“This House Is Not for Sale”
Nollywood’s Spatial Politics and Concepts of “Home”
in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Art
Nomusa Makhubu
In Lagos, it is common to come upon houses with the
hand-painted sign: “this house is not for sale” (Higo. 1).
This arises because con artists frequently sell other peo-
ple’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 “cri-
sis” of the home is symbolic of the “crisis” of the nation. Como un
visual metaphor, the home or the house is correlated to decep-
ción, 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 art-
works as well as in Nollywood video-film generally, I explore the
way in which sociocultural performance inscribes moral geog-
raphies. 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—usu-
ally the fantasy bourgeois home—is common. This doubly
foregrounds “moral performance(s)" (Kalu 2003) where desire
reunites with taboo and with social acceptability. Además,
Nollywood video-film, referred to as “home video,” is generally
viewed at home (as well as in cafés and barber shops).1 The dou-
ble 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
(lugar) 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 Nolly-
wood’s representations of the fantastic in everyday spaces.
SPATIAL DEPTH IN DOMESTIC 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), cual
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 Par-
lour (2010) and Mourning Class (2010), I wish to suggest that
visual constructions of domestic space in African popular cul-
ture are not only settings for melodramatic performances but
are a microcosm for the “crisis” in social relations in contem-
porary Nigeria.
Phyllis (Higo. 2), shot in Lagos Island, depicts a young woman
who lives alone in Lagos and spends her days watching Nolly-
wood 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 (Higo. 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 supernatu-
ral force—her eyes roll back so that only the whites of her eyes
are visible (Higo. 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. Allá
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.
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1 Nomusa Makhubu
This House is Not for Sale (2010)
Photo: courtesy of Nomusa Makhubu
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 sud-
denly 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. Phyl-
lis begins crying streams of blood (Higo. 5). Phyllis, positioned
under a statue of a white Jesus, laughs as she cries. The charac-
ter 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 pic-
torial 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 jux-
taposed with the illusion of the seemingly liberating public space
of the city. Sin embargo, even the public space of the city has its limi-
taciones. 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 Phyl-
lis sells wigs—are significant as circumscriptions of the fantas-
tic and of moral performance in certain spaces. The presence
of the women wearing the hijab, sin embargo, is a coincidence. Como
explained by Saro-Wiwa, they happened to be in that location
when the video was shot. The interplay between real and fic-
tional 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, el
veil covers the women’s heads and symbolizes religious and per-
sonal piety. The wig suggests Saro-Wiwa’s critique of artificial
hair, which is used extensively in Nollywood video-film to por-
tray stereotypical modern, público, Pentecostal Christian women.
Además, 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 spe-
cific physical geographical places outside Lagos Island or out-
side Nigeria. They not only refer back to other places but, más
importantly, they can be seen as ways of reading economic
relaciones, class differences, or gender biases within the politics
of space. Both the wig and the hijab map out and complicate
“moral geographies,” the notion that “certain people, things and
practices belong in certain spaces, lugares, and landscapes and
not in others” (Cresswell 2005:128). While the wig is historically
indexed to bourgeois wig-wearing in seventeenth and eighteenth
century England and France, its contemporary uses are a lot
more variegated.3 The bright pink or bright blue polymer wigs,
sin embargo, seem to symbolize a guileful woman and are also asso-
ciated with prostitutes. In contradistinction, the veil symbolizes
modesty, devotion, and virtue while also circumscribing certain
places as Islamic.
The debates regarding the hijab bifurcate into two notions:
that the veil empowers women, and the Western feminist per-
ception that the veil symbolizes sexist backwardness and con-
fines or oppresses women. Sin embargo, Nilüfer Göle emphasizes
that the veil is a marker through which Islam is made visible
and constitutes a “threat” to European ideals. Signs such as the
veil are politicized, vilified, and used to marginalize Muslims
VOL. 49, NO. 4 WINTER 2016 african arts | 59
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2 Zina Saro-Wiwa
Phyllis: I Am Not Alone (2010)
Archival print
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
3 Zina Saro-Wiwa
Phyllis: Street Hawker (2010)
Archival print
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
rial conditions of her world. Notablemente, Phyl-
lis steals the souls of other women through
placing wigs on them and looking straight
into their eyes. In some ways, this ele-
ment corresponds to the Ogoni belief that
the soul of a human being has the power
to leave its human form and enter into
other forms (Saro-Wiwa 1992). This power
arguably contributes to an understanding
of the body not only as that which expe-
riences space, but also as space. The soul
inhabits the body as space, which is there-
in Europe (Göle 2003). A diferencia de, Saro-Wiwa’s video art uses
dialectical critique to interrogate the contradictory value sys-
tems that are played out within both public and private spaces,
particularly in Lagos. While the veil in Nigeria does not nec-
essarily bear stigma, it does denote the spatial organization of
Nigeria where the North is predominantly Islamic and the South
is Christian. Nigerian video-films are defined through ethnore-
ligious categories: Christian video-films are made in the south
and Islamic video-films are made in the north (mostly in the city
of Kano). In the pictorial space are layers of narratives, subtexts,
and connotations about ethnoreligious tensions (the recent surge
of bombings by the Islamic sect Boko Haram, Por ejemplo).
fore a temporary “home” for the soul.
