It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” - Tony Soprano

I have two brothers who might be classified —much to their chagrin—as elder millennials. True statesmen of a partly-abstract generation universally defined by facebook and blackberries and garish sneakers and the abhorrent pop songs of the aughts and rose-colored glamour of growing up in the vivacious 90s. They saw the turn of the millennium. The y2k hysteria . The apocalyptic mongering of conspiracies.They witnessed the birth of a new generation — us, the new barbarians born into a perplexing little dark age of infinite screens, home videos/vhs, a world without twin towers , a nation embracing the impregnable tenets of democracy, here to decimate the last shred of civility holding the world to some iota of form. 12th of April 1999 i was born, 29th of may 1999 Nigeria returns to civilian rule. To some idealistic shaman those events should symbolize the dawn of something a la Kubrick’s 2001:a space odyssey but I am no shaman.And I don’t suffer the noxious optimism and mawkishness of my brothers and their now-dated cohorts.

My oldest brother is an accountant. My immediate older brother is a wasted potential as they say but when he isn’t practicing as a professional bullshiter well-versed in the sophistry of guilt, he also generously moonlights as the world’s most conspicuous thorn in the proverbial flesh of our modest family. They are both in their 40s, the ripe age to understand your parents and forgo any sense of earned individuality. They are both fathers. One is a decent father with the somewhat antiquated values of our own father. One is a brute. He thinks he’s Michael Corleone but he isn’t. He is not that much of a Greek tragedy of Sicilian provenance. I say these things not as an indictment of their personalities nor do I completely address them pejoratively. My assessment of them this time is merely anthropological because they were the closest thing I had to Nigerian millennial culture as a younger fella learning to be useful in the world. My brothers were cool and they walked with cool friends and they had even cooler girlfriends who became proxy sexual awakenings for me. It took me a while to accept the evidentiary pseudo-freudian fact that my brothers and I had the same taste in women. Svelte, opinionated, riotous. They listened to nu metal and rap. Dido was our artiste-in-residence. They had the coolest video games, books and films. Sneakers and accessories. How I dress now is a variation of my immediate older brother. I am a Tom Clancy affiocionado now because my oldest brother was one. They were my portals to a brave new world. They had ideas. They weren't our parents who were antediluvian despite espousing certain liberal values. They were supposed to be the leaders of some tomorrow that we bellowed with naive conviction in our national anthems. They were so cool. Now they and all their erstwhile cool friends are married, separated with children, with jobs, with a slender grasp on the new, with a conservatism conflated for real life. No longer portals to the new. No longer vestiges of a culture poised to topple the old world.

It might be rightfully rendered absurd to speak authoritatively on the fading charm of the preceding generation. I am after all not far removed from said generation. Everything in my generation is partly a function of that generation. Such is true for all generations but it is particularly overt between millennials and the ill-named gen z. Our fascination with the Internet as the Shakespearean undiscovered country finds its genesis in the Zuckerbergian machinations. Our humour as well as our irony is attributable to them. Some of us might be more politically correct now, but many a millennial on Twitter in the 2010s was authoring jokes so tasteless they might have compelled Louis C.K. to find Jesus. No, truly—why did they say any of that?. Of course, these similarities and divergences should be adjusted for class, geography, and the usual suspects, but we are nevertheless the direct spawn of the once-and-future cool kids. Their sensibilities became ours. Their internet became ours. Their irony became ours. And now we find ourselves drifting toward the same semi-charmlessness, heralded by a deleterious strain of reactionary politics and the gradual sedimentation of conservative instincts.

I have my own friends now. Not unlike my brothers' friends back in the day, all my friends are cool. They might even be cooler. Writers, filmmakers, poets, designers, artists. Quite the Wildean bunch. They possess the same certainty I once observed in my brothers and their companions—the conviction that culture remains malleable, that the world can still be rearranged by force of taste and personality. They speak in references and allusions. They know the right books, the right films, the right parties. They have theories about everything. Some of these theories are even correct. But my friends are not a perfect representation of my generation. I have sequestered them in a bubble as reference for how I might want to shape the world someday. But the truest of commonalities that remains glaring is the existence of what I hypothesize to be The Great Vacancy. I do not mean loneliness, though loneliness is certainly implicated. Nor do I mean alienation in the strictly Marxist sense, though that too hovers somewhere in the background. The Great Vacancy is more elusive. It is the persistent sensation that one has arrived after the decisive events have already occurred. Arriving at the end of history. An arrival that engenders a sharper skepticism of ourselves, as though we are out to get each other. No, it isn't a case of not loving each other enough or the death of community. It feels like something much ancient and inscrutable exited quietly, leaving us with systems and ambivalence. Leaving us a perpetual state of cultural diagnosis. One may say this is curable by simply going outside and immersing yourself in the many wonders of the world. Others may say it's an abstract problem for sociological onanism. I know I risk sounding like a post-woke Chuck Palanuik when I say this is our own great depression

But what are we to say when the youngest of us remain calcified in the biases of our parents? . What are we to say when we aspire for arbitrary aristocracy and deny the depth of our actions?. What more can we say about better politics or the virtue of a social contract? The Golden Rule? The importance of being earnest?. Soon enough, like my brothers, we shall cease to be interesting. Our sons and daughters, nephews and nieces will cure themselves of their fascination with our radicalisms and ingenuity. Our coolness will fade. It will become a dead language. The internet, the greatest Rosetta stone, will mock our abbreviations and shibboleths and I too will be my brothers. Full of compromises. Forced to be realistic.

What was it that Eve Babitz said in that essay about Jim Morrison? — And we were all so young.

NORMAN WILLIAMS STREET, LAGOS —The interior architecture of Dada Gallery in Ikoyi is a cathedral for sound and light. Not only in the punctum of the displayed art, but in the building itself—its interiority during the day, when one cannot escape the overcast of travelling heat, allows for a striking panorama of perception as you spelunk further into its capacious  depths. This ambience, made possible by the clustering logic of structural engineering, is not entirely sui generis; Lagos, I am sure, is inundated with galleries that are equally prepossessing.

Yet I found myself standing there dazed last weekend—in what I took to be the building’s nexus, if my eyes did not pull a Judas on me—watching fervent beams of light assault the orifice above, the glass barrier holding at bay the aliens of the natural world. My eyes probed each piece without philosophical information. I refused the barcode posted up somewhere in the ante-floor of the building. Only armed with curiosity, a pathological need to deconstruct how present I am and the agony of not knowing if I possessed the epistemological  acuity to see what I needed to see. To an astonishing degree, it is a feeling I have come to embrace these days when I set my sights upon art that truly edifies me in ways that give me pause.

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.’’ — John Berger 

I was a film correspondent and critic for a reputable magazine for four years. During my time there, I had to learn how to watch a film with the sole intent of appraising. It was no longer about watching a film for the sake of meaningless categorization and frankly speaking, participating in facile twitter conversation but actually immersing myself in the purity of film and film theory. Hard to do with the churning of hokum prevalent  in nollywood – film criticism and nollywood have a fraught relationship that leaves the thinker in a dogged hopelessness that puts you between the  sacred  duty of documentation and the position of a necessary jester. Somewhere in the warpath against “anti-intellectualism” by way of the written word you abdicate the natural wrought of instinct –  the wordless, grammarless, de-epistemic recognition of beauty. That experience that presents itself as an analogue to religion is put to bed much to the detriment of the ways of seeing.

 One of the great aporias of living in an undefined age constantly in the telescope of scrutiny is conflict between knowing and feeling. Both are ontological characteristics that engender a divergence of outcome. To know is rarely ever to understand but it is very often a precursorial stage to feeling. The poets amongst us might describe the feeling you get in the presence of great art as indescribable or transcendental but such feeling is informed by a recognition of beauty — a recognition that is itself informed by a certain soupçon of knowledge. The question now becomes ; what came first, the feeling or the knowing?. John Berger answers this adequately in his seminal text Ways of seeing. He states that we see things in relation to ourselves and between things. He furthers his postulation by stating there's a reciprocity of vision embedded in nature which surpasses the act of spoken dialogue.

Do not mistake this for a eureka moment but it seems to me that the middle-ground between criticism and armchair facile thought has been obliterated by the need to be smarter than we are and the need to be cerebrally docile for fear of being seen as sincere. A great many of us who have the privilege of being proximal to great art have lost our ability to stand still and absorb the language of objects. We cannot process encounters without dismissive demeanor or ivory-tower pathology. Or worse, interrogating the performativity of it all. This used to be a problem endemic to the Internet but having been to film screenings and art shows there's an abnegation of dialogue mediated through the phone. And, no this isn't a put-your-phone admonition. Phone addiction is incurable. It's our great evil that has now become the fun uncle. I'm more worried about the conversations, the quality of conversations, the proliferation of pixelated experiences and hyper-mechanical understanding. I'm more worried about those who do not know or feel but find themselves siphoning social capital from the profitability of coolness. It's easy to conflate this for the cardinal sin of gatekeeping but I'm more of a spy in the house of the nouveau riche than I am a gatekeeper. I get to watch people be oblivious to the fact that they'll die. They'll never see the wonders of the world again for the first time. That there's a permanent blindness on the horizon. 

For the film-literate, Paul Thomas Anderson is a rite of passage. He was once Hollywood’s wunderkind. The patron saint of well-read film bros. His dense filmography spans a wide thematic range, but its formalistic instincts —especially the haphazard choreography of eccentric ensemble and space—remain indebted to the ingenuity of Robert Altman. Certain cinephiles and film scholars might dare to argue that this directorial influence is only apparent in the early quadrant of his filmography; Hard eight, boogie nights, magnolia and punch drunk love respectively. But the presence of Altman’s visual philosophy and obsession with American complexities in the latter part of his corpus makes him the consummate epitome of what I deem the Altmanian spawn.

