Dis nollywood palaver: on villainy & language
Fifi Oddly
Nollywood villainy is demonstrated in various ways, like the sleight of hand with which the evil-doer or villain would sprinkle juju in another’s food like it’s parsley.
The villain here stands alone as the juju/jazz by itself, excluding even the person who goes to the babalawo to get a prescription that would send her — let’s say in this case — lover reeling back into her arms and instantaneously despising his side-chick.
The moment the motions of the ritual are performed, if he is in bed with his other lover, he would immediately get something like a spark in his head, a re-awakening of sorts that would cause him to turn away from the other woman, perhaps even get violent should she try to interfere with the abruptness with which he must find his way back into the arms of the woman, who with jazz has inspired his sensibilities with a fight, flight, or beg feeling of love towards her alone and the purgatory would be dutifully recorded.
I have used this example because it is a common occurrence in the repetition of our stories, and we keep repeating stories.
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There have been aphorisms such as “all stories are the same” expressed by legends of the storytelling artform but nollywood’s way would be telling the same stories in the same way.
I cannot ascribe the nollywood juju scene alone to the depraved. I do not think the grunt is hers alone to bear, for the act itself really is a collaboration with the Babalowo.
Babalawo is a Yoruba word which loosely translates to “A man (or baba) who deals in the occult.” When I asked for the English word for babalawo, people said shaman, diviner, priest, native doctor, native sorcerer, traditional priest. I added jazzman. A word that had featured in many childhood conversations with my sisters and cousins.
We used it to describe Iya Basira, who would have the whole school spend large chunks of their break-time in ridiculous queues waiting to buy her food daily. Like Styl Plus’ famous song, Iya Basira had jazzed us. I wonder who Iya Basira’s jazzman is, the jazz is strong, we would say as we sweated and hustled for jollof rice and meat so that Iya Basira was not the only culprit, we were curious about the potency of her jazzman’s jazz.
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Some would consider the jazzman himself, who performs a ritual of incantations and spitting and rattling a small version of something like a sekere with high-strung beads fastened to ropes worn over its wooden body, so every time it shakes, it performs a staccato-like dance and all its condiments rattle along with it, more absolved than the one who goes seeking his help: it’s his job after all, and they may be right.
Though it would not be too far-fetched if I should assert that perhaps the only reason this juju might be considered a genre of nollywood villainy all by itself is because we’ve been shamed into forgoing our original traditional religions for the colonial idea of faith and good deeds — “Erect a church so high, all men would bow to it!” and yet even in our acrowned Hollywood, black magic would be negative too, just not as frequent a ploy as it is in nollywood: if all else fails, turn to jazz.
There is the western context of that kind of magic portrayed as an evilness but there is also the Nigerian context of Western magic. Remember how Nigerian parents of the early 2000s wouldn’t let their children read or watch Harry Potter after many a Sunday service in which the preacher would proclaim Harry Potter a thing infused into the media by the devil with strong spiritual significances that can lead their children astray and raze everything they’ve spent their whole lives building to the ground?
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It is not in every instance where juju in nollywood would be summoned as the villain. There are times we do not show it as this negative thing we must strong-arm people to make a moralistic decision about.
There are two instances that come to mind. In Joy, the Benin-realness of the first scene where the jazzman prances around making incantations is effective.
The scene opens with him chanting in Bini and a chicken squawking. He pulls the live chicken apart. “A witch cannot kill a baby without the Iroko tree knowing,” he says in Bini as he spills the chicken blood over the floor. “Trees and wind make a rhythm, as I said at night, I said in the day.”
He splays the chicken on the ground and plucks out some intestines. “If I call the police on my master, this shrine will kill me,” and Mariam Sanusi, the actor who plays Joy, repeats after him. “If I use witchcraft against my master, this shrine will kill me. So shall it be! As I said in the night, I said in the morning.” He spits more aggressively, “A witch cannot kill a baby without the Iroko tree knowing.”
