The film enters the world of Revivalism through Bishop Charles Marrah, a Revivalist and Obeah scientist/“science man,” with an established ministry in Rock Hall, a rural town on the border of St. Catherine and Kingston, who transitioned in November 2023. The film centers the family and community on the living side of the kalûnga divide, as they mourn the bishop, articulate their vision for his legacy, while seeking his assistance in their endeavors in the mundane realm, in order to sustain life in the face of hardship as practitioners of a marginalized religion.

On an overcast day, August 19, 2025, the film team piled into our hired minibus after completing last-minute preparations for the first, and arguably most significant day of filming ⸺the kumina ritual. Kumina, like Revival Zion, is part of the Kongo complex of Jamaican religions.  The African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory Bank, with whom the film team consulted, describes kumina as a musico-religious practice whose central purpose is to facilitate communication “with the ancestors of the Congo people of Africa and their descendants in Jamaica” (“ACIJ/JMB Fact Sheet – Kumina,” 2022).  Kalûnga defies space-time and metaphysical boundaries, as well as the intended disconnection of transatlantic slavery’s human trafficking enterprise.

Kumina, and Revivalists, indeed, hold that the dead are not under the earth but groan, run, feed, dance and sing with their living kin who request their presence. How does one cordially request the presence of the dead? Through sounds, vibrations, dancing, singing, sacrificial animals, and copious handles of white rum. Drumbeats played by master drummers summon spirits to enter and possess the Kumina dancers, and even participants, in what is known as Myal. The drums do not only summon spirits, but are themselves often loaded with spirits, thus, the heads of the drums are saturated with white rum during the ceremony, so that the spirits can drink.  The ACIJ explains that

On death, the personal spirit of a person possessed by ancestral spirits during Kumina rituals can join other ancestral spirits who are able to return to earth. Ancestral spirits can also be called upon to aid the living. Kumina ceremonies are held for specific purposes, mainly death in a family (wakes, entombments, and memorials). They are also performed to celebrate births; weddings; thanksgivings, for healing, and to remove the wrong kind of spirit from a person. Kumina dances can also be performed at public sessions or in private ceremonies. 

“ACIJ/JMB Fact Sheet – Kumina,” 2022

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Our team arrived at the bottom of a steep hill in Rock Hall at 3 pm, eager to pay our respects, alongside family and community members, at Bishop Marrah’s kumina and to learn about Bishop Marrah’s life and work from the people who knew him best. We had to abandon our minibus, as it could not make the climb. We packed up our camera and sound equipment, donned our raincoats and umbrellas, with our offerings of white rum, and tackled the steep and winding hill, whose peak disappeared under thick, gray nimbostratus clouds. Before we even made it up the hill, as luck, or the spirits would have it, we met a welder and his wife, the Lewises, at the foot of the hill, who were enthusiastic to ask questions and to share their stories of Marrah’s impact on their lives in terms of his healing ministry and facility with various interpersonal and social afflictions. As we neared the bishop’s balmyard (name for the healing compounds of multiple kinds of Afro-Jamaican religion practitioners), we began to hear the voices of seasoned singers backed by the Bandu and Cas drums. Their rhythms seemed to play hide and seek between the trees and bushes. They were not alone. Throughout my decade of ethnographic research with Revivalists (Khytie), it seemed no kumina was complete without the staccato of at least one disgruntled community member, who (somehow always out of eyesight) would make their displeasure at “wickedness,” “devil work,” and “obeah workers and buyers” known. It was no different this day, as out of sight, seemingly hidden away downslope in a ravine, a woman cursed us for about fifteen minutes, lamenting that she couldn’t believe that we “came all the way from foreign to buy obeah, what a shame! Blood of Jesus pon unu!” “Bad blessings” lined our path, and we continued our trod until we were finally greeted by a gate made of corrugated zinc and wood, and a rustic handwritten sign on a green wooden plank, secured by tree limbs, that read “CM Holy Trinity Peace Church Living Christ Ltd.”