Former dancehall-artiste-turned-pastor Sarid DVN is a survivor. He reportedly survived near-death experiences, schizophrenia and demon possession while he was attempting to make it big in the dancehall industry in the early 2000s.

Sarid DVN claims the practice of witchcraft or obeah is prevalent in dancehall. He said he knows because it happened to him.

“Witchcraft is involved in music but most people don’t know, but I have a personal experience with it,” he said, recalling one of his superiors allegedly telling him that “we have to guard”.

“I was naive, he started to take us to Olympic Way where an obeah woman lived, I didn’t know she was an evil woman. I was so in tuned with making it, I didn’t know that people will kill you or that you have to watch your friends, I didn’t know,” Sarid DVN, who is now an ordained pastor at a church in St Kitts, said.

Grant grew up in Millers Wood, on the border of St James and St Elizabeth. In his 20s, he travelled to Kingston to pursue music. He christened himself Mr Ice, then released his first single Thumbs Up Ladies in 2002.

He performed as part of a crew of artistes for three years up to 2004. The crew performed to rave reviews at a number of stage shows such as Sting, Merciless’ birthday party in Asylum, Spectrum and a Marcus Garvey tribute show in Negril.

He was on the verge of a musical breakthrough as the group’s songs hit the local charts, but then a series of unfortunate events were set in motion, and he suddenly got sick. What happened next, he said, was a horrific, harrowing experience that underlined the demonic dangers in secular music.

He described an incident when industry executives allegedly summoned him and members of his musical crew to a cult photo shoot in Old Harbour.

“I thought it was a regular photo shoot, where they brought us into a house and each of us went into a room and watched a TV where my whole career play out in front of me. They called us in one by one to watch the photos, one person went in and came out sad, At the time, I wasn’t expose to evil, I wondered why he came out sad. I was the second person they called in, I thought I was going to see pictures but instead I saw moving images of what my future would be,” he explained.

The images, which played out like a film with timelines, promised untold wealth, fame and riches, he claimed.

“I saw myself as a Rastafarian artiste, well rich, doing well on stage shows, saw wealth and riches, moving images like a movie, and then I saw myself getting sick, I saw people in my life who were not at the photo shoot, I saw my girlfriend, I saw myself doing songs with other big artistes who I admired, and there was chains leading from me to them, like a chain, and it show you years where it’s gonna happen…I see myself performing on Capleton show and mi name change to something else. The devil knows things and have power but there is certain limit that God give him, they know and manipulate things,” he explained.

Then the images revealed a bad card waiting in the deck, he alleged.

“I see myself getting sick, I saw my dead grandfather who was already dead from 1988, carrying me in his hand in one of the scenes. Then I heard my manager say behind me, ‘him ah go get sick?’. The devil can impersonate and mimic anyone, and I felt something flew on my back and I felt weak and start to fall to the ground,” Sarid DVN said.

The demon possession had taken hold, he said.

After this, he alleged that he was being pressured to sing “those songs that (they) saw me singing in the future”.

“It was like they put a spell over me, a covenant…the enemy know things and can show you things and is your choice to sell your soul to him, or leave,” he said.

Upset at what was going in the camp, the other members of the group left, but determined to beat poverty and ‘buss’ as a deejay, he said he refused to leave.

DEMONIC POSSESSION

Sarid DVN claimed he experienced a form of demon possession during which he rapidly lost weight, suffered convulsions and fits, and then as his condition worsened, he was suddenly crippled, and found himself unable to speak.

“For months, I couldn’t walk, my tongue felt like it was being stretched out of my mouth, I couldn’t talk, my mind gone, mi meagre and thin out, mi ah converse with spirits but it look like mi ah talk to miself. My management at the time was involved in witchcraft, they set me up to sacrifice me and a woman gave me some food and a spliff with cocaine in it that drove me crazy. I was demon-possessed, my people took me to several obeah men to get rid of the demon, nothing worked,” he said.

He said hope dwindled among his family members that he would ever recover and one day, during one visit to one of those houses of iniquity, he had an attack during which he was foaming from the mouth and writhing in agony on the ground. At the time, the obeah man began to place four banana leaves alongside him on the ground , he claimed.

According to the gospel singer, when his mother enquired what he was doing, the obeah man responded: “Yu nuh see that is a dead man this mommy?”

At one point, Sarid DVN thought all was lost. During his two-year battle with mental illness and demon possession, he said he had several near-death experiences. Car robbers shot at him early one morning while he was in Kingston, and later, as his illness progressed, he almost ran headlong onto a major highway when he tried to escape from a doctor’s office. But God was with him.

After several weeks of all-night fasting and prayer by Evangelist Mullings from Mt Zion Church of God Seventh Day church in St Elizabeth, he said he was able to get rid of the demons.

After that, he was still mentally-ill, diagnosed as schizophrenic and was eventually admitted to Ward 21 at the Cornwall Regional Hospital. A nurse administered medication, but he was released a few hours later because of ‘God’s intervention’.

“This is how God works in people’s life. I am living testimony of God’s healing power, His power is infinite,” he said.

Sarid DVN said that the workers of iniquity had conspired to take his life.

“They put a spirit on me to kill me, but God preserved me. Mi talk to spirits, mi shake like a leaf, demons throw mi down and twist mi hand under mi foot….but I eventually got well, the process took about two years, God healed me. Then I started to talk, I started to talk, I was dumb, the Lord brought me back. There is light, there is darkness, there are people working for the devil and people working for God,” he said.

He got baptized and entered the gospel field full time. He changed his name to Survivor the Gifted and recorded his first gospel song, ‘Fear God’, in 2005. He enjoyed success in Jamaica where he performed at many concerts.

“After I went into my church, mi backslide, tried to go back in the dancehall world and then mi go back in church again, it’s been a journey, through it all, God preserved me,” he said.

He eventually migrated to St Kitts and Nevis in 2017, after getting married. He has done regional performances in the islands of Antigua, Saint Lucia and he performed on two nights of the Hosanna Gospel festival in St Kitts.

LOW CITY ALBUM

He is ecstatic that his album, Low City: The place where God meets people, has been streaming well since its release on December 30.

“The album has over 15,000 streams, and features 15 tracks and the most popular track in terms of actual streams and downloads is Island Praise. I am really happy with the response, God is great, ” the artiste whose real name is Donovan Junior Grant, said.

He is also grateful for the success of the single, Fear God, which encapsulates the message and overarching theme of the entire body of work: humble yourself and fear God.

“The focus is that people need to know that “a broken and contrite heart, God will not despise”. If you want to be saved in the Kingdom of God, you must be humble . It is the soul that is giving the problem in every human being, the soul says ‘it is all about me’, and gets puffed up, and the soul is the most arrogant part of man,” he said.

“But the knowledge that I got from God is to get everyone down on their knees because God is coming back, you need to humble yourselves before God, humble and fear God.”

He is a two-time nominee in the Antigua and Barbuda Gospel and Media Awards (ABGMA). He won the ABGMA award for a remixed version of Fear God in 2020.

“Nuff people see the glory, but they don’t know my story,” he said.