Now the direction of his chanting transcends towards her protection, and he becomes father-like. “If anyone tries to harm me because I am in Europe, this shrine shall kill them.” He spits. “Move the thing forward quickly. Let it rub, let it stick. As I said at night, I said in the day.” She has taken the oath. “Take a drink to them! Protect her from the living and from the dead.” He gives her something like chicken blood to drink. She sips it from the plastic bottle in his hand. “When you eat, you drink. Trees and wind make a rhythm.”
He asks her to sit and when does, he begins rubbing on her forehead, his potbelly is set like a mountain and sticks out towards her face. “A witch cannot kill a baby without the Iroko tree knowing. Trees and wind make a rhythm.”
He rubs a greenish substance on her back as she cuts her toenails with a razor, the clippings of which he fastens to a thread and keeps in a papery-looking thing. Then, in broken English, he tells her that when the debt is completely paid, she can send her mother to pick up the mysterious object that supposedly binds her to the shrine. “And if you have problems in Europe, let me know!” A fatherly command.
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The reality of the scene is so intense and because of it, Joy would begin with a jolt. An endless and depressing escape into the reality of young African girls who find themselves doing prostitution in Europe.
Their parents are aware of the sacrifices their bodies and minds would unfurl and believe it is worth it. Living in Europe as an African immigrant is difficult enough. On some days, the placelessness and lack of belonging are bewildering, but living as an undocumented prostitute in Europe?
Joy asks that we confront this reality so that you find yourself asking: imagine if this were me? You commit and just go down down down, drowning in your own self-imposed depression. I remember pausing midway and asking my friend, “Why are we watching this? Why is it so sad?” “I don’t know,” he had said in a mock-crying voice.
The life force of every glimmer of hope that struggles against odds to rise to the surface is quickly snuffed out, the way it is in such a reality, which Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street, too, accurately depicts.
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My mother, a sarcastic, funny, somewhat liberal woman, once told me, while we discussed marriage and prospective candidates, not to consider marrying someone from Benin. When I asked why she scoffed and said they’re very fetish and clicked her tongue so that her mouth produced a regretful sound.
I probably said “Ehen?” and brushed it off in the same manner many Nigerian children who decide to unlearn their parents’ biases would brush their Nigerian parents antics off when they’re not in a mood for a confrontation and a difficult crash course in empathy(?) — with a shrug, a slight chuckle and maybe an “Ahn ahn, mummy, why now? But aren’t Yoruba people fetish too?” only allowing themselves enter into the terrain of debate when they possessed sufficient energy and willpower.
I possessed neither that day, though it stayed with me that Bini people are extra-fetish and to my young mind, it was a detail worth noting since it produced a regretful sound from my mother’s mouth.
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My family spent many weekends and evenings binging films on Africa Magic Yoruba, which was background noise to the work I was always bent over doing.
My mother and my older sister are Africa Magic Yoruba cheerleaders; my two younger sisters are not. Sometimes they would have a tussle over what to watch, and I would look up from my work to tell my younger sisters to allow my mummy and older sister watch what they want. My siding them would come accompanied with me teasing them about their IQs reducing due to the IQ-jacking plots we consistently subjected ourselves to, and they would say, “Ehn leave it us like that, we like it like that, you that you have big IQ, what have you done with it? Are you not still here with us? Abegi.”
We would laugh at the stereotype of cheating husbands, cheating men and sinister women. We would laugh at the juju-riddled plots and about the portrayed fetishness of the Yoruba tribe and when I asked my mum, “Are Yoruba people really this fetish?” A question which led to a robust conversation, the summary of which was: as long as whatever man was a god-fearing man then we, all her four girls, were fine.
My mother would joke about how I had always sought silence inside the noise and tedium of living bodies and moving souls, how while studying for common entrance, I would carry my Ugo C. Ugo and stay silently smuggled in the ruckus of my family’s constant banter. It was a habit I never dropped, and my work was so dear to me that I was always doing it and trying to enjoy my family at the same time, so that many nollywood movies would be the background noise of my creative process or my harrowing over mathematics.
