The film, Blood Vessel, which premiered on Netflix in December 2023, sinks its jaw into the oil spillage debacle to draw a tale of love and the loss of it amidst a gang of stowaways. It is supposedly set, or at least originates, in the Niger Delta community of Nembe, which is about 64 kilometres south of Yenagoa, in the southern part of Nigeria and flaunts characters who claim Nembe roots. Not only does Blood Vessel circumvent every reasonable allusion to the core of Nembe practice and culture, it immerses itself in a false depiction and is littered with erroneous portrayals.
At the risk of discounting the local dialect, the filmmakers opt for an Ijaw that is hardly a lingua franca of any quarter of Nembe. Characters converse, or try to, in this deviant tongue and themselves answer to generic Ijaw names like Oyinbraekemi and Abbey (which is itself seldom a name in the culture from which it has been lifted). These words have only the slightest etymological connection to what is recognized in Nembe.
The Ijaw language enjoys dominance within the Niger Delta both for the numerical strength of its speakers and as a parent language for many dialects in the region. But contrary to what is rendered in the story, its utilization is far from overarching. Coastal tribes such as the Nembe people maintain a distinct Nembe dialect that is as distinguishable from Ijaw as black is from white.
The problem with Blood Vessel‘s blunder in shoving this notable marker of Nembe culture beneath the carpeting effect of the larger Ijaw one is that the Okpaleke brothers end up dismissing the cultural heterogeneