The Zambian Sensibility of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”

Most people who see the Zambian British director Rungano Nyoni’s extraordinary new film, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” will not be Zambian. Like Nyoni’s first feature, “I Am Not a Witch” (2017), it has played in film festivals, competed at award shows, and appeared in cinemas in several European countries, and now the United States. It may eventually show up on the back-of-the-seat screens of airplanes on international flights among those nations. It will find its place in the upper ranks of that oddly redundant category “world cinema.” (Where else would cinema be made?)

We generally like it when art bridges worlds like this, when it has cross-cultural or, better yet, universal appeal. But when I first went to see “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” in a New York movie theatre, I found myself sighing, crying, laughing slightly out of synch with the rest of the audience. It was as if I were watching the film’s shadow, or hearing a frequency that no one else could discern. It made me want to take each person there aside, replay the film scene by scene, and say, “There. Did you catch that? That’s so Zambian!” A lesson not in anthropology but in aesthetics.

What does it mean to be Zambian? It’s a tricky question. Our borders, if not strictly arbitrary, were certainly arbitrated by outsiders during colonialism, and fixed on the map only six decades ago. Zambians come from upward of seventy tribes; we do the nightly news in seven languages, plus English. The country’s very name is a late invention, a riff on the name of the river that runs through it—Zambezi, a word of uncertain origin.

And yet, there is such a thing as Zambianness. Anyone who has been to Zambia, hung out with Zambians, spent time immersed in our various microcultures, will recognize it. Sound may be the best way to describe cultural specificity. You don’t have to have perfect pitch to enjoy a song. But learning the scales, time signatures, and standards of a particular musical form allows you to distinguish between the off notes and the striking ones, between the classics and the avant-garde—and to make sense of how they come together in harmony or dissonance.

Once, when I was trying to figure out how best to describe a Zambian sense of irony, a painter remarked to me, “You know, in Zambia, we don’t have a yes and a no. We have two yeses, and one of them means no.” The idea illuminates other aesthetic dimensions beyond Zambian humor, too. Our art reflects a commitment to the pleasant (over, say, the happy or the ecstatic), a subtlety and delay in how we communicate, and an easygoing acceptance of contradiction—a kind of unresolved yet unfraught doubleness. What makes the painter’s epigram so apt, I think, is that you can almost hear it: the sound of the Zambian yes that means no.

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” begins with a woman named Shula, played by Susan Chardy, in a beautifully modulated début role, driving down a deserted road in Lusaka at night. She’s got a mask on, sequinned silver rays stretching back from bug-eye shades. She’s gently bobbing her head to the Lijadu Sisters’ 1979 song “Come on Home,” which begins with a talking-drum sequence that sounds a little like we’re underwater.

When Shula, sighting something in the road, stops the car and gets out, we realize the mask is part of a whole costume: Missy Elliott’s inflated black garbage-bag outfit from the video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” Later, in a nice deflation of the Afrofuturist vibe of this opening, we learn that Shula’s celestial costumery is a realist detail: she’s coming from “a fancy-dress party,” which is not uncommon in Lusaka—we love to hang, and we will party just about anywhere.

Shula has stopped because she’s seen a man lying on the road, wearing boots painted with flames. The camera pauses over his purple shirt and his still face. When it returns to Shula, we get a flash shot of a girl with a fuzzy halo of hair—presumably a younger version of herself—who turns and intently watches her adult double return to the car in a puzzled fluster.

Shula calls her father, who is also at a party, and tells him that she’s just seen Uncle Fred’s body. The unlikelihood of this turn of events—a niece being the first to find her uncle’s corpse—dissipates into the dynamic of the call: Shula’s bored, patient matter-of-factness, her father’s jolly, scattershot drunkenness. He laughs and says, “Fred can’t die. Just sprinkle some water on him,” but eventually asks her to send him her location—and also some money for a taxi.

We cut to an old grainy video of a kids’ show, “The Farm Club,” hosted by two teen-age girls, Mutale and Mazuba. It’s so Zambian! The little brick building they’re in front of; their blue aprons with red-trimmed pockets and lining; the call and response between the hosts and the little ones; the way the lesson is conducted through a riddle: “I am found in Africa. I can live to about twenty years old. I can grow to about seventy-one centimetres long. I can come in the color brown, red, yellow, black, or white. What am I?” It is Shula’s memory, but it feels like mine.

