Summary: A dead body belonging to Shula’s uncle was found on an isolated street late at night. While the last rites are being observed, she and her cousins unfold the story of a Zambian middle-class family.
The car radio, which has been placed on mute, is allowed by Shula (portrayed by Susan Chardy) to blast owing to ‘dress-up’ the party and all’s gone alright on her way back home after a friend’s function, which one feels is a well-done job. In this situation, the theme makes no sense: When she goes dressed up to the party, only to appear like both, an Invader character from Eyes Wide Shut and a sweater-wearing Sumo wrestler, Shula is choked from Spirit Halloween costume stores. What she doesn’t know is the distortion of sound and movement that makes her ordinary positioning in the car into something more and more unique, that of a woman filled with anticipation for a single thing from her memory: the corpse of a man. In a low tone, she mumbles eastern words that translate into what seems to be a confirmation ‘This is him, this is the man’. It’s that beautiful moment when the reality sinks in, Gbu in all his wildest imaginations never thought he would receive a phone call from his father’s friend saying ‘hello’ to him. “Hello Shula, Wyes,” she says in the Bemba language. “Induna is dead and I think it is on Kulu Road.
What is highly comical at this point is the absence of any dynamics; this certainly comes both is an interesting set of events but still, it seems a lot of emotions are rather distilled and muted.
What could explain Shula’s apathetic state after such an extremely distressing episode? There must certainly be more to Uncle Fred than would trigger such a reaction, right? These questions, and many others that may relate to and resolve changes in characters such as Fred, do not ever get tackled directly throughout the story in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, but it certainly would be too naive to ignore any of them as one would with Fred. These are the questions that are not left hanging like the necklace of Fred’s grandmother because there are answers to them in the way the story has been woven. One is bound to phrase and encounter regarding the social evils of this sombre yet tragicomedy family drama, such as child abuse, which “has always existed and continues today, what can be done about it happened in the past”. Certainly, the answers are rooted in history, but not the history of events of recent times when Shula was unfairly presumed to have discovered the child abuse. Rather, it was the history of Shula’s kin, countless years ago when they set foot on this planet.
Shula’s situation does not seem particularly pleasant, especially after her cousin took a moment to blink in surprise at the state of her dead Uncle Fred’s body, which was somehow resting in a relaxed and rather casual manner on a nearby ‘kamuyanga’ close to the brothel. Instead, it seems that her being a violation or a form of abuse, which there could be the case of Uncle Fred, is not a revelation that she would quite welcome. We must also point out Fred´s inclination to homosexuality because it presents less direct family dynamics and internal conflict and doubts concerning Uncle Fred. These issues will unfold later in the narrative.
But finally now, when we are returned to Shula and her cousin’s baby sister who was displaced and was placed in the care of Shula’s mother to begin, they reflect on their family, telling them the story of Fred and his events with his family. So these two women come to Fred’s mother as she is throwing everybody else out of the picture under the guise of the family mortuary.
He had built up considerable riches, and although it was customary that a widow gets to keep the property and belongings of her deceased husband, it is siblings and cousins of Fred say that the woman never made sure he had enough food and never attended to house matters and so did not even regard him as a human being which resulted in this large scale cruelty which cost him his life. When Shula first meets the woman in question, she is outside struggling to find a place to pee: Shula’s mother is too angry to let her go to the restroom, for it was her negligence which caused Fred to die.
The present void left by the father figure who was loving and gentle yet strong and tough is the main impetus that propels the narration of the story in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. The reader cannot help but look into the events of the storyline with sympathy as it is the family where the children lose their father figure but at the same time, Shula, Nsansa and their cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) have a darker side of the story where they believe that their uncle left them scarred for life.
But in burying their uncle, the listeners will find that they touch once again upon the old spots, the areas where Nyoni places greater emphasis describing how the three girls do their best to display the pain that is within their bodies to their mothers and aunts. Pain is a form of beauty and it is also a form of ugliness. Pain is redemptive but it is also a torment. The painful moments are relentlessly filmed and this has been the most inspirational moment of the year.
This seems to be the beginning of Nyoni’s metamorphosis from being merely a culmination of a family’s hopes and culture as in the 2017 movie, ‘I am not a Witch’ where young people were her family members, to becoming a creator of tour de force, in this case, narrative conflict. And much of that, of course, is thanks to the performance of Angie Chardy, the English-Zambian actress in her debut lead role that according to Nyoni, is what is in her pressure cooker.
Not just a cliché Western woman who in a quiet moment when everything is turned upside down and she is in action easily returns to an empty apartment where she does not have to deal with the corpses or mayhem from the previous day. In such a case, why then does Nyoni let her creativity out to put much effort into what she perceives the audience to be like? It is not that difficult, is it, to over-depend on the arc of the plot of this kind of hero and villain, who are clearly defined.
But it is in the nuances of her character that Nyoni made the film’s case convincingly, for they reminded the audience that there was an intellect who knew what was needed to create more raw and dramatic scenes, more so cultural ones, which this is.
Now we reach the title of the film. Shula and her family are seen on screen until a coloured picture of a program called FARM CLUB which is centred on some guinea fowl, a rather unique type of bird from Africa, pops up. The story of On Becoming A Guinea Fowl’s that has central figure covers a lot of ground, and though the animal features made therefore and their relevance to this particular tale in question were not disclosed, Uncle Fred and his several victims provide us with information which helps to solve this riddle the riddle is: what do all Curley girls have in common? It turns out that the guinea fowl has a rather peculiar feature, fowls protect the animals living nearby from danger. Would this be pretty much too on the nose metaphor, for instance? Probably, but only when we put it this bluntly.
By contrast, Nyoni does not bring the comparisons of the guinea fowl to the fore in the same way as She does with Shula’s realization that to finally break from the endorsement choke of her traditionalist family, she has to go against their customs, and which culminates into an excellent and ghastly ending that is also quite dramatic in a sense because it is an unusual confluence. At times, it’s necessary to engage in the strategies of the fish and the three.
Except this, one does not simply turn into a guinea fowl: one becomes one of the top apex predators of the kind that they advised you about, the kind of bird that the plane was warning you about in most instances in the first place.
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