Stew Peas: New movie highlighting Jamaica’s outlawed obeah belief system

Durrant Pate/Contributor

A new Jamaican feature-length suspense movie, Stew Peas is shining a spotlight on the island’s enduring West African-based magic and spiritual healing tradition known as obeah.

The film from award-winning Jamaican filmmaker, Sosiessia Nixon, tells the story of Jamaican detective Tessa, who is obsessed with an old murder case. Tessa’s life begins to fall apart when it becomes clear her husband, Neil, has fallen under the spell of her new maid, Marcia. 

The story takes a dark turn with the shocking revelation that Marcia has been adding a secret ingredient to Neil’s food – her menstrual blood. Nixon hopes the movie will spark a dialogue about the tension between Christianity and obeah, which is rooted in the country’s African heritage and still practised today.

This, despite being outlawed by colonisers in the 1700s, is still illegal today. For Nixon, “the practice of binding a man with stew peas remains very much taboo in Jamaica, and I wanted to open a conversation. I wanted to look at this belief system in depth. Jamaicans often say that belief kills and belief cures, meaning that whatever you believe is what is going to happen. So, does this thing really work?”

Inspired by actual experiences 

Coming from St Thomas, an idyllic coastal parish on the south-eastern tip of Jamaica, sometimes nicknamed the “obeah parish”, Nixon said, explaining that she was inspired by actual experiences; growing up in St Thomas, I was very much exposed to a lot of obeah.”

Continuing, Nixon declared, “This film focuses on the persisting Jamaican obeah belief that a woman could ‘bind’ a man in a relationship by serving him a meal of the traditional kidney beans and meat stew, which becomes a potent love potion when her menstrual blood is added.”

Producer and actor Ava Eagle Brown, who created Jamaica’s Black River film festival, is confident that the film will resonate with Caribbean people everywhere, arguing, “There is so much of us in this film, the things that make us Jamaican – especially if you’re in the diaspora…it brings you back home.”

Stew peas warning

Brown, who is also in the film, posited, “It’s probably going to now have some men looking at their women with suspicion and asking, ‘What did you put it in my stew peas? But on a serious level, I told my son to make sure he doesn’t eat any stew peas from any woman!”

Commenting on the film, Jamaican cultural studies scholar and the director for UWI’s Centre for Reparation Research, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, contended that the stew peas belief is linked to the African view that natural elements, including blood from menstruation, have an inherent potency. The idea, she added, was that the red kidney beans will mask the blood so the man being charmed could not detect it.

Niaah welcomed the opportunity to explore forms of African spiritualities, which she said are often misunderstood, after being vilified and outlawed by European colonialists who had linked them to resistance and rebellions among enslaved Africans.

For her, “people in this part of the world are people of African descent, and there’s a pantheon of African spirituality that we have in our blood, that we have inherited … But [today], African spirituality has no attention, no substance; it’s not being taught in schools; we are so afraid of ourselves, we are neglecting it.” 

She is adamant that Jamaica needs to keep making films that boldly represent the region, communities and cultures, even as it grapples with tough challenges such as rebuilding after Hurricane Melissa.

Brown, who had to cancel this year’s Black River film festival after Hurricane Melissa demolished parts of St, Elizabeth parish capital, where the event is normally held, echoed Stanley Niaah’s sentiments, describing Stew Peas as “a ray of hope”, as Jamaica’s multibillion-dollar creative industry struggles to recover.

She acknowledged that the postponement of the Black River film festival this year is a real blow because it is part of how Jamaican creatives were starting to connect with the globe, including contacts from major networks like Canal+ and Netflix.

Jamaica’s film commissioner, Jackie Jackson, is emphasising that films such as Stew Peas are “a powerful testament to the resilience, ingenuity, and determination of Jamaica’s creative industry. It’s important to keep going and demonstrate that Jamaica is still open for business. By signalling this, it encourages international productions to return to Jamaica, which positively affects jobs and film production expenditure.”