Of talent and culture in the adaptation of a canonical work
By Dokubo Melford Goodhead
I thought the debate is about whether Idris Elba, an actor of African descent, born in Britain to Sierra Leonian and Ghanaian parents, or Chiwetel Umeadi Ejiofor, an actor of African descent, born in Britain to Igbo parents, is the better fit to play Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart. If this is what started the debate, the writer has, by misdirection, taken us to another debate: whether Hollywood or Nollywood is better suited to make a TV series on Things Fall Apart?
I think I have the training to comment on both debates, as a scholar on African and African Diaspora literatures and film, who has published a scholarly article on Things Fall Apart, ‘The Prophetic Statement in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Textual Comparison,’ in the Contemporary Journal of African Studies, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2015, pp. 95-111; published a scholarly article on film, ‘The Resisting Spectator and The Green Mile,’ in the Howard Journal of Communications, Vol. 33, Issue 1, 2021, pp. 45-5;” received an invitation from a publisher to submit a proposal to write a book on Hollywood cinema, and recently acquired a Master’s degree in film. Incidentally, when I started corresponding with the editor of the Howard Journal of Communications during the process of preparing my article for publication, after it had gone through the peer-review process, I discovered that the editor of the journal was Dr. Onwumechili, an Igbo man. I am sure that he became the editor of the journal because the editorial board of the journal and others involved with it assessed him as the best person for the job.
This brings us back to the discussion surrounding the question on whether Mr. Elba or Mr. Ejiofor is best suited for the role of Okonkwo. The best person to answer that question is the casting director. Some may disagree here and legitimately argue that it is the director if he or she has a particular vision for the making of the film that they think best fits a particular actor. That is why we sometimes hear people saying that a certain director said that they will sign on to a project if the producer is able to bring a particular actor on board to take the lead role.
That said, both men are very talented actors and their impressive body of work shows why sentimental considerations like casting Mr. Ejiofor over Mr. Elba based on the sentimental consideration that Mr. Ejiofor is of Igbo descent totally misses the point. Take, for example, Mr. Ejiofor’s Oscar-worthy portrayal of Solomon Northrup in Twelve Years a Slave. Mr. Northrup was an African-American and a resident of New York, who was kidnapped there and sold into slavery in Louisiana in 1841. Since Mr. Ejiofor is not of African-American descent, the same argument that is being made for him to play Okonkwo could have been used against him for the role of Solomon Northrup in Twelve Years a Slave. Yet, anyone who has seen the masterful performance of Mr. Ejiofor as Solomon Northrup is likely to say that his casting in the role of Solomon Northrup was a stroke of genius. What about Mr. Ejiofor’s equally Oscar-worthy performance as Trywell Kwakwamba, the father of William Kwakwamba, in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind? This film is again an adaptation of a memoir based on a story that took place in Malawi. As such, we could again argue that a Malawian should have played the role, not Mr. Ejiofor. Yet, after watching Mr. Ejiofor’s stellar performance in the role, can anyone step forward to say that the right man was not cast in the role because he was not a Malawian but an Afro-Briton of Igbo descent?
Chiwetel Ejiofor on set Twelve Years a Slave film
As for Mr. Elba, who can forget his jaw-dropping performance as Mandela in a Long Walk to Freedom? I can’t. I gave the introductory remarks on Mandela before the screening of the film to the Atlanta chapter of the National Association of Black Accountants when the film was released in 2013. Mr. Elba’s canny performance of the role of Mandela in a Long Walk to Freedom is the sort of performance that elicits the oft-made comment about great performances, namely that an actor was born to play the role. Or who can forget his unforgettable performance as Commandant in the film Beasts of No Nation, an adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel by the same title? The novel is set in a war-torn African country and the name of the protagonist is Agu but the story bears more of a striking resemblance to the story of the civil war that took place in Sierra Leone than that of the Nigerian Civil War. But it is a Nigerian, Mr. Iweala, who tells the story. And it is a Ghanaian, Abraham Attah, who plays the role of Agu, not an Igbo. Meanwhile. the director of the movie, Mr. Cary Joji Fukunaga, is the son of a Japanese-American father and a white mother.
I mention these facts to show why it often looks like going down a rabbit role when people start to talk about who should play a role because they are from a particular place or should not play a role because they are not from a particular place. The argument about giving more opportunities to underrepresented groups in Hollywood is a valid one but when even within the category of the underrepresented (Africa and its Diaspora), we begin to make an argument for ethnic or national specificity, such as this one, we end up making a mockery of the whole idea of the push for fairness and equity for underrepresented groups in the film industry.