Anderson’s camera, like Altman’s before him, repudiates the limiting tyranny of singular perspective. Like the eye of god , it lingers on the frenetic periphery, hovers in domestication and American edifices, eavesdrops on hedonistic conversations that seem incidental yet are teeming with consequence. In Boogie Nights, the atmosphere is sprawling, dizzying, and uncut but the linear chaos functions as an anthropological survey of human ambition and desperation.Pure American sensualism and naivete. A mise-en-scène that mirrors Altman’s American corridors. Each actor occupies a world simultaneously their own and shared with the others as narrative hierarchies dissolve into a democratization of cinematic space. We become participants in a living organism of interwoven lives, a concept Altman had pursued in films like M.A.S.H (1970) and NASHVILLE (1975) with unequivocal obsession.

There is a point of cinematic divergence, however. Anderson differs from his de facto progenitor in the subtlety of affect, a meticulous eccentric articulation of interior states that Altman often left tacit. Where Altman luxuriated in the communal as seen in 3 women (1977) or McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) – a movie God’s favorite film critic Pauline Kael called “a beautiful pipe dream “. PTA allows characters to emerge organically from the ensuing interplay of multiple presences. He excavates the idiosyncratic, tracing the precise contours of individual consciousness even as it intersects with the fluid choreography of the ensemble. Consider his magnum opus Magnolia—a film that exhibits the Wallacean constitution of a Bush-era great American novel– chance functions simultaneously as dramaturg and moral arbiter. Overlapping dialogue in suburban boredom, the polyphonic insistence of coincidence, and the orchestration of temporal simultaneities all resonate with Altmanian inheritance, yet the film’s psychic gravity, its relentless scrutiny of grief, masculinity, failure, and desire, is distinctly Andersonian. Within this oscillation of pandemonium between external spectacle and interior depth, he transforms influence and pastiche authorial competence, rendering the lineage both homage and metamorphosis.

This is noticeable especially in films like There will be blood, The master,Inherent Vice and dare I say One battle after another. His voice – with reference to Miles Davis – took him a mighty long time. You detect a triumphant graduation from the tutelage of the primogenitor. PTA begins to understand the American mind in the vein of Altman in Nashville but with a far more sinister perspective about the socio-cultural contagion that has made itself pervasive. Akin to Thomas Pynchon , a writer he is heavily inspired by, he engenders an affinity for the individual within the macrocosm. I have always argued that There Will be Blood and The Master are the dyad political nightmares of PTA ( though he gets sufficient flack for not being vocally political) – both films are companion studies of domination, belief, and the instability of the self. Nightmares, metabolized through characters such as Daniel Plainview and Lancaster Dodd,where the individual cannot be tamed when moored to the daemon of ambition and internal dysregulations. This is the truest of American myth-making for what is more American than men chasing ghosts, wraiths of new frontiers and God in a conspiratorial doctrine. What’s more worthy of Altman’s anxieties than the tragi-comedy of men who die twice?

With the current success of One Battle After Another,across every conceivable parameter we use to measure cinematic success, there’s no doubt that we await with bated breath the next PTA sojourn into America’s psyche through the interiority of the individual. OBAA is probably his most polarizing work but it has also become his most contemporaneous film and perhaps his love letter to fatherhood and country. And despite the conspicuous reluctance to play advocate by decrying the Trump-era malaise or even engaging with the racial politics of his film, he’s still one of America’s most important directors – especially in this epoch of hokum and decimated literacy. Like him, pan him, indict him, debate his place amongst America’s finest but when you talk about American film history at the makeshift schools of Athens or film clubs; you will talk about the father Altman and his son Paul.

Paris — a pan to the hands of a few curiosities armed with phones. The Louvre is a province of flashes, digital votive candles. A smorgasbord of seeing. A unison of experience. They are looking at Da Vinci’s piece de resistance. They will be photographed, embossed into a virtual mise en abyme. Our future belongs to the watchers of watchers.

Lagos — someone is always writing about the so-called contentification of everything. The suffix “-ification” has long since lost valence, dragged through the trail of discourse by the makeshift intelligentsia affix novelty to a common social phenomenon. That very observation about the suffix misuse, at the risk of leaning into the unbearably meta, exhibits a need to counter a misrecognition of novelty with false essayistic novelty. What often accompanies this battle of the witless is not only the absence of conversation but a continuation of the trance — a state of constant admiration for the sheen of manufactured idiocy. A worship of selfhood.

I had the pleasure of attending the 234 art fair a while ago with a couple of friends. It was one of those Saturdays on Lagos mainland. Minimal traffic. A mild stench of industrial waste. A transient moratorium on the city's agony. Heads and bodies orienting towards heads and bodies. It was a great day to see art and I was with my friend Ifeoluwa. Inside the fair, art bedecked walls and sculptures stood in nooks, every booth was populated, a confluence of eyes gazing rapidly at Africa's finest while the body of the crowd performed its own exhibition. Phones rose almost instinctively, like extensions of hands. A painting would catch the eye, but the gesture that followed was rarely deep contemplation. I recall staring at a painting that evoked a hybridization of Fauvism and Cubism only to be asked to abdicate the space by what I assumed was a content creator who thought I was in her shot.

“Why is this one looking at the painting?” She says.

I bit my tongue. Recalling my oath to my inner governance.

From the edge of the fair one was reminded of the famous scene in Don Delillo's White Noise, where tourists gather around the most photographed barn in America. No one seems entirely sure what the barn looks like anymore; they photograph it because it has already been photographed. Something similar hovered over the rooms that afternoon. The works were there, certainly, but so too was the quiet understanding that the experience had to pass through the camera first. Models, content creators, citizen muckrackers all eating from the capitalistic cake, aestheticizing the small worlds of new-school craftsmen. Art and spectatorship fused into a single chimera-esque reflex: to look, to frame, to record oneself looking, to document oneself as erudite but to ultimately the worst kind of dilettante ; a fraud.

This isn't to recklessly claim that I am the chosen one — different from the flock of superficial lambs. I know how I sound when I talk about the dearth of thought or the digital and real-time convening Thackerayan festival of nonces. It's a very anti-fun stance that engenders questions about how much I've made from thinking or why I think I'm different from the scoundrels who just want to take some pictures. Why I hate fun. Why can't I let people have fun?— the thing is, given the status quo, the time for fun, total entertainment forever or the dopaminergic everlast is over. We had our share of that in 2019 before we experienced the truest of brinks. Despair deepens when you watch people forget to be enthralled by the beauty and hideousness of an art event. Regardless of what anyone thinks, it's infinitely better to pretend to care than it is to blatantly disregard the depth in the ways of seeing in service of the photograph and the algorithmic god. Not to get too debordian about the spectatorship of the Nigerian mind but ours is more than just the artifice of the representation or the worship of the spectacle. It's a kind of neo-primitivism — a distortion of imagination, an all-too passive acknowledgement of death. A passivity we cannot afford as our problems teeter toward institutional absurdism. Admittedly, art will not save us. Love will not save us. Putting our phones down will remind us of the old world and it will not save us. But we must never forget the shibboleths of looking. We were something before the ubiquity of the cameras. And the intractable beauty of our inventions will outlast our vanity.

With the current state of affairs it’s easy to feel a sense of monotony if your eyes are constantly on the mainstream facet of the Nigerian film industry. You lose sight of the ingenuity brewing in its nadir and obscure nooks — the DIY portion of it. But if you are attuned to the festival circuits and micro-cinema collectives currently inundating the industry you'll find that there are brilliant filmmakers existing outside the orthodoxy of the usual. Admittedly, it's a nigh-impossible task compiling a perfect list given the variety of new voices but herein are some of the filmmakers we feel you should keep an eye out for in the future.

WISDOM DEJI-FOLUTILE

Deji-Folutile made his mark on us at IFA’24 with a screening of his short film ABLE LEADER – a mockumentary about the baffling absurdity of our institutional malfeasances and the culture of impunity that pervades the Nigerian government on every level. Before helming the director’s chair Deji-Folutile cut his teeth as a journalist where he had a front row seat to direct news of the nation in all their farcical glory which would later serve as foundational material for his short film. Able leader is nigh sui generis, with overt influences of The Office in its use of cutaways and comedic timing reminiscent of HBO'S veep and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. If we are to someday have our own Dan Harmon with a political consciousness or Michael Annauci, Wisdom Deji-Folutile is our best bet.

IRE BELLES

Ireayooluwanitemi Anne Olota, professionally known as Ire Belles, is a filmmaker, writer, voice-over artist, and spoken word poet committed to telling stories with formal clarity and emotional dimension. Her short films Round, Finding Dede, and Awake indicate an interest in intimate narratives and the subtle transformations that occur in private spaces. Outside of directing, she has contributed to the sound departments of Netflix originals Blood Sisters and The Origin: Madam Koi Koi, grounding her understanding of cinema in the often overlooked mechanics of post-production.

Her work is guided by a poetic sensibility—one that seeks not sentimentality but resonance. For Belles, film becomes a conduit for reflection, solace, and imaginative release, a way of shaping interior worlds into images and sound. She is part of the new generation of Nigerian filmmakers building hybrid creative identities: equally fluent in performance, sound, and narrative construction, and committed to making work that is both accessible and formally deliberate.

ODUWOLE ADEBAYO.

Adebayo’s approach to filmmaking can be accurately encapsulated with one word : spielbergian . Specifically, Spielbergian with a fair volume of sentimentality and a vaudevillian visage. The Covenant University alumnus is far removed from the pedagogical rigidity he endured there; his creative instincts are attuned instead to the malaise and mirth of ordinary people wrestling with ordinary problems.

Adebayo began writing for film in 2019, working on student-led short projects that doubled as creative laboratories. MORDI (2019), a campus-set whodunnit, and H.O.P.E. (2021), staged within a group therapy session for rape survivors, signaled his early interest in character-driven tension and moral confrontation. A mockumentary followed before the project files were lost to a collaborator’s negligence—an anecdote now part of his personal filmmaking mythology.

Later in 2021, The SOFA— a psychodrama examining trauma coping and domestic violence,served as his turning point. The gap between the script’s intent and the film’s execution clarified to him that writing alone would no longer be sufficient; direction would be a necessary extension of narratorial authorship. That realization catalyzed a working relationship with filmmaker Ema Edosio-Deelen after they met at a screening of the film.