Being at home alone, Phyllis is socially alienated. As a single
woman, she is marginalized. The margin, writes bell hooks, como
a space of radical openness, is “a profound edge.” She remarks:
I had to leave that space I called home to move beyond boundar-
es, yet I needed also to return there … Indeed, the very meaning of
home changes with the experience of decolonization, of radicaliza-
ción. At times, home is nowhere. At times, one knows only extreme
estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place.
It is locations. Home is that one place which enables and promotes
varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers
new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference (hooks 1990:148).
Saro-Wiwa criticizes the need for wigs
in the making of femininity in Nolly-
wood video-film. Without the wig, Phyl-
lis loses her womanhood. This is not the
only aspect that forms part of an otherwise
fragmented notion of feminine subjectiv-
idad. The home is linked to the feminine
body as if the one is an extension of the
otro. Phyllis’s experience in the home is
based on watching rich women who are
also mostly confined in domestic spaces on
television, wearing fancy wigs. It is within
the domestic space that Phyllis constructs
her fantasies. She looks at posters of celeb-
rity women; one of these posters bears the
words “guilty pleasures.” She gazes at an
image of Christ on her walls. The meta-
phor of seeing in this video has contra-
dictions. Phyllis sees the world through
fantasy and becomes “blind” to the mate-
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4 Zina Saro-Wiwa
Phyllis (2010)
Video still
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
Homeplace for hooks is a site of resistance. Home in Zina
Saro-Wiwa’s work is not only about estrangement and disloca-
tion but also about resistance to seeing the home as a limita-
tion for subjectivity. Saro-Wiwa defines Phyllis’s state of mind
as “loneliness” and as a kind of “mental illness.” The video can
be read as an interpretation of the mental space or space of the
mente. This is not only in the use of things placed on the head
(the wig, the veil, and the enamel tray) or the whitening of Phyl-
lis’s eyes but also in its portrayal of the infinitude of imagination,
of place and ways of seeing. Since Phyllis finds it hard to wake
arriba, what is seen in the video could be things imagined or dreams
within dreams and therefore the visual realization of home as an
abstract space.
The video portrays the physical place and abstract space that
Phyllis occupies. In discussing the making of this video, Saro-
Wiwa asserts that it was only by being in such particular space
that she could envision the character of Phyllis. She describes
this creative process as something that happens through “an
emotional tenor and an emotional vibration that allowed every-
thing to come through.” The meditation through song enabled
Saro-Wiwa to name this character Phyllis and loosened “the idea
of narrative.” Phyllis “asked” Saro-Wiwa to find and construct
various visual elements of the video. Saro-Wiwa asserts that this
project “didn’t come from me but came from somewhere else.”
Her description of the making of Phyllis as a combination of
conscious decisions and inexplicable, unintentional happenings
alludes to the channeling of the abstract.
Saro-Wiwa explained that the color blue in Phyllis’s apartment
is a color that was not chosen consciously but Phyllis “asked
[her] to find it” and she realized that her “insistence on this color
for the installation” reminded her of her father’s television show.
Saro-Wiwa’s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa,4 a writer and the leader of
the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP),
was also known for having produced the television series Basi
and Company. Although Saro-Wiwa does not necessarily con-
nect the particular artwork entitled Phyllis to her father’s polit-
ical work against land and cultural dispossession, the space in
Phyllis is not only a surface but has depth of meaning in which
Phyllis’ inquietude reflects a psychogeography of dispossession.
Phyllis watches melodramatic Nollywood video-films where
the characters, both male and female, are shown crying spec-
tacularly. Theatrically touching the television screen, Nollywood
posters on the walls, and stroking wigs, Phyllis alludes to what
Laura Marks refers to as “haptic visualities.”5 In an analysis of
the materiality of film in cinematic images and photographs,
Marks (2000:162) argues vision is tactile: “the eyes function like
object of touch.” Haptic visuality is “connected to smooth space
or space that enables transformation and codified space” (Marks
2000:xiv). In touching the screen and the posters, the immedi-
acy of other places is experienced as a presence and depth.
Melodramatic Nollywood video-films are sometimes seen as
banal—the opposite of profund. For Saro-Wiwa, sin embargo, ellos
are simultaneously “highly emotive” and “unemotional.” One of
the women on the screen sways uncontrollably as if possessed.
What emerges is a dialectic of depth and surface. Profundity
defines depth of emotion and insight. The triviality and super-
ficiality of melodramatic performance in the domestic spaces of
Nollywood is appropriated by Saro-Wiwa to draw attention to
surface and depth. It is not only the surfaces of the images on
the surfaces of Phyllis’s walls (posters and the television screen)
from which she draws ideas of herself, but also her continuously
changing “surface” appearance as she changes wigs from bright
pink, deep blue, tan, etc.. Phyllis’s depth and polyvalence of char-
acter is negotiated not only through her “surface” appearance
but also through the souls of women that she steals. Phyllis is a
single woman who is not linked to the home as a wife or mother.
The conception of femininity as one that finds profundity in the
home and conjugal family (a theme that is predominant in Nol-
lywood video-film) is presented in Saro-Wiwa’s video as a prob-
lematic surface image.
