A Personal Review of Mami Wata

I do not care deeply for Nollywood at the moment. The avalanche of its recent output, since the leverage of Netflix and a reviving cinema culture in the post-pandemic years, has been a pandering to capitalism. Valid nonetheless, the industry remains a source of job creation; Nigeria’s philistinism and hardship doesn’t give room for art that is ‘high seriousness’ anyway. I believe, just as our music took time and finally arrived at where it is today, that Nollywood is also in a pre-Big-Bang phase, collecting cosmic dust.

When director C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi announced on X (formerly known as Twitter), in December 2022, that his movie, Mami Wata, had been selected for Sundance Film Festival 2023 in the US,  I was distantly excited—the emotion one has when another Nigerian has done something monumental on the global stage—and happy for him. But I was curious as well. What is this movie, especially because of the praise that trailed it, and seeing that I’d recently written a 4,000-word essay on the same subject of his movie title, i.e., the Tiv moniwata masquerade? I had to see Fiery’s movie.

I live in the slow city of Makurdi, Benue’s capital, where there’s only one cinema. On 8th September, the D-day Mami Wata was showing in Nigeria, I received a call from culture journalist, Emmanuel Esomnofu, informing me he was in Asaba with two other writers to see the movie. I told him I was going to miss being part of that history that day because the movie wasn’t showing in my city. But I had underrated the cinema in my backyard. When I checked their Instagram page, I was surprised to see it had actually shown the movie on that same day. Two days later, I went to see the movie with another friend, Somto, who turned out to be a good sport, participating in a keen viewer’s response with me throughout the experience of seeing the 1hr 47mins movie.

It is a monochromatic immersion when the 4K-shot video comes on and runs for the initial minutes. A bit of disorientation assails you as you imagine the monochrome goes on for the next one hour, forty-something minutes. Waves froth and crash against the big screen. A young woman in an adire gown knots her braids. She is silent, almost absent-minded; then we see her rise and walk into the sea. In the next scene, a woman, the young woman’s mother, is beseeching the priestess (Rita Edochie) of the town’s goddess, the Mami Wata, to help her return her daughter who has been carried off by the water goddess. Obstinately, the priestess or ‘asayi’, very characteristic of ossified traditionalists, insists nothing can be done, that Mami Wata takes any maiden she wants. She intones indifferently, ‘Your pikin no die. Na there she for don go. You sef know say na so e be.’

I remember long-time New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik’s sentiment about going to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical, Hamilton, when he wrote, ‘I will admit that I went to “Hamilton”, hard-won ticket in hand, with the critic’s . . . sneer stuck on my face, and even a pre-written critique stuffed into the pocket of my mental blazer,’ because he had been told by ‘a friend of good judgment’ that Hamilton was a ‘great work of art, so far, of the twenty-first century.’ I didn’t have Gopnik’s sentiments, but I was nonetheless driven by the praise following Fiery’s film as I sat in the film hall of Exodus Cinema.

For almost 45 minutes into the movie, I didn’t get the experience commensurate with the high praise the movie had received. I hadn’t read any reviews of it. Somto was beside me trying to catch the experience, too. The turning point for us, and I think, of the movie too, is when the priestess has a vision of herself being murdered by Jabi (Kelechi Udegbe), leader of a rebel gang against Mami Wata worship, and the plot that mounts to the eventual murder. Up to this point, the movie suffers a lack of profluence often characteristic of a weak script. This is accompanied by the actors’ stilted handling of dialogue as if still coming to terms with what they’re doing. In a nightlife scene, where Prisca (Evelyne Ily) complains about Zinwe’s (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) nonchalance towards Mami Wata worship, we pause by the scene’s fatigue, palled further by a guy who comes to Prisca—‘Mek we dance,’ he says, betraying any subtext to show us that the two are familiar or lovers as we find out later. It is too much to bear. However, the movie’s tempo changes from its turning point, the acting becoming more animated on the big screen.