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The second instance where juju is properly displayed, aids the story instead of being an easy cop-out and is more than a moral instruction — and there is no problem with films that set out to teach moral lessons but that must not be the story’s primary preoccupation. The story must first preoccupy itself with its own telling, with being good — is Tunde Kelani’s Agogo Eewo. Like in Joy, it begins with the diviner, divining. The diviner is an Ifa priest, and the narrators are a drum and the old singing guard at the Palace entrance. In my manuscript, I take the whole scene and fictionalise it. The protagonist’s family watches Agogo Eewo together on a Saturday, reminiscent of the way it would’ve been in my own home back in Lagos:
Reni belongs to the beating of Saworoide. When Akasalu drums, she gets on her knees and stays like a four-legged animal, she moves her shoulders forward, backward, forward, backward, then she gets up and throws one foot forward, and the other foot backward:
(to ba se pe mi ni won ni ni won ni,
to ba se pe mi ni won ni ni won,
to ba fapa jo fapa jo fapa jo,
to ba fese jo, fese jo, fese jo)
and she does just that. Reni dances with her hands when the drum asks her to, and dances with her legs, when the drum asks her to. The drum says if you were me and I were you, I would dance with my whole body and so she twirls around and throws her body into a rhythmic gyration, into the turning of the music, into the kaka kaka kaka of her father’s proud smile. Remi joins in, following Reni’s movements. He dances with his arms (f’apa jo) and with his legs (f’ese jo). He carries the ruffles of his imaginary agbada and throws them over his shoulders, moving his feet across the rug, and between the throw pillows his head has just bolted. Remi and Reni move together, as they twist their shoulders forward and backward again, bending slightly to their knees, smiling at each other, almost laughing. Ayaba introduces a new movement, one they would rarely see in colour television, or that they would only see on rare occasions in Ayaba ’s mother’s town. She looks up and smiles maniacally (the dance of the Yorubas is firmly planted in the flexibility or, if you will, plasticity, of the smile. The smile works, and the body moves in response, a joyous thing). She rests her outward-facing palm ever so lightly against the timid force of interior air and begins to move backward, dragging her foot to the far right and then stepping that same foot behind the other. The surface of her feet graze the topmost hairs of the mustard rug, she moves like an antelope. Remi and Reni face her too, smiling brightly back at her. The drum stops and the king is dead inside it. Saworoide wrings his neck.
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In searching for things in my personal history that had conveyed Yoruba culture, tradition, and religion to a young me and bound me to its core with curiosity and interest, I would first find myself going back to Tunde Kelani’s films, even before seeking out text and literature through which I could learn more about my people.
We watched Agogo Eewo and danced. We unceremoniously danced to the music from many movies that played through our television. Tunde Kelani knows how to do storytelling and special attention must be paid to the language. I mean the same kind of attention given to the language in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or in fact, to language in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s discography.
Tunde Kelani makes films so local to his people, their languages and their mannerisms. He makes it easy for the actors to step into their roles and to portray the reality of his stories, for them to see through the same eyes as him.
About nollywood, we have constant conversations of insipid dialogue and watery performances, yet Tunde Kelani takes all that unrefined talent and makes it easy for the actors to step into their roles by making the dialogue and the characters so real to them, they have no option than to get it right.
They are acting out their own lives, or the lives of their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, the lives of their country. Their very own language. So they commit to getting it right. Not many Nigerian films are able to demand such commitment from their actors so that they settle for too many half-baked scenes which we term “another typical nollywood movie”.
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In thinking about nollywood and deciding the critical questions to ask, one important question for me was: so what really is nollywood? Is Joy, by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai, nollywood? Is Nigerian-born Biyi Bandele’s Half of a Yellow Sun, nollywood? According to Wikipedia, the origin of the term “nollywood” remains unclear. Jonathan Haynes traced the earliest usage of the word to a 2002 article by Matt Steinglass in The New York Times, where it was used to describe Nigerian cinema. Charles Igwe noted that Norimitsu Onishi also used the name in a September 2002 article he wrote for The New York Times. The term continues to be used in the media to refer to the Nigerian film industry, with its definition later assumed to be a portmanteau of the words “Nigeria” and “Hollywood”.
