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Most viewers who see Zambian-born British director Rungano Nyoni’s unusual new film, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, probably won’t be Zambians. Like his first feature, 2017’s I Am Not a Witch, the film has been shown at film festivals, in competition, and in cinemas across several European countries and now in the United States. It may eventually appear on screens in the back rows of international flights between those countries. It will take its place in the upper echelons of that strange and redundant category of “world cinema.” (Where else do films get made?)
We usually like it when art bridges worlds, when it has cross-cultural or, better yet, universal appeal. But when I first saw On Becoming a Guinea Fowl in a New York theater, I found myself sighing, crying, and laughing slightly out of sync with the rest of the audience. It was as if I were watching a shadow of the film, or picking up on a frequency that no one else could quite capture. I wanted to pull each person aside, run the film through, scene by scene, and say, “There. Did you get that? That’s so Zambian!” It wasn’t a lesson in anthropology, but in aesthetics.
What does it mean to be Zambian? It’s a complex question. Our borders, if not strictly arbitrary, were certainly drawn by foreigners during colonialism and mapped only six decades ago. Zambians come from more than seventy tribes; we make evening news in seven languages other than English. The country’s very name is a late invention, an improvisation on the river that runs through it, the Zambezi, a word of uncertain origin.
Still, there is something called Zambianness. Anyone who has visited Zambia, interacted with Zambians, spent time immersed in our diverse microcultures will understand this. Sound is probably the best way to describe cultural quirks. You don’t need perfect pitch to enjoy a tune. But learning the scales, time signatures, and standards of a particular musical form allows you to discern the false notes from the bright ones, the classical from the avant-garde – and to understand how they come together in harmony or dissonance.
Once, when I was trying to find the best way to describe the Zambian sense of irony, an artist said to me, “You know, in Zambia we don’t have yes and no. We have two yeses, and one of them means no.” This idea also illuminates other aesthetic dimensions beyond Zambian humor. Our art reflects a commitment to pleasure (happiness, say, or ecstasy), a subtlety and delay in our communication, and an easy acceptance of contradictions – a kind of unresolved but unburdened duality. I think that’s why the artist’s statement is so apt – you can almost hear it: the sound of the Zambian “yes” that means no.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl opens with a woman named Shula, played by Susan Chardy in a beautiful debut role, driving down a deserted road in Lusaka at night. She’s wearing a mask, glittering silver rays trailing from her bug-eyed glasses. She’s bobbing her head gently to the Lijadu Sisters’ 1979 song “Come on Home,” which begins with a sequence of talking drums that sound like we’re underwater.
When Shula stops the car and gets out after spotting something on the road, we realize that the mask is part of a larger costume: Missy Elliott’s inflated black trash bag from the video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” Later, in the pleasantly enervating atmosphere of the Afrofuturist intro, we learn that Shula’s sky costume is a realistic detail: she has come from a “masquerade party,” which is quite common in Lusaka—we like to party, and we can have fun anywhere.
Shula has stopped because she notices a man in flame-painted boots lying in the road. The camera locks on his purple shirt and still face. As she turns back to Shula, we see a moment when a girl with a fuzzy halo of hair—presumably a younger version of herself—turns and watches intently as her older self walks back to the car, confused.
Shula calls her father, who is also at the party, and tells him that she has just seen Uncle Fred's body. The unlikelihood of this turn of events—a niece finding her uncle's body first—is dissected by the dynamics of the call: Shula's bored, patient businesslike demeanor, her father's cheerful, erratic drinking. He laughs and says, “Fred can't be dead. Just splash him with water,” but eventually asks her to send her location—and some money for a cab.
We cut to an old, grainy video of a children's show called The Farm Club, hosted by two teenage girls, Mutale
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