In 2023, at EbonyLife Creative Academy, Adebayo wrote The Last Sane Man in Lagos, which went on to win Best Script and Best Film—an affirmation not just of talent, but of artistic clarity. In December of that same year, he co-wrote When Nigeria Happens with Edosio-Deelen, later produced in mid-2024. Shortly after, he wrote, produced, and directed Deep Blue Grief—a film conceived years earlier—marking his first fully realized short with a public screening and accompanying art exhibition.

2024 became his industry consolidation year: writer’s rooms for Otiti (Afmag Original) and Debbie’s Salon (Afmag Family), followed by a YouTube feature project and a stint as a writer for the fifth season of Street Foodz Naija, expanding his on-set literacy across formats and audiences.

In 2025, Adebayo returned to the director’s chair with two shorts: And Then There Was One—a microfilm about migration anxieties and the erosion of communal intimacy—and When Tari Met Voke, a romantic short written by collaborator Praise Okeoghene Vandeh. His filmography, though nascent , reflects a filmmaker steadily defining his thematic concerns: the cost of tenderness, the private negotiations of survival, and the performance of resilience in everyday Nigerian life.

AGATHA DOOWUESE AKAAHAR

At just 23, Tiv filmmaker Agatha Doowuese Akaahar is part of a growing cohort of Nigerian directors redirecting attention towards the unexplored regions of narrative filmmaking. Her short BLACK SANDS, which screened at the ALLIANCE FRANCAIS in Lagos, turns its focus to a family in rural Benue State caught in the middle of a violent raid. The film follows two older siblings who hide their younger ones inside a water drum, sacrificing themselves in the process. Rather than staging the violence visually, the film stays inside the children’s perspective, allowing sound—muffled screams, footsteps, gunfire—to carry the emotional and narrative weight.

What distinguishes Black Sands from other films of its strain is its restraint. Akaahar avoids the journalistic sensationalism often associated with conflict cinema, favoring handheld camerawork, natural light, and an observational tone that foregrounds lived experience over conceited dramatization. Daily life—cooking yam, humming lullabies, household teasing—is given ample space before it is abruptly interrupted by the tumult of unrest. The result is a film that speaks to the Middle Belt crisis without converting it into polemic; the emphasis remains on memory, loss, and the quiet aftermath of violence.

Akaahar’s filmmaking is minimalist but assured. She understands the power of what remains unshown, and the ethical weight of representing violence without exploiting it. Black Sands marks her as one of the young independent filmmakers to watch—especially among those interrogating how personal history, regional identity, and political trauma intersect on screen.

KUFREABASI EYO

For Kufreabasi Eyo, filmmaking is the consummate act of defiance. A trained medical doctor who pivoted to cinema. Her debut short film Banana Boat, produced in Calabar—a city with little to no filmmaking infrastructure—is a creative triumph to say the least .

The film has had four screenings thus far , including one at her own Nocturna Film House in Calabar (with a Lagos branch launching soon), and others at Waf’s Home Movie Film Club, Family Film Club’s Film Therapy, and African Stories Untold’s Unreleased Movies. Banana Boat has also been selected for two festivals: Short Spotlight Film Festival and First-Time Filmmaker Sessions, Vol. 10.

Beyond filmmaking, Eyo is a film journalist, as she serves as the editor for Nocturna Film Reviews, where her keen insightful lens sharpens her creative instincts. Her background—oscillating around the sciences, content marketing, and social media—has bestowed her with a rare combination of technical precision and aesthetic sensitivity.

“I think film is the perfect art form,” she says, “because it involves writing, photography, fashion, performance, music—everything.” That synthesis of disciplines defines her work: cinema not just as craft, but as convergence—a meeting point for all the arts she loves.

IFEOLUWA OLUTAYO.

Filmmaker, critic, producer, scholar, co-founder of Screen in transit — a micro-cinema collective passionate about the sharing and preservation of African cinema. Wearing many hats in service of the arts Ifeoluwa Olutayo’s voice in contemporary African cinema is one of tremendous salience. With two short films (The canvas & All the places I once loved you) under his belt, Olutayo is a prominent voice in the film space whose cinematic prowess is on par with his trove of knowledge about African film history.

HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN IN JUSTYNA OBASI’S RITUAL

See the child — behold the boy. Encased in fabric, flamboyant, animalistic, cartoonish, wading through the cacophony of the market, the world's wanton logic and its gaze of primitive cruelty. He doesn't belong here. Some say he's an aberration. Some say he's a ghost. Justyna Obasi says he's just a boy.

Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity contends that identity is not a pre-given essence but a series of repeated acts that constitute the social reality of gender. In Ritual, Justyna Obasi translates this conceptual insight into the cinematic register in less than 5 minutes, observing masculinity not as a fixed attribute but as a contingent, ritualised process of constantly mutating. Set in the skeletal expanse of an unfinished Lagos building, in which Lagos itself is parsed as an alien city, something from an unknowable and an unknown future. The film follows a young man whose daily gestures — dressing, arranging cloth, tracing careful movements through space — operate as both inheritance and invention, repetition and self-definition.

Obasi’s camera privileges stillness and interiority, allowing each gesture to accrue symbolic weight. Masculinity is not performed through dominance or spectacle; it emerges in the disciplined attention to materiality, space, and bodily comportment. The folded garment, the precise motion of the body, the ritualised passage through sunlit corridors — these acts form a ceremonial ontology of manhood, one rooted in patience, care, and conscious engagement with inherited norms.

The unfinished building functions as a metaphorical counterpart to the protagonist’s interior landscape: both are incomplete, mutable, yet rigorously structured by architects that predate their existence. Here, Obasi interrogates the conditions of masculine existence, revealing it as a process rather than possession, shaped as much by vulnerability as by social expectation. Each repeated act is a negotiation between self-determination and expected inheritance, between the humdrum rhythms of daily life and the exerting of the weight of lineage.

Visually, Obasi renders the quotidian sacred. Through measured compositions and a deliberate pacing that mirrors ritual, the film transforms everyday gestures into a meditation on becoming. In doing so, Ritual situates this definition of masculinity within a philosophical frame of performativity, treating it as a living, mutable practice rather than a preordained state of being. The result is a film that is as much an inquiry into male subjectivity as it is an ode to the quiet rigour of embodied life.

Ritual is thus both a study and a proposition: to be a man is not to occupy a role or assert a position, but to enact — ritually, consciously — the architecture of one’s existence in dialogue with the dirge songs of the world.

Love liberates the despondent in Rete Poki’s Traces of the Sun.

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love - Frank O'Hara

In his book The Art of Loving (1956), German social psychologist Erich Fromm postulates love as a venture bereft of natural intuition and narcissism but rather as a craft that requires the stretch of our humanity, patience, kindness, intention, and time — sacrifice. On the surface, one might perceive this as a cliché known to all and by all, a fine sentiment we echo when we wax poetic about love and its varying possibilities: a lá love conquers all. But in an age where the technology for isolation outstrips our ability to mitigate against its compounding effects, the cracks are becoming more conspicuous. It's been increasingly difficult to practise that which we preach, especially in a country such as ours, where cynicism and scepticism are the emperors of our minds and love is just another ware in the kiosk. Rete Poki rebels against this state of affairs.

Traces of the sun tug at your heart — it utterly disarms you with its simplicity. Sparing no modicum of exploration through visual language and first-hand testimony of people speaking earnestly about the nature of love without the enshrouding poetry that allows people to avoid saying what they mean plainly. Two young lovers in a living room. A squad of friends. A community of people tethered to a divine social contract. A painter painting her friends — a craft stoked by parents who dedicated a wall to her childhood sketches. Generations of women with beaming smiles clustered together for a picture. Accounts about salvation by friends and family abound. Accounts about the resilience of lovers settle. Accounts about the foreignness of simple gestures. Rete Poki explores what is humanly possible when we decide to set aside gloom-ridden perspectives, difficult as it may be, to make way for kindness and compassion. In the end, the film echoes Fromm’s postulations on love, that it requires work and discipline and the full extent of ourselves. You leave feeling like the essence of that Rainer Rilke quote that is in itself the truest of counsels— let everything happen to you, all the beauty and the brutality.

Dominus (non est) tecum: The silence of God in Dika Ofoma’s God’s wife.

God’s Wife opens like a punch to the senses: hands twisting a rosary, the Marian prayer in Igbo spilling into the air, relentless and unheeded. A widow in white endures the ritual shaving of her head, flanked by two women whose expressions oscillate between judgment and sorrow. Her face is a ledger of grief—resignation, accusation, pity—all silently catalogued. She speaks to God, but God is mute. Her husband is gone. The culture around her is not. From the first shot, Dika Ofoma stakes out his territory: faith is personal, but its absence is overtly socio-political.

In fifteen taut minutes, Ofoma does what many a feature fails to: he makes silence roar. Nkiruka (Onyinye Odokoro) is trapped between catechism and custom, devotion and the brute entitlement of her brother-in-law. Tradition fills the void, speaking louder than prayer, and sanctions what would be intolerable if faith were answered. Here, divine silence is a participant in oppression, a Thomistic quandary rendered through ritual and body language. Obedience without accountability is power. Think of Bergman’s Winter Light (1963), Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), with the visual mien of Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952)

Ofoma’s command of cinematic rhythm is remarkable. The dialogue is spare; the prayers repeat; the camera lingers on eyes, hands, small gestures. He is economical but never frugal—every frame carries significant weight. It’s Hemingway’s iceberg applied to film: what is off-screen, unspoken, or ritualised communicates more than words ever could. Silence is not absence but an ecclesiastical machinery where authority exerts itself, and the audience feels the gravity of God’s muteness.

Odokoro is magnetic. She speaks little, prays incessantly, and carries the interior life of grief in a posture, a glance, a barely parted lip. The tension is in her restraint, the slow accumulation of despair. Music is almost absent, sound design naturalistic; the world is quiet, but the quiet hums with a suspenseful dread. By letting the environment assert itself and giving the performance room, Ofoma ensures that faith and its limits are an experiential reality. God does not intervene in the affairs of culture.

