“This House Is Not for Sale”: Nollywood's Spatial Politics and Concepts of “Home” in Zina Saro-Wiwa's Art

Abstract

In Lagos, it is common to come upon houses with the hand-painted sign: “this house is not for sale” (Fig. 1). This arises because con artists frequently sell other people's homes to unsuspecting buyers. The notion of a home being sold off through a con echoes the discourse surrounding the flight of the country's oil resources, from which the majority of the citizens do not benefit. The “crisis” of the home is symbolic of the “crisis” of the nation. As a visual metaphor, the home or the house is correlated to deception, illusion, or the ruse through which the experience of place is inseparable from image and imagination. Focusing on the theme of home in Zina Saro-Wiwa's installations and video artworks as well as in Nollywood video-film generally, I explore the way in which sociocultural performance inscribes moral geographies. Although I do not make a strict comparison between video art and video-film, I do reflect on the definition of one as art and the other as popular culture.The use of personal homes to shoot Nollywood films—usually the fantasy bourgeois home—is common. This doubly foregrounds “moral performance(s)” (Kalu 2003) where desire reunites with taboo and with social acceptability. In addition, Nollywood video-film, referred to as “home video,” is generally viewed at home (as well as in cafés and barber shops).1 The double metaphor of the home as a space of video-film production and elite consumption, as well as a place within which gender and class boundaries are set and negotiated, defines home as a multilayered profound space. Although space is more abstract than place, I consider “home” not just as a particular location (place) but as a relational, mutable, and often dislocated space. I propose the concept of “profound spaces” not as a stand-alone concept but as part of a relational approach to interpret Nollywood's representations of the fantastic in everyday spaces.New York-based artist, curator, and documentary filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa illustrated the amplification and depth of space in her exhibition “Sharon Stone in Abuja” (2010), which she cocurated with James Lindon at Location One in New York. By discussing Sara-Wiwo's video artwork Phyllis (2010) that featured in this exhibition, as well as her installations Parlour (2010) and Mourning Class (2010), I wish to suggest that visual constructions of domestic space in African popular culture are not only settings for melodramatic performances but are a microcosm for the “crisis” in social relations in contemporary Nigeria.Phyllis (Fig. 2), shot in Lagos Island, depicts a young woman who lives alone in Lagos and spends her days watching Nollywood films in her apartment and hawking colorful wigs in the city. She walks the streets in a bright pink wig, with an enamel tray lined with wigs on heads of manikins in her hands (Fig. 3). She is portrayed in her home staring blankly into the camera. Initially, she is unable to open her eyes until she puts on a wig. As soon as she takes the wig off—as if possessed by a supernatural force—her eyes roll back so that only the whites of her eyes are visible (Fig. 4). Without a wig she cannot see, or possibly she perceives other realms. When she puts on a wig, she takes on the personality of the woman who last tried it on. She lies on a bed of wigs, picks one up, and her eyes roll back to seeing again. There is silent-movie-style text declaring, “Phyllis was not a morning person.” She prays, has posters of Jesus in her room and a Bible by her bed. She then walks over to a Nollywood poster on the wall and brushes her hands against it. Phyllis watches Nollywood films that depict clips in which women are dramatically crying. We see her eating garri and egusi—a characteristically coastal Nigerian dish.She leaves her apartment to roam the streets, hawking wigs. When a woman approaches her to try on a wig, Phyllis helps her put it on, then brushes it with her fingers, and then she suddenly tightens her grip on the woman's head as if she is sucking life out of her. The woman is left looking insensate and lifeless, like a zombie. After demanding money from the woman, Phyllis grabs the wig and sends the woman off. When Phyllis arrives at her apartment she puts on the wig that the woman in the street tried on. The music in the background is the Igbo gospel tune “I Am Not Alone” followed by Jackie deShannon's 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” sung by Dionne Warwick. Phyllis begins crying streams of blood (Fig. 5). Phyllis, positioned under a statue of a white Jesus, laughs as she cries. The character of Phyllis, defined by Saro-Wiwa as a “psychic vampire,”2 is portrayed as a lonely, vampire-like woman whose subjectivity is symbolized by the artificial hair.In Saro-Wiwa's artwork, we are made conscious of the spaces that confine women. It is not only the seemingly small, cramped, blue-walled domestic space of her apartment, but also the pictorial space of the television screen and posters crowded with celebrity faces. When Phyllis leaves her apartment, a man blocks her, giving her no space to leave the building, and then harasses her before letting her pass. These spaces of confinement are juxtaposed with the illusion of the seemingly liberating public space of the city. However, even the public space of the city has its limitations. As she walks the crowded streets, the gaze confronts her. It is not only men who look at her, but there are also piercing looks of pious women as well as others wearing a hijab.The juxtaposition of public/private and of the symbol of Islam—the veil—with symbols of Christianity—the Bible, the poster depicting Jesus, and St. Peter's church, where Phyllis sells wigs—are significant as circumscriptions of the fantastic and of moral performance in certain spaces. The presence of the women wearing the hijab, however, is a coincidence. As explained by Saro-Wiwa, they happened to be in that location when the video was shot. The interplay between real and fictional underpins Saro-Wiwa's work. Phyllis's psychological and economic dependence on wigs is contrasted to the veil. Worn by the women in the video in the same way a wig is worn, the veil covers the women's heads and symbolizes religious and personal piety. The wig suggests Saro-Wiwa's critique of artificial hair, which is used extensively in Nollywood video-film to portray stereotypical modern, public, Pentecostal Christian women.Furthermore, Saro-Wiwa notes that the presence of these wigs and other “plastic goods” that come from elsewhere through international trade “are at once nasty and perniciously attractive: they infiltrate the soul somehow.” Hair extensions are sourced from temples in India, where women (and men) piously shave off their hair, which is then cleaned and sold as hair extensions (Malcomson 2013). Saro-Wiwa's observation here invokes specific physical geographical places outside Lagos Island or outside Nigeria. 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