It was with great expectations and even much greater anxieties that on Wednesday this week I went to a private screening of Biyi Bandele’s film adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie’s prize-winning novel on the Nigeria-Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun. The “expectations” can be quickly or summarily expressed. Both the filmmaker and the novelist rank very high in my estimation. Adichie is now one of the most deservedly world famous authors in contemporary literature and Half of a Yellow Sun is one of her best works. The occasion of its adaptation for the big screen of cinema in the highways and upper levels of popular culture and not the alleyways and side streets of video films is therefore an occasion that excites great expectation. Add to this the fact that though Biyi Bandele who adopted the novel for the screen is an accomplished playwright, this is his debut film, his first venture into the rarefied world of movies optioned by very influential producers and made with big-name actors. [For truth in public discourse, I must state here that Biyi Bandele was my student at the University of Ibadan in the mid-1970s]
For these reasons, I was immensely pleased that my great expectations were not disappointed and I left the cinema on Wednesday night very glad, very gratified that the film version of Adichie’s great novel is also a delightful and absorbing work. I understand that it will premiere in Lagos next week and bearing this in mind, I strongly recommend that everyone reading this piece should see the film if they happen to be in Lagos during its run there. It is precisely on the basis of this “recommendation” that I now go to the matter of the anxieties with which, side by side with the expectations, I set out to watch the film last Wednesday, especially since even after watching the films, the anxieties still remain. But before dealing with this issue, permit me to briefly discuss the things that I found delightful and compelling about the film.
Most of those who watched the private screening of the films at Harvard on Wednesday had all almost certainly read Adichie’s novel. But in the marketplaces of popular cinema in the world at large, the vast majority of those who will see the film will not have read the novel. For this reason, the film must and will stand or fall on its own and cannot bank on the celebrity status of the novel and its writer. I am glad to report that it succeeds in doing this wonderfully, so much so that I expect that after watching the film, many of those who have not read Half of a Yellow Sun will be sufficiently piqued by how close to or different from novel is Bandele’s film that they will rush to read the novel. They will of course discover, either to their pleasure or disappointment, that the novel is far more complex than its film version. But that is beside the essential point being argued here. With very few exceptions, nearly all film adaptations of great works of literature do not match the depth and complexity, the unique perturbations and intimations in the original literary works. This is why, in the last instance, film versions of works of literature must stand or fall on their own. Not paying sufficient attention to this categorical imperative, many adapters of literary works for film use the reputation of the work or its author as a crutch to lean on and in the process fail woefully. Perhaps the most notorious example of this phenomenon is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and its many film adaptations, not one of which is successful as film, as a work dependent on the mastery of the medium of film and its demands and satisfactions.
Perhaps at the base of Bandele’s success in his film is his recognition that though its subject is an epochal historical event, Adichie’s novel is not a historical novel. This is because though it is fiercely faithful to depicting the harrowing and unforgettable effects of the historical event of the Nigeria-Biafra war on those who had to live through the war, the real strength of Adichie’s novel lies elsewhere. It lies in its ineffable ability to both capture the quotidian realities of life in the midst of devastating war and to plumb the depths of the conflicting inner drives and motivations of characters in whom the war brings out the best and the worst in them. In Bandele’s film these two aspects of the novel – the terrifying banality or ordinariness of the ravages of war and singularly driven characters for whom the war serves as a backdrop to who they really are and who they are striving to become – are realized powerfully without the slightest hint of exoticism, the bane of films made from novels on Africa or by Africans. Thus, where films on such novels as Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), Cry the Beloved Country (Alan Paton), A Good Man in Africa (William Boyd) and Out of Africa (Karen Blixen) all failed to rise above the level of cliché and exoticism in depicting Africa as background and Africans as human subjects, Bandele’s film is, in my opinion, the first film in the genre to soar exultantly into the realm of unforced plausibility and warm, funny, intriguing and compelling presence of all the characters, African and European. Nollywood directors and actors will find a lot to learn from this film. This, in fact is the point of departure for the anxieties that I had about this film, anxieties that have not disappeared with the great pleasure and delight that I had in watching the film.
If Bandele’s film succeeded in assuaging my anxiety about the tendency in Hollywood or British films based on novels on Africa or by Africans to exoticize the continent and its peoples, alas it did not allay my worries concerning the baleful effects of the popularity and influence of Nollywood on cinema audiences in Nigeria, the African continent and the Diaspora. At the screening of the film at Harvard where slightly under half of the audience was African or black, this influence of Nollywood was very palpable, very disconcerting. Every time that the Mother of Odenigbo, (the main male character in the novel and the film played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) spoke, the majority of the Africans in the audience either burst into raucous laughter or tittered uncontrollably, even though how she spoke and what she spoke about did not entail comedy. In time, I became very conscious in the “racial” division in the audience response to this character’s role in the film: blacks laughed all the time; the whites were silent or perhaps mystified and querulous about the laughter. Personally, I was greatly inconvenienced by the fact that one of the loudest of the laughers was sitting right next to me! It did not matter that this role of the Mother was played by Onyeka Onwenu with verve but also with nuance and with dignity in the second half of the film; every time the Mother appeared laughter erupted. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the voluble, completely unselfconscious laughers did not and could not see Onyeka in the role; what they saw was Patience Ozokwor, the Nollywood essence of Mothers and Mother-in-laws as insufferable shrewish termagants.
Let me hasten to say that I am not making too much of this laughter around one single character. What I saw, what troubled me was the fact that, as soon as she appeared in the film, this character’s presumed essence became the benchmark for the response to the whole film. Laugher, loud comments, voluble talking back to characters became commonplace in the response to the film. And in nearly all cases, these responses trivialized the film and its brilliant, compelling probing of existential and social issues of great moral and psychological weight that the war bequeathed to us, as represented by Adichie’s novel and Bandele’s adaptation of it for film. In this particular case, my anxiety is this: after Nollywood, can serious and engaging cinema in our country hope for and get popular audiences who will watch films with fresh eyes and open minds?
This question, which indeed provides the title for this piece, is all the more vital given the fact that the film is after all about the Biafra-Nigeria civil war which is second to no other historical event or crisis in postindependence Nigeria in causing wrenching divisions between us concerning both its prosecution and its legacies for the present and the future. The concrete terms in which this pertains to Bandele’s film can be gauged by the controversies that erupted after the publication of Achebe’s last book, There Was A Country. Thus, following those controversies around Achebe’s book, the question that is the title of this piece can be applied to the film: will it be watched at home in Nigeria with fresh eyes and open minds where Achebe’s last book failed to produce such freshness and openness? I certainly hope that it does.
Like Adichie’s novel, Bandele’s film is pro-Biafra. But also like Adichie’s novel this film cannot be reduced to a pro-Biafra tract. As in Adichie’s wonderful novel in which only the most narrow and intractable anti-Biafra and anti-Igbo zealot will fail to respond to the evocation and probing of common, universal failures and strengths, Bandele’s film takes us beyond narrow and intractable divisions of ethnicity, religion and region to inner recesses of the heart and the mind that are common to all of us. If this film can take its audiences at home to these regions of the heart and the mind, perhaps, but only perhaps we might be able to seriously begin to engage the legacies of the civil war with fresh eyes and open minds.
But then, first of all, Bandele’s film has to get past the invisible but impregnable obstacles set up by Nollywood. Oh, Patience Ozokwor and your countless Nollywood partners-in-cinema-yamayama, what great obstacles thou hath all unwittingly wrought in separating complexity from healthy laughter, depth from comic frivolity and nuance from mindless joviality!
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