Dika Ofoma’s compositional intelligence is unmistakable. Recurrent shots frame Nkiruka alongside other women—her mother, her daughter, as labourers, threading the narrative into a cycle of tradition, patriarchal and unyielding. The past, present, and future of cultural imposition are contained in a single frame. Ofoma’s directorial insight is in this clarity that it was ever thus with the women of this land. Each of them is fated to be fodder in the tussle between antiquated ideals and catechism.

By the final moments, the hands that once prayed may have shifted purpose—agency, defiance, vengeance—yet the Marian prayer lingers, faint and unanswered. Silence has become law, God’s absence an apparatus of authority. God’s Wife is a short film that has the makings of a feature: a meditation on power, faith, and obedience that leaves the viewer not comforted, but alert, unsettled, and aware of the quiet complicity embedded in silence.

KHALIL AGBOOLA'S HAPPY TIMES AND THE UNRELIABILITY OF TESTIMONY.

In his 1994 text titled Akira Kurosawa and the intertextual cinema, James Goodwin says this of RASHOMON

“The multiple versions of the crime do not form a relativistic mosaic in which all truths are equal. Rather, they constitute a struggle for narrative and moral authority. Each speaker reshapes events to preserve a coherent image of the self, and it is this desire for self-coherence—rather than the impossibility of truth itself—that generates contradiction”

This thesis is effectively portrayed in Khalil Agboola's Happy Times. With a duration of 19 minutes, what unravels is a story that negates itself. Two men, one woman, two crimes, multiple perspectives and the dissolution of truth. The visual grammar: static shots, economical blocking, a well-timed cross dissolve portraying the interior contention of a character and a freeze frame restraining the dispensing of violence — all indicating a competent filmmaker alongside a DOP (Unwana Uteh) with ample understanding of cinematic form and the function of the image.

The Rashomon effect is fundamental to Agboola's short film, but he also draws from the oeuvre of Joana Hogg, Max Ophüls and (arguably) the king of formalism himself, Alfred Hitchcock. He's concerned with the inescapability of contradictions— the unreliability of impassioned testimony. That desired effect is achieved when the camera, sterile and pliant, is made to oscillate between sceptical subjectivity and near-factual objectivity. Consequently, you are tossed in the synthetic throes of truth and untruth presented, doubting the matrix of credibility, on the platter of film's traditional elements: the image, the camera movement and the montage. If films are canned dreams, then Khalil Agboola's Happy Times might be the stuff dreams are made of.

RACHEL SEIDU TAKES ON THE ALLEGORY OF LIFE AND DEATH IN THE EVENING, WAITS PATIENTLY FOR MY ARRIVAL.

A boy awakes to the sleeping world, one fraught with the association of routine and a department of dates and simple gestures that indicate a life. He marks a date on a calendar. He is waiting for something unspeakable. He partakes in the dance of hygiene and fashion. He steps into the fray of a buzzing planet, the marketplace of life where he's known by all and loved by most, where his guardian angel awaits with celestial poise. He partakes in the trade — he buys food and ropes for a noose. Man's diet is after all meals and death. His garbs are complimented albeit slightly anachronistic, depending on whom you ask. He kisses other boys in the sizzling glow of club lights, bereft of the penitent’s burden. He's fated to die tomorrow. If the gods are kind, they'll make him anew.

At first glance, Rachel Seidu’s film is rendered through this persistence of obscurity, relying on the heaviness of metaphor a lá reincarnation within Yoruba cosmology and proverbial didacticism. But it is a simple story of life and death, a story about the nigh-preternatural nature of queerness and the unsayable density of the body. She uses her environment — Ogba in the city of Lagos for visible realism and a device to contrast inner alienation with the riotous external. Coupled with the intentionally muffled sounds of dialogue that keep us at a distance, enough to preserve our objectivity, Rachel Seidu creates an allegory within an allegory with an ultimate function. She does not play it safe. And perhaps by sheer coincidence or intention, she alludes to a line from an Emily Dickinson poem; Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves.

dispatches from the ennet house. 

What's to be said about the great American novel twice denied that hasn't been said by refined minds and scholarly brains that surpass me? — nothing. But I find myself here again, in the dark waters of the unapologetic tome that sits on the nightstand of America's most literate white men, enchanted by the opacity of it. Anchored to the liturgical decorations appended to each sentence and footnote. The nature of Infinite jest is almost biblical, as if written by a prophet on acid or a vaticinator inflicted with the burden of documenting the future to come. I am not American but the novel —any novel worth its pretentious existence in the genus of beauty — transcends those diseased United States. 

Much like Pynchon, Franzen, Phillip Roth, Helen DeWitt to name a few, as a reader I have a nagging preoccupation with metaphysical calcification in the eye of international absurdity. I am particularly enlivened by the virile novel. Infinite jest fits into that olympus. It's a novel that rejects plot — not in the sense of defying the rules of storytelling but in the sense that there's a meandering that happens when you try to summarize the novel. Is it about addiction? Is it about the proliferation of vapid entertainment? Is it about the poetics of tennis? Is it about fathers and sons? Is it about the architecture of a family? Or is it about Hal Incandeza’s disillusionments and ennui? Fragmentation? And so forth. You end up with the saccharine, stating that it's just about being human in all the battered glory of being a sentient bipedal creature walking the earth. 

My relationship with Wallace as a writer is purely cerebral. He was a detestable man. He was also an intelligent man. These features are not symbiotic but it is imperative that as readers we are able to rid ourselves of the neo-infantalization often induced by theatrical morality. What he intuited about entertainment and technology and the collective technophilia of our species is nigh-accurate. Which goes to show that sometimes your Nostradamus can be the devil, a complicated man, a stalker, a wife beater. Does it muddy the waters of reason? Yes. Such sins must give us pause. But I treat Infinite jest as a piece of history that transcends the posthumous celebrity of the novelist. It achieves what Samuel Butler’s words could not — it enjoins the perspicacious amongst us to probe our addictions, a little gods, our ironies — our indelibly paralyzing fear of being human. 

We are here, in the grave of the universe, surrounded by heads and bodies. 

For she said in herself, If I should only touch the hem of his garment, I shall be saved — Matthew 9:21

Every epoch is destined to set God ablaze. Not in the Nietzschean sense of collapsed modernity but in the overreliance on artificial liturgy. Every epoch exhausts its constructed metaphysics, rendering theological transcendence obsolete and inconvenient. Across the interdenominational Bible belt of Nigeria, God's detritus is scattered disproportionately across lands — rotting, excavated by the clergymen and the faithful for miracles, for a taste of heaven or a salve for the crisis of being. On every street you can hear the declarative wails of a preacher against the emergence of prehistoric evil, you can hear the riotous shrieks of the downtrodden hoi polloi oriented towards the sky. A miracle. They are summoning a miracle from a dead god. 

Friends and denizens in the Nigerian film milieu who know me are aware of my admiration for Michael Omonua, my favourite member of surreal’16 film collective. His short film Rehearsal (2022) has doggedly planted itself in my cognitive unconscious since seeing it three years ago. Filmed at Lagos's National Theater, this 14-minute short presents the spectacle of Nigerian Pentecostal miracle healings, in a cinema veritè-esque mode, with the theatricality that is imbued in them. We observe the production apparatus: auditions, script revisions, the brutal editing process where unconvincing performances are discarded. The valence of the story unfolds when a preacher's predatory behavior toward a congregant intrudes on this meticulously orchestrated interior world.

As a Nigerian you are no stranger to the televangelists and healers who posture as arbiters of a monopolized holy ghost. At every church revival and vigil, there's someone, none the wiser, hoping the man of God with a suit more expensive than their annual rent defies the principles of nature with the name of Christ. Omonua’s film peels the layers of this lavish simulation and the manufacturing of consent that is furtively woven into the stagecraft. The film presents itself as a counterfactual statement to the claim that we are God's nation. There is also, perhaps as an epiphenomenon, a bleak reminder that we have been abandoned, that we are victims of a divine carnage. Fittingly, it was shot at the National theatre; further legibilizing the nigh-baudrillardian dramaturgy of worship and miracles, parsing the Abrahamic God as merely a mythological gambit on the lectern that serves as a means to an insidious end. It's hard for me not to constantly think of Omonua’s thesis here, as we grapple with quotidian spiritual erosion and economic discontent — we need to, now more than ever, deify reason and make it our new opium. The Internet is inundated with men who claim to have been touched by God spewing tenuous apologetics, neoliberalist ideologies in tandem with charlatanism. All of this is done as some of them harm women and get a slap on the wrist because we must touch not thine anointed. It's blasé and tediously iterative to say that we must emancipate ourselves from the cultic vagaries of religion but we must at the very least recognise the signifiers of the simulacrum. I want to believe that's Omonua's cinematic thesis with Rehearsal — a recognition of our social reality and a freedom, if possible, from Jesus' bastard sons. 

Nothing good comes from the venture of shouting intelligent commentary at the clown show . If you are a writer, critic, artist, thinker of any merit you'll learn this faster when you question what makes the contemporary Nigerian audience cheer. It's a lesson you are going to learn the hard way, a necessary crucible that reaffirms what you have always suspected about the IQ per capita of this fine nation.A suspicion I shall avoid  reiterating here because it’s not worth the contention. I learned my lesson when I wrote a piece on my substack about a particular famous contemporary artist’s cornucopia of paintings — the same avoidance shall be instituted here as I treat said artist like Harry Potter’s nemesis or a preternatural entity whose invocation is forbidden by Apollo himself. Look, no one enjoys the diatribe of the so-called untalented, never mind that criticism is beyond the churning of polemical verbiage — but I was subjected to glaring display of anti-intellectualism and a disappointing exhibition of an artist who wants to “unite” the world with their ancient cow of a painting. I was famous for a while, a provocateur of sorts, speaking truth to power, like Lester Bangs in the seventies slicing down Black Sabbath. But I despised the quality of dissent I witnessed —it had a neutralizing effect on my flailing trust in the bona fides of the new brains in consumer society. Truth be told, pardon my french,we are truly fucked.

