This reported op-ed belongs to a package celebrating Caribbean Heritage Month. Throughout June, we will be honoring the powerful creativity, ambition, and heart of Caribbean culture by spotlighting those of Caribbean descent inspiring and impacting popular culture in their home countries, the United States, and beyond, as well as exploring untold stories in hopes of uplifting the voices of the Caribbean community. The Caribbean is not just a tourist destination — it is a region, a people, and an identity rich in history and spirit.
Even in its conception, the Caribbean was a place of other people’s imaginings. When Columbus set out to find India and instead infringed on the territories of its Indigenous people, he misnamed them as “Indians,” not recognizing — or caring for — their own Taíno identity. In the postcolonial Caribbean, this remains. The region — its culture, the countries within it, and its citizens — is often homogenized and understood as a monolithic culture rendering each individual defining characteristic as indistinguishable from the next.
With some of the most hypervisible countries of the region being Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, much of what is dubbed as “Caribbean” derives from one of these three places or does little to acknowledge the rich diversity within the region’s individual countries. Caribbean food is reduced to jerk chicken and patties, Caribbean music is seen as only reggae and dancehall, and rarely do people consider the cultures and histories of the French, Dutch, or Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
Where this disconnect becomes the most apparent is in the output of television and film. Historically, many screen-based productions that include characters with Caribbean identities or heritage, or take place in the Caribbean, do little to ensure both the accuracy of the region’s culture and that its people are represented with dignity. The most egregious offense is what’s been done with language. With very few Caribbean people in decision-making positions who can dispute a transgression, the languages and dialects spoken on-screen become another imagining.
We have, unfortunately, been subject to excruciatingly painful renditions of alleged Caribbean accents and dialects. In fact, in 2019, Jamaican artist Shaggy went viral for his thoughts on some of the worst accents in film throughout history. The quintessential and oft cited Release-Us-From-the-Confines-of-Terrible-Caribbean-Accents list include the classics Cool Runnings and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, as well as recent misses like the Bahamian Outer Banks character Cleo and The Little Mermaid’s Sebastian.
Many claim that Caribbean languages are indecipherable and have seemingly opted into making their own iteration of what they believe Caribbean people sound like — which essentially sanitizes and completely disregards the richness of how people in the region speak. Even when we’re behind our own productions and stand firm on including our languages, there is still pushback.
Producer Rob Maylor has firsthand knowledge of this. While his 2018 sports drama Sprinter, directed by Storm Saulter and produced by Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment, was in production, concerns about understanding the hired local Jamaican talents were paramount. With Maylor’s desire to guarantee the vibrance of Jamaican Patois translated into the film, there was a suggestion to include subtitles to meet the needs of audiences unfamiliar with the dialect while also preserving the linguistic integrity.
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The ongoing conversation about the “subtitle barrier” compelled Overbrook to opt out and institute a strategy called the “Yankee Take,” which saw the actors do a take speaking in Jamaican Patois and then immediately after do the same take at a slower pace, as reported by Variety. While the film was in post-production, Maylor, Saulter, and Overbrook realized that this affected the actor’s performances, and they ultimately agreed to subtitle the film.
“I think it’s lazy and antiquated to not seek out authentic speakers and subtitle,” Maylor tells Teen Vogue. “People want the cool of learning to speak Jamaican Patois authentically, and times are changing. Subtitles should no longer be seen as proverbial scarlet letters on a film for Hollywood audiences, but rather lauded as passport stamps to a rich, undiscovered cinematic world. In the same way we can watch, enjoy, and laud Parasite or Narcos or Banshees of Insherin, the natural dialects of people from the Caribbean deserve the same latitude and consideration for language.”
As far as casting goes, there seems to be a lax approach to ensuring authentic talent gets selected. Casting assistant Rachel Osbourne notes that while casting directors have parameters they work within as they collaborate alongside producers and directors, often there is simply not enough effort to make certain that lesser-known candidates fluent in Caribbean dialects even have an opportunity.
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“In the world of casting, everybody wants what they call, quote-unquote, the best actor. A lot of time, they don't want to discover anybody,” says Osbourne. “They just say, ‘let me see your resume, let's go on your IMDB.’ If your IMDB is empty, if they can't watch you in something, if they don't know your name, if you don't have an agent, all of those things stop people who are talented from coming into the business in the first place.”
After watching the second season of Marvel’s Luke Cage (in which the season’s villain Bushmaster made headlines for his “completely unrecognizable” Jamaican accent), Osbourne felt compelled to found her boutique casting agency Nuance Casting. As implied in its name, Osbourne intends to approach her work within the agency with the necessary gravitas to get things right by championing authentic representation.
When casting non-white roles, there seems to be a general trend of discarding of care and a desire to tokenize; people across the Black diaspora particularly feel the brunt of it. Black casting directors like Reuben Cannon, Robi Reed, and Leah Daniels Butler have lent their talents to multiple productions that have brought the fullness of Black expression to life on our screens, but what happens when there aren’t Black casting directors at the helm? When a level of cultural awareness is missing, there’s seemingly an unwillingness to outsource for additional support — and it shows.
“The thing that I'm learning about casting as a casting assistant is a lot of casting directors are used to doing things in a specific way in terms of workflow and digging, which is what they would call it,” explains Osbourne. “It upsets me because there's some kind of monetary concern. For example, if we're looking for Jamaican characters, are we going to go to someone who's in the community that actually works with Jamaican organizations? Are we going into the community and [giving] people a little pocket change to help us bring authentic people in? That's one part of it. To me, if a production is resourced, then they should do the work to go out into the community and find the people.”
For filmmaker Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, who is of Jamaican and Bajan descent, it’s a matter of responsibility. The director was able to scout talent directly from Jamaica for her film When Morning Comes to verify that representation translated. “I think that we have to see ourselves as historians,” she says. “We have to be carrying this cultural accuracy with us. It’s important that we do that. If we look back at [films from] the ‘90s — Cool Runnings, How Stella Got her Groove Back — all of these [accents] are inaccurate.”
As a director, part of the feat of being at the helm of any production is striving towards authenticity. This is a task for showrunners, producers, and actors to consider as well, and for casting directors to incorporate as a tenet in their digging process. Quite frankly, the disregard of considering the necessity for Caribbean characters to meet this criteria reflects as an inability to do one’s job at best, or sheer xenophobia at worst. If the current state of affairs is an indictment on anything, it’s that many people need to either reconsider their careers or simply leave the Caribbean and its people out of the stories they want to tell.
We are not figments of fiction. Caribbean people deserve more than whatever’s concocted in the imaginations of any given director, producer, actor or casting agent. When renderings of our language and who we are on screen are simply used as markers of difference, it robs people of seeing the region for what it is, and becomes yet another example of Hollywood’s storied history of othering, racism, and laziness.
