the Nigerian Ghoul in an American Forest
Browsing the archives for the Art category.
The Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program supports films that aspire to artistic excellence and accomplished storytelling, and substantially contribute to the development of local film industries. Award recipients of the 2010 Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program can use award money received from Africa First to complete initial production and to pay for post-production costs such as laboratory fees, sound mixing, and editing.
More information here.
“I feel it’s best to look at this story critically from two angles. The first is the merits of the writing, which should of course remain paramount. In this, Tubosun does very well. He captures the dry absurdity of a potentially terrible situation, and the ending is remarkable in its pathos. I believed both the matter-of-fact and slightly sympathetic tone of the nurse, and I believed the narrator’s feelings when he hoped he did not have the illness, but suspected that, because of his life and where he lived, he might. Tubosun alternates between writing with very plain, ordinary language, such as when a conversation occurs, and larger, quite grand sentences which seek to encompass the tumultuous shifts of emotions experienced by the narrator. He is adept at both, and perhaps most importantly, knows when to use which. When the narrator talks to the nurse, the writing becomes short and sharp because the narrator himself is tense with anticipation, he must be calm, because if he is not – collapse. When he retreats within himself, his conscious is allowed to expand, and so, too, does the writing, Tubosun’s sentences uncoiling like languorous snakes willing to take their time to reach their destination.”
Culled from Damian Kelleher’s review of my story in African Roar. Read the rest here.
Set against the background of a corrupt society, the story of the votary virgin designated to “carry the calabash” for one last time before settling down into matrimony is enticing on its face. Add to that the intrigues of puberty and University life, the corrupt and often lecherous leaders (many of who have real life equivalents in Nigerian politics), historical figures in short cameos, and a multi-award winning director known for equally engaging films, and you have a winner, right? Yes, if you are a skillful playwright looking for a nice plot to use in writing the next bestselling play. No, if all you want is a screen flick that tries very hard to please everyone (UNICEF, Cultural experts, Movie buffs, Local language activists, suckers for love stories laced with music, and pretty much everyone else).
What I’m trying to say here, of course, is that I wasn’t much impressed with the movie except with the super acting by the seasoned actors (Lere Paimo, Kareem Adepoju, Bukky Wright, Peter Badejo, and the new Bukola Awoyemi), the song Afi fila perin , the major plot (which is the cleansing of a town as tied to the symbolic act of the virgin votary), and the picture quality. Everything else seemed distracting, especially the flashbacks. The sub-plots looked like poorly-handled attempts to situate everything in this quasi-imaginary world in which the events took place in the events of our real life. We see Obasanjo. We see Bola Ige. We see Abiola. We didn’t need to see them, but we did. Nothing else in the overall plot of the movie prepared or compensated us for the distraction. And even the love story which is the major subplot did not always convince. It surely didn’t live up to the standard of Ajani and Asake in O Le Ku handled by the same director.
The flashbacks were the main distraction. I did not see the point in keeping the details kidnapping attempt on Adetutu till the end. It should have been enlightening then, but it wasn’t, because we had already consoled ourselves – having seen her hale and hearty – that she had already survived in one piece; and the minor intrigue of the women who wanted her removed on the rumour that she had been raped did not really impress. What about the king’s inglorious offer to Adetutu earlier in the beginning? We didn’t know much about it until the end, for no justifiable reason. Other distractions included the sub-sub plot of the Islam and Christian adherents at the beginning and the end, Adetutu’s jealous rival (played by Kafat Kafidipe), the Oral Rehydration Therapy that eventually never saved a child from dying, the jealous housewives in the king’s palace, the spirits seen at the beginning and at the end coming out of the (supposed) Osun river to play with Adetutu (when we know for a fact that the story is not science fiction) among many others. I’m an ardent fan of Mainframe, but here, I see only minor resurrections of what we liked about Saworoide, Koseegbe, Campus Queen, and even O Le Ku. But that’s where the love ends. At the end of the movie, I did not stand, smile, ponder and send a text to my friends to go get a copy. I merely rewound it to listen to the song Afi Fila Perin many times again, then go to bed.
Now, this is what I suspect: there were too many consumer constituencies to cater for by this offering. And in the end, it ruined what could have been the best story since Death and the King’s Horseman (which is not even a movie yet, as it should be) - a classic meeting of tradition with “civilization” and the fallouts thereof. So many possibilities… Maybe if Tunde Kelani had written the story himself, or at least passed it through the hands of Akin Ishola, Bamiji Ojo, Wole Soyinka, or Bayo Faleti…
There, my KTrotten Tomatoes! Two stars out of five. Okay, maybe three. Maybe.