To “unfuck” ourselves we have to stop worshipping money. That much is obvious. We also need to alienate gratuitous mercy. Gratuitous mercy isn't optimism, it's the sub-engine of echo chambers, a gathering of Brown-noses and ass-kissing bonding over the comprising intellectual purity or the right to dissent. The writer, the thinker, the journalist, the critic is often the scapegoat — everybody wants a piece of the pretentious twat in the room who fancies himself a hipster academic. Being a broke one rarely helps your case in the republic of bad taste. It's a masturbatory fancy , onanistic drivel, the lord's prayer of the philistine. For the good of all, I'll point out the obvious. The audience doesn't want art that demands anything from them —maybe they do but they seem timid about being human. They want entertainment that confirms what they already believe, packaged digestible chunks that require zero cognitive effort. They've been trained like Pavlov's dogs to salivate at the consecrated bell of instant comprehension, where every painting must announce its meaning through narrative before you've even finished looking at it, every poem must land like a fortune cookie aphorism or Mel Gibson rallying the troops in Braveheart, every novel must read like a screenplay waiting to be option or with minimal descriptions to spare you the arduous task of imagination.

This isn't true democratization of culture—it's the complete annihilation of aesthetic standards or just decent taste. Hyper-accessible art has its place but it is just capitalism wearing a progressive visage, the tipping point of the imagination where complexity is rebranded as elitism and difficulty as gatekeeping. The contemporary audience, Nigerian or otherwise, has been conditioned to treat anything that requires sustained attention as an act of violence against their precious time. They want art that does all the work for them, pre-digested pabulum that slides down easily into their gastrointestinal system and disappears just as fast.

Forgive the saccharine sermon but art —the kind that actually matters or we hope matters —resists you. It demands. It doesn't give a fuck about your comfort level or your need for immediate validation. But we've constructed a cultural economy where resistance equals irrelevance, where the artist who refuses to simplify is labeled pretentious, out of touch, unmarketable. The result? An endless parade of safe, neutered work designed for maximum virality and minimum friction. And when you dare suggest that maybe mediocrity shouldn't be celebrated just because it's popular? You become the enemy, persona non grata.The snob. The bitter failed artist who just doesn't understand that "art is for everyone." As if accessibility and quality were the same thing. As if pandering to the lowest common denominator was somehow a virtue rather than a surrender.We're drowning in content engineered for instant consumption and immediate disposal, and calling it culture. There's nothing anyone can do about it now. Outside — they are hanging the muckrackers and throwing brains on the street. They are so happy to be insulated and numb and rich. Amusing themselves to death.

Don Delillo wrote that all plots move deathwards but the plot of this community forged by Chukwu’ Martin, Georgina Duke and Moses Ipadeola is waltzing into a grander scale with no tipping point on horizon ceteris paribus. It's been a long time coming ; a Nigerian film milieu not beholden to the wiles and ornaments of mainstream nollywood, an living apparatus that allows from real-time feedback to new filmmakers cutting their teeth with paltry experience, nigh-zero wherewithal and the true DIY spirit that is the lifeblood of any indie scene. The 2025 edition, organized under the thematic frame IFA IS HOME, is indicative of an advertent shift from routine annual programming toward an articulation of IFA’s long-term cultural ambitions. The emphasis on “home” signals an attempt to creatively consolidate Ibadan as a ferocious intellectual environment for independent filmmakers, one that resists the centrifugal pull of Lagos-Laden film production. This year’s edition extends beyond exhibition to include workshops, critical dialogues about the state of film and film theory, and the plans for an official IFA Journal designed to archive the festival’s formative years while documenting the trajectory of Ibadan’s independent film scene in real-time. Collectively, these developments suggest a transition from an emergent quasi-festival to institutional infrastructure — an effort to construct the unified memory, discourse, and continuity required for a sustainable alternative cinema culture in Nigeria.

It is writ large in the films curated and in the atmosphere that steadies the three-day event. Filmmakers are subjected to questions from critics, journalists, and enthusiasts alike. Criticism, for Chukwu’ Martin (HOME and WE DANCED AND DANCED , his films or rough plays as he calls them also screened) remains an inviolable component of the craft. He reiterated this when I caught up with him for a brief conversation before the award ceremony, a performance by resident balladeer Tega Ethan, and the screening of Ema Edosio’s When Nigeria Happens, a film I reviewed earlier this year. We also spoke about the challenges that shaped this year’s execution of IFA. Time, he admitted, was the foremost constraint—and once you step into the fray, you realise how much of a village it takes. Vendors, photographers, the amiable Keona Uwenmbeni the project manager who barely sat down till the encore.

“Time wasn’t a resource we had on our side. Physical meetings, orientations, planning. Collaboration has mitigated the need for funding. We also plan on eventually investing in filmmakers. But above all, we are trying to curate an experience where film and film criticism take center stage every year. We want this to be a place where people can learn without timidity or aversion to critique. We want to be true to the indie spirit.”

The indie spirit: you can feel it in the crisp air and the winds cutting across the hill—clusters of some of our finest minds and cognoscentis holding impassioned discussions about the state of cinema, even Third Cinema, with a seriousness rarely afforded in contemporary spaces. Every conversation I partook in or overheard was refreshingly devoid of the usual performative politeness that marks corporate-sponsored events. There was to a degree a democratization of intellectual thought — I even had the gall to tell a filmmaker who seemed pretty accomplished not to answer questions that required him to elucidate on his film and he took it in good stride without so much as an inkling of visceral antagonism. Friendships were forged without the ill-intent of solely networking and conversations were had without the eerie elephant of forced politeness. The most remarkable image to me was that of the children’s session— they hosted kids fromTotal Parental Guidance Orphanage, Ibadan . They arrived just before the final screenings commenced. Seeing their heartening faces enchanted by the psychochemical magic of motion picture, made through the labor of love and limited wherewithal, from my vantage point put things in perspective. Past the buzzing chatter about film theory and lighting choices, underwhelming establishing shots and whether or not dialogue was circuitous, image semiotics — you forget that you reside in a system fueled by the perverse, like those children you let yourself be decimated by beauty and tragedy of stories and you submit yourself to the home of a new kind of cinema dancing on the seven hills.

I'll see you next year.

God is a verb in a comic book.

I’ll spare you the details of my epiphanies but I am –like all my compatriots– plagued by western individualism and cosmic pessimism. The need to be alone, the urge to seek certainty in the many-postulate structure of the universe,the material constitute of love, the forward fall of decay. I have traversed the texts of dead in an experience one can only describe as the hazards of truths without legible meaning but thus far I have only found a salve to the alpha-unsolvable in the 2-d projections of a comic book. This is tremendously embarrassing.

Eschatology is a wave-form in Hickaman’s secret Wars.A wave-form embedded with the theatrical violence expected of event comics, the story contains its events with the sterile calm of a system recognizing its own grand failure. Universes drift toward each other, collide, and fold into red haze. People feel the hitherto intractable architecture of their cities ripple before the collapse becomes visible. Hickman writes the apocalypse as though he has been rehearsing it for years. Ribić draws it like a slow shutter, the kind of image that captures motion by refusing to freeze time.

Hickman had been sketching these omens across his Avengers run. The incursions felt less like plot devices than like background data—persistent signals that something fundamental had started to unravel. The multiverse carried too much history, too many parallel logics pressing against one another. A system overclocked until its structure began to sweat. His heroes sit in rooms full of screens, reading the future through numbers they can no longer interpret. The veneer of problem-solving remains, but the decisions feel like rituals meant to disguise helplessness.

Systems collapse when they lose the ability to forget. Even cosmic ones.

Doom’s World and the Burden of Memory

Once the universe ends, something unnatural rises in its place. Battleworld. A smogasbord of surviving fragments arranged by one Victor von Doom. The territories are structurally incongruous. Their borders feel like geographical errors, stitched with the precision of a man terrified of losing the the tethers ofthe past. Doom becomes a god-curator with absolute power, a sovereign whose authority resembles a nervous archivist guarding a private museum.

Hickman presents Doom with a kind of cool distance. He is not a villain in the theatrical sense, but a presence, a deified consciousness shaped by the weight of too much preservation. Everything he has saved becomes a reminder of what he fears to release. The result is a world that feels suspended, as if someone pressed pause on the metaphysics of time. Nietzsche’s eternal return reimagined as a zoning law of sorts in a city where the seat of power is the function of a warped reality.

Battleworld unfurls with the unease of a system that knows its rules are artificial. Citizens go about their routines with the intuition that something has stalled — that something is amiss in the constellation of nature.

Poisoned Philosophy in Ruins

The philosophical undercurrent in Secret Wars is difficult to miss. Hickman’s Illuminati, once tasked with solving cosmic crises, drift into a form of Arendtian despair. Their authority folds inward; their decisions become self-consuming. They produce diagrams, equations and models. Every solution collapses into the next catastrophe. Bureaucracy expands to the size of a pantheon, and still nothing improves.

The incursions resemble DeLillo-esque writing with its venture into bewildering background noise as a device —persistent, low-frequency reminders that the world’s machinery is winding down and on the precipice of grinding to a halt . The collapse of the multiverse mirrors the exhaustion and attributes of late-modern systems: a saturation point where nothing new or innovative can emerge, a place where the refusal to end becomes its own pathology. Battleworld embodies this exhaustion. Doom saves everything only to strip it of vitality.

The difference between preservation and creation becomes the central philosophical tension of the story.

Reed Richards and the Ethics of the Possible

Reed Richards emerges as Doom’s counterpoint. His quietness reads not as restraint but as a mind slightly out of phase with language. He is a man who understands structures beyond human range, yet speaks as if aware that words arrive too slowly for him. If Doom is the curator of memory, Reed is the architect of the possible.

Their confrontation is staged like a metaphysical argument rather than a battle. Doom insists he did all that could be done with the remnants of existence. Reed tells him he did not imagine enough. It is a simple critique with devastating reach. Doom rebuilt a world that reflected his limits. Reed would have risked a world he could not fully articulate.

Kierkegaard’s notion of despair hovers over the exchange: the refusal to become oneself, the refusal to expand the horizon of possibility. Doom’s despair is monumental. He recreates the universe only to render it small.

Reed offers a contrasting ethic. Creation requires vulnerability. It requires opening oneself to futures that cannot be controlled. He accepts this without flourish, almost as if it were a basic scientific principle.