As she waits for her father, listening to a self-congratulatory podcast, an American droning on about the “relationship hack” of kissing one’s wife in the morning, another car pulls up behind Shula’s. A woman gets out, visibly inebriated, and examines the body in the road, too. This coincidentally turns out to be one of Uncle Fred’s other nieces, Nsansa (a delightfully rambunctious Elizabeth Chisela), who will be the funnyman to Shula’s deadpan stooge for much of the film.

Nsansa tries to draw her cousin into a celebratory mood by staging a solo party, doing a slow, charming grind to Omah Lay’s song “Godly” in front of the headlights. Then she drunkenly calls a policeman friend, who instructs the women to wait—“the problem that is there” is that the vehicle needed to collect the body is being used for “national duties.” Nsansa searches the glove compartment for something to cover the corpse in the meantime. “Let’s just use what is handy!” she suggests with a cackle, unwrapping a menstrual pad and sticking it onto Shula’s forehead. Nsansa eventually covers the body with a blanket from the boot.

A gray dawn. Nsansa snoring in Shula’s passenger seat. A billboard becomes visible: “MIRACLES: HEALING AND DELIVERANCE,” a small handpainted sign beneath it advertising “MAIDS” with a phone number. A man pushes a wheelbarrow down the road. As he passes by the corpse, it vanishes. Shula gets out of her car once again to investigate. Another flash shot: Uncle Fred standing behind her in his infernal boots, mummified in white menstrual products—and Shula wakes up.

The police, in their green-and-beige uniforms, are carting the corpse onto the bed of a pickup truck, an officer trailing behind with the flame-toed boots. Bystanders record on their cellphones; Nsansa chatters outside with her policeman friend. Oozing with Schadenfreude, she informs Shula through the car window that Uncle Fred died a stone’s throw from a brothel.

None of this is played for laughs, exactly, but it is hilarious nonetheless. Much of the humor comes from the dialogue, conducted in what is sometimes called Zanglish: a combination of local languages, in this case mostly Bemba, and our homespun version of English, less broken than torqued in its grammar. Nyoni wisely subtitles the whole film so that even non-Zambians can be immersed in this twining stream of words without worrying too much about the switching currents.

Shula, an insider-outsider, a “been-to” who is home from abroad, is the ideal figure to navigate this blend of traditional and imported cultural forms. She is more irritated than disconcerted when house workers start removing the furniture from her mother’s living room to transform her home into the funeral house where the mourners will gather. When the relatives begin to arrive, crawling in on their knees, droning a dirge about death, Shula promptly departs for a hotel, pink suitcase in tow.

She takes a work video call, a matrix of white heads dithering on as her sole brown one blinks at the screen. There’s a knock at the hotel-room door. A brood of aunties has come to chide her. Why has she bathed when a man has died? Why doesn’t she have a chitenge wrapper tied around her waist? Why isn’t she acting properly traumatized? Why isn’t she planning to fetch her mother from the airport? Soon enough, Shula is dragged back to the house of mourning.

The house is divided into gendered and generational spaces. The aunties kneel and sway and hug on the living-room floor, keening dramatically one minute, chuckling over their cellphones the next. The uncles sit outside, drinking steadily, demanding to be served their favorite foods. The nieces escape their Sisyphean kitchen labors by hiding in the larder to drink and gossip. (“Fred was married?”; “That’s his wife. The one crying like a cow”; “Her style of crying has a pattern”; “Where did you get that style from? Did you download it?”; “Why are they mourning Uncle Fred like he was an angel, not a pervert?”) Later, the abject widow is found huddled with her relatives in the pale curve of an empty swimming pool, a glowing charcoal imbaula nearby to keep them warm.

Nyoni and the Colombian cinematographer David Gallego repurpose the ordinary details of life in Lusaka to marvellous effect—the Zambian ethos Nsansa captures with her call to “just use what is handy.” Geometric wrought-iron gates and latticed concrete walls pattern the scenes with a penitential feel. An inescapable maze of parked cars on the lawn makes manifest the trap of family love. A funeral program is dictated from an aunty to Shula’s cellphone to a worker at a copy shop: a game of telephone to launder a reputation. In the film’s final scene, T-shirts screen-printed with the dead man’s face make him present in distorted fashion at the disputatious indaba over his belongings.