Since a long time now, whenever I check my blog statistics to see the popular posts for the day, I have noticed that this particular post “On the Origin of Names”, written in jest more than seven months ago, keeps coming back into the charts. Either by searches through Google of people wanting to know what a particular Yoruba, Swahili or Nigerian name means, or by regular readers curious to read that post again in line with their current discoveries, I have found it strangely popular. On the list of popular posts, on that bar to your right, it is number three. As it is going, it will one day make it to the top of the list. I’m revisiting it today then, by popular demand. Maybe you should read it to if you haven’t. And when you’re done laughing at the post and comments, you may return here for my concern for today.
Now let me review a few things that has happened since I wrote the article. I have discovered some even more bizzare naming patterns across the continent. While having an evening conversation with our host in Ife, a German professor originally from Uganda, I found that a tribe of people exist – the Muganda, where he was from - who never give the same last names to brothers of the same family. I mean, if I give birth to two boys, none of them would have Tubosun as their surname. Now assuming that their first names are Demoke and Murano, they would be something like Demoke Agboreko and Murano Adenebi respectively. (You can tell which play I’ve been reading lately.) In the Muganda clan, there are about fifty male last names to choose from to give to children and “Agboreko and “Adenebi” will just be two of them. And each of the clans in Uganda practice this, with each of the having different numbers of names to give to their sons as last names. So when they grow up, two or more brothers will have different last names, and would have to explain the culture to anyone who asks, e.g the visa office saddled with the responsibility of allowing one of the brother to go and meet the other in a foreign country and verifying that they are actually brothers even though one bears Shaban and the other (perhaps) Dada. How does the visa offer convince himself that they’re not playing tricks on his intelligence? The same applies to the women as well. It turned out to be the most interesting naming phenomenon I’ve ever heard of, and I was suddenly glad to be staying a night within the University campus on that night.
As the conversation progressed into the night, I found out that there were some even more peculiar ones not related to any particular culture, but rather government policy of orderliness. I have a German friend, present at the gathering, who has been stuck with a last name only because her mum did not get a divorce from the man (whose name she’s now stuck with) before having children with her own father. German laws do not allow children born of that union of have any other man’s last name except the man to whom their mother is currently married, even if they are no longer together. And more from Germany, if you ever bring a name to the registry to give your newly born child, you must also have proof that the name exists in real life, and that it doesn’t mean anything ugly either in German or in another language. Gerd Meuer jokes that when he chose to name his first child after his friend Wole Soyinka, he was turned back because “Wole is not a real name (in Germany)” and he had to return with a stack of the author’s books before he was granted the priviledge. I’ll tell you one more. In China, women’s names are the ones that end in “a”. e.g “Aya”, “Anja” etc. If you enter China with a name like Kola, she said, and you’re a man, don’t be surprised if people start looking at you funny. It was for this reason that I forgave my friend Yun Hsin from Taiwan just concluding her field trip in Nigeria who, in her postcard to me, had written her adopted Yoruba name as Funmilaya. The last vowel is originally and “o” in Yoruba.
Now, poet Ogundare Foyanmu’s family name is Akinlabi – as his nephew kindly informed me a few weeks ago (and corroborated by someone who ought to know). King Sunny Ade’s family name is one of Adeniyi and Adegeye (talk of a double heritage). And so one day in my youth when it occured to me that my surname is actually my father’s first name and not his own last name or our family name, I approached him, worried, especially since my mother bore his own name as her last name. I wondered aloud what kind of point he was trying to prove. My mother and I bear two different last names, each belonging to the same man. “Look to the Bible,” he said. Patriarchs and other notable people did not automatically become inconspicuous when they had children by retaining the name of the dead great grandparent. “How could you all retain the grandfather’s name and render all descendants inconspicuous? There was J.J. Ransome-Kuti, then I.O Ransome-Kuti, then Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. His own children would also be Ransome-Kuti. Many years down the line, how would we be able to know which of the Ransome-Kuti someone actually came from?”
