remember feeling awestruck at 
the fact that we all carry a bit 
of magic in us. I was filled with 

wonder at the thought that all of 
the women in my life, from my 
mom to my aunts to my grand-
mothers — and even myself — are 
an embodiment of the goddess 
we collectively place our love and 
trust in. At the time, my imagi-
nation sent me to a place where 
I could see all of the women I 
knew with mini goddesses sit-
ting inside of them, ready to 
defeat evil and spread goodness 
instantly, almost like our own 
version of Tinker Bell.

Now, I’m starting to realize 

the true meaning of Devi inhab-
iting all of us. I see Devi in the 
way my mother, like the ten-
handed goddess Durga herself, 
balances her busy life of taking 
care of her family, sending us 
off to school each morning and 
even now, reminding me that she 
is just one phone call and a 30 
minute drive away if I need any-
thing. I saw Devi in her when she 
braved the fear of COVID in the 
early months of the pandemic 
so my brother and I wouldn’t be 
exposed at the store while our 
father was stuck across the bor-
der in Canada. I see Devi in her 
when she sits down to sing, her 

melodic voice floating through 
the house and finding its way 
into our hearts, giving our whole 
family the security of knowing 
that we have a mother’s love fol-
lowing us forever. Most impor-
tantly, I’ve grown up seeing 
Devi in her, in the way she has 
overcome all obstacles of immi-
grating to a new country and suc-
cessfully raising a family in this 
foreign land.

Every year, we offer endless 

prayers and resources to our 
gods and goddesses in ceremo-
nies that last the whole day; the 
entire community rejoices in 
celebrations for the entire week. 
We wait all year for Durga Puja 
to come around so we can spend 
our days eating good food and 
enjoying new clothes, but the 
older I get, the more and more 
I’m realizing that the goddess 
we worship so fervently isn’t 
just some distant mythical fig-
ure; in showing our love to Maa 
Durga, we are also promising 
our own mothers and female fig-
ures in our lives that we commit 
to loving and respecting them 
throughout the course of our 
lives.

I’ve never been a fan of 

old horror films. Though I 
can understand why people 
love movies like “Psycho” or 
“Frankenstein,” I can’t seem 
to find them satisfying or 
entertaining to watch. That 
was until I watched the 1968 
independent 
horror 
film, 

“Night of the Living Dead.”

The black and white film is 

a classic horror story. A mys-
terious zombie apocalypse 
plagues 
the 
country 
and 

strangers are forced to band 
together in order to survive 
from the man-eating crea-
tures. The film starts off with 
Barbara, played by Judith 
O’Dea, running from a herd 
of zombies after her brother 
was murdered by one of them. 
She arrives at an empty house 
in complete despair. I 
was annoyed with her 
nonsensical actions at 
this point in the film 
and felt myself getting 
bored until a new char-
acter made his entrance. 
A tall Black man named 
Ben, played by Duane 
Jones, arrives at the 
house and quickly jumps 
into action, unfazed by 
Barbara’s state of shock.

Ben quickly became 

my favorite character. 
He 
wasn’t 
overcome 

with fear at the horrors 
outside of the house. As 
more people joined the 
group, he adapted to the 
situation and became a 
natural leader. He was 
boarding up the house, 
making plans and ensur-
ing the safety of others. 
He got shit done. Until 
recent years, I hadn’t 
seen many horror films 
where the token Black 
characters 
weren’t 

playing a trope or a vil-
lain. So to have a Black lead 
as the responsible, smart, 
bad-ass leader of a group of 
white people in a movie from 
the 60s was shocking. My 
jaw dropped multiple times 
throughout the film at his 
assertiveness and bravery. 
When Ben proclaimed “I’m 
boss up here” to a hardheaded 
group of white folks, I under-
stood why so many Black 
viewers love this movie.

“Night of the Living Dead” 

holds an important space in 
Black history. Duane Jones 
was one of the first African 
Americans to have a lead role 
in a mainstream horror film. 
This is even more notable 
because there is no men-
tion of Ben’s race in the film. 
The director George Romero 
said that, though the char-
acter wasn’t written to be a 
Black man, Duane Jones had 
simply given the best audi-
tion, so they hired him. In a 
time period as tumultuous 

as the late 1960s when Black 
people 
were 
participating 

in sit-ins, planning marches 
and receiving violent push 
back from white America 
every step of the way, Ben 
was taking charge and lead-
ing a group of white people to 
safety. Duane Jones’ perfor-
mance as Ben showed audi-
ences around the country and 
the world that Black people 
could be dynamic leaders. 
We could play more than side 
characters 
or 
troublemak-

ers, and our storylines should 
hold more substance than 
just making a social commen-
tary stance.

