the mojo bag and the mother tongue

On Annie, Wunmi Mosaku, and what Black women carry across the crossing.

I want to talk about Sinners again.

The first time I wrote about this film, I wrote about Sammie, and conjure, and the legacy of the Blues and the Bible. But now that the film has swept the awards season, I want to talk about love, and language.

I want to talk about Annie.

And I want to talk about what it means that the woman who played Annie started filming at 7 months post partum, walked the red carpet nine months pregnant, and came out the other side of it all knowing her mother tongue.

When we first meet Annie in the movie, her deepest losses have already happened. Her baby is gone before the film begins. We get her grief (and Smoke’s) as weather¹. As the thing that has already shaped her into who she is.

Annie turns that grief into a mojo bag, and that energy carries the moral and spiritual center of the film.

When she places that bag in Smoke’s hands, she is doing what Black women have always done: using the knowledge she inherited and refined and lived inside to protect the people she loves.

The bag doesn’t save Smoke from dying.

It saves him from dying wrong. It gives him a death with meaning. He goes out swinging at the Klan, aimed at something worth dying against. He dies victorious and undiminished. And Annie, when the vampires come, chooses her own crossing. She walks into her death on her own terms, which is actually a form of sovereignty.

The ending of Sinners is not a happy ending in the way we usually mean that. Annie and Smoke lose their lives. Smoke loses his brother twice over. Annie never gets to mother her living child. The regime takes almost everything.

And yet, it is, somehow, a complete ending where nothing is diminished. That is what Annie’s practice made possible. That is what hher way of knowing, her medicine, and her mojo built.

That is the representation I have been waiting to see.

I need to say something about Annie’s body, because the film is saying something about it and I should say it too.

Annie is dark-skinned. She is not skinny. She is loved completely and visibly, the way you love something sacred … which is exactly what she is. And in the film’s own visual logic, Annie is the standard of desire.

Compare her to Stack and Mary. Their love is real, but it is consuming. It burns through the people inside it. It cannot hold the weight of its own intensity. Stack and Mary love each other the way people love things they are afraid of losing, which is why they spend the whole film losing them.

Sammie and Pearline are just beginning. Their love is tender and unfinished, still figuring out what it can hold.

Annie and Smoke love each other like people who have already survived the worst.

The mojo bag is their love, expressed in Annie’s language. She brings her whole knowledge to bear on keeping the person she loves alive in a world that is trying very hard to kill him.

That is not a small thing to see on screen.

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Now we gotta talk about Wunmi Mosaku.

She is Nigerian-British. She came to a role playing an American Southern hoodoo priestess and according to her, “Hoodoo broke the dam”.²

For five years Wunmi had been studying her mother tongue, Yoruba, and for five years it wouldn’t stick. Then she spent six months inside the character of Annie, and she came out speaking.

Yvonne Chireau, the hoodoo scholar who served as the film’s consultant, walked Wunmi through the spiritual practice³. And for the first time, Wunmi saw the connection between herself, Yoruba Ifa practice and New Orleans hoodoo.

She also learned about American racism and the Black American culture of reclamation. She began to see the connections between hoodoo and the traditions that colonialism had deliberately severed and demonized so that Black women across the diaspora would fear their own medicine.

This matters because we know the fracture exists. Continental Africans and African Americans don’t always see themselves in each other. Black British and Black Americans don’t always either. The logic of the Middle Passage is partly to blame, and so is every system that has since benefited from Black people not recognizing themselves in each other across the diaspora.

Black actresses have named the toll that performing a version of a self the industry can package and sell takes. Any number of them have described the slow accumulation of what they’ve had to put down or put away or pretend they don’t carry in order to get through the door.

Annie gave something back.

She gave Wunmi her mother tongue, and at seven months postpartum on set,⁴ a visceral sense of herself growing as a woman, a mother, and a member of the wider world. She said she felt bolder, stronger and more connected.

And in the exchange, Wunmi gave Annie something too. She gave her body to inhabit⁵ Annie’s grief and her power and her practice.

And through Wunmi, Annie got to be in the presence of a living child.

She walked the Golden Globes red carpet in a yellow Iyade gown. Iyade is the name of Wunmi’s newly launched maternity line, and it means, in Yoruba, Mother has returned.

She dressed her pregnant body in her mother tongue on the night the world was celebrating her for a role that gave her that tongue back.

I don’t know what to call that except a sacred exchange.

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Here is what Soulwork wants to say about this:

The knowledge that survived the Middle Passage did not survive in the official record. It survived in the body. And in the practices and memories that kept crossing with us even when everything else was confiscated.

It survived in women like Annie.

And every time a Black woman encounters that knowledge, be it through a role, or a language lesson that finally sticks, or a film that made her weep in a dark theater without knowing exactly why, that woman is following the thread back.

Wunmi Mosaku followed the thread through Annie. Annie walked into the sun in her white dress and she was whole, even in death. The entire movie was held together by the same practice that held her man, held her grief, and held five centuries of Black women making medicine out of what empire called nothing.

The mojo bag is still working.

Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!

1. Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press, 2022). Benjamin draws on Arline Geronimus's weathering hypothesis, which was originally developed to explain accelerated physical deterioration in Black women's bodies under chronic stress, and extends it to describe the cumulative erosion of Black life across multiple registers: social, psychic, political, not only medical.

2. Wunmi Mosaku quotes sourced from Variety (July 2025) and Screen Daily (February 2026)

3. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, 2003). Chireau served as the official spiritual consultant for Sinners.

4. Wunmi Mosaku welcomed her first child, a daughter, in 2024 with her husband, talent agent Tash Moseley. She described the experience of filming the movie Sinners shortly after giving birth as a challenging “huge shock” that involved transitioning from breastfeeding to pumping while working, she told W Magazine via Yahoo

5. There goes that word again.