It’s been more than a month, I shouldn’t have left you without a dope Three to step to. No vex. Here goes, three things that caught my eye this past month in the cultural multiverse. Previous editions here and here.
What Old Nollywood Tells Us About Love, Money, and Gender Roles
One of my favorite pop culture things right now is the revival of older Nollywood films through social media accounts like Yung Nollywood, YoruNolly and Area Babes and Ashewo Superstars. Like everybody else, I love the irony and nostalgia of these images, and thinking how far away (or not quite) we are from the people these films depict.
It is worth noting that we have not always consumed Nollywood ironically. I remember watching the first Living in Bondage. I saw Domitilla and Rattlesnake and Violated 1 and 2. I saw Segun Arinze become everybody’s favorite bad guy and Bimbo Akintola’s “don’t mess with my Tutu” moment in real time. Then, stories from Nollywood were mirrors of our current reality. Women who flouted societal mores were cautionary tales who smoked and drank and fornicated into oblivion, waking up one day and finding no one to marry them. We have become a more conservative people over time (word to Adichie, who said this to much opprobrium years ago, although I can’t find the article now). This has only largely airbrushed the nuances we used to see from one culture to another, and flattened them according to our Abrahimic convictions. Now, decades later, these bad girls’ stories have been recontextualized. By chopping and screwing Nollywood scenes into gifs and memes, we have let these women’s stories exist, not as ideals or figures of contempt, but as avatars of a certain kind of womanhood built to survive our times. These bad girls, it seems, were never quite that bad after all.
I don’t think that it’s an accident that these memes are popular in a time of seemingly incessant conversations on feminism on social media and large-scale anxiety of many young Nigerian women have about love and relationships. Many Nigerian young women learn from older women in their lives what love interpreted as drudgery and onerous responsibility looks like enough to fear it. Many women today feel the gravitational pull to eschew roles that don’t serve them and create modes of life that are much closer approximations of the kinds of love — and indeed, life — that they want for themselves. Besides, we hear all these stories of men who cheat with abandon while in relationships and how little support women who choose to walk away often get at home or in their places of worship. It thus makes sense, this idea that one must extract every inch of value you can possibly get out of the situation so that when he does the inevitable or leaves, you can dry your tears with the money in your bank account, the new dress you finagled, or whatever else.
The ironic amusement that these memes elicit does not quite tell you anything about what Nigerian young women actually want for themselves, but it does tell us what a lot of us wish you were capable of. “Securing the bag” gives some control. If he’s going to trifle with you, logic goes, at least don’t make it easy for him. Extract every inch of value you can possibly get out of the situation so that when he does the inevitable and leaves, you can dry your tears with cash in your hands, the new dress you inveigled, or whatever else. It is not impossible to be successful at getting material things one wants from these kinds of transactional relationships, but it does require a different set of tools from dating men who are more one’s contemporaries. You know, the ones young women will likely end up getting married to.
The problem with the kinds of more equal relationships a lot of young women say they want is that they likely have never seen them modeled in their context (nor have the guys, by the way). This is important because where our imaginations fail, routine takes its place, and we easily lapse into the comfort of what we know. That uber-progressive couple you know will somehow ease into a pattern of the guy watching EPL replays and hang out with his friends while his wife increasingly takes on the bulk of the household responsibilities if they are not intentional enough, or do not check this slow creeping in of the default in its infancy. We know this, because we see this slip into the default happen all the time. Cue even more anxiety.
Recontextualizing of Nollywood fashions, moralities and social commentary serves its purpose by allowing a new generation of young Nigerians to reckon with the Nigerian society we currently have. Now we might just need to create new images for the kind of world we actually want.
Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys and Visions of Freedom
In a recent round of interviews, filmmaker Lena Waithe said this about the two characters in her film “Queen and Slim”, and how they are stand-ins for MLK and Malcolm X, more specifically how these men adopted different approaches to Black Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement:
“I had Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. as my road maps for them. It was also about, “How do I get them to eventually swap places?” At the end of Malcom’s life, he became more liberal and more open. Towards the end of Martin’s life, he became more militant. That was a beautiful thing, as I learned about their lives. Just before their lives were unjustly taken, they were moving into these new chapters.“
This particular idea — that there’s either the militant or the pacifist way of fighting oppression — isn’t a new one, but it does provide fertile grounds for creative exploration. In January, I read Colton Whitehead’s brilliant novel Nickel Boys. It tells the story of Elwood, a young man with respectable dreams who had the misfortune of getting waylaid by police on his way to school and ending up on a reform school — ok, prison — for boys called Nickel Academy. Here, too, Whitehead meditates on this idea, holding Elwood up first against the other boys in his neighborhood then the other boys in the halfway house. We learn how tightly Elwood grips onto ideas of respectability and the ideal of fully realized personhood that was not necessarily based on anything he had seen, but rather what he believed to be right. We then see him lose his grip on these ideals slowly as his time at the reform school wears on.