I found myself really enjoy-

ing the movie despite my 
admitted disdain for old mov-
ies until I reached the end-
ing. As I had hoped, Ben was 
the last survivor. Through-
out the film he didn’t make 
rash decisions, he put him-
self in danger to help others 
and he tried his best to find 
a way out of the house and 
to a nearby military base for 
safety. He earned his sur-

vival. In the last few minutes 
of the film, a rescue/zombie-
killing team made its way 
toward the house. Ben crept 
upstairs from his hiding spot 
in the basement. He laid low 
in the house and waited for 
help to come his way. Instead, 
the armed mob shoots Ben in 
the head and kills him after 
mistaking him for one of the 
undead. The film ends with a 
slide show of stills as the mob 
carries Ben’s lifeless body to 
be burned with a pile of dead 
zombies.

My heart sank to my stom-

ach. I sat in front of my screen 
in disbelief as the credits 
rolled to the end. Of course, 
many good horror movies 
end in a ‘gotcha’ death of the 
protagonist but knowing that 
didn’t make me feel better. 
Ben made it all that way, and 
in the end he was still mur-
dered. Not by the undead, but 
by a gun-toting mob of white 
men. A truly horrific sight for 

Black people in rural America 
in the 1960s. His murder was 
unjustified and felt a little 
too familiar to the lynchings 
of Black folks throughout 
American history. The imag-
ery of his body being carried 
by smiling white men was 
jarring. I couldn’t help but 
make a connection to those 
old photos of lifeless Black 
men hanging from trees or 
their mangled bodies held up 
like trophies with a crowd of 
smiling white people in the 
background.

Despite how I felt about 

the ending, I wholeheartedly 
believe we need more charac-
ters like Ben in horror films. 
Horror is not a film genre 
that Black folks are usually 
given the chance to shine 
and be the hero. But nearly 
fifty years after “Night of the 
Living Dead,” Jordan Peele’s 
“Get Out” changed the nar-
rative. 

The widely successful 2017 

film tells the story of Chris, 
played by Daniel Kaluuya, 
who finally meets his white 

girlfriend’s 
parents 

on a weekend getaway 
trip only to find out 
the family has a dis-
turbing secret hiding 
in the basement. To 
me, “Get Out” is one of 
the most well-written 
and thought-out hor-
ror films of all time — 
Jordan Peele won the 
Academy 
Award 
for 

Best Original Screen-
play for his creative 
brilliance. 

While 
the 
film 

remains an exception 
and not the standard 
representation of Black 
people in horror, its 
major success shows 
white-run studios that 
there is a demand for 
movies that are actu-
ally representative of 
the people that watch 
them. And one of the 
most impactful aspects 
of the movie is the fact 
that Chris survives in 
the end! Not only does 

he avoid going to jail and 
murder, but he defeats the 
racist white family and is 
rescued by his best friend, 
another Black man. 

Peele’s 
intentional 
deci-

sions to turn the presence 
of Black horror characters 
completely around is why 
Chris’ ending feels so dif-
ferent to Ben’s. “Get Out” 
challenges the stereotypical, 
white supremacist image of 
Blackness while “Night of the 
Living Dead” purposefully 
remains colorblind. White 
people stealing the bodies of 
Black folks is not a new story 
of America but in this case 
Chris is the hero. He became 
the survivor that Ben didn’t 
have a chance to become. It’s 
a triumphant ending and I 
think it really shows how far 
Black horror has come and 
how far the Black community 
has come as well. We are the 
creators, leaders and heroes 
of our own stories. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan In Color
18 — Wednesday, October 28, 2020 

An ode to everyday Devis

 SUBARNA BHATTACHARYA

MiC Columnist

‘I’m Boss Up Here’:
The importance of ‘Night of the 
Living Dead’ in Black horror history

 CAMILLE MOORE

MiC “Off the Record” Blogger

BOUDHAYAN BARDHAN VIA UNSPLASH

As she braids oil and red thread 

through my hair, my grandmoth-
er tells me that her greatest fear 
is dying alone in her own home. 
Because her home had no longer 
remained a home, rather it was 
simply a place of half remem-
bered dreams and visions of a life 
once lived, of a certain sort of stale 
and heavy air that rendered the 
tea no longer sweet and the soup 
sour, lining your throat with itchy 
cotton and sticky honey so that 
screams and cries and laughter 
became muffled. It was a place of 
rusty banisters half removed from 
plaster, of too low ceilings, of water 
that took hours to heat, and her 
body half splayed and contorted in 
only the way a dead woman could 
be after she had died from a stroke 
3 days before my freshman year of 
college. 

