The Oath and the Open Door

The opening of Joy shocked me. But I kept watching. A young woman in Nigeria, dressed for a ceremonial occasion, participates in a ritual that the film presents without explanation or translation. There was a chicken, alive at first. There were loud chicken noises until there weren't. There was blood. There was an oath, sworn before she leaves for Europe. We don't get explanations, but we got it. If you don't already know what juju is, what the oath means, what it costs to break it, the film is not going to explain it to you. It trusts you to catch up, use your nuggen, or to sit with not knowing, which amounts to the same thing. Don't fret!

Later in the film, you understand what the ceremony was. It was a contract. The Madame who arranged the crossing, who paid for the journey from Nigeria to Vienna, extracted this oath as collateral. She wants her ROI. The belief system — the genuine, deep, communally held belief that breaking a juju oath brings harm to you and your family is the mechanism of the debt. The tradition is the lock on the door. It's a loan insurance of sorts. In Antigua, we call this obeah. It works for many who believe.

Joy (2018) was directed by Sudabeh Mortezai, an Austrian director of Iranian heritage, and premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film. It tells the story of Joy, a young Nigerian woman working the streets of Vienna to pay off the debt to her Madame, while sending money to her family in Nigeria and trying to secure a future for her young daughter. Partway through the film, Joy is assigned to supervise Precious, a teenage girl just arrived from Nigeria who is not ready to accept what her life in Vienna is going to look like. Lead actress Joy Alphonsus, a non-professional at the time of filming, won Best Actress at the Seville International Film Festival and the Austrian Film Awards. The film is on Netflix.

Mortezai immerses the audience in this world with a raw, how-it-is frankness, and the Variety review noted that the women at the center are exploited equally by foreign oppressors and within their own communities, making for a cycle of abuse that's almost impossible to escape. That observation is accurate, and it's what makes the film harder to watch than a simpler story of victims and perpetrators would be. The Madame is Nigerian. The debt structure runs through the community. The system is not only external, it has roots inside.

I want to think carefully about the argument I'm making here, because it is easy to make it wrong.

The wrong version of this argument goes: the women are trapped by their own beliefs. If they simply rejected the juju oath, they would be free. The tradition is the problem. This is not what I'm saying, and it is not what the film says either. The belief is real, the community that holds it is real, and the oath has power precisely because it is embedded in a genuine cultural framework of obligation and consequence. The Madame knows this. She is not exploiting superstition. She is exploiting something with deep roots, which is a different and considerably more serious thing. Is tradition an incentive towards success, or a thing around her neck?

The more accurate version of the argument is this: circumstances created a system in which traditional structures - I mean structures built for entirely different purposes, for maintaining community bonds, for holding people accountable in contexts where no other enforcement existed, were extracted from their original context and redeployed as debt instruments. The juju oath was not designed for this. It was designed for a world in which community held you, in which breaking an oath meant something in the place where you lived, where your family lived, where your social world existed. Removed from that world and dropped into the backstreets of Vienna, the oath becomes something it was never meant to be: portable, transferable, a financial product.

While watching, I wish Joy would have just said, to hell with the juju. Free herself rather than continue to suffer the indignities. But, then that's not her character. Tradition made her. Tradition controls her.

Cus Deh Pon Yuh, Yuh Muma, and Yuh Whole Family

The question of where circumstance ends and belief begins is one I have thought about in other contexts. People migrate all the time for a better life, for family, to escape the past or a dangerous place or people, or just poverty left after the ravages of colonial plundering. What keeps us from growing? Belief or circumstances?

There is a version of this pattern that has nothing to do with trafficking. You see it when communities hold their children to expectations built for a world that no longer exists, or when people refuse opportunities because the community's framework doesn't have a word for them yet. You see it when belonging is priced at the cost of a particular kind of future, and people pay it because the alternative isn't a choice they can name. Tradition doesn't only trap people through coercion. Sometimes it traps them through love, or some deep devotion.

What makes Joy hard to watch is that it refuses to tell you who is responsible. The Madame is a villain, but she is also a woman who came through the same system she is now running. Joy herself is both victim and perpetrator, supervising Precious toward a fate she knows is wrong, because the alternative, for her, is worse. Mortezai keeps her perspective on women throughout even the film's most brutal moments, striving to celebrate the life of Joy despite all the pitfalls and suffering.

The film ends without resolution, which is the only honest ending available to it. Joy does not escape. Precious does not escape. The door does not open. What you are left with is the question of what would have had to be different — and the uncomfortable answer is: almost everything. I really felt sorry for Joy and could not find an answer for her. Not just Joy's beliefs, not just her circumstances, but the structure of the world that made Vienna the destination and Nigeria the departure point in the first place, not vice versa.

I felt like hard immigration, the one without papers and money, when you have a low-demand passport, is hopeless on both ends. Maybe not hopeless. As an economist, I know things can be done. Leave Nigeria and whatever other country with their resources, and let them make more of their people comfortable so they don't have to leave for strange lands in desperation. This desperation is produced. It does not have to be. The film left me emotionally exhausted. I won't watch it again. But I am glad I did.

Joy (2018) is directed by Sudabeh Mortezai and is streaming now on Netflix.