The Event is the event

Secret Wars fulfills its corporate mandate—continuity cleaned up, histories folded, the world reset. Yet the heart of the book lies elsewhere. It is a holmesian study of endings, of systems suffocating under their own density, of creators who must choose between control and openness. Hickman writes with the sleuth-like detachment of someone watching a machine power down, aware that the sound of shutdown is a kind of music but he is sentimental enough to infuse it with stakes that resonate on a microcosmic scale.

Doom wants a world he can perfectly understand. Reed chooses a world he cannot predict with the composite of pure analysis. The difference between them is the difference between nostalgia and possibility, between the curated past and the uncertain future. Two sides of the same coin dancing in the machinations of the only constant that predates god — entropy. Beginnings.Endings. Ordained collapse.

The universe ends. The universe begins. The cycle continues, but something in its rhythm has shifted in the flow of the ouroboric apparatus .

Hickman leaves a question in our palms, quiet enough that the reader must lean into it:

What does a universe owe its future?

Perhaps only this: the willingness to let the old world die, and the courage to let the next one surprise us.

The dimensions of my face… our faces are now under intense hostage negotiation. Not with age, genetics, or inheritance. Those negotiations used to be final. The current negotiation is with a visual order that has become planetary: the global marketplace of faces. This marketplace has a preferred look—smooth, bright, symmetrical. A face that circulates anywhere and offends no one. A face with little history. I call it the faceware. The faceware is a corollary of the filtered-face which is also just an academic way to avoid the indictment of Snapchat. I define the faceware was a constructed orthographic and eurocentric projection of what technocrats who desire to mould the world in their projected image believe you must look like.

It is no accident or stroke of serendipity that generative AI “beautification” lightens skin, narrows noses, brightens eyes, softens hair texture, sharpens jawlines, and blurs pores. The algorithm did not invent these preferences; it absorbed them from your troves of parameters and notions. The software extracted the faceware from the grand archive, and the grand archive is not neutral, it's not Switzerland — it's Nazi Germany in the war against rightful disparity. What is being funneled and precipitated is a meticulous accumulation of who has been photographed, admired, and allowed to be seen without apology. We have sufficiently remodelled the zenith of beauty in a pagoda that houses all our living idols.

But this visual order is not merely cultural. It is economic. I have my reservations about some argue that we are living in a technofeudal environment — where users do not own their data, their images, or their likenesses. Platforms own the superinfrastructure of visibility. The face has become property that we manage but do not own. The beautified face is the rent we pay to remain legible inside corporate platforms that function like walled estates and colonies. Our faces circulate within systems that reward compliance with inherited beauty standards. The more a face conforms, the more reach and recognition it receives. Visibility itself becomes a form of tribute.

In this sense, the universal face is not just an aesthetic default. It is a platform default. We could very well posit that this is just the marching continuity of capitalism but it's difficult not to parse it as a fiefdom of algorithmic overlords battering the labour of beauty for en masse conformity.

These platforms do not distribute visibility evenly. Their design logic produces fascism — technofascism if you will: not fascism in uniform or slogans a lá the third reich or of Mussolonian wrath , but in the enforcement of sameness where your face is erroneously categorised as the scourge of modern art. A hard totalitarianism of appearance. This system does not need to command you to look a certain way. It simply withholds attention from faces that deviate from the prerequisite.

In doing so, colorism and facial standardization travel quietly. Users may not notice the shift by virtue of it being utterly imperceptible. We are standing too close to the elephant on the screen and that makes us clueless to the game in the server rooms. They simply see an image that the platform rewards. “Better” becomes whatever draws more likes. The platform trains desire.

Preference does not begin in isolation. It has lineage and now it has an algorithm.

The faceware descends from colonial portraiture, magazine retouching, Hollywood glamour, music videos, and global advertising — but now, the infrastructure of distribution is owned by a handful of companies. The face does not belong to the person wearing it so much as the system hosting it.

The shift remains ever subtle: a shade brighter, a fraction slimmer, a softened texture. The goal is not to become another person. The goal is to become processable — a face that passes smoothly across borders of taste, platform, nation, and class.

People, especially millennials with a hard-on for LinkedIn (disappointing generation, I must say) beautify images because a face is social currency. But in a so-called technofeudal world, currency is not used to buy freedom; it is a fiat for permission. The beautified face is the passport to being seen without being penalized.

This is the concentricity of logic; the racial logic inside the beauty logic inside the platform logic.

Some faces are assumed to belong. Others must qualify.

So when someone uses AI to refine their face, they are not simply seeking beauty. They are trying to avoid exclusion. They are trying to remain visible in a system where invisibility means silence.

This is not vanity. It is survival disguised as aesthetic participation even when it comes off as simply tinkering with new technology or being enchanted by the wonders of code. A peculiar quest for physical perfection is covertly interspersed with the enchantment.

Even “natural” has become theoretical. The edited face becomes the expected face. Surgeons now report that clients bring AI-enhanced images of themselves. The body begins to chase the simulation.

At the center of this is a truth that is difficult to say plainly:Beauty is not the point. They are trying to avoid being unacceptable and that which is unacceptable has been defined in no uncertain terms racially, historically, and now algorithmically.

The beautified image is not evidence of vanity. It is evidence of a world that treats certain faces as evolutionary errors. The technology is new; the insecurity is inherited; the enforcement is automated.

The original face remains in the mirror or in a painting locked way as seen in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Unedited. Not lacking. Simply refusing to perform. A face that stands outside the marketplace and the platforms. Outside the feudal estate. Outside the if/else calculus

A face that does not pay tribute to the god-interface or the gaming of impressions. You are not obligated to love that face or bear arms against the red glare of artificial intelligence. The ascendancy of technology shall always outstrip the abstraction of human thought under the dome of capitalism but you have the agency to own your ugliness without the dance of corporate-sponsored ads about body positivity. You have the responsibility to map out the natural geometry of your face before it takes your mouth and leaves you with the aching urge to scream into the reactor of souls.

“I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.”

— Seamus Heaney, Follower

They fuck you up

your mom and dad - Philip Larkin, This be the verse.

A shadow of the father: Heaney imagined it as inheritance, as weight and longing. Akinola Davies Jr’s My Father’s Shadow begins from a similar silhouette, but in Nigeria, 1993, the shadow is not broad and reassuring. It is fractured, elusive, the darkened outline of a man who reappears only to disappear again.

The film’s story is deceptively slight. Two young boys (Godwin Chimerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo) live in a rural village with their mother when their father, Fola (Sope Dirisu), suddenly returns. He offers no explanation for his absence, only paternalistic authority. He demands obedience in clipped “Yes, daddy,” and “No, daddy,” then insists they accompany him back to Lagos.

What follows is less a road movie in the Kerouac style and more of a slow initiation into jarring disappointment: a bus without petrol, a truck ride over battered roads, endless waiting for wages that never arrive.

Davies constructs Lagos as a cauldron of memory and threat. Soldiers’ faces loom in tight, intimidating close-ups, expressionless visage of organized power. Polo ponies clatter absurdly through the streets, their presence mocking the omnipresent poverty that surrounds them. The boys stare at the National Theatre, a once-grand building that carries a revelation: their mother was once theatre-mad, spending all her time and money there.

For the children, this is an initiation, not only into their father’s world and wound but into the fragments of a mother they never knew. The city teaches them that adulthood is built on hidden histories, on institutions that promise wonder and deliver ruins of wonder.

Fola himself is both captivating and unreliable. Dirisu plays him with charisma that slips constantly into recognisable menace. He laughs too hard, his eyes linger on a waitress, and his body is wracked with unexplained nosebleeds. He is affectionate but evasive, confident albeit visibly unraveling. The boys watch with an admixture of awe and unease, absorbing lessons about manhood that arrive tainted: to provide is to disappear, to love is to withhold, to protect is also to wound.

The film’s most piercing moment comes when the elder son repeats his mother’s explanation: that their father left because he needed to earn money, because he loved them. And if God, too, is absent yet loves them, is absence itself a kind of love? The question sits in the film like a bulwark. It reframes everything: the father’s distance, the nation’s betrayals, even the silence of God as absence remodelled as unwavering devotion. Davies never resolves it. He lets it hang, echoing across the images, shaping the story’s rhythm.

This refusal to answer is central to My Father’s Shadow. The film resists the conventional arc of reunion and reconciliation. There is no cathartic moment, no final embrace that redeems the years of neglect. Instead, the children inherit fragments: a glimpse of their mother’s past, their father’s vulnerabilities, the sheer density of a city they do not yet understand. They inherit the knowledge that fathers are often present only in disappearance, that love is often articulated after the fact.

Set against the political backdrop of 1993, the film’s private drama resonates with collective history. Nigerians cast their votes that year in what should have been a turning point, only for the election to be annulled by the military. Hope was suspended, deferred indefinitely. In the same way, the boys’ hope for their father’s presence is deferred, displaced into shadows. The personal and the political mirror each other: wages withheld, elections annulled, affections interrupted.

Davies’ visual style emphasizes this suspension. His camera lingers on faces in close-up, not to provide clarity but to insist on opacity. Crowds become overwhelming, soldiers inscrutable, even the father unreadable. The city is never conquered; it swallows those who enter. For the boys, Lagos is both dazzling and crushing; it exudes space that overwhelms them with information yet denies them comprehension.

The performances of the Egbo brothers are crucial. They carry the film with quiet restraint, their eyes speaking what their voices cannot. Like many child actors in the best cinema, they are less performers than witnesses. They do not explain; they absorb. Their silence becomes the film’s true language, their bewildered stares the medium through which Davies asks us to confront the limits of love, presence, and inheritance.

What the film refuses, above all, is consolation. In another director’s hands, My Father’s Shadow might have ended in reconciliation, a family restored against the odds. Davies denies us this fantasy. Instead, he ends in suspension, with absence still unaccounted for, with the boys carrying questions that cannot be answered. It is a braver, more truthful gesture: life rarely provides closure, and love is rarely simple enough to resolve in a single embrace.

