I saw On Becoming a Guinea Fowl recently. A whole two weeks ago, actually. It still has not left me. Always nice when that happens, always nice to be reminded that movies can still do that. I think maybe it hasn’t left me because watching it was like swimming in a memory, something already a part of me. I guess I’m trying to say that I felt “seen” in ways that were sharp and painful and electrifying.
The movie, directed by Rungano Nyoni, is about many things. I won’t go too deeply into the plot (though if you want no spoilers whatsoever, maybe stop here), but it opens with our hero, Shula (Susan Chardy), driving down an empty road in the dead night somewhere in Zambia — moments before she comes across the body of her uncle lying dead in the street. What unfurls from this nexus point is a story that is part family melodrama, part black comedy, part surreal meditation on death, inheritance, collective memory, and the kind of secrets that are not so much hidden as simply unacknowledged.
As the funeral proceedings begin, and hundreds of people descend on Shula’s family home to mourn dear Uncle Fred, a familial culture of silence, denial, abuse and absurd spectacle (all in the name of so-called “tradition”) begins to emerge. Shula is detached, apathetic. But she makes herself agreeable. She cooks and cleans and runs errands for her disapproving aunties who see grieving as a contest (“She doesn’t look like someone who has seen a corpse!”).
Shula makes herself small enough to fit into a space that was made for her a long time ago, an empty space that is small and cramped and full of ghosts. A space of silence. And this is how so many families work. They assign you a role, and you either play along or you leave. The people around you will call this love.