One of the most arresting images in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the second feature by Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni, arrives in the opening seconds. A Black woman sits in a car facing us; a bedazzled headpiece conceals her forehead and wraps around the shades that rest gently atop her nose. Nestled beneath are her lips—glimmering slightly, coated in burgundy, poised between sadness and joy. Watching her feels like a transgression, because she seems so serene; she evinces a kind of vulnerable confidence she might not willingly show others. And yet we must watch. As she drives, she bops her head to the languorously buoyant pulse of “Come on Home” by the Lijadu Sisters, which is playing over the car speaker. Her lips occasionally curl toward a smile but then retreat to neutrality. They express something profound and cavernous while expressing nothing at all.
Can a single image contain an entire film? A single expression the sum of a person’s identity? Sometimes. Perhaps. But not here. Because just an instant later the woman—her name is Shula (Susan Chardy)—glances out of her window and notices something on the road. She faces us once more, her expression transformed. The time for enjoyment has passed. She stops the car, removes the headpiece, and steps out. She is wearing what looks like a large black bag, or perhaps a tarp; it billows around her as she walks toward us, a refugee from a Missy Elliot video. The camera pans down. Two shoes point skyward.
We soon learn that these shoes belong to a dead body, and that the body belonged to her uncle Fred (Roy Chisha). In the narrative business this is called an inciting incident, the moment when the plot begins to unfurl. It’s also the moment that cleaves her life into two—who she was before, and the irrevocable aftermath. From now on she will be consumed by the duties that follow death—the ceremonies and silences that dictate who she must become. In other words, her life—her ambitions, her thoughts, even her body—will be in service to someone else, someone no longer living.
In a 1985 essay for The New York Times, John Edgar Wideman wrote that “everyone lives a significant portion of life below the surface. Art records and elaborates this unseen dimension.” This is what we see in the opening image: the surface of the woman’s face, and what glimmers below. And then, after she sees what she sees, merely surface. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a revelatory film, a close study of patriarchy in contemporary Zambia, the kind of movie that rewards multiple engaged viewings. Yet it is also shaped by the unseen—the lost possibilities of Shula’s life, and the alternate pathways that remain unavailable to women because of entrenched hierarchies. The opening image does not contain the entire film, but something far more valuable: a depiction of freedom, and a reminder that we should all have access to the same.
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After the shock of finding her uncle, Shula begins to troubleshoot. She calls her father and doesn’t blink when he asks for rent money. She tells him she’s just found Uncle Fred’s body, but he dismisses her: “Come on, Fred can’t die,” he says. “Just sprinkle some water on him. He’ll be fine.” Shula insists, so he tells her he will come. He gives her two directives: “Lock yourself up in that vehicle,” he says. Then: “Send me money for a taxi, please.” Her face remains impassive. “Don’t forget to send the fee,” he adds. “Okay, I’ll send it,” she says.
Throughout this scene—and for much of the movie—Shula’s face is a study in control. Chardy is so effective at conveying Shula’s stoicism that she transforms her face into a kind of mirror; we continually search for the emotions we expect—grief, anger, frustration, resignation—but find only a blank surface. We search for her emotions and instead are forced to confront our own.
But then the mirror transforms suddenly into a window: Shula rolls her eyes as another woman appears and carefully examines the body on the road. It’s her cousin, Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela). Shula ignores her and feigns a conversation on her phone as Nsansa draws near. One can already discern a vast gulf between these people; Shula, having recovered from Nsansa’s sudden arrival, settles into her familiar circumspect mode; Nsansa, possibly intoxicated, dances frantically in front of Shula’s car. The wonder of this moment resides in their varied responses to tragedy. Nyoni shows how each has grown so accustomed to calamity that they bypass acknowledgment and instead activate their coping mechanisms. The body on the road, then, is not merely a body but also an alarm that alerts us to the presence of an unseen dimension—one that distorts their ability to engage reality.
Who was this man whose absence serves as the irritant around which the story forms? Nyoni depicts him by outline, through the actions of others. Shula’s mother cries; an aunt warns her not to utter a word. Slowly, and then with impressive speed, a procession of mourners arrives at Shula’s home to pay their respects.
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In this film, the passage from death to mourning is immediate and nearly frictionless; once Shula identifies Uncle Fred’s body, an ancient, impassive force seizes control of her life. The force is tradition, and it dictates how Shula and the rest of her family must comport themselves in the days to come. Nyoni astutely demonstrates how tradition often serves dual purposes: it enables us to process grief by supplying a detailed script that imparts structure and meaning, and—because we inherit tradition from history—it superimposes the past on the present and future. We must do what we do because we have always done it.
Nyoni promptly reveals how this force claims Shula’s body. She attends a Zoom call once she arrives home, her dark face the only one of its kind among the many static squares. Then a knock at the door. Four older women stare at her coldly; they enter and investigate her bathroom. “Have you bathed?” they ask. Shula looks down; her silence is her answer. “I’ve never seen that before, bathing when there’s a funeral,” they say. The juxtaposition is striking: Shula’s engagement with a virtual community has been interrupted by an ancestral pull. Her family drags her from a world where meaning can be co-created to one where it is prescribed.
Shula slides effortlessly into this realm, or so it seems. She cooks, cleans, and tends to others—especially men. Nyoni shows us that mourning is a performance, and like nearly every performance requires unseen and largely unacknowledged background players to ensure the production is successful. Shula is also performing, of course, but she is merely an extra; she is not expected or required to utter any lines of consequence.
