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| Odia Ofeimun |
(The Guardian)--Nigerian poet and critic, Odia Ofeimun, has been writing
about life in Lagos for the last forty years. This past summer on a rainy June
afternoon, I spent a few hours interviewing him while co-producing a radio
documentary about Nollywood (streaming in
full here). His observations reflect many of the key tensions in
contemporary Nigerian life. The following quotes are culled from the interview
at his home in the Oregun section of Lagos:
Odia Ofeimun: "Lagos is a
city you get to and feel like you can achieve anything in the world. It is not
the most beautiful city, but it has its seductions. It is a society that sucks
you in, and even when you are not part of the shaking or the moving of the
city, you begin to have the feeling that you too will be there one day."
"There is a headiness the average Lagosian has — you
do not really feel that the big man, no matter how big he is, is your boss, the
man you call "Oga." And he, the man you call "Oga," knows
that you do not really regard him as your master. "Oga" does mean
master, but the average Lagosian who calls you "Oga" is just doing it
to silly you. Those who take him seriously are fools."
On Nollywood
"When Nollywood gets it right, there is something
marvellous in having your stories told in a way that you can just lap up like
syrup. Even when you know that the story has been badly told, you still want to
know what comes next. There is a self-flattering in it for many Africans. And beyond
that, people are generally looking for answers for questions that they don't
have answers to, and you can't be too sure whether the next film might provide
an answer.
People swallow it like gospel. In some African countries,
when an original film star is visiting, you would think it is a head of state —
and that is part of what makes it bothersome for me. Young people don't get
their own history told in the right way. In many Nollywood films, it is not
about getting it right. It's not about representation.
Many people do not like the word representation. But there
is a need for us to know what a human face looks like before you bring to it
all the jazziness that artists sometimes bring to it. In art, if you did not
have those well-realized Roman noses and facial structures, the kind of things
that Picasso had to do would be more difficult to understand. It's like trying
to understand African art without seeing those original Ife forms that were
styled to match nature.
The standard Nollywood narrative pays very little
attention to knowledge as knowledge, in which case you are not allowing the
storytelling to dictate what is knowable. There is a reality before the
story."
On the portrayal of traditional culture in Nollywood
"There is a sense in which we have not quite taken
traditional society seriously enough. The Westerner who moved to Africa drew a
line and said this is Western and this is African, but what we needed to do was
to do a proper matching. You look at a Nollywood film of pure fetish, and it does
not reveal the underlying science. All of these issues about importing the West
or not importing the West — that's running away from the problem. There were
inoculations in Africa against whooping cough, against all manner of diseases,
before Western science brought their own methods of inoculation. Because our
universities have not developed enough to the point of actually taking the
knowledge of the English language into the traditional and taking the knowledge
of the traditional into the English, we have a sharp divide between the two,
which has made it very difficult for so called African science to become a part
of the mainstream of world of science."
"Nigerians discuss federalism like it was something
imported from outer-space, but I've seen many traditional African societies in
which federal principles were rigorously adhered to — we've just not managed to
study them enough as federalism. We have studied them as traditional African
culture, and we distinguish them from the other forms as if the two can never
meet. We end up bastardizing the original without having made good use of the
Western fields of discourse. In my view this creates a lot of problems. And of
course, people try to solve the problems by going into magical realism in
fiction, or animist realism, which is sometimes just a way of running away from
what you don't understand. So you find a lot of padding in some novels which
tell you next to nothing about what is really happening."
Religion in Nollywood
"Much of what you see in Nollywood in relation to
religion is hogwash because the human capacity to solve problems is denied. The
power to make things happen is given to God, who already gave you powers to
use. It's as if you are denying that God gave you those powers when you credit
to him every evil or good that happens. In Nollywood, that is the way it
happens. Problems that have direct objective and scientific solutions are made
to appear so outlandish, so out of this world, so otherworldly, that it is
solely by appealing to God that they get solved.
There are psychological problems that have direct
solutions. Somebody living alone who has little oxygen may have nightmares. It
is biological. But in Nollywood, when you come across someone who lives in this
situation, rather then taking a look at the circumstances of that individual,
you appeal to God. Every nightmare is interpreted as a spiritual attack which
some pastor will deal with. People have stopped using their brains. Societies
like that are asking to be colonized. They are asking for forces outside their
own orbit to intervene in their environment. So much is granted to that
otherworldly power that the powers that individuals have always been given by
their maker are neglected and allowed to decay. Nollywood is a good example of how
Africans are taught not to use their minds. I am just hoping that some smart
kid, some smart young women or man, will enter that business and turn it upside
down. It will be the radical revolution, the break and rupture that will make a
difference."
The role of criticism
"Much of what I am reading still fails to engage
Nollywood in the way that Nollywood should be engaged, because it does not deal
with the society that is producing Nollywood. The two need to be looked as
connected — Nollywood as the product of our society. And you need to look at
that society to see how it is either engendering, encouraging, or distorting
what can be produced."
"Nollywood films are as underdeveloped as Nigerian
society, and when you watch them, you see all the forms of underdevelopment,
both technically and socially. If you really want to know what is going wrong
with Africa, Nollywood shows it: the very unscientific approach to problem
solution is there, brazen. And the self deceit that is part of communal life is
there, also brazen. So it is a case of the mirror that is itself problematic.
What it tells you is not exactly what you ought to know, but without the mirror
you would probably see nothing. And that's where the relevance of Nollywood
comes in. We manage to see something, even if it's not what we should be
seeing."
"But I must confess I am sometimes kind to Nollywood
because I don't want to destroy it. It's like: this is the only thing we've
got, we might as well not destroy it. But again, we don't have the media that
can do it well. Everyday, newspaper attention to Nollywood is at the same time
propaganda and advertisement, before it is an artistic assessment. And
therefore, much of it is not valuable from the standpoint of the creation of
standards. The way that the universities have started to move into it, and
actually creating Nollywood subsections in the departments of film, can help.
But in Nollywood, you have a situation in which those who would use the highest
of standards have to go through media that would not accommodate those
standards properly.
We also appear not to have acquired that academic sense of
objectivity, which can take a hard look at the culture and go after it.
Because, as I tell some of my friends, if you put culture or ancestors on the
line, I will go after them. There is no reason I should worry about whether
your ancestor was better then mine. We judge the ancestor by what the ancestor
did in relation to certain values. And if your or my ancestor cannot meet those
values, too bad for him or her.
At the end of the day, it is
the capacity to do a critique that sometimes engenders the capacity to create.
The best critique of a work of art could also be a work of art."
Source: The Guardian, 2012
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