This is why My Father’s Shadow lingers. It is not a film of catharsis but of recognition. Recognition that in Nigeria, in 1993 and still today, fatherhood is often shaped by economic precarity and political betrayal. Recognition that absence is not the opposite of love, but it's a condition that we often name as love when it can no longer be touched. Recognition that shadows, though insubstantial, are what we inherit when presence fails.

Davies has made a debut of intelligence and restraint, one that moves between the personal and political with uncommon fluidity. He avoids sentimentality, avoids spectacle for its own sake, and instead gives us fragments: a watch glimpsed in the final shot, a theatre that once mattered, a child’s unanswered question. Out of these fragments, he builds not a full picture but a haunting silhouette, in which the children, and the audience, must learn to dwell.

My Father’s Shadow is a film about sons and fathers (if I were to re-title I'd title it that as a D. H Lawrence reference) but it is also a film about a nation that has become a father-imago in the jungian sense, about an interventionist God that's entertained by our provincial woes or the lack of , about the interstitial spaces between presence and disappearance. It asks: What do we inherit when the ones we love are split between places? And it answers, not with resolution, but with a blackness that lengthens itself into the anatomy of the ghosts of those who birth us.

Two things are true in heaven and earth: Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is about me and Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion is a film about people who have learned how to appear intelligent but forgotten how to live wisely.

Well? Same difference.

It opens like a comedy of manners and closes like a philosophical tragedy. Yang is not interested in moral failure as spectacle but as daily habit. He is interested in the slow albeit substantial domestication of conscience in a city that prizes civility over clarity. His Taipei hums with the econo-cultural optimism of the 1990s, yet everything in it feels provisional, as though the future,anthropomorphized and feared, was already exhausted.

The title is not ironic but diagnostic. Confucianism once promised moral coherence through social order; Yang’s characters inherit the vocabulary but not the conviction. Their confusion is not theological. It's in the realm of daily ethics: they wish to be decent without losing relevance. The old virtues of sincerity, righteousness, and propriety have been converted into makeshift slogans for modern success. In this society, the performance of goodness substitutes for its practice.

Yang treats this not as a sociological curiosity but as a metaphysical condition. His method, faithful to Bazin’s notion of cinematic realism, is to let time itself expose the contradictory nature of everything with frame. The long, unbroken takes hold their subjects accountable: no editing, no escape. When Molly, the theatre director, rehearses a parody of Confucian virtue, Yang’s camera observes without ridicule. The satire arises from the stillness. As the actors exaggerate moral platitudes, the audience feels the gap between intention and performance widening. The laughter is uneasy because it implicates us; we, too, recite principles we no longer inhabit

We invoke Deleuze, who postulated that modern cinema reveals the crisis of action — when characters think more than they do. A Confucian Confusion embodies this perfectly. Its professionals, artists, and lovers fill their days with the cocoon of the conversation. They explain, justify, and negotiate ad infinitum, but nothing really happens. The film’s Taipei is not chaotic but over-organized, westernised, a labyrinth of offices, apartments, and studios where conversation replaces consequence. Every space feels interchangeable, an “any-space-whatever” of suspended purpose.

The dinner sequence near the end distills Yang’s philosophy of dissonance. Multiple plotlines converge over polished tableware; everyone smiles, lies, and flatters in perfect order. The camera’s distance is merciless. It records the civility with anthropological precision, until laughter itself becomes a form of repression. Yang’s moral vision is not theatrical; it is architectural. He builds rooms where people trap themselves.

This detachment is not cynicism. There's no place for cynicism in the Yangian world. Yang does not mock his characters; he pities their clarity and dogged quest for it.

They are articulate without being self-aware, and that, for him, is the modern affliction. Taipei’s middle class, radiant in its professional polish, has replaced spiritual discipline with emotional management. A Confucian might once have sought harmony through virtue; Yang’s citizens achieve it through convergence and public relations. The substitution is complete when a lover’s quarrel sounds like a boardroom meeting, or when a moral doubt is resolved by a press release.

Yet the film never lapses into total despair. There are moments. Small, unguarded ones. Moments when sincerity reemerges despite the machinery of appearances. When Chin, the screenwriter, admits her unease with the direction of her own life, the silence that follows is unedited, uncomfortably long. Yang holds the shot until her confession ceases to sound like dialogue and becomes thought. It is in these intervals, between performance and collapse, that the film breathes.

Yang’s beauty lies in his refusal to sentimentalize clarity. He knows that modern confusion is not ignorance but excess — too many truths, too many buzzing systems competing for belief. His characters are not villains but victims of coherence. They crave order while living in a society that rewards fragmentation. His use of stillness, geometry, and temporal patience transforms this malaise into something almost sacred. Like Ozu, he locates emotion in restraint; like Antonioni, he understands alienation as a form of architecture. But where those directors mourned the loss of intimacy, Yang studies the loss of sincerity — a subtler and more contemporary decay.

If there is a philosophy to A Confucian Confusion, it is that civilization outpaces wisdom. The rituals of the moral life survive, but their spirit has fled. People still apologize, still bow, still talk about honour and duty but only as gestures, hollow rules of living without any metaphysical consequence. The tragedy, and perhaps the comedy, is that they continue to perform these gestures with unwavering earnestness . Yang in Yang fashion refuses to offer resolution because confusion, in his world, is not an error to be solved but a condition to be endured with grace and torture.

What saves the film from moral fatigue is its subtle tonality: lucid, ironic, humane. Yang observes his characters as one might observe relatives at a wedding — with affection tempered by disbelief. This ethical neutrality with the camera, rare in satire, gives the film its moral power. By not forcing judgment, Yang restores to the viewer the necessary burden of thought.

In the end, for me, the film closes not with revelation but with continuity. Life in Taipei resumes, as glossy and ambiguous as before. No one renounces their illusions, and no one is punished for them. Yet something has shifted, not in circumstance, but in the scope of perception. The viewer leaves with the uncomfortable awareness that confusion, honestly faced, might be the last remaining virtue.

Yang’s Taipei will always plague my subconscious. Those restaurants and Cafes with resplendent decor of modernity and renaissance scaffolding. Neon-tinged streets and the stench of economic prosperity in tandem with a mass skepticism. Those characters of the Whitmanian poetic maxim emboldened by the illogics of dreams and the death of the old ways. Those characters under the shimmering architecture of a city at odds with the thesis of the soul. The film leaves me wondering into the diameter of nothing. In search of a cosmic repossession. I'll never find it.

I don't know if you've noticed but long gone are the days when meaning or the making of meaning bore any salience to the conferred nomenclature of our decade. If you are on twitter (I refuse to call it x as an act of defiance) or anywhere that has the Internet’s coded stench you must have noticed the chilling inflection, the effect of the watershed moment, the seismic shift from methodical madness to entropic bedlam. No one knows for certain when it happened but we can dare to say that we are of many ages; the “postmodern”, the post-literate, the post-analogue, the post-post everything, the post-artist. Everything now exists in the daydream of analysis. We are in the age of visibility. This cauldron of the many-named malaise demands conspicuousness of us, a substantial participation in the alpha narrative barrelling toward the last breach of order. These ages, these signs of the times and decade of great clusterfuckery has changed art, medium,artist and audience.

Anthony Azekwoh’s wedding paintings illustrate this dilemma with unnerving grace. His figures glow with a kind of digitally sanctified light—Caravaggio if he had an Instagram filter merged with the searing rustic ennui of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The maiden installment in the series is the most striking. Aptly titled The Bride, the halo-like chiarascuro behind the woman calls you into the hitherto unbridled despair within her. She doesn't care to tell you what transpired at the party, you are safe to assume, you are permitted to form your conjectures but the most one could ever do is watch without knowing what truly happened. The bride rejects the sleuth and the dimestore ekphrasis. It rejects this very essay. It leaves me stuck but I feel pity. Everytime I stare at it, I don't want to hold her. I want to leave.

It's different for the subsequent paintings. They hover between devotion and display, between intimacy and cultural iconography. Seen together, the paintings resemble a dream too carefully remembered, their repetition both a comfort and a warning. They are moving, yes, but also a little too rehearsed. Their charm is deliberate, their ache engineered by us all. You can sense the painter’s hand searching for emotion but finding only its simulation. The paintings become the performance of feeling rather than its expression.

Roland Barthes would have seen this as the disappearance of what he called the punctum. That sudden detail in an image that pricks the viewer, that unsummoned truth which eludes the artist’s control. In Azekwoh’s case, the punctum is smoothed away by repetition. Serialisation immunises us against surprise. The studium, the part of art we can admire and analyse, remains intact, but the punctum—the wound, the mortal spark—has gone missing. We are left with the form of affection, minus its voltage.

John Berger foresaw this fatigue in our vision. “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” Yet when an artist serialises endlessly, that relation collapses. The viewer no longer encounters a painting; they recognise it. Each work arrives pre-interpreted by the one before it. What was once an event becomes a pattern.

Of course, seriality itself is no crime. Monet did it. Warhol made an empire from it. But their repetitions investigated the difference. Azekwoh’s series seemingly insists on being seen. The modern artist repeats not to explore, but to maintain visibility. The painting must travel ; through screens, grids, and feeds until it becomes a kind of aesthetic currency. In this market, novelty is expensive and coherence pays the bills. The

painter’s signature becomes the logo of a brand losing its own internal logos in the process. Roland Barthes said the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the author. In our age, the birth of the audience demands the automation of the artist. The artist, in effect, is a product manager.

Azekwoh’s wedding paintings occupy this uneasy ground. They stage love and belonging with tenderness, but also with the anxiety of needing to be seen doing so. The subjects are not so much lovers as they are models of love, curated symbols of togetherness. The compositions echo the language of engagement photography, the self-conscious serenity of the posed moment. By translating these scenes into digital art, Azekwoh both elevates and replicates them. They gain beauty but lose spontaneity. The image, meant to preserve affection, instead performs it for the timeline.

