THE FIGURINE: WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE?
Following the traditions of the griots of West African performance and storytelling traditions, The Figurine inaugurates itself with a narration of events from 1908 in the remote town of AraÌroÌ£ miÌre, named after a goddess who wishes to be brought forth to life from the bark of a cursed tree. AraÌroÌ£ miÌre is the goddess of fortune, and heralds seven years of affluence for members of the village who touch her materialized form in worship. There is however a reversal of fortunes as AraÌrọ̀miÌre follows her goodness with a seven-year long season of misery, destruction and death.
The people of AraÌroÌ£ miÌre can hardly take this, so they turn their backs on her. The narrative technique employed here is seminal as the first voice heard is that of Bisade Ologunde, Lagbaja, who introduces the storyline. The narrator or storyteller is an integral feature of indigenous performance practices, and Afolayan, by integrating this into The Figurine, steeps the film in that tradition. Besides, that the narrating voice belongs to an artiste whose profound employment of the masking tradition has been noted is also suggestive of Afolayan’s proclivity for an engagement of the diverse performance codes of the African cultural imaginary.
The narrative begins in Lagos where Mona and Femi embark on a journey to AraÌrọ̀miÌre, this time, it is for the compulsory national youths service ─ a sort of rite of passage for them. During their endurance trek, Femi and Sola, a friend who joins them later in camp, find the carved image – the figurine – of AraÌrọ̀miÌre, and it brings them wealth and fortune after their departure from NYSC. Sola gets a job and marries Mona, while Femi, who gets home to find his cancer-diagnosed father healthy again, is flown abroad by his firm for training. The scenes that follow detail the love triangle of Sola, Mona and Femi who, on his return, is still secretly obsessed with love for Mona; then comes along Linda Chukwu, Mona’s friend who, having been introduced to Femi falls in love with him. In terms of character portrayal, it is the vivacious and funny Linda Chukwu who propels the film, although her character of the desperate husband-seeking single is somewhat effusive and unrestrained.
The narrative reaches a climax when Mona’s former teacher, a History professor tells her that AraÌroÌ£ miÌre’s downsides are “seven years of destruction”, but even the learned professor reduces it to “just a folklore, fairytale”. She later shares her fears about the carved image in Sola’s study with Femi, who takes advantage of these apprehensions to initiate a series of mysterious reappearances of the image after several attempts to throw it away. Mona’s response in a phone discussion with her best friend is:
“Linda there is an evil in my house; it won’t go away.”
Mona eventually loses her pregnancy and a seven-year old son; while Femi, whose asthmatic conditions return, loses his deep-thinking sculptor-father. AraÌrọ̀miÌre’s season of carnage eventually ends in tragedies that claim the lives of both Sola and Femi. It is noteworthy that although the lives of all the female characters are spared in The Figurine, not one of the male figures in the film survives, including Sola’s young boy. In this, Afolayan inadvertently assumes an unfriendly stance towards his male characters. However, psychoanalytically, this could be reflective of his excessively apologetic deference for women. Besides that, Afolayan’s character as the philandering Sola, who consistently cheats on Mona, compels Linda to ask: “Why do men cheat?”; the deity, AraÌrọ̀miÌre is also female., which inspires admitting that Afolayan understands the sacred place of the woman in the spiritual and cosmic ecology from which his film-text is produced.
Culture clash is a recurrent thematic preoccupation in The Figurine. Westernized Nigerians, suffering from the malaise of "double consciousness" struggle with the consequences of an identity unmoored in the epistemic and moral base necessary for meaning in their universe. Sola and Femi, as a result of their western education, interpret their encounter with the figurine of AraÌrọ̀miÌre from the perspective of their imported religion. Femi shouts “JeÌsuÌ€” and withdraws when Sola throws the figurine at him during their bonfire night at the NYSC camp. Similar to this is the scene when Sola tells Junior, his son a bedtime story about the gods; he is rebuked by Mona, who insists that such a story was scary; while Junior, like Mona’s professor, reduces it to a fictional tale about the Spiderman. Afolayan, it seems, persistently affirms to his audience the possibility that the gods still live amidst us whether educated and globalized or not, and that individuals and societies could suffer when they pursue aspirations that are unmindful of the sacredness of ancestral presence and metaphysical exigencies.
Sola, Femi, Mona and Linda are all characters who have been alienated from their culture. It is the implications of this alienation that Afolayan interrogates in this film. He validates Soyinka's view that there exists a connecting thread between the worlds of the living, the dead and that of the unborn; but Afolayan’s vision exceeds this overstated assumption. He is also particularly interested in the urban and contemporary construction of the consequences of what Soyinka calls "the severance of self from essence".
Although many viewers might uncritically reduce the topicality of the film to issues of “superstition”, it is contended that The Fugurine positions us all to identify with culture and indigenous values and belief systems, despite our western education and foreign religions; the film therefore transcends delusory themes nested in another ritual genre, and goes beyond questions of superstitions. The soundtrack is also used to affirm the potency of AraÌrọ̀miÌre’s powers. For every scene where evil happens, the soundtrack goes, "Araromireeeeee... La la la la la la la la..."
The Figurine is a cinematic engagement of issues of beliefs, love and obsession, corruption, as well as the critical place of spiritual and moral agencies in the confrontations of individuals and societies. While Soyinka insists that the dislodgement of cultural codes by colonialism in African societies is "the tragedy of our race"; Afolayan's major engagement in The Figurine, besides an interrogation of Yoruba metaphysics, is the tragedy of the consequences of our beliefs and choices as deritualised Africans. In The Figurine, Afolayan calls attention to the need for every culture to uphold its sacred codes and lores, while individuals, despite their modern training, respect the provenance of the ritual imperatives of such cultures.
Compared to Tunde Kelani’s Thunderbolt, it is apparent that Afolayan is indecisive as regards the resolution of his plot. Whereas Kelani, despite the presence of modernity and western education, affirms the efficacy and virility of the ritual practice of MaÌguÌ€n in the lives of his city characters, Afolayan chooses to live ultimate judgment to his viewers; an attitude unfounded in the theatre practice from which his film-text finds inspiration, since in oral traditions, the story is always closed so as not to leave any ambiguity about interpretations.
However, the film ends on a postmoderm note, as Afolayan leaves the final interpretation of the film to the audience when he asks, “What do you believe?”
The implication of this is the upholding of the deconstructive principle that locates the actual meaning of the text not in the "author" or film director but in the "reader" or viewer of the film-text. The interpretation given by every individual viewer of The Figurine becomes the true meaning. After all, in a postmodernist world, there is no absolute moral centre for truth, rationality and meaning.
Written by Yeku A. T. James