Nyoni has designed a film that is preoccupied with the character of mourning, how it can double as an aperture into the priorities of a society. What she makes clear, and Shula robotically enacts, is the idea that mourning is not for the deceased or to soothe the living but is a means of consecrating a narrative that enables a culture to maintain its status quo. In this case, in the Zambian society of which Shula is a member, men are worshipped and set apart, so when a man dies his story must be written according to these terms. Uncle Fred was good. He was funny and kind. He was a pillar of the community. He will be missed. His past, as a result, is obscured and then sanctified.
Shula’s face, the mirror that has shown us so much, remains unresponsive as she serves others (“Cry a bit, why are you cold-hearted? You’re embarrassing us,” a relative exclaims). It is apparent that she—and the other women who have been deputized to perform—find their responsibilities suffocating; they pine for freedom. When they occasionally manage to escape backstage, we have a rare opportunity to see them as they are, not as they are supposed to be. One such moment occurs when Shula, Nsansa, and a mutual friend tuck into the back of a kitchen to share gossip and beer. They whisper and giggle. Shula laughs and she smiles, a truly radiant expression. They are human beings again. Then they hear loud, sustained knocks at the door. Shula stands and frowns. “I’m going, somebody has to do it,” she says. She leaves her friends and slips back into her role.
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As time passes, the unseen surfaces. Shula and Nsansa leave Shula’s home to find a younger relative at a local college. As they walk on campus, Nsansa—who, again, is intoxicated—reveals that Uncle Fred once forced himself on her. She plays this violation for laughs. Nyoni and cinematographer David Gallego stage this scene with a keen visual intelligence—while Shula’s cousin narrates her sordid tale, her vivid, mocking face fills the frame. Yet when the camera cuts to Shula we see only the back of her head. Shula grants her cousin the distance to say what she must say to preserve herself, for she knows that if Nsansa were to stare into the cool depths of her placid face, the truth would pour out. A few moments later, when they find their cousin, they discover she is unwell and unable to walk. It turns out Uncle Fred abused her as well.
Shula thus finds herself trapped between two stories: the official account about kind, goodhearted, funny Fred, and the truth. Nyoni masterfully depicts her internal impasse during a later scene: as Shula drives she hears Nsansa’s monologue about Fred’s abuse (it is unclear whether she hears Nsansa in her head or if the sound is coming from somewhere else). Suddenly we hear Shula’s voice—“you were not just a brother,” she intones, “but also our father figure.” Her face remains impassive. The monologue continues, extolling the life and accomplishments of Uncle Fred until a sudden cut, and we see Shula on the phone in a copy store taking dictation for Fred’s funeral program. The sanctioned account carries the day.
This kind of narrative victory—the contrived story blotting out the truth—is the objective of all who seek to dominate others. Consider the recent revival of old hierarchies dressed up as nostalgia: the rhetoric that romanticizes submission, the laws that would re-possess women’s bodies, the social media sermons extolling “tradition” as if it were liberation. Patriarchy endures by consecrating these ideas until young women defend them as gospel. Give up your autonomy and you will be protected, the story goes. You will be worthy of respect. Nyoni has traced this pattern before: in her first feature, I Am Not a Witch (2017), the young protagonist, also named Shula, is ensnared by similar myths of obedience and control.
Yet no matter how much this Shula conforms, how willingly she capitulates to the status quo, it is never enough. Back home, Shula grows frantic when she learns that a relative is missing. She hurries outside, her ear to her phone; the slight tremor of her breath echoed by the tremor of the camera. She is flagged down by three older men who sit serenely on lawn chairs. It is hard to tell whether they register her distress, though one suspects they would not care if they did. Their desires are paramount. They each ask Shula to prepare food for them. They tell her to hurry up.
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Guinea fowl are native to sub-Saharan Africa and are known primarily for their loud, unrelenting calls—alarms to warn their flocks of danger. They are notoriously difficult to calm; once they begin cackling they continue until they are done.
For the past year I’ve had the tremendous honor of serving as critic-at-large for The Georgia Review, and initially I was overwhelmed when I considered what I would write about. Perhaps I would simply review a few books, as I have done for the past few years as a freelance critic. Or perhaps I would use this opportunity to write about other artforms that hold my interest, like visual art and cinema. But how would I choose the subjects of my pieces? And would there be some overarching theme connecting them, some throughline that would connect the first word to the last?
Then I came across this quote by bell hooks, a thinker I’ve been studying most of my conscious life: “Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up their power.” I thought of my two young girls—Funmi, who is eight, and Femi, who is five. I thought about the profound responsibility I have to mold their lives, and I wondered if I was doing anything—subconsciously or otherwise—to encourage them to give up their power. They have their mother, who is also a Black woman, and is wise about these matters, but I still have a great deal to learn. So I decided, in honor of them, that I would spend the year engaging with the work of Black women—artists and thinkers whose accomplishments and insights continue to revitalize our cultural imagination.
And I have learned so much. I’m still processing what I’ve learned. But now, as I near the end of my yearlong project, I can’t stop thinking about Shula, who she has become, and who she might still be. At the beginning of the film, soon after she sees Uncle Fred’s body, a young Black girl appears. Shula is encased in a billowing tarp, and her young doppelganger is as well. The girl looks down at Fred’s body, and then up at Shula. Shula scurries away. But then she stops. They share a meaningful glance. Shula is looking at herself, at the person she was before she became a woman, before she gave up her power. Throughout the film she is lost and unmoored, she compromises at every turn, but she retains this vision of her past, a past she must reclaim if she wishes to survive into the future. All she must do is let go. All she must do is react. All she must do is belt out a call to alert everyone that she remembers who she is.
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Directed by Rungano Nyoni. A24, 2025.
