by Akinwande Jordan
An isolative image of hands fiddling with a rosary assaults our senses. The Marian prayer is uttered in the eternal melody of the Igbo language. A rite takes place — the shaving of a widow’s head. She’s dressed in white; two women stand guard mournfully beside her at the doorstep of a dilapidated house. One woman is tasked with the ritualistic shaving of the widow’s head. The widow’s face is an absorbent receptacle for an immeasurable agony, for a quiet resignation, an outpouring of accusations, a deluge of pity, a continuing objectification. Her recitation of the Marian prayer marches on into an unseen abyss. She’s talking to God — her deaf husband in the Silver City.
Dika Ofoma’s God’s Wife defies the demands of the formulaic — one doesn’t screen at the surreal 16 film festival if you are in the trade of derivatives and uninspired art. I dare say we can dub him the king of shorts at this point in his partly nascent career as a filmmaker. One brief look at his oeuvre provides you with a definitive sense of the cloth he is cut from. He is unwavering in his cinematic language and resilient in the glorification of the image, as seen in his previous shorts, namely A Japa Tale (2023), A Quiet Monday (2023) and The Way Things Happen (2022).
God’s Wife exudes a clear progression in his perspective as a writer-director. He confronts the oppressive treatment of widows by virtue of archaic parts of an enduring culture through the eyes of a Catholic widow, Nkiruka (Onyinye Odokoro), ensnared in the demands of tradition and adherence to catechism.
God’s Wife has a familiar pathos — a pathos that lies in the lecherous advances of her brother-in-law, who deems himself entitled to her body, never minding the period of mourning as he exploits her grief-wielding tradition as a license to wreak havoc on the bereaved. We have seen this narrative in numerous Nollywood productions spanning decades, but Dika’s iteration packs more than a punch in a duration of 15 minutes; it feels like a sacrament forged by holiness and iniquities. He replaces drama with the glacial nature of silence. Not dissimilar to Hemingway’s Iceberg theory or the minimalist art movement, dialogue and shots are rendered from a place of deft brevity.
More is expressed with facial cues and the eyes as windows to the soul. Plenty is shown from what is blocked and beyond the confines of the frame— Ofoma, as a student of Italian Neorealism and cinematic formalism, is evident here. Music is used sparingly and ominously, never disproportionately, and only in service of specific moments in the scene.
All this is done, to reemphasise, in 15 minutes. You are enraptured by the tautness, the economy of the Igbo language and the sprawling dread of the quiet. And the primacy of your immediate world rests on the facial balancing act of Onyinye Odokoro, whose plight puts on you a knife’s edge. Biblical. Abandoned. An argument against any mode of theodicy. Hearing the eloquence of God’s silence.
At the slightest risk of sounding like a Dika Ofoma evangelist, you notice why he was awarded the Rising Star award at the Surreal 16 Film Festival last year. He, alongside his director of photography, Joe Penny, shoots the women in God’s Wife, like Carravagio’s paintings.
They are often superimposed against the natural world around them. In two distinct shots composed of three women respectively, two disparate symbologies (perhaps unintended) are outstanding — three women in hell, as they process cassava flour for garri; a laborious process that requires a furnace to and three women of a lineage; Nkiruka’s mother, Nkiruka herself and her daughter. Each of them is intricately composed and portentous of a future where the tradition endures as the ills cascade from daughters to daughters ad infinitum. This is the genius of Dika as a filmmaker. Beauty in moderation.
To the untutored eye, the end might feel rushed and gratuitously ambiguous for the sake of ambiguity common to most short films, but what novas beneath all that ambiguity is a primaeval rage. A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, to paraphrase the title of the 1988 Almodóvar picture. For we are left mesmeric and curious, right back at where we started — the motion of hands. Hands that were once innocent and sorrowful have maybe evolved into tools of vengeance against a perpetrator of a deathly patriarchal practice. We are no longer left with the Marian prayer or the sanctity of a faithful woman. Whatever remains in this story remains to be seen.