On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Maria Garcia

Produced by Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, and Tim Cole; written and directed by Rungano Nyoni; cinematography by David Gallego; costume design by Estelle Don Banda, edited by Nathan Nugent; art direction by Malin Lindholm; music by Lucrecia Dalt; starring Susan Chardy, Blessings Bhamjee, Henry B. J. Phiri, Elizabeth Chisela, Doris Naulapwa, Mary Mulabo, Esther Singini, and Maggie Mulubwa. Color, English dialogue and Bemba dialogue with English subtitles. An A24 Films release.

Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl begins in long shot on a straight, deserted country road illuminated by dim pools of light from above. A car appears in the distance moving directly toward the spot in the road where the driver, clad in a bejeweled helmet fitted with dark glasses, first reduces speed. She then glances through her passenger-side window. A slow-motion blur shot follows as the driver puts her car in reverse. She removes her headgear, opens her car door, and walks to a body lying in the road. After an insouciant glance, the woman looks up and sees a vision of her adolescent self (Esther Singini).

She calls her father (Henry B. J. Phiri) and the audience learns that she is Shula (Susan Chardy), perhaps the same nine-year-old Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) who is enslaved in I Am Not a Witch (2017), Nyoni’s debut feature, also set in her native Zambia. The corpse lying in the road is her Uncle Fred. In less than five minutes of screen time, beginning with the discovery of the body, through the portentous, allusive shots, all measured in frames, some accompanied by the movie’s menacing musical leitmotif, the writer-director skillfully conveys her protagonist’s history with that body. For Shula, it is not history. It is present and prologue, the space-time of the slow-motion blur shot and that wary young girl she wakes up to every day. 

Shula waits for the undertakers, who arrive in the early morning hours. As they recover the corpse, an apparition appears—again for the blink of an eye—a monstrous upright man, his body littered with weights. The point-of-view captured in that long shot is unclear; the undertakers are oblivious to the apparition and Shula is not present in the frame. In this deeply personal tale of generational sexual abuse, Uncle Fred’s lifeless body lying in the road, his torso and face in shadow, is an anticlimax for Shula. Nyoni’s apparition is the visible, objective picture, the true measure of evil, not unlike Albert Lewin’s mirror shot in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and Ebenezer Scrooge as he appears in his terrifying nightmare, in Brian Desmond Hurst’s A Christmas Carol (1951). While the absence of a point of view can be read as Nyoni’s direct address to the audience, the monster is also an archetypal figure. In Jungian thought they are rife with intent, calling for a response.

Much of the impact of Nyoni’s stunning opening sequence begins with Shula’s attire (by Estelle Don Banda), later explained as her outfit for a costume party she attended that evening. Her body is engulfed in a puffy, hazmat-like jumpsuit that exaggerates her size and distorts her figure; Shula’s helmet, sans glitter, would be the bronze headgear worn by warriors in Ancient Greece. Together they constitute a fearsome panoply, one that speaks not only to Shula’s desire for protection, but that also points to her implacable personality. As if that were not enough, Shula sports an Aegeis in the form of a late model car that in some scenes appears as large as a tank with an unusually expansive windshield and passenger windows. Like the mythical Aegeis, Zeus’s gift to his daughter Athene, the car is a powerful defensive shield, although its pellucid qualites are problematic.

The car shields Shula from anyone who may be lurking on the deserted street, but not from Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), her drunken cousin, who shares her indifference to Uncle Fred’s death. Automobiles represent an equivocal force for Nyoni’s protagonists. In I Am Not a Witch, Mr. Banda, the overseer of the enslaved “witches,” invites Shula to travel in his van as part of a new scheme to overthrow his female boss. At first, Shula feels a frisson of freedom, but she soon realizes that Mr. Banda has created a new way to exploit her innocence. Throughout Guinea Fowl, Shula uses her car as a quiet refuge and a means to ferry relatives arriving for Uncle Fred’s funeral, but on lonely night drives she sometimes recalls her girlhood. Near the end of the movie, the interior of the automobile is the stage for Nyoni’s most affecting scene in which Shula and Nsansa recall their shared betrayal. 

Despite the heft, speed, and protective shield of the car, in Shula’s real and metaphorical reversal on the road to view the corpse, she becomes suddenly unguarded. In an instant, the palpable memory of Uncle Fred compels her to confront his continuing “aegis,” the seemingly serendipitous discovery of the body through the car window a catharsis that  presages the film’s narrative of self-actualization. Uncle Fred’s death compels Shula to revisit her armor, and her growing resolve to sound an alarm—as guinea fowls do when they are threatened. Nsansa, too, is affected and in her inebriated state tells Shula that she prevailed when Uncle Fred tried to rape her.

Shula returns home, and watches a TV show that features two girls who are conducting a workshop for younger children. The subject is guinea fowl, although only cartoon images of the birds accompany their talk. Six species are endemic to Sub-Saharan Africa, including the colorful helmeted guinea fowl, the highlight of wild bird tours. The attractive, spotted bird may well have inspired Nyoni’s film: in the bush, the loud cries of all guinea fowl—that can rise to an ear-splitting cacophony when they sense danger—also warn other animals of predators. It soon becomes apparent that the girls on the television program are Shula and Nsansa, and that Shula is replaying the same passage of the show in which her younger self cries “guinea fowl,” as she raises her arm and points her finger in a gesture of accusation. The brief but chilling passage is an iteration of Shula’s largely suppressed continuum of vulnerability.

Zambia’s cloak of silence around rape is so profound that even Shula resorts to euphemisms when she tells her father, late in the film, about Uncle Fred’s depravity. A few minutes after their conversation, he telephones her to ask if she was “bothered” in that way, and she lies, perhaps to spare him guilt but also because she is slowly shedding her protective shield. This brief, delicate exchange between father and daughter, worthy of an entire essay, marks one instance of Chardy’s flawless, understated performance, the perfect counterweight for Nyoni’s bold and surrealist approach to storytelling.

