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.