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Children of Blood and Bone: What the Film Trailer Owes the Òrìṣà
The fight over the Children of Blood and Bone film trailer is not a fight about whether Hollywood got the òrìṣà right. It cannot be.
The Negative Father Archetype: Mwindo, Yennenga, and Longar
A chief seals his newborn son inside a drum, has the drum bound shut, and pushes it out into the river. He has already tried a grave.
Children of Blood and Bone Film News: What Orïsha Is (and Isn't)
The advice comes in the replies under every trailer: it's a fantasy movie, relax, none of it is real.
Orisha on Screen: What a Film Adaptation Owes a Tradition
Row F, forty minutes into the show. A character says a name — Ọya, maybe, or Èṣù — and somewhere in the dark a phone lights up and somebody types it into a search box, half-spelled, no diacritics.
Adinkra Symbols: What the Akan Signs Mean on City Walls
On a plywood hoarding outside a shuttered bank, someone has painted a bird the size of a door. Its body faces forward, its head turned all the way back, and in its beak is an egg it has lifted from…
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Nigerian Novels and Film
Ben Okri opens The Famished Road with a river that becomes a road, and a road that stays hungry because it was once a river.
Yoruba Indigenous Religion in Church and Mosque: What Survived
The praise session at a Pentecostal church in Ìbàdàn opens the way a party opens. A gángan — the small talking drum held under the arm — answers the song leader line for line, bending its pitch to…
Children of Blood and Bone: Film Adaptation Announcement and the Orïsha
The number I wrote down was ten. I had the trailer running in one tab and a dog-eared paperback of Children of Blood and Bone face-down beside the keyboard, and I did the small, slightly obsessive…
Vodou Spirituality and Practice vs. the Hollywood Zombie
A sugar mill turns in the dark. Six men lean into the capstan bar, walking it in a circle, and their faces do not change. One of them slips and goes into the grinder. Nobody stops.
African Mythology in Netflix Releases: What the Numbers Miss
The subtitle reads the spirit world. The word the actor said was Ọ̀run. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is the whole subject of this piece.