In 2019, I received a surprise email from the Baghdad University. What was the email about? A professor at the university, who was serving on the editorial board of the Global Journal of Earth and Environmental Science, was asking me whether I could review a scholarly article that had been submitted to the journal for publication and give my opinion on whether the article should be published or not published in the Global Journal of Earth and Environmental Science. I was wondering how he got hold of my information. Then I realized that two years ago I had published the article ‘The Discourse of Sustainable Farming and the Environment in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather’ in the Legon Journal of the Humanities 28.1, 2017, pp. 30-45. Here was a scholar in Iraq asking a Nigerian scholar based in the United States to give his expert opinion on an article that could go into determining whether another scholar should be given tenure or not or should be elevated to full professorship or not based on an article that I had published in a scholarly journal domiciled in Ghana. That is how talent works. Had the Iraqi professor chosen the parochial route, he would have limited his search for reviewers to Iraq and, perhaps, even to his department at the university. The same can be said for the Editor-in-Chief of a scholarly journal based in India, who, two weeks ago, invited me to become a member of the editorial board of the journal. Talent matters when one is striving for the best.
On the issue of culture and its faithful representation in film, people miss the argument when they reduce it to the place of production. It does not matter whether you produce a film in Hollywood or Nollywood or Bollywood when you are considering the issue of faithfulness to the representation of a culture. That question starts with the writers of the TV script or the screenplay. That is largely where the battle is won or lost. If you get a poor writer or one who fails to do their research about a culture, the result will be a poor script, likely filled with stereotypes and clichés. The result will be a poor series, whether you are making the series in Nollywood or Hollywood.
Let me take the liberty to quote from my published film article, ‘The Resisting Spectator and The Green Mile,’ to drive home the point. I write: “In a 1943 article in the Negro Digest, entitled ‘Is Hollywood Fair to Negroes?,”’ Langston Hughes bemoans the racist representation of blacks on the screen. ‘“For a generation now,” Hughes writes, ‘“the Negro has been maligned, caricatured, and lied about on the American screen, and pictured to the whole world… as being nothing more than a funny-looking, dull-witted but comic servant. Hughes goes on to say how these images are not innocent but inform and shape the way people around the world see black Americans.’” I also write: “In a 2018 commencement speech at Howard University, Chadwick Boseman tells his audience that he was let go from his first television series in Hollywood after he complained that the gangster character from a broken home, with an absent father and a heroin-abuser mother that he was playing had barely a glimpse of positivity, talent, or hope. He was the stereotypical black character. The images of the black subject that Hollywood gives to the world are thus, in most instances, always already mediated by unflattering stereotypes that play a very important role in the construction of black subjectivity and identity by the rest of society.” Thus, if you get a culturally competent writer, such as Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, Chimamanda Adichie (who, by the way, holds up Achebe as a primary influence in her writing), Chika Unigwe, and many others, you will get a culturally-competent script.
Once the most important matter—that of the script—has been settled, the three other important roles in a film crew in the making of a culturally competent film are the director, the set designer, and the costume designer. It is the director who will interpret the script and he or she will do a creative interpretation of the script, which sometimes may defeat the purpose of some of the work that the writers of the script have done in making sure that the TV series or film are culturally competent. That is not to say that the director must be an Igbo, an African, or of African descent. It is to say that they must do their research and work closely with the writer of the script.
Very often, directors dislike it when the scriptwriter is on the set. They take it as lack of trust in their ability to do the work of interpreting the script (which every director worth their craft takes pride in doing), and interference in their work. Take, for example, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple. You can’t get a bigger name in Hollywood or the planet than Spielberg to direct a movie and some think that The Color Purple is one of his most important films. Others think otherwise. And those who think otherwise include leading film scholars in black cinema such as Manthia Diawara. So, here is a case where the director, in addition to immersing themselves in research work on the culture of nineteenth century Igboland, may also have to closely work with the scriptwriter or the cultural advisor. Aside from the director, the set designer and the costume designer are perhaps the most important crew on the set as far as fidelity in the reproduction of a culture is concerned.
On the other hand, regarding the question of fidelity, one can legitimately ask whether too rigid fidelity to the representation of the culture of the period—nineteenth century Igbo culture—is indeed a good thing. Here, the question that will crop up again and again is: Where does artistic invention and creativity come into the picture? And that is a legitimate question to ask, because fidelity to the reproduction of a culture and a certain degree of creative freedom should always be in conversation if one is looking for artistic excellence and not a work of Igbo nineteenth-century sociology. If the latter, it becomes a scholarly project, not an artistic project.
Here, the words of Achebe, himself, are apropos. In Morning Yet on Creation Day, he writes, “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past with all its imperfections was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.” This, I think, should be the touchstone for every scriptwriter or filmmaker that seeks to bring Things Fall Apart to the small screen or the big screen, whether they are doing it from Nollywood or Hollywood.
Dr. Goodhead is scholar on African and African Diaspora literatures and film