My grandmother had prepared 

me for the expectation of her 
own death well, lodging it into 
the dough she kneaded for bread 
and the patterns and spirals of 
henna she left on the palms of my 
hands. A day I soon came to dread 
as I had learned of the inevitabil-
ity, the definiteness and the great 
equalizing power of loss over the 
years, and more so, because while 
my own grief is tightlipped and 
silent, restricted to only bathroom 
tile and the confines under my 
bed, my mother’s grief is loud, the 
kind of grief that shatters mirrors 
and fractures concrete, the kind 

of grief that covers the wedding 
china in a thin film of bitter yellow 
pulp, and peels back the corners of 
the dining room wallpaper, bloat-
ing it so that it begins to stretch and 
sag, until it comes undone from 
the wall in faded strips. Her tears 
flood the kitchen floor, lapping at 
the edges of the cabinets, surging 
into drawers so that the forks and 
knives, spoons and whisks, hole 
punched reward cards, and the 
free matchbooks from a hotel in 
Cannes begin to float. Submerg-
ing the hallowed space under the 
fridge where our left feet kick 
ice cubes, and toe crumpled cou-
pons for a diner on its third grand 
reopening, or have-you-seen-me? 
missing child notices for a girl 
from Texas, or Arkansas, as left 
feet always tend to do. Flowing 
past pink construction letters of 
unrequited love, and unvalidated 
parking passes in an angry flurry 
of bubbles and salt, and finally 
choking the radiator, trickling into 
greasy crevices and rusty corners, 
rendering it so that it can longer 
make the loud, croaking, clanging, 
guttural noises it could never cease 
to do in the hours after midnight. 

The death of a grandmother is an 

expected one. A death that doesn’t 
cause cars to swerve off roads 
and corner stores to shutter their 
doors. A death that doesn’t prompt 
morbidly excited watery phone 
calls of did-you-hear-so-and-so-
died-how-tragic. It is a death that 
is crudely thrown around, the 
grief it leaves behind so crass and 
paper thin, it functions as mostly 
an excuse out of a paper due at 

midnight. But the death of my 
own grandmother meant the final 
loss of what little connection I had 
left with the homeland. Because 
there is a special sort of finality 
that comes after a body is buried 
in the ground and I’d like to think 
that the earth would not accept my 
grandmother. That the gravedig-
gers who had 5 other bodies to bury 
before noon, heaved back and forth 
on rusty shovels, angling them this 
way and that way to no avail. That 
they clawed at the dirt with fin-
gernails and cardboard and pieces 
of glass, pouring water, showering 
it with kisses and prayers in the 
hopes that maybe the splintered 
land would fall apart. 

Now there are there are vultures 

circling my roof, their talons scrap-
ing away at tile and chipping at 
plastic siding, perched in the gut-
ters and edges of storm drains, so 
many that even the neighborhood 
cat named Max keeps his distance, 
and the girls that play never end-
ing games of jump rope in the mid-
dle of the street moving only for 
cars and groups of brisk walking 
women retreat indoors. Because I 
have lost the love my grandmother 
tied in necklaces around my neck 
and in scarves around my hair and 
she only appears in my dreams 
asking me why have I not stood 
at her grave, why have I not made 
prayers for a soul in purgatory, why 
have I not done so many things and 
I feel bare and raw and alone and 
as if my skin could give into the 
power of the sun and turn red and 
cracked in a way that it never could 
before. 

On love and loss

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

 SARAH AKAABOUNE

MiC Columnist

Content Warning: The following 

piece contains spoilers of the 

films “Night of the Living Dead” 

and “Get Out”

DESIGN BY MEGHANA TUMMALA

While ‘Get Out’ remains 
an exception and not the 
standard representation 
of Black people in horror, 
its major success shows 
white-run studios that 
there is a demand for 

movies that are actually 

representative of the 

people that watch them.

