Raven Irabor Reimagines Caribbean Folklore in “She Island”

by Mell P

I was first introduced to She Island at the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival this past September when screenings were offered between the festival events. I was captivated by the movement created in the film, women dancing in white dresses and red turbans along a Caribbean beach, their movements weaving together past and present, memory and mythology. The visuals drew me in. This is the world of She Island, filmmaker Raven Irabor’s enchanting meditation on cultural survival, feminine power, and what happens when a people’s memories begin to fade.

This past Sunday, I had a chance to see the film in its entirety at the African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF), and an opportunity to meet Irabor. The film has been screened at festivals like the Reel Sisters Film Festival, where it won the Best Cinematography Award. 

The Forgetting Tree

“I am really into Black futurism and surrealism and folklore,” Irabor explained, tracing the origins of her experimental film. The Bronx-born daughter of a Trinidadian mother and Nigerian father has always existed at cultural crossroads, and She Island emerges from that liminal space where identities merge and transform.

Her research for the film led her to utilize the mother-daughter journey to tell the story of Caribbean women through characters inspired by Ouidah: The Forgetting Tree. This character draws from the actual Tree of Forgetfulness in the Benin city of Ouidah, where enslaved Africans were forced to walk in circles, nine times for men, six for women, in a ritual designed to erase their identities before the Middle Passage.

“I’m looking at women as the gatekeepers and holders of culture,” Irabor says. “If they forget their identities and their customs, what happens to Caribbean culture?”

This question propels the film’s narrative: a mother and daughter embarking on a perilous journey to break the curse threatening to erase the memories of their island’s women. Guided by La Diablesse, a figure from Caribbean folklore that Irabor deliberately reimagines, they navigate ancestral rituals to reclaim their heritage.

Reclaiming the Demonized Feminine

Irabor’s choice of La Diablesse as a guide rather than villain speaks to the film’s larger project of cultural reclamation. In traditional folklore, La Diablesse is often portrayed as a dangerous seductress known to cast spells on her unsuspecting male victims, but Irabor saw something else in the character.

“Female folklore is often demonized,” she notes. Irabor was drawn to La Diablesse’s hybridity, the way the African deity Oshun transformed and transmuted upon reaching the Caribbean, only to be later demonized. “She resides at so many intersections and best represents what I was trying to replicate in the film.”

This reimagining also reflects Irabor’s own family history. The women on her mother’s side embody a particular kind of strength. “Like my grandma doing things on her own in her 80s,” she said with clear admiration.

Building a World, Finding a Language

The physical landscape of Trinidad became essential to the film’s authenticity. After spending a month on the island, researching folklore and immersing herself in the culture, she shot in her grandmother’s house and church, an experience Irabor found “very different but also similar to African churches.” Her grandmother is a Spiritual Baptist.

Language mattered too. Irabor was particular about incorporating ancient Creole, Dutch, and Jamaican patois. “I wanted to show the differences and nuances in the diaspora because it’s how I was raised,” she explains, describing herself as a “pan-African image maker” working to unite the African diaspora through art.

She credits her time on the Caribbean dance team at Syracuse University as directly impacting her desire to create this film. That predominantly female space, combined with her explorations of Nigerian and Trinidadian womanhood, gave her the foundation to examine “the specific nuances of Caribbean womanhood as a form of Black womanhood.”

A Reference Point for the Future

She Island culminates in a triumphant ritual and vibrant carnival of renewal, a celebration that refuses forgetting, that insists on remembering, that dances memory back into being. For Irabor and the women she centers in her work, this isn’t just filmmaking. It’s the preservation of identity itself, one frame at a time.

Her ambitions for She Island extend beyond the screen. As a self-described researcher who couldn’t find many reference points for this film, and she hopes her work will serve future Caribbean filmmakers.

“I want my film to be a reference point for other Caribbean filmmakers in the future and for us to become written into each other’s lives,” she says.

For now, she’s considering becoming a griot of sorts, creating a storybook from the film that captures oral histories for younger generations of Caribbean women to understand their own womanhood.

She recently completed a cultural project in The Bronx using art as a healing modality, and her journey into storytelling continues as she explores the experience of dating in your thirties and choosing oneself, in her next film that focuses a Haitian character.  

Throughout it all, her vision remains clear: creating surrealist experimental works that honor ancestral wisdom while imagining new futures.