Saro-Wiwa destabilizes the fantasy and ideal of a conjugal
family by portraying a woman in the house without the pres-
ence of a man. She consumes (and is consumed by) the video-
film playing on her television. She perceives ideas of her “self ”
through the screen as it reflects an image of her. In Nollywood
video-film, the house is represented as masculine but the home
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is where things are both fermented and cooked” (2010:24). En
occult video-film, the womb of the woman is sacrificed to the
occult god and the luxurious houses that the male members
own have few or no women. These homes cease to be repro-
ductive spaces. The house, as represented in video-films about
the occult, generally has a shrine in a secret part of the house or
has a corpse hidden in it and any woman who comes into the
house is a concubine and, usually, a victim of sacrifice (ver, para
ejemplo, the film series Born-Again Billionaires, Kingdom of Bil-
lionaires, Tears of the Billionaires by Kenneth Okonkwo, a pastor,
Nollywood actor, and producer).
The refusal of reproduction for magical creation of wealth
and the sacrifice of the conjugal family constitute crises. cris-
tine Koggel argues that the “critical importance of reproduction
has prompted governments, colonial and nationalist, to control
women and the moral power of domestic space.” She argues
that there is a cult of domesticity (an “emphasis on good mother
and housewife”) that is integral to “the cult of modernity at the
core of bourgeois ideology” (Koggel 2006:200). In Nollywood
video-film, the domestic space is a site of ideological struggle
where the concept of the modern home is plagued by incursions
of the supernatural. The bourgeois home, with its ostentatious
commodities, is a fantastical and eclectic space that continu-
ally depends on the international marketplace. With its flows of
commodities, the home can hardly be seen as a coherent whole
and is profoundly unsettling.
THE CONCEPT OF PROFOUND SPACE
The idea of the home in video-film, centered on the fantas-
tic,7 alludes to the volatility of the home as a constellation of
the imagined and the imaginary. These are terms that, accord-
ing to Arjun Appadurai, “direct us to something critical and new
in global cultural processes, the imagination as social practice”
which “is now central to all forms of agency, it is itself a social
fact and is the key component of the new global order” (1996:31).
Given that studio facilities are barely available for Nollywood
video-film, many filmmakers use domestic spaces (borrowed
or rented houses) and sometimes hotels for shooting films.8 As
Jonathan Haynes notes, “Nollywood does not have the capital to
construct its own spaces” (2007:138). The use of borrowed homes
for video-film performances has created a distinctive iconogra-
phy of Nigerian domestic spaces in which the classic notion of
the conjugal family is a site of struggle, reflecting the paradoxes
of conflicting ideologies. Como consecuencia, the ideal of a contented
patriarchal conjugal family, as a “unit” of national constituency
and of a capitalist mechanism (Mohanty 2003), remains a fan-
tasy or an unfulfilled desire.
The Nollywood domestic space is relational, drawing on mul-
tiplicity and ambiguities of private and public spheres in Nige-
ría, and as such it illuminates the intricacies of performativity
and power play. The association of the body with the home, el
countryside, the city, and the nation-state, as Neil Smith com-
pellingly argues, is “continual production and reproduction of
scale” that “expresses the social as much as geographical contest
to establish boundaries between different places, locations, y
sites of experience” (1992:64). He asserts that Lefebvre’s “produc-
tion of space” is “an inherently political process” and “far from
providing an innocent if evocative imagery, the use of spatial
5 Zina Saro-Wiwa
Phyllis: I Am Not Alone (2010)
Archival print
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
is depicted as feminine. Gender-biased concepts of the home in
video-film necessitate the presence of a man as its proprietor and
patron even though he is not always visible within it. Para examen-
por ejemplo, the man outside Phyllis’s apartment who tries to stop her
from leaving is positioned not only as if he is the edifice, pero también
as though he has rights to the space she occupies. In video-films,
houses that do not have a male presence are portrayed as spaces
of derangement, in which women who are not tied to traditional
conjugal families are depicted as evil, wayward, or mischievous.
The fantasy bourgeois home with extensive reception rooms
filled with luxurious furnishings is common in Nollywood
video-film. A house with guards and servants is common. En
video-films depicting the occult,6 homes are devoid of women
who otherwise inhabit those spaces as mothers or wives. Patrick
Iroegbu argues that, within the home, spaces such as the kitchen
or the cooking place are a metaphor for the woman’s womb: “it
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metaphors actually taps directly into questions of social power”
(Herrero 1992:65). The boundaries of different scales are socially
established, contested and negotiated.
The constructed domestic space, as a visual representation, en
video-film invokes imaginaries of Nigeria’s rural–urban spatial
complex. Although the urban home comes across as the ultimate
expression of modern city life whose opposite is rural village life,
the Nollywood home is the representation of both; one as the
reflection of the other and vice versa. Generally, in video-film,
there is a portrayal of those who fantasize about having a bet-
ter life and leaving the rural village to go to the city, or leaving
the Nigerian city to go to European or American cities. Tobias
Wendl proposes that “the village forms part of the ‘uncanny’,” of
what the city has repressed, and what now returns from time to
time into the consciousness of the city-dwellers as the “horror of
traditions” (2007:267). In this conceptual separation and prob-
lematic hierarchy of place, the African city is recast as village.
