Grieving is not linear

The streets were blocked off to make way for the swathes of celebrities and their fans waiting to see them. September in Toronto marks the season of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), ongoing from the 5th to the 15th. On day two, I was delighted to take my seat at the Scotiabank Theatre to see On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the sophomore feature film by director Rungano Nyoni. An A24 production, the film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Un Certain Regard category for best director. Nyoni’s work has also won a BAFTA in 2018 for Outstanding Debut (I Am Not a Witch). After reviewing Sira at TIFF in 2023, I was more than excited to see what this year’s keen selection of Nataleah Hunter-Young, TIFF’s International Programmer for Africa and Arab West Asia, would bring to my eyes. 

The film opens with big, jazzy bass notes, female voices, and a car riding in the dark on a desolate street. Here we are introduced to Shula, the film’s protagonist. She is alone in the car when she sees on the side of the street a body – the dead body of her uncle, Fred. Shula has no reaction. She creeps the car to a stop and calls her father. On the other end, Shula’s dad needs help with the rent, and eventually the topic of Uncle Fred’s dead body is discussed. Again, there is no catharsis, no big emotions, barely even a pause to process the information. The conversation is very “business as usual” as Shula’s father instructs her to stay in the car and promises that he is coming. 

Her father never comes. Instead, we are met by Shula’s cousin, Nsansa, a woman who appears to be drunk, walking alone on the road at night, enjoying the loud music from the speaker she carries. Shula is not warm to Nsansa, barely acknowledging her presence, ignoring her completely until Nsansa hands her a phone through the car window with the police on the other end. It is Nsansa who realizes that Uncle Fred’s dead body is only a few yards away from a brothel. 

When we first meet Shula, she is adorned in the iconic and immediately recognizable costume Missy Elliott wore in to 1997 Supa Dupa Fly (I Can’t Stand the Rain) music video. She has the out-of-this-world sunglasses attached to the sparkly headpiece and the oversized black jumpsuit. She is wearing dark lipstick, a nod to the ‘90s and a look that Black girls pull off the best. These first few moments of the film, with Shula by herself, listening to her radio, wearing clothing that expresses her taste and interiority, are the only glimpses we see into Shula’s backstory. Once the call is made to her father, Shula becomes a daughter, a niece, a cousin, and a young woman in a society that overbearingly dictates her every move, particularly the expectations of her during the mourning period and funeral preparations. Now, the only way we see Shula express herself is in her disdain for her cousin, Nsansa the drunkard. 

Throughout the film, we meet a cast of Shula’s aunties, mother, and other cousins. The women have big personalities and strong opinions about decorum. All gathered in one house, it is revealed to the audience and Shula that Uncle Fred had a wife, a woman who is now widowed. Some aunties decide not to feed the in-laws, while Shula does the cooking to bring to the widow. The kindness is denied and the food never gets to the widow’s family. 

It becomes clear that grieving is not linear, not equal, not shared. Fred’s sisters believe that they have lost something, while his wife, the mother of his children, has lost nothing, that she is a bad woman, a bad wife, and she is the reason Fred is dead. They treat her and the other women in her family like lepers, punishing them with chastisement and increasing ostracism. At one point, the in-laws are found sleeping outside, in an empty pool in the yard, far away from the other mourners. It is Shula who notices and begins to find out more about this woman.

Audiences learn that Fred has seven children at home, with a grandmother also living in the house. The grandmother pleads with Shula not to evict them. Still, Shula is emotionless, inviting the grandmother to come up off her knees. Shula realizes that the widow must have been 11 or 12 years old when she started having Fred’s kids. It is in this contemporary African narrative style that family secrets unravel. Already the unreliable narrator, Nsansa drunkenly revealed that one night Uncle Fred attacked her sexually but she was her own hero and fought him off. She later confesses that that was a lie: she didn’t fight him off. She was molested. At the university to pick up Bupe – another female cousin – to help with the cooking, she made a video revealing that for years, Uncle Fred had been molesting her. Bupe’s mother tells Shula to explain that Bupe has malaria and that is why she is in hospital. We remember the flashback of a young Shula over Fred’s dead body and piece together that Shula had also been molested by Fred. We start to understand the emotional flatness of Shula, her autopilot approach to grieving and her muted acquiescence of what is expected of her from this family. It is in these moments between cousins, in the pantry looking for ingredients, in the hospital, at the university, away from the others, that we see Shula start to warm up to Nsansa, give space to Bupe, and form their own community of grief.  

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a complex depiction of layered pain, the festering wounds that crystallize into silent resentment. It is a film that twists death into the kind of transformation that comes from shedding automatic roles of diplomacy and giving birth to new ways of expression. The aunties find the cousins in the pantry, an intimate moment of bonding, and saying without saying that they know their nieces are in pain, that they are loved, that they know. They sing, there is crying, and the scene is almost baptismal. Water was a recurring theme throughout the film, or spaces of water where there was none, such as the family sleeping in the empty pool. This symbolism calls my attention to the water that is not there, the tears that had not been shed, the saliva from shouting so loudly about their experiences that had been swallowed for years and decades. At times gut wrenching to see all of the pain bubbling at the surface ready to explode, balanced with other moments of music, mischief, and the delights of a sardonic sense of humor. Nsansa gave Shula permission to laugh at these events. And that levity gave audiences permission to also not mourn Uncle Fred or care much about who he was or how he died. The story was about the girls, their healing, and finding voice in the voids. 

In a recurring memory, young Shula remembers the children’s program she used to watch. The narrator explains that guinea fowls chat: “when they see a predator approaching, they start clucking as if to say ‘watch out’. Guinea fowls are useful to all creatures on the Savannah.” At first, I think of the aunties, always moving as a unit, always directing instructions, always clucking their orders, and on occasion, singing in harmony. But it is the closing scene that makes everything clear. While the widow is being accused of witchcraft and the men are deciding the price for Fred’s death, through the window we see a child on Shula’s hip, followed by Fred’s six other children, cousin Bupe, and grandmother, all walking towards the house. At first inaudible, soon we hear the strained vocal cords of Shula, as if being used for the first time. She squawks, an unpleasant screech that forces her to take deep breaths. She is moving towards the chaos, with Fred’s forgotten family, alerting those inside that, even in death, Fred is a marauder. In this act of becoming a guinea fowl, Shula is not only levying a confession that Fred was a pedophile, but also issuing a warning that silence is dangerous. She is calling attention to the family secrets while also breaking the customs of how things have always been. The screen goes black as audiences are left sensing the potential for change, and digesting how much damage had already been done. 

While some flock to TIFF for their spot to see the stars on the orange carpet, it is films such as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that capture my attention. These are the moments of important storytelling, a world stage to laugh, cry, and feel fulsomely the power of human stories. I am drawn to Nyoni’s distinct way of delivering punchlines that make trauma both recognizable and universal. I was not left feeling raw with emotion. Instead, the ubiquity of these experiences, the pointed truth-telling that families like these existing everyplace, left humming in me a sense of recognition for these characters. We have all met them, again and again, but Nyoni’s directing gives us opportunity to get to know them, to twist them, to move them, to scratch at the cracks. And it is done in a way that feels fresh, healing, and like the film was an experience of flipping through our own family trees, a group therapy session where we all understand the subtext that is felt and not spoken. The film felt like the deep breath one takes after telling the whole truth and then deflating, waiting expectantly.