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.