Arguably, the city—its large architecture and fast-paced
ephemerality that makes things seem magical—could equally
symbolize a fantastical place. In response to Wendl’s argument,
it can be argued that the horror that surfaces is about loss and
dispossession, where the concept of the village symbolizes ori-
gin or “home” and the city is a representation of that loss of ori-
gin. The city, as a place where no-one belongs and everyone is a
migrant, is an allegory of alienation and social fragmentation.
The allegory of the fantastic city is that it is not a place that an
average individual can own or belong to, in the idealistic sense. Él
is always already a place of victimization, which is at times rem-
edied by the construction of the village as a territory that has
self-defined judicial systems. The city, as a totality, is incompre-
hensible or unfathomable. It is also a place that represents the
theft of land, and the theft of identity, and is characterized by the
ruse or the con (Internet scams, ATM cons, etc.). The city is alle-
gorical to the wilderness that Wendl refers to. It is portrayed as a
place full of dangers, illusions, and deceptions. The urban–rural
complex has a presence in the visualization of Nollywood interi-
ors that alludes to socioeconomic dynamics embedded in ideas
of private property in the city or its opposite: sacred or ances-
tral land in the village.9 Following this logic, the urban home can
therefore be seen as metaphor for profanity. Seen as a repository
for commodities and possessions, the urban home directs atten-
tion to the marketplace as fantastic space.
The marketplace, defined by Patricia Levy as the “focal point
of the village or town” (1993:65), can be seen as a greater domes-
tic space of production as well as consumption, manufacture,
and performance of ideology and comprises infinite interspaces.
There is a Yorùbá proverb that states aye l’oja orun ni’le: "el
world is a market, the otherworld is home” (Drewal 1992:26).
This proverb emphasises the coexistence of the material world
with the supernatural otherworld, where the structuring of this
world is based on the otherworld. Like a Foucauldian hetero-
topia, the marketplace is “capable of juxtaposing in a single real
place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incom-
patible” (Foucault 1986:24). Heterotopias are not abstract and
counteract conventional order in an “other place.” The intersec-
tion of convention and unconventionality can be seen as a met-
aphor for the market as a network of crossroads or “the place
where roads cross in an endless pursuit of both profit and other
things” (Adesokan 2011:10). Crossroads and the marketplace
are defined in Yorùbá cosmology as the place where Eshu, "el
trickster god,” “god of the marketplace,” and “master of such net-
works of desire” resides (davis 1991).
Adesokan asserts that “the market is the bedrock of liveli-
hood: it is a complex site of resistance, where the collective
unconscious is shaped through traditional schemes of globaliza-
tion” (2011:6). It is a space of exchange, of spectacle, and can be
regarded as a profound space. People sell what they produce but
the marketplace is also a place where cultural performances such
as Alarinjo, from which Nollywood is derived,10 and other trav-
elling theater troupes would perform. Considering Adesokan’s
definition of the market as “both system and place” that bears
the “distinction between peripheral/primitive economies and
Western economies” (2011:6), the marketplace can be argued to
be a fantastic space par excellence. In Marxist theory, the mate-
rialist notion of fetishism, in which relations between people are
defined through the exchange of commodities, may illuminate
dyadic interpretations of the money fantasy as magic or wealth.
There is the notion of the marketplace as an actual market, a
lugar. Sin embargo, there is also an abstract concept of the market-
place as space for the mystified and unconstrained exchange and
flow of global capitalist trading that is cynically termed “zombie
capitalism.” The negotiation of traditional practices in the West
African market and international capitalist forces (the presence
of mass-produced factory commodities as well as individually or
communally produced items) deepens the images of the market-
place in Nollywood video-film.
6 Zina Saro-Wiwa and Mickalene Thomas
Parlour (2010)
Installation view
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
VOL. 49, NO. 4 WINTER 2016 african arts | 63
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Against the idea that land is commodity, sacred land is a par-
ticular place and territory that is reserved for burial or used
for the performance of festivals. It is profound in its refusal of
material production and consumption consisting of interspaces
through which the possibility of a supernatural realm can be
imagined as a definite presence. Since there is collective use of
sacred land, a breach symbolizes the violation of a collective or
community of people. Sacred land refuses proprietorship or can-
not be commodified.11 It is a space over which no one person
could have power. The representation of sacred land in video-
film counteracts the rise of capitalism in postcolonial contexts
and questions the exercise of property as power. Power over
sacred land is regarded as “supernatural” power. The profundity
of sacred land lies in this symbolic and material struggle, dónde
territory represents the basis of people’s livelihood.