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Therefore, I think any kind of cinema that tells a Nigerian story, regardless of the nationality of the producers, directors or cast, is nollywood. But there is nollywood-nollywood and then there is nollywood. Joy is nollywood. Everything Tunde Kelani produces is nollywood-nollywood, yet there is nothing typical about the films Tunde Kelani produces: they are real, nourishing and they work.
The scenes in Nigerian films where the actors are trying to reach for a contemporary (read: western-accepted) kind of dialogue are almost painful to watch. Even in English-speaking Nigerian movies, when the actors chirp in something in their native languages, I get a jolt of originality and freshness.
There, in the haven of our own languages, we find comfort — the actors finally believe what they’re saying and we have no choice but to believe them too. You would observe that in well-done English-speaking nollywood films with scenes dedicated to the shaman where he goes on reeling off incantations like it’s nobody’s business, the dialogue or monologue in such scenes, compared to other English-speaking scenes, would stand out for their poeticness, even when translated to English as subtitles, if well done.
If a little attention is paid, the dialogue shifts from stereotypes and becomes interesting and mysterious like a poem. Language sets the mood of an art piece and in dialogue, it becomes even more precarious.
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A film is about dialogue, the unspoken and unspoken dialogues, the ones humans share with each other but also the ones seas whisper to skies and birds caw-caw about at sunrise, awakening early birds with them, and that’s why French films would be so distinct.
You hear French in the first scene and the mood of the piece: a dark alley, a sombre scenario and two French-speaking lesbians is already set. In African francophone countries, the films would still be in French and I get the sense that such countries internalised their colonial language more than countries like Nigeria did theirs.
Colonialism affected different countries differently. In Francophone speaking countries on the African continent, it’s been said that they would call themselves French. Nigerians born in Nigeria would never call themselves English; they would call themselves Nigerian.
At a time when my favorite question to ask was, “What language do you think in?” I had a love who said he thinks in Yoruba and I am still jealous of it. I would make a habit of asking him that question only to hear him remind me that the first and only language of his thoughts was Yoruba. I would vicariously pass the pleasure around my tongue, imagining myself as someone who could shuffle the language of my mother tongue in my head as things as potent as thoughts, only translating them when the other became involved. I speak Yoruba but I don’t think in it.
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The way that Nigeria is affected amongst many other ways is our language: we do not know what to do with it. The same way our original traditions were shunned is the same way our original languages were shunned.
Classism would not let us accept our own tongue. In Nigeria, to be classy is to be as white as you can be. How well can you speak the English or don a suit? The work to unlearn all this is obvious and there’s a generational shift back to our culture and language, but the effects of this displacement would be glaring especially in nollywood, the biggest flaw of which is neither dialogue nor acting, but language.
In our literature, we’ve been able to listen to the bigger pan-african conversations, mercilessly critique ourselves and hold ourselves to higher standards by force by fire. I think it’s time we extended these same standards to our films.
Take nollywood scripts and rip them apart on the basis of what is done with language. Hold them accountable like that, and the quality of such a language would organically flow into the dialogue and the actors would step into other bodies as fully-realised characters.
We have Africa Magic Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa, television stations on DSTV where all the programs and films shown are recorded in Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa languages respectively, yet even though the language is traditional, the stories aren’t often complicated or layered enough and often riddled with cliches.
I expect the shift in our relationship to language in our films to riddle down from the filmmakers passionate about their craft, about producing films that can compete on a world-class (mind you, the world is not the West) stage and ripple slowly. What I mean is taking the locality of your language and working it so hard that it becomes a universal language. Unlike French movies, we have to spend much time deliberating over what language is best to tell our stories.
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In Nigeria, over 520 languages are spoken, and we learned English at the order of British colonisers, but did we learn it well enough to know what to do with it in our films? Or are we still grappling with displacement and a keen lack of understanding of what language means to us? Or do we not have the courage to make lemonade out of a language imposed on us by absolutely making it ours, pushing it to the edge of the bare minimum so much it becomes almost unrecognisable from the original thing passed to us. Or do we lack the courage to tell our stories for ourselves because things become confusing when we don’t know who our audience is.
I am glad Half of a Yellow Sun wasn’t a solely Nigerian project as we don’t yet have the tools. Prove me wrong by doing a purely Nigerian take on the story — a documentary about our own civil war, a love story — leave actors Thandie Newton and Anika Noni Rose in their America and do an all-Nigerian cast and crew, prove me wrong, I beg you!
Remake the scene where Thandie Newton discovers Chiwetele Ejiofor has slept with Amala, how it was revealed first on their faces before they even made to make words, how Chiwetele said, “She forced herself on me!” his face almost melting off with the guilt of having been disloyal. The pain on both their faces is remarkable, one could peel it off and make wall art out of it or something like a collection of face emotions kept in small wooden pots as kitsch in your one-room apartment to mark the time being; you know you won’t be here forever, I tell myself this all the time.
Imoh Umoren knows what I’m talking about when I say this. He said the same thing when he tweeted, “As a writer you must go out and live. Observe life, Go outside. Don’t base your characters off something you’ve seen countless times. ‘Honey, I can explain’ is not the only excuse people caught cheating say”. Meanwhile, I am very excited to see Imoh Umoren’s Herbert Macaulay — I think I am already being proved wrong and I am excited about the prospects.
While we watched this Half of a Yellow Sun scene, my non-Nigerian friend said, “But he didn’t even say sorry, he only made excuses,” which is contrary to everything I struggled to moralise growing up Nigerian: men are above everything, so that it took my friend to say “Look, that’s not normal. The first thing a man who has done such a thing must say is sorry, and mean it, not make excuses.” I mean I knew that already, but that was not what had stuck out to me in the scene: the failure to deliver a sincere apology, the quickness in making himself a victim.
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It would be impractical for me to say that all our movies should be made in our traditional languages because that would not be portraying our truth. Most of us speak English daily, but how do we really speak it?
These are the questions we must ask whenever we set out to create. They are questions I ask myself and beat myself up over, even in the dialogue that I write.
How do our people really speak?
The critique I would always assent to with a sobre “Yeah, I know right?” about my manuscripts would be the critique of dialogue not doing enough, of not being there yet.
We are a theatrical, comical, lovely and dramatic people, and that’s why Aki and Pawpaw would go down in Nigerian television history as great entertainers, yet there are expressions, ideas and emotions that we express that require a more nuanced and calculated portrayal.
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There are books that do this well. In Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me, from the first paragraph, you can hear a Nigerian woman speaking, the voice kinds of crawls up on you and wraps you with familiarity. In Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, the whole text is in Patois and I’m a fangirl of hybrid languages.
I am of the opinion that all languages are hybrids, and all languages must aim to be hybrids, must be consorted with the culture and history of the people who need it, must be tools — only tools, must be adaptable, must form themselves into bridges that negotiate the gap between what a people are given and what they actually need.
Akwakeke Emezi’s Freshwater not only achieves this hybridity from the spiritual-political realm of identity but also in the use of language. My friend, Eghonghon-aye, while reading it, texted me out of the blue and said, “Ada’s spirits have started speaking Nigerian English.” I replied, “lmao yes. The spirits are very nigerian.” “I stan,” she said. “And this Soren boy. See why we should do men dirty from the start?” relating to a conversation we had on a cold night in Paris as we stayed up late and joked about “these men” and “what to do with them”.
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart will always deserve an honourable mention. The man wrote the book in English but what you hear as you read is the very rhythm of the Igbo Language!
This Zikoko mag interview by Fu’ad Lawal, too, gets it right. There is hardly any physical description of the anonymous subject, but through the process of Fu’ad speaking to him, he captures his essence through language so keenly that you can imagine the guy, imagine his mannerisms, his smile when he says “mad oh”, how his eyes squint just a little.
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Burna boy too gets it right, even more so recently than ever before, and in fact, a large chunk of the Nigerian music scene is a case-study. English doesn’t work and they switch to Yoruba or pidgin with the seamlessness of the Nicholas brothers doing splits across a stage.
It’s all after the order of Fela, who took his power and influenced a whole generation of music makers.
For instance, consider the way in which Skiibii first says, “Said she loves me” in his hit single Sensima and volleys it back with a witty “eyan lovette” before you even know what is going on or how Niniola uses her spectacular games with language to say, with a kind of enviable artistic confidence and abandon, things apostle must not hear a sexually-liberated Nigerian woman say; she says it all. Or the brilliance that is Simi and Falz’s Mind Your Business off Simi’s Omo Charlie Champagne album. The pidgin dialogue at the beginning of the song stuffs the nail inside the wood.
This is the fluidity of language that we must seek, and without the flourishes of “Do you see what I just did? Behold the funny mayguard who just switched from English to pidgin? Ha ha ha” No, they must be organic, more believable.
To reach this point, we would have to spend more time listening to ourselves, observing the nuances of our interactions, the body language, the subtle things we’re often too busy fighting the fear of inertia to actively consider.
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If Tunde Kelani is the king of nollywood, then Patience Ozokwor is its evil queen.
One Saturday, my mother had just returned from the market holding bags of fruits, vegetables, fish and meat in her arms. I rushed down to the car to help carry our food into the house. With excitement, she said, “I read a Patience Ozokwor interview in a shop today. Nigerians don’t like her, they think she’s evil in real life. In the interview, she said she went to the market to buy some food and once a couple of people recognised her, they threw things at her, reigned curses on her, called her an evil woman. She had to get out of there.”
“Wow, people think she’s even in real life?”
“Apparently.”
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We had a good laugh. But that’s the truth of Patience Ozokwor’s villainy. She inhabits the evilness, wears it so that the lines of the wicked mother-in-law mark her face. Her expressions contort to reveal a farcical fake-smiling sneer, and the imminent result would follow, when the fake smile morphs into a contemptuous snigger that tells you she is now ready to wreak havoc. She is just so evil, and she prances around the screen with complete ownership of it.
But has she ever acted the role of a good woman, like ever? Google pulls up a video of her preaching in a UK church. In real life, she is now a pastor. She is a seasoned actor. A passion she discovered and started honing in primary school by doing stage plays. Married at the age of nineteen to a man she did not pick out for herself, she had three children with him and when he died, adopted five more children who all bear her name.
As I watch the video on Youtube of her preaching in a church in the UK, I resolve that this is a woman who has learned how to be herself. It is with this same ease and complete ownership of herself and her skills and passion that she is able to become a villain.
In films, the real Patience “Mama G” Ozokwor is replaced by a character with large dark circles underneath her eyes, who with a broom, chases her daughter-in-law out of her son’s home for putting too much salt in his food, or maybe even not enough salt, or maybe too much pepper. You can see her tasting the food, how she smacks her lips together; the countenance radiating out of her body is so inspiring, it becomes an incandescent vexation.
“So you think you can my poison my son, ehn? In his own house. It’s me and you today, we will enter the same trouser today.” Her son is off at work, ignorant of his mother’s shenanigans. Patience “Mama G” Ozokwor dashes out of the house to pick up a pestle from the outdoor hut-like kitchen. She would use it to frighten her daughter-in-law, who would take off her rubber slippers and flee from her husband’s house to preserve her dear life.
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Her character is unforgettable and I think that’s how to make a good villain: make them extraordinary, like Thanos. Make them unforgettable like the Joker. Make the consequences of their scripted actions bigger than them, way bigger, so that they become more consequential than even the actor’s ability or inability to hit and retain a single note.
Villains are allowed to be one-note characters, to hit a single note and hold it for as long as they can: where you’ve got it, you stay with it; to drag out the suspense of their intentions and actions for as long as possible so it blurs the line between their real selves and the actor selves, and in nollywood, where exaggeration and dramatisation are often taken literally, Patient “Mama G” Ozokwor is an aficionado in performance, in mastery of the consistent tone which any villain who’s worth their salt must come to.
about the author: dancing carefree, tits hanging like mangoes