His logic seemed a little sensible, but faulty. Thus although my mother became Mrs. Hisownlastname, we all – children – became Name Hisfirstname and have remained like that ever since, except my sisters who have now got married and changed their names. So whenever I filled forms that asked for my mom’s name, I wrote Mrs. Myfather’slastname. When it is time to write my name, I wrote it, and then proceeded to explain. What pop didn’t consider, of course, is that if my brother and I choose to go by that same rule of having our children be Whatevertheirnameis Myfirstname, then my father’s first and last names will also be lost forever. Doesn’t it then seem like an extreme measure to battle mortality? And what’s the solution then? Perhaps the Kutis can help us again. Fela rebelled and became Anikulapo-Kuti after a while, while his own son became simply Femi Kuti. Of course, the name was originally Kuti before the British brought the Randsome in so not much has changed. Many generations down the line, we still won’t be able to tell who was from Femi, Seun, or any of Olikoye or Beko’s sons. I’d better not confuse myself trying to figure it out. The family already have that as a lifetime task. Some people in America have changed their names from Clay to Ali, some from Little to X to prove political points. In Nigeria, some have change their names Ogundare to Oludare, and Sangobiyi to Jesubiyi, and Ifadeyi to Ayodeyi in order to ward off the siege by imaginary gods and spirits in the original prefixes. My last name too (my father’s first name) is not Tubosun. I’ve cut out the first three letters just to make space (a long story), and to make it faster to pronounce. Some people just have all the time in the world 
.
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare had wondered. I’m guessing that he won’t have loved this century very much.
PS: Happy Birthday Yemi. Good thing you’re beyond the problem of the family last name 
I find it interesting that the historic “Proposition 8″ ban on gay marriages in the American State of California was struck down on the same day that I’d plan to blog about this movie that I was seeing for the first time. Brokeback Mountain (2005) is a very moving (but to me a little discomforting) story of two men whose friendship evolved into something more and lasted for a lifetime, withstanding even the challenge of their individual marriages and separate heterosexual lives. I doubt that bisexual love has been depicted on the screen with this level of boldness before or since Brokeback. Wikipedia compares it to the great romance stories like Romeo and Juliet and Titanic.
I had also recently seen a German movie called Aimee & Jaguar (1999) set in the Second World War, a true life story of an “abominable” (by standards of the time) relationship between a German woman, wife of a German officer, and a Jewish woman. Adapted from a book which contained photos of the many letters shared between the two, and official correspondences post WWII, the movie was remarkable not only because of the same sex nature of the relationship but because of the way the story depicts the love within the dangerous power relations and politics of the time. I know I could have enjoyed it better if my German was as good as that of the actors. Translations didn’t help much.
Both films – given to me by the same person who felt that I needed to update my tolerance credibility by exposing myself to the two prominent sides of the controversial coin – were refreshing in their own way. They both ended up very sad, yet moving, with very affecting moments, good acting and nice picture. Brokeback Mountain features Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and it was nominated for the most Oscars at the 78th Academy Awards. It won three but lost “Best Picture” to Crash.
I took these random shots at the Faculty of Arts, in my former University in Ibadan, a few days ago. I also discovered that the very first female Head of the Department of Religious Studies since 1948 when the Univeristy was founded, has just been appointed, effective August 1st. It’s a positive news, tinted with the disillusionment that this should have been commonplace since very many years ago. I took these pictures from the balcony of the Department.
I stumbled on a pack of seven albums of a legend called Odolaye Aremu a few weeks ago and my life has never been the same again. The famous exponent of a brand of poetry/music/chant called Dadakuada recorded more than two dozen albums of his brand of art between 1977 and 1990 in Ibadan. He himself is a product of the town of Ilorin. His art spanned decades of politics, religion, social issues, love, lust, feud and music itself, and my first intimations of it must even be earlier than I can even pinpoint, way back to pre-youth, when music was played only on record plates. The reproduction of the albums by the original production company (ORC) in Ibadan for mass distribution in today’s world there is a very welcome development. I’ve particularly had a very pleasant time reconnecting with the curious mix of musical styles hidden within the vein of this particular peculiar art form never since reproduced on this scale by any other indigenous artist before and since the death of Odolaye.
Dadakuada stands in equal stead with Apala, Awurebe, Ijala, amongst many other distinct indigenous styles of musical poetry from the sixties that have all but died off in their original forms. Thanks to digital technology, we still have enough of them now to remind us of the richness of Yoruba poetry, especially of the performance kind that, though commercialized, retained much of their original distinctness.
Alton, IL