I’d read about these kinds of prisons in Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments last year (I wrote about it here). As part of her work to document how ordinary Black Americans carved out a life under the cruelty of nationalized white supremacist violence, she shared stories from the case histories of black people sent to these reform institutions. I am intrigued by her work, because it challenges us not to look at key figures who are often outliers of their time, but rather the fates of ordinary people. This is important, because I think our reading of historical figures — along with such things as religion and our parents’ need to challenge us into some sort of ambition — adds fuel to this funhouse mirror perspective that we are or can be exceptional if we would only try hard enough. Most of us, alas, are pretty damn ordinary, and will neither start global enterprises nor lead revolutions. It stands to reason, then, that the weight of a time and its impact in shaping the direction of lives cannot be sought only in the lives of exceptional figures. It did not take much for people to end up in these reform schools; ordinary people were accosted and arrested for pretty much any offense — from petty thievery or having a child out of wedlock to giving a white person a look they didn’t like or just being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The Dozier School in Florida State on which the reform school in Nickel Boys was based opened in 1900 and was in operation for 111 years.
This passage in Hartman’s book especially captures just how illusory the notion of freedom was for people at the time:
“The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released into nothing at all. They didn’t yet know hat the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh. People were too busy dreaming of who they wanted to be and how they wanted to live and the acres they would farm, and searching for their mother they would never find, wondering what happened to their uncle, was their sister dead, and was it rue that someone head seen two of their brothers as far north as Philadelphia? Free was the promise of life that most would never have and that few have lived.”
Elwood believed in freedom. Much more than the story of a young man’s life and the way the caprices of racist institutions shaped it, it’s also the story of a loss of faith. We see Elwood’s persistent belief that his hard work and diligence will be noticed and praised, his belief in the goodness lurking within the hearts of those oppressing him will manifest if he proves himself deserving. This belief bent the arc of his life towards, not justice, but something quite opposite. At Nickel, he comes across another boy Turner who becomes the Malcolm to his Martin. Turner recognized Elwood’s vulnerability and was both amused by and drawn to it. Their differences aside, they formed a bond that would shape the direction of the rest of their lives.
Turner and Elwood do not quite switch places the way Waithe says her characters did, but Turner’s witnessing of Elwood’s experience pulls him away from who he was. In that way, neither the Malcolm figure nor the MLK one is given complete vindication. Much like in Queen and Slim, both Turner and Elwood experience a sort of death. In the end, the characters in the story do not have freedom as they envision, but they have themselves. That, too, is enough.
Netflix Enters Naija
Netflix’s recent expansion into developing content for Nigeria isn’t too much of a surprise. Our movie industry’s appeal YUGE, after all, and it is no surprise that this is happening alongside our music industry turning major heads as well. Besides, I love the evolving story of how, more and more, people who partake in the creative industry can make a living out of it. I’m always going to be on the side of Nigerian creatives flourishing.
There are already a lot of Nollywood films on Netflix, and I just think that one of the things to ponder is how to ensure the increased exposure allows for more attention to detail in the films that do get invested in. Lionheart was the first Nollywood Netflix film, and there were bits that were just as lazy as one has sadly come to expect in the average Nigerian film. One of the results of the whole “the Africa you don’t see” conversation that grates like hell is the fact that so many of our films choose to highlight only middle and upper-middle class realities. Seriously. If I see one more frame of the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge I will scream.
Of course, work from just about anywhere can be flawed, but what is especially infuriating about the work that comes from our end of the world is just how little attention is paid to things besides look-and-feel. There are many things that explain the current state of affairs, but I think a major contributing factor is that there is not much of a culture of criticism (remember this risible episode?). There is a lot to be said on this, but Ouidah Books Editor Molara Wood’s thread on the topic is more articulate and illuminating than I am.
Until next time.