Barthes reminded us that a photograph’s power lies in its proof that something has been. A painting was meant to escape that finality, to wrest beauty from the endless present. Yet the serial painting, reproduced and re-shared, begins to mimic the photograph’s melancholy. It repeats itself into absence. The viewer confronts not presence but ghostliness. The faint trace of meaning worn down by exposure. Berger’s warning rings true: when images become commodities, we see not what is there, but what we already believe should be. Serialisation flatters belief; it rarely challenges it.One might argue, charitably, that serialisation is not surrender but confession. It may be an artist’s quiet acknowledgment that originality has perished, that singular vision can no longer survive in a culture of copies. Each repetition then becomes an act of mourning for what used to be possible—a painter’s small defiance against the tyranny of novelty. Seen in that light, Azekwoh’s wedding paintings are not products but elegies that can be products. They lament the fading aura even as they participate in its decay.

Walter Benjamin wrote that aura decays in the age of mechanical reproduction. In our digital age, the decay is aesthetic rather than mechanical. Serialisation reproduces aura itself, its shimmer and posture, until it becomes indistinguishable from nostalgia. We no longer crave the original because repetition flatters our memory of it. We are content with the echo.And yet, for all this, Azekwoh’s work still matters. His wedding series has us scratching and scribbling plots to cohere gamut of portraiture. The paintings may not wound us, but they do make us think about the conditions under which wounding is still possible. In translating ritual into the language of the feed, he captures the tension of our time: love as spectacle, intimacy rehearsed for the archive. What endures is not fatigue but awareness. Even repetition, in the right hands, can still surprise us if we learn to look past recognition.

Azekwoh’s gift lies in making tenderness and anguish visible. His task, and perhaps that of our generation, is to recover danger from within the beautiful, to risk painting what does not fit the frame or maybe painters of his ilk are meant to participate in the immortality of the internet. A painter in the margins of fossilized presence. Maybe the art of now does not care to wager its own extinction.The wholesale reactions to these paintings are in and of themselves questions ;whether beauty can survive the glare of recognition, whether art can still startle us into feeling when every image arrives pre-explained. Perhaps the only honest answer is that it tries but that answer is inadequate. Maybe it's that obstinate attempt to punctuate our so-called doomscrolling with a story within a story is where the point of these paintings lie. I think certain paths of the old aura flicker again in these paintings as they are cannibalised by the very medium that birth them.Maybe it's untrue but I like to imagine Anthony Azekwoh constantly painting against the narrative in tandem with upholding the narrative of an algorithm.

Tortured artists no longer have the certain pizzazz they once possessed, the church doesn't commission Italy’s finest anymore and the House of Medici are just silicon valley technocrats high on Ayn Rand—what we have now is an artist of the World Wide Web, Anthony Azekwoh will probably be the personification of that concept.Nevertheless, it's still difficult watching the dispensed sensitivity of a talented artist consumed by the exhaustion of observers and the inadvertent need to trap their evasive attention but conversely, I think this is where we are now —watching beauty become fodder for sentimentalization, low-grade humour and psychoanalysis (the irony isn't lost on me). I long for the quietness of watching and then leaving unresolved, walking away from the tyranny of “what, why, when and where”. I hope his next painting asks us to bask in the transience of its frame. I hope it asks us to thank whatever gods maybe that beautiful things exist at all and I hope this image leaves with us with nothing but abyssal blackness of endings after we stop watching.

Jean Paul Sartre believed that the world was holistically unaffected by the divinity of literature. He posited, at the risk of reductionism, that literature was merely a gambit to evoke pensive cogitation and thought, a weapon for political engagement and social analysis. It's impossible to know whether Wole Soyinka’s The interpreters sought to subvert that notion or whatever bore all the watermarks and heraldry of revolutionary novels with a straightforward message to topple the ever-conquering powers that be. There's nothing cogent to say about Kongi you don't already know or can't find in the fine print of Nigerian history. Elusive he is, ubiquitous he remains, misunderstood eternally. But what he doesn't do, for all his faults and mystique and funny hair, is insult the collective intelligence of the readers. He does not, and will never, interpret. Like David Lynch, he's a walking No to the question of elaboration.

All the local prophets want publicity. It's good business

Published in 1965, for a country still reeling from a glorious emancipation from the empire of tea and crumpets. The Azikwe years lulled us to a final sleep, seats of power still vacillating from adjustment to adjustment. Think of the pristine streets, the infancy and the colonial architecture that still remains. We could still fit the country into a scientific systemization. We could still translate what was happening — or could we? — The interpreters begin with the men of its time ;Biodun Sagoe the journalist, Sekoni the engineer, Lasunwon the lawyer, Egbo the fiery aristocrat, and the wise Bandele as described by the novel. These men are on a canvas with a painter-svengali called Kola, a backdrop of post-independent search nationally but the novel eschews the grand total of that search for the microcosm and the unremittingly existential. Unravelling through the prism of Yoruba mythology, Soyinka renders every character as a representational figure of deities and gods. Each according to their hamartia and albatross, unspooling unto nothing but sound and fury. It's not ambitious to say it's second to none —no, it doesn't reinvent the wheel — but its inquisitive yet satirical charm about the disillusionment of the everyman and the failure of Nigeria’s elites. Soyinka swerves through sentences in a non-linear fashion with anecdotal absurdism and the aim to dispel our overreliance on expected chronology. As if the novel is one comic diablo ex machina — the devil in the machine. Nothing falls forward, everything is contained in Soyinka's polyphonic urge to understand what we all want to understand ; what is a nation? Why are we here? What's after here? Of what purpose is this cosmic billion-act play?

If all this sounds like a pool of boredom then such is the point. Every character here is immersed in boredom, a kind heightened by the hyperliteracy of Soyinka's prose. All the characters here have a Bernhardian attribute about them, you could retrofit any of them in Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters and they'd fit perfectly. Shakespearean traits aren't far from the hydra-head narratives too. Egbo, the descendant of a king is torn between cosmopolitan life and the duties of the throne. Sekoni, sculpture extraordinaire, is teeming with idealism only to fall to the cruel jaws of life. Sekoni whose engineering exploits are hindered by venal practices and deep-rooted corruption. The taciturn Bandele serves as a linchpin for the enigmatic band of friends. And Kola, the omniscient presence explicates their stories in a pantheonic fashion. Having understood the motives of each character and how they react to the stimuli of existence, it becomes easier to merge the disparate voices into a singular voice.

“The church is my dedication and I am a self-taught man in everything. I can read the Bible in Greek, did you know that? In Greek. Because I found an old Bible in Greek and I was seized by a desire to learn the language of the Greeks, thinking this was the same as Hebrew. It wasn't, but at least I gained a knowledge of Greek.’’

The many lives in the lives of many is the central thesis of the novel. A very dense coinage from national regeneration. But all that can be lost in the typical Soyinka linguistic obscurity and dense modernist habits— the onus lies on us as the reader to reject being a neutral spectator and engage with the verity of the work. If we place things in the prescience-realtime equation , The Interpreters is the forgotten novel of the future and the slowly cancelled present. Though unremembered by the contemporary literate masses, it carries a clairvoyant and humorous peculiarity. Consider its kafkaesque postulations from the third person objective, it's analogous to how we view the average — whatever that term implies — Nigerian toiling in the imperial gallows. We are the dead and the unborn, a cosmological rattle recurrent in the novel. And our chronology as a nation is, by and large, contingent on sense and sensibilities. Not of the Austenian kind, but of being able to interpret the past and where we are now. The headlines become more absurd and isolating with each press release. The news is hauntingly accessible — unregulated, hazardous, specious, ignominious, farcical. Kola can't paint this. He would die trying but he will misinterpret our mournful state with kings.

                          The first bird. 

Because I had the luxury of nothing, I became a black bird. Or was I a wretched human with a skin grafted upon with the traits of flightful creatures. There was, before this, the fainting ecstasy of abiding with the programming of walking and talking, there was the riven of essence. The misery of immobility. The collapsing of thought against the external surge. The cognisance of cosmic oyster. Now I am a bird. I am a black bird soaring across the toxic tropics of West Africa. I do not know how this came to be.

Before the air — the palace of clouds, the impositions of the firmaments, I walked the lands with a bare poise, hindered by the rigours of everyday life and the eternal torment of traffic lines. Street hawkers and thugs, ever-corruptible policemen and a clownish government — a nation on a fiery carousel. Landlords curmudgeonly demand the wages of shelter. Money funneled by the nightmarish policies of Honourable this and Honourable that. I worked at the ministry of national logistics and national planning for youth affairs and infrastructural development. I worked as a staffer moving paper from one department to another with no official outcome that had a bearing on the nation. I was merely a shrapnel. But I enjoyed the furious sound of rain on roofs during downpours, it helped me deal with the paper-moving. I'm not sure how this fragmented biography pertains to my condition now as a black bird but once I worked for the government. I was an ant. 

Once you find yourself working as an ant, every facet of your transient existence is in service to the hill. There is nothing potent beyond the servitude, no dreams or wishes upon the poisonous star-depleted sky. There is the affordable reality of survival. There is something steady. Never more, could be less. In some gloomy endless backdrop, you are mechanically hindered from unfolding into individual glory — not that I had anything to morph into. All I had ever known was the paper. Knowledge of the paper was of a predetermined kind. The kind that had entrenched itself in the affairs of man. Dreams were a deviation from knowledge. As a bird I cannot remember dreaming as an ant but I remember the cacophonous buzzings of the ground and the deception of progress. 

Perhaps the dreams sauntered me here into the body of flight or was there a death? A transmutation of soul upon that which does not speak? I don't know. But this divine exhilaration enthralls me as I watch over the topographical geometry of a dying zone. You can smell the paranoia from up here in the expansive dome of the most natural blue. 

Death collides with the cosmic composts of the sun. Trepidations have a stench, oozing from the bodies of lost men and frightful women.

 The other animals, can they smell this too? The decaying intestines of a demiurge. The open sewers of heaven. The weariness of good-natured angels. I fail, not of my own doing, to see the difference between this body and my former skin. The perspective though different does not quell the surge of vile air across cities and estates and towns of nameless reputations and hearts with good intentions. So why then was I put in this body? Dreamed into the wings? — if I soar on I shall find answers. At the edge of the earth, the middle core —maybe I shall stumble upon a new Eden. You should see everything from up here beneath the host of heavens, all the lights of industry are having an eternal funeral. 

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