My hypothesis of profound spaces therefore refers to the way
in which everyday spaces such as the home, burial site, or mar-
ketplace have infinitude in their proliferation of other material
and metaphysical spaces in the manufacture of desire and the
performance of moral values. Rather than being a contained and
pure unit, the home persistently produces the possibility of alter-
native space through the aspiration or desire for other things
and other places. The television in the home would constitute
7 Glass flowers on a glass-topped coffee
table in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s and Mickalene
Thomas’s installation Parlour (2010)
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
8 Refreshment stand with gold-rimmed
glasses in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s and Mickalene
Thomas’s installation Parlour (2010)
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
9 Gold gilded frame in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s and
Mickalene Thomas’s installation Parlour (2010)
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
an interspace since it provides multiple connections to spaces
at various scales (national and global). The television set, ambos
in the private home and in public spaces, is a way of seeing “the
world out there.” As Oluyinka Esan points out, in Nigeria “televi-
sion has facilitated excursions to distant countries” (2009:323).
The television, por lo tanto, is a frame through which the distinc-
tion between interior and exterior is destabilized. A menudo, Nolly-
wood video-films depict living-room scenes in which characters
are watching other Nollywood video-films, replicating the act
of looking through boundless representation. Another example
is the shrine in the basement of a house12 as shown in many so-
called occult Nollywood video-films, that would also consti-
tute an interspace between this world and supernatural worlds.
Relations between material and simulated spaces reverberate
through interspaces.
As a nonvisual metaphor, profundity is possessed by matters
of “love, death, human fulfillment, redención, weakness of
will and self-sacrifice” (Harrell 1992:1). When performed, estos
abstract values texture space in video-film as something that is
“more abstract than place” (Tuan 1977:6). For Yi Fu Tuan, “place
is security, space is freedom” (1977:3). As Tuan argues, humanos
yearn for freedom/space, and that desire characterizes spaces as
fantasy. Abstract values, such as love, fulfillment, and redemp-
ción, are central to the qualitative interpretation of space. Mi
choice of the word “profound” seeks to emphasize depth so that
the interpretation of Nollywood interiors can be a process of
reading beyond the surface layer of what is visible and to unpack
the abstract properties of space in discussing the contempo-
rary condition. I refer to space in order to complicate the idea
of “socially produced space” that “plays the same role as place”
(Cresswell 2004:10, Lefebvre 1991). There is the notion that
“home is an exemplary kind of place where people feel a sense
of attachment and rootedness” (Cresswell 2004:24). Nollywood
representations of home have a complexity beyond theatrical
actuación, where the home is not a particular location but a
deep visual image or an exhibitionary space.
64 | african arts WINTER 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 4
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11 Mickalene Thomas
Two Wives: Nollywood #1 (2010)
C-Print
Photo: courtesy the artist and Artists Rights
Sociedad (ARS), Nueva York
10 Mickalene Thomas
Two Wives: Nollywood #2 (2010)
C-Print
Photo: courtesy the artist and Artists Rights
Sociedad (ARS), Nueva York
Profundity seems an inappropriate and impossible term to
use next to Nollywood video-film. It seems to be a better fit
for the word “art.” Given that the kind of social value that is
granted to art is based on concepts of authenticity, originality,
and provenance, contemporary cultural practice questions the
manufacture of value within the context of unequal economic
desarrollo. Complicating this dynamic is the dichotomy
between high art forms and popular culture. In European criti-
cal theory, this dichotomy is characterized by “a confrontation
between the rural and urban working people’s tactics, aimed
at the production of an autonomous culture (identity), y el
institutions’ and elites’ strategies of dampening their old and
odd cultural elements” (de Certeau in Jewsiewicki 1996:343).
The differentiation between art and popular culture is based on
legitimation, where art is regarded as singularly produced and
intellectually engaging, but popular culture is perceived as mass-
produced easy pleasure. Nollywood is referred to as popular cul-
tura (Barber 1982). This term, sin embargo, should not mean that it is
depoliticized. For Stuart Hall, “popular culture is … the ground
on which transformations are worked” (1998:443). If one con-
siders other media, such as video art, the principles of differen-
tiation are inconsistent. Video art often adopts an antinarrative
approach but, like video-film, repetition is an aesthetic strategy.
The differentiation between high and low forms of culture, él
would seem, is not based on different elements of representation
or even an issue of quality but on who produces and consumes in
which geographical locations. The concept of profundity neces-
sitates consciousness of continual power shifts through which
taste and value are constructed. As “a people’s art,” Nollywood
video-film draws attention to collectively constructed process-
based creative public interventions that respond directly to vola-
tile political and economic situations.
THE NOLLYWOOD LIVING ROOM—PROFUNDITY OR KITSCH?
Taking the contradictions embedded in terms such as “popu-
lar culture” and its kin, “kitsch,”13 into consideration, I turn to
and unpack Zina Saro-Wiwa’s interpretation of Nollywood’s rep-
resentation of objects in domestic settings in video works such
as Parlour (2010). Saro-Wiwa dislikes the term “kitsch” but finds
Nollywood living rooms “visually dissonant, sometimes even
just ugly yet fascinating in [su] inspiration.” She points out
that the living room set in Nollywood video-films and particu-
larly her collaborative art installation Parlour (2010) has univer-
sality. Visitors to the exhibition remarked that the living room
reminded them of an uncle’s house in Pakistan or a house in
Ucrania, Por ejemplo. Además, she regards these domestic
settings as a form of accessing “modernity or the proximation of
it” and constructing “post-industrial identity.”