Uncle Fred’s sins would undermine the reputation of Shula’s maternal family if they were exposed, and Shula is tasked with erasing them by writing a glowing eulogy. This ironic turn of events is explained in part by an earlier scene in which Shula is leading a Zoom meeting at what appears to be her film studio. She is a well-regarded member of her family, for her generosity, and for her habit of upholding tribal customs, and her tongue, in the name of harmony. That self-reflexive element of the film studio suggests that Shula’s story is Nyoni’s story, but the movie’s extraordinary authenticity, especially in Nyoni’s stunning surreal passages, should not be read as biography.

The filmmaker’s silent nine-year-old in I Am Not a Witch receives her sobriquet, “Shula” or “uprooted” in Bemba, from the elderly “witches” because she has no name. She appears from nowhere and disappears at the end of the film. She only fleetingly belongs to the enslaved women who protect her when they can. The adult Shula of this film is no different. Singled out for sexual abuse, uprooted from her childhood, raised by mothers and grandmothers whose protection of their female children was limited by their own abusive history, Shula is naturally insular. 

She reflects Nyoni’s existential perspective of womanhood in a patriarchal society as rooted in displacement, in the perpetual feeling of “otherness.” Naming and not naming, the sharing of names, especially on a possible metalevel—Mr. Banda and Don Banda, the surnames of the character in I Am Not a Witch and Nyoni’s costume designer Estelle Don Banda, as well as the reappearance of nine-year-old Shula, unamed on the TV segment, and the two Shulas from I Am Not a Witch  and Guinea Fowl who may or may not be the same person, are an important part of the narrative of uprooting that is Nyoni’s view of female identity.

As Uncle Fred’s wake stretches to days in Shula’s childhood home, she becomes increasingly agitated, at first with traditional grieving rituals that include people having to crawl around the house rather than walk, and a required abstinence from showering. Although outwardly respectful of her elderly guests, she barely tolerates her “aunties,” who are indignant over her lack of demonstrative grief for Uncle Fred. Midway through Nyoni’s story of survival, Shula quietly ignores the rituals and speaks sparingly with her cousins who are often closeted in the kitchen to escape obligatory, vociferous displays of grief. There they can speak openly about their anger over the fact that no one protected them from Uncle Fred. As the backdrop for much of the film, the wake is fated as the site of a collective reckoning, especially among Shula’s generation of female cousins one of whom cries “They should bury him and be done with it!” The reckoning begins with a video.

Shula’s aunt asks that she pick up Bupe (Esther Singini), her daughter and Shula’s cousin, who is away at college, so that she can attend the wake. Just as Shula is about to leave the aunt receives a video on her phone in which her daughter asks forgiveness for what she is about to do. Shula rushes to her cousin’s campus, and in a dramatic, surreal sequence, Bupe’s room is awash; she is slumped in her bed, tendrils of her hair floating in the flood waters. It is not clear that she will survive. Sloshing through calf-high water, the depths of her unconscious, the deepest, darkest part of her being, Shula loses her mooring. She is unable to distinguish her wounds from those of Bupe, her girlhood from her cousin’s adolescence and budding womanhood.

After Bupe is hospitalized, Shula returns to her mother’s house, and to the sound of the film’s ominous, musical leitmotif she sees Bupe in the kitchen. Although in her conscious mind Shula knows her cousin is in the hospital, she asks her what she is doing in the kitchen, and Bupe replies that Uncle Fred is dead, that there is nothing more to worry about. Bupe is actually teetering between life and death after her attempted suicide, having endured years of Uncle Fred’s abuse. Shula, who has lived her entire adult life in the moment of her uncle’s crime against her, is at a crossroad, along with her cousins. Sensing that and their children’s collective disgust with the longstanding tradition of silence, the mothers and grandmothers hold a beautiful, healing ritual in which they beg their female children to forgive them. While Shula and her cousins cry, memories surface, and Shula can finally speak of the past.

She and Nsansa are seated in her car facing forward, the camera at their backs. Shula is trying to maneuver the car out of a tight spot, surging forward and then reversing several times, echoing the opening scene of the movie, although now the automobile seems much diminished, its power no longer needed.  Shula asks Nsansa if she recalls what she had told her about that last visit to Uncle Fred and Nsansa replies, “You played a game, but then the game hurt, and you said you would not look at Uncle Fred again.” Then Nsansa confesses that she lied to Shula about overcoming Uncle Fred. She, too, was raped. Shula stops the back and forward motion of the car, and turns off the engine. She says that they should walk, and they do, unencumberd, Shula having shed her panoply. 

Recent genome studies indicate that helmeted guinea fowl were domesticated in Sub-Saharan Africa around 500 BCE, the classical era in Ancient Greece. While all guinea fowl are largely terrestrial, the colorful helmeted guinea fowl can fly long distances and roost in trees when threatened. Their distinctive, guttural cries and frenzied motions when they sense danger made the helmeted guinea fowl ideal guardians for people’s homes in Ancient Greece. The girl Shula who first cried “guinea fowl,” hoping to alarm her elders, was silenced; later, forced to gaze once again at her rapist, she dressed as a guinea fowl, helmet and all, to frighten other predators. In the end, she gathers his ailing toddlers whose existence was a surprise to the family and, leading them by the hand to her mother’s home, adopts the wordless ululation of the helmeted guinea fowl. Nyoni leaves her audience with that postapocalyptic hero and little hope.

Maria Garcia is a New York-based freelance writer, feature writer, and author of Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero’s Encounter with the Beast (NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

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