Grieving Processed
By Bedatri D. Choudhury
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Dir. Rungano Nyoni, Zambia/U.K./Ireland, A24
In African countries, where guinea fowls are endemic, they are often kept as pets. The birds forage through manure and feed on ticks, maggots, and other parasites, helping to maintain an ecological balance between life and death, health, and disease. In Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a tale of a Zambian family of women grieving a dead relative while confronting the legacy of abuse he leaves in his wake, the metaphor isn’t hard to spot.
The protagonist Shula (Susan Chardy) makes her appearance dressed as Missy Elliot from the music video for “The Rain”—an inflated black suit and a bejeweled helmet paired with black glasses. When she takes off her glasses to call her father, her golden eyeshadow shimmers in the dark. “I’ve found Uncle Fred’s body on Kulu Road,” she tells him with a straight face. Her father, clearly drunk, is of no help, which sets the tone for the inept but garrulous sort of masculinity we’ll see throughout the film.
The women—all sisters of the deceased, aunties and mothers to Shula and her cousins—are quick to launch into rituals of mourning, taking recourse in a centuries-old tradition, ticking off behavioral boxes for a circumscribed period before life goes back to normal. They fall on floors, wail, shame Shula for not crying, castigate Fred’s very young widow (played by Norah Mwansa) for not crying enough, all the while discussing other women’s affairs and scrolling through Facebook photos. They cook, clean, prepare for the funeral while men just sit and place dinner orders: someone wants more meat, another wants more gravy.
I am reminded of the western Indian state of Rajasthan and the practice of upper caste families hiring mourners/criers called rudaali. Since it’s considered unbecoming of women of upper caste families to grieve loudly in public, rudaalis, all women of lower castes, are hired to weep and lament loudly in proxy. Performing grief, across diasporas, is essentially a woman’s job, and its specific nature is dictated by class and caste. Shula’s family is markedly upper class and therefore all the grieving, as practiced by its women, necessarily needs to protect the “honor” of the family. The widow’s family, poorer in social standing, can never grieve “correctly.” When she doesn’t cry, she is deemed insensitive. When she does, she is compared to a cow and a mosquito.
As we soon discover, everyone in the family knows that Uncle Fred was a much-loathed serial abuser who had violated Shula and her two cousins, Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) and Bupe (Esther Singini), when they were children. But this is a truth barely reckoned with. Amidst the performative mourning, Nsansa asks why the family keeps grieving him. The older women’s grief practices become less a means to mitigate the pain of the present than a tool to deny the past and perpetuate and maintain the myth of a united happy family. The performance of grief becomes a suppression that feeds into the conspiracy of silence. With Fred’s death, the younger generation undergoes a devastating and complex grief that cannot be sated by rituals. At once, they are grieving a childhood forever altered by an act of violence, while trying to maintain social propriety that communal mourning dictates. In some ways, they are also grieving for their mothers and an entire generation constantly and helplessly buying into a fallacy. Shula, Nsansa, and Bupe also mourn a sense of self that is lost because death has forever altered their lives and the way they interact.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a complex film whose layers are so dense that they’d be impenetrable if not for Nyoni’s knack for dark humor, fantastic imagery, and her seething rage at a patriarchy that has co-opted women to be its foot soldiers. Nyoni tells the story with a constant, straight face—the uncle’s dead body appears in the dark without any buildup. In another scene, Shula and Nsansa find Bupe passed out from what seems like a suicide attempt in her dorm room, and the floors are awash in water. The viewer isn’t led to know where the water came from; what matters is that the insides of the dorm feel like a womb from which these three women re-emerge, born again into a new phase of their lives, untethered to Fred’s looming specter.
As much as rituals strive to bring a sense of closure to the experience of loss, the act of mourning itself remains unwieldy and gnarly in Nyoni’s film. At once suffocating—with the house filling up with wailing crowds and the women trying to keep the guests fed—and liberating, the performance of grief finally allows Shula and her cousins the time and space to talk about old wounds. Gender studies scholar and philosopher Judith Butler, writing in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, wrote “of gender and sexual minorities” that “we are, as a community, subjected to violence, even if some of us have not been.” In Butler’s later works, they expand this idea of community to include political minorities, and question what makes specific kinds of lives worthy of mourning vis-à-vis the deaths we readily accept and move on.
What or who gets mourned is a question that might arise when we look at Shula’s family, too. It is the abuser who is grieved over and not the years of trauma the survivors have endured. The resultant mourning of Shula and her cousins over their compounded losses is what Butler says makes one vulnerable, but in a very public way—“at once assertive and targeted.” The way out of a mourning like this, where “a full ‘recovery’ is impossible,” is through the formation of a new political agency, Butler says. This agency, in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, comes from the kinship the cousins form, uninfluenced by their ages or differences in their personalities, but buttressed by the complex loss they share.
Shula and her cousins co-opt the kitchen—the seat of traditional domesticity and femininity—and carve out a niche to sit, drink, smoke, and, most importantly, commune. The mothers and aunties who populate the world outside of this kitchen corner hold up a sanctified silence by refusing to confront the fact that their dead brother had sexually violated their daughters. But the kitchen corner becomes a space where this silence is ruptured, stories are shared, and knowledge is gained. This liminal space of kinship becomes so dangerous to the status quo that the mothers conspire to emotionally blackmail the younger cousins until they nearly break down in surrender.
The family, held together by threads of forced silence and a denial of the past, only bursts out in rage and anger when its members meet the family members of the widow. The dead man’s debauchery is blamed on the widow’s lack of love; her family apologizes for the shame she has brought upon them. They are asked to pay up to compensate for the widow’s shortcomings—a sum they can only partially afford. Dressed in silk and pearls, Shula’s aunts dredge up the trauma to prove that the widow deserves nothing from Fred’s estate. The same women who kept denying the past now resort to it to support their mercenary feud, reaching a crescendo when both sides descend into fighting over blankets and other menial possessions.
Amidst the jungle-like cacophony, we hear a guinea fowl screech in the distance. It recalls an early scene where a teenage Shula sits watching an episode of Farm Club, an old children’s educational TV show where the young hosts educate their followers about African wildlife. Guinea fowls are talkative creatures, they say; they screech to warn others of their flock of impending danger. The birds’ beaks rummage through filth, fishing out parasites that make humans ill, feeding on foulness to cleanse the world of malice.
The otherworldly in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is presented without any fanfare. Bupe is hospitalized but is well within minutes, appearing in two places at once; women transform into birds and caw in anger; mothers break into a song in the midst of crying. While many critics may be tempted to define the film as “magical realist,” we must acknowledge that the concept has been continually misidentified and misused by Western critics and journalists, who for decades have used it as a catch-all for intricate, nonlinear storylines that don’t always fit into the three-act storytelling structures.
In both On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and Nyoni’s previous I Am Not a Witch, women are tasked with laboring and bringing normalcy to an off-kilter world, choosing to seek out other planes of existence to forge kinships and form communities. The act of balancing the personal and the socio-familial becomes so overwhelming that the films can only transgress the realm of the human. In rejecting the limits of human society and its cruelty, Nyoni’s women find liberation. It may all seem like magic, but it’s all too real, attained through toil and tears.