Saro-Wiwa shows the complexity of kitsch in the kind of
urban, modern home that is depicted in Nollywood. Her collab-
oration with artist Mickalene Thomas for the exhibition “Sharon
VOL. 49, NO. 4 WINTER 2016 african arts | 65
from American television programs? Donald Cosentino criti-
cizes the “understanding of kitsch as evil imitation” and argues,
“In Africa, imitation can also be part of a process of reinvention”
(1991:242). He proposes that Afro kitsch “generates fresh and ten-
sive images out of old traditions” (1991:254). In their orchestra-
tion of familiar objects and reconstruction of familiar spaces,
Saro-Wiwa and Thomas’s installations incite a rethinking of
the Nollywood living room as the culmination of exhibitionary
spaces such as the gallery and the stage. Displayed objects are
transformado.
Barrot asserts that, as “the main centre for forgery in Africa …
Nigeria uses the art of counterfeit in its video industry, incluido
recycling the names of films: Pretty Woman, Sharon Stone, Die
Another Day” (2008:28). This derisive description operates on a
cultural value system that venerates the original over the copy in a
sociopolitical dynamic that assumes Africans are copying the East
and the West. En este sentido, the term “kitsch” seems derogatory.
The misconception that Africans are copying others is often based
on representations of Nollywood domestic spaces that are filled
with “kitsch” objects including imported designer leather couches,
stuffed animals, green curtains,15 glass-topped coffee tables with
metallic frames, chandeliers, alcohol bars, and large-screen televi-
siones, as well as glass and porcelain sculptures that signify modern
wealth. Piracy, sin embargo, plagues the Nollywood video-film indus-
intentar. In the arts, the Western postmodernist discourse of the copy,
as demonstrated by Rosalind Krauss (1986), surmises that in the
postindustrial, post-Fordist age there is a loss of an original. El
economy of the copy in Nollywood is an important element as it
subverts the hierarchy/cult of the original. The discourse of the
copy and representation of kitsch in Nollywood video-film should
shift from a criminalizing discourse (bootlegging, theft of ideas,
etc.) to one that recognizes interventionist appropriation. Schol-
arship in the arts of Africa emphasize that repetition is a signif-
icant and inventive aesthetic strategy (Drewal 1992, Vogel 1991).
The Nollywood phenomenon subverts notions of private property,
authenticity and cult of personality (artists).
Celeste Olalquiaga distinguishes between melancholic kitsch
and nostalgic kitsch, arguing that “kitsch is the attempt to repos-
sess the experience of intensity and immediacy through an object
… it is the debris of [the mystical] aura … a two-way ticket to
the realm of myth—the collective of individual land of dreams”
(1999:291) In this way, Saro-Wiwa’s interpretation of kitsch in the
Nollywood living room adds depth. It sets the stage for enacting
memory and imagination as well as for thinking critically about
home as a transient space and the loss or impossibility of “ori-
gin.” Rather than being an aesthetic quality that emerged from
the formation of an industrial working class, cultures or objects
that appear as kitsch in Nigeria arose in the negotiation of the
affirmation of local cultures as well as appropriation of transna-
tional cultures during economic shifts.
For Saro-Wiwa, this installation is not only an interpretation
of a typical Nollywood or Nigerian living room or simply an
assemblage of familiar objects, but it is a requiem. When I inter-
viewed Saro-Wiwa, she mentioned that the color of the living
room set in Parlour (2010) had more to do with the set of her
father’s situation comedy television show, Basi and Company.
This comedy was broadcast in the 1980s on the National Tele-
12 Television set Zina Saro-Wiwa’s and Mickalene
Thomas’s installation Parlour (2010)
Photo: courtesy of Zina Saro-Wiwa
Stone in Abuja” was an installation of a typical interior of a liv-
ing room or parlor with green walls in Lagos, fashioned like the
parlors that are used as a setting for most Nollywood video-films
(Higo. 6). In this installation, there is a “fake” miniature Doric
columna, “fake” or plastic and glass flowers, “fake” gold-rimmed
drinking glasses, and a “fake” gold gilded frame with an image of
Christ on the cross, as well as flower-shaped lamp shades (Figs.
7–9). On the walls are large portrait photographs of Nollywood
actresses by Mickalene Thomas. The actresses are dressed in
batik print fabric outfits and seated on couches that are also cov-
ered with batik print fabric (Figs. 10–11).14
Carmen McCain (2010) sees the use of batik fabric in Saro-
Wiwa and Thomas’s installations as a copy of the ways in which
Nigerian homes are imagined but not how they really are. Ella
estados: “The bizarre notes in the room were the zebra-striped
and leopard print throw pillows, reminding the visitor that this
was not a home in Nigeria but a gallery in New York, where ani-
mal print is often the easiest visual shorthand for Africa.” These
objects can easily be perceived as kitsch, but why? Are these
objects kitsch because there are many copies of the same objects
in working-class and lower-middle-class homes? Are they kitsch
because they recycle or copy images of modern living interiors
66 | african arts WINTER 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 4
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13 Zina Saro-Wiwa
The Mourning Class: Nollywood (2010)
Installation view from “The Progress of Love,"
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2013
Photo: courtesy the artist, © Pulitzer Arts
Base
vision Authority (NTA), and because it parodied the get-rich-
quick mentality it became very popular. The domestic set in Basi
and Company was often powder blue or green. The green space
in Parlour (2010) resonates with the space constructed for Basi
and Company, setting up a dialogue between Saro-Wiwa’s cre-
ative practice and her father.
Saro-Wiwa and Thomas’s living room or parlor in a gallery
(Higo. 12) is echoed by the parlor in the television screen (desde
video-films are watched on television sets), as copies of copies
proliferating ad infinitum in a matrix where no object claims ori-
gin and which frustrates the process of valuing and categorizing.
There is something original about Nollywood (as well as Ghana-
ian video-film) as a culture “like no other,” but it produces and
recycles cultural images that circulate in the public sphere, hacer-
ing it both familiar and strange. Nollywood is everywhere. Esto es
its fantastic nature so aptly defined by Okome as “ubiquitous,”16
as if it were omnipresent. This is also how it can be experienced
as sublime and perhaps profound. It keeps drawing attention to
prevailing and overwhelming power systems that are renegoti-
ated in everyday life.
This infinitude of the living room is also demonstrated in
Saro-Wiwa’s video installation Mourning Class (2010). A series of
televisions screens depict women (Nollywood actresses) looking
straight into the camera and performing loud crying episodes
(Higo. 13, cover). Saro-Wiwa points out that the performance of
mourning does not necessarily mean that there is pretense, pero
that “the piece explores the role of performance in mourning.”
The close-up of each woman who is crying fills the space in
each television screen such that one becomes aware of the way
in which television encroaches on personal or inner space that
evokes loss (of family). For Saro-Wiwa, this work is linked to the
deaths in her family. The spatial dimension of mourning (solo
at “home” or publicly on burial sites) is about confronting one’s
locatedness in the world. It is common to see, in a video-film,
a woman throw herself on to the ground, crying and scream-
ing hysterically17 the same words repeatedly when she hears dis-
appointing news. As also shown in Phyllis, spectacular wailing
through the loud repetition of words could be seen as comic, pero
at the same time deeply poignant. Saro-Wiwa points out that she
was interested in performed sentiment or the “choreography of
grief.” Hyperperformance in Nollywood video-film is crucial in
understanding the politics of dispossession or of how space is
VOL. 49, NO. 4 WINTER 2016 african arts | 67
inhabited and is experienced.
Considering Larkin’s observation that video-film “constitutes
a living experience” of “fantastic narratives about Nigerian life”
(2008:13), its profundity may not necessarily lie in its technical
quality or narrative content but in its ability to bring unpolished
elements of the material conditions of everyday lives into close
proximity (a spatial metaphor). Eso es, the video-film medium
appears as a hyperreality of everyday life and as such over-
whelms the senses; in doing that, it can be aligned to the notion
of the sublime. Video-film, as shown in Saro-Wiwa’s video art,
also interrogates the experience of new technology not just as
visual but “multi-sensorial” (Drewal 2005). For Saro-Wiwa, este
manifests not only in video art that we can see and hear but also
in installations that invite the viewer to experience the typical
domestic setting of Nollywood that is both strange and famil-
iar, both “awful and engaging.” Video-film seems to bring things
into proximity such that they are too close for comfort.
Citing French journalist Emmanuel Vincenot, Pierre Bar-
rot (2008:29) notes that Nigerian video-films have a “kitsch
feel.” Brian Larkin, sin embargo, finds that video-film reveals how
the “colonial sublime” operates. For Larkin, whose focus is the
technology of video-film, the “use of technology to represent
an overwhelming sense of grandeur and awe in the service of
colonial power” plays an important role in the “representation of
technology and technology as representation” (2008:7). Colonial
power was expressed through technology that pervaded politi-
cal and cultural life. The construction of massive bridges, dams,
and monuments by colonial administration in colonies is part
of the colonial sublime. The sublime is based on profundity that
experienced in relation to space. Larkin uses the Kantian and
Burkean notions of the sublime as “the individual or collective
response to a confrontation with phenomena or events outside
of imagination’s possibility to comprehend” such that it “per-
forms an outrage on the imagination”; it is “about a representa-
tion of limitlessness” (Larkin 2008:35). This sense of limitlessness
can also be seen in Saro-Wiwa’s description of plastic goods in
the Lagosian public sphere. While Burke locates the sublime as
a characteristic of objects, Kant posits that the sublime can only
exist “in the apperception of objects by a judging subject” (Lar-
kin 2008:35).
Por lo tanto, the sublime is an experience that is not only defined
as seeing something “absolutely great,” but it also describes “the
overwhelming physical powerlessness individuals feel in the face
of something overpowering and terrible” (Larkin 2008:36). Para
James Donald, the qualities of the sublime and kitsch are con-
verse but can coexist. Donald defines kitsch as “the sublime’s
true antithesis” because it is “collusive with the value-less world
of bourgeois modernity in providing a mask of order and value
for its real disorder” (1989:240). Sin embargo, since “terror is a rul-
ing principle of the sublime,” the sublime is only differentiated
from the fantastic by the manner in which it identifies “the
source of terror” (1989:109). He argues that “popular forms share
with the sublime” the transgression “of beauty, grace and rea-
son … [y] of aesthetic boundaries … bad taste takes its place
alongside the fantastic, the uncanny, and the sublime in a car-
nival of resistance to the hegemony of the beautiful” (1989: 19).
Nollywood contravenes conventions of representation as well
as unstable aesthetic categories of rational and beautiful. En eso
contravention, sin embargo, it reunites kitsch and the sublime to
reveal the terror of (neo)colonialism and overwhelming gluttony
of capitalism, which can easily be disguised as the everyday and
mundane (kitschy objects in urban homes). By placing images of
these effects into proximity, Nollywood renders them as shock-
En g, and they can be experienced as sublime. The significance
of video-film, in its emerging form, should not be undervalued.
Even though the images of the home that Nollywood proliferates
seem superficial, they are indices of real concerns about spatial
política.
CONCLUSIÓN
Saro-Wiwa’s installation and video art captures the overwhelm-
ing reaction to a complex and fantastic postcolonial situation.
Through its representation of domestic/local and international
spaces, Nollywood becomes a significant medium through which
contemporary spatial politics are negotiated. Además, her
work depicts the complex reinforcement of moral values through
local sociocultural practices by “screening” other worlds on tele-
visión. This paper instigates debate in the process of reconcep-
tualizing the image of kitsch in the Nollywood living room as a
profoundly extraordinary space. Profound spaces, as proposed
aquí, are fantastic multiscalar spaces. Particular scales such as the
home, the market, or sacred land facilitate the shaping of a way
of life and are constituted by simultaneous imaginaries of spa-
tial experience. The domestic house is represented in Nollywood
video-film as a space where the desire of things that are out there
is constructed. The depiction of these spaces shows how negotia-
tions of so-called moral values in video-film symbolize the com-
plexity of the image in contemporary culture. The rhetoric of a
“better life” in the cities is transformed into the nightmare of the
city as symbol of cultural decay, alienation, and social fragmenta-
ción. Nollywood themes draw out narratives of domination and
marginalization, alienation and displacement, where people seek
to move from one place to another (from the village to the city,
from being local urbanites to being cosmopolitans or from pov-
erty to riches). They are narratives that contend the margin, el
border or the boundary to break up conventions of meaning, y
to provoke and recreate geographical imaginaries.
Nomusa Makhubu is a lecturer in Art History at Michaelis School of Fine
Arte, University of Cape Town. nomusa.makhubu@uct.ac.za
Notas
I am deeply indebted to Greg Ruiters for the constant
but mostly subtle encouragement, patience as well as his
generous and unconditional support.
1 This is also changing. In July 2012, when I was
in Lagos, there were Nollywood films being screened at
the Silverbird Galeria cinema in Victoria Island, Lagos,
where American movies are usually screened. Estos
were also produced as celluloid films rather than video-
film and have been referred to as “New Nollywood.”
2 All statements made by Zina Saro-Wiwa in
this paper are drawn from a Skype interview with the
author, Julio 28, 2014.
3
I am grateful to the external reviewer who
pointed out Michel de Certeau’s discussion of la per-
ruque as an interesting way to read the metaphor of
the wig. Using the example of la perruque, or “the wig,"
de Certeau argues that “operational models of popular
culture … exist in the heart of the strongholds of the
contemporary economy” (1988:25). La perruque is work
that an employee does for personal fulfillment during
work hours or “company time.” In this way, the worker
challenges the established order through the use of
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popular tactics. One can think about Zina Saro-Wiwa’s
use of the wig as a way of “tricking” established orders.
This is what de Certeau calls “styles of social exchange,
technical invention and moral resistance” (1988:26).
4 Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the military
government of General Sani Abacha in 1995. Cuando
the agricultural economy shifted to an oil economy in
Nigeria, land was used for oil pipelines. Ken Saro-Wiwa
campaigned against Shell Oil Company, who were
responsible for oil spills in Ogoniland, and the use of
land for oil operations.
process originating in Indonesia, critiques the notion
of authenticity (Shonibare et al. 2004). The discourse of
copy and original, based on the premise that the power
relationship between the colonized and the colonizer
results in the notion that the former copies or mimics
the latter who symbolises power, is subverted in Shoni-
bare’s artwork.
15 Green curtains and green paint on walls have
become stereotypical of Lagos homes. The color green
refers to the national flag that comprises green and
white colors.
5
I would also like to thank the external reviewer
16
Interview with Onookome Okome, Puede 23,
for pointing this out.
2011, Pretoria.
17
I use the word “hysteria” with caution, y con
suspicion of Freudian neuropathological explanations.
The term is, sin embargo, also reminiscent of the scientific
discourse about “mass hysteria” in reference to, para
ejemplo, el 1962 Tanganyika Laughter epidemic where
school children had so-called laughing attacks (Anglade
and McConnell 2006:122). Loud crying, like loud
laughter, is seen as a form of hysteria that differentiates
between classes and between rational and irrational.
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6 The film Born Again Billionaires 1&2 is an
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8 This research was conducted during 2011 y
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9 Tunde Kelani’s film Ti Oluwa Ni Ile (1995), para
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