Who is popular today?

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

AS AN anthropologist, I often turn to the vast literature on the Caribbean to understand national hullaballoos and cultural responses. So, here’s your post-Christmas read on spirituality and power in our republic of complex religions and beliefs.
I’m not concerned with the truth of recent allegations that Massy Holdings Ltd mandates employees to attend retreats which include learning to contact the dead and self-heal with white light energy. Instead, let’s look anthropologically at these allegations.
In reportedly undertaking training which included necromancy and Obeah, Massy, which has denied the allegations, would have been as truly Caribbean as a company could be. Culturally speaking, nearly everyone in the region, regardless of officially-identified religion, believes in jumbies, spirit possession, the power of the dead (and veneration of ancestors), seers and divination, and healing practices which are unauthorised by dominant religions.
The roots of the word Obeah are Ashanti, coming from "Obeye" meaning spiritual leaders (sometimes described as witches and wizards), and accessing the occult has long been associated with sourcing strength, building community, providing cures, ensuring justice and causing harm. Historically, African Obeah women and men also held power and prestige, much like Delphi Sphere Consulting seems to have today.
However, engagement with the unseen and energetic are not just African, but also Hindu, Muslim and Christian. Indeed, the spiritual is a domain of what Keith McNeal, scholar of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean transcendental practices, calls “transculturation,” where there is significant mixing and multidimensionality.
Like Carnival, which brings together people of all religions in what soca music often describes as a spiritual experience, belief in the supernatural has become national culture and, translated into business speak, such culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Writing of Hindus, Vidya Naipaul brilliantly nailed the kind of ambition that led Ganesh, the main character in his novel The Mystic Masseur, to turn to mysticism and religious healing. These enabled Ganesh to successfully con his clients, who were willing believers.
Moving from the literary, anthropologist Kumar Mahabir has documented Indo-Muslims' belief in Sheikh Sadiq, a jinn who possesses people and who is subject to Hindu mantras and Muslim prayers. Mahabir interviewed one 77-year-old lucky enough to see Sheikh Sadiq, whose manifestations were only visible to women.
Reading marvellous realist texts, such as David Dabydeen’s novel Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008), scholar Aliyah Khan describes Mahabir’s interviewee and Dabydeen’s novel as two of many examples of Muslims’ “magical negotiation with indigeneity and environmental space.” In other words, whatever voodoo you do is a mode of becoming and belonging to the Caribbean.
CEPEP-employed Pentecostals believe in healing with hands just as much as middle-class, new-age, Reiki enthusiasts. People drop rum in a corner for the thirsty on the other side. They jharay for jaundice. They put blue bottles and barrels in agricultural gardens to ward off maljo. They mount stickfighting bois and perform secret rituals before becoming visible as jab jabs and blue devils. However, these are typically considered peasant or proletarian customs.
The Massy allegations, had they been true, would have instead revealed how economic elites were (allegedly) just as deep in practices that continue to carry a colonial stigma of backwardness, low culture and illegality. Corner block talk knows it has always been so. Thus, popular response, comprising memes, Tik Tok videos and Christmas lime picong, was hardly condemnatory for Massy execs had simply been shown to be "one of we."
Upper classes (who were once white elites, but now include an oligarchy of all ethnicities) were brought into intimacy with the everyday and popular; down a notch from air-conditioned and upper-floor financial wizardry. Despite their business-suits and millions, they were just like schoolgirls from Moruga, for whom the paranormal and superstitious were real.
Yet, Massy’s preference for foreign over local Babalawos, pundits and healers, had it been true, would also have been about a capitalist refashioning of Obeah, not as low and disavowed superstition, but as a technology of successful Caribbean modernity.
Elite practices and profits are typically considered mysterious, untrustworthy, corrupt and advantageous. It makes sense then that outcry would be less about dead-dealing and light-healing than misuse of forex, particularly as small and medium businesses have been crippled by lack of access to the very foreign exchange (and successful capitalist modernity) which appeared inequitably available to Massy.
Anthropologist Daniel Miller describes Christmas as the ultimate national festival, celebrated by everyone regardless of religion in ways typically Trinidadian/Tobagonian. It’s a good moment to highlight that, interspersed with such rituals, is a landscape of supernatural ongoings which also expose just how much our divided society secretly shares across class, religion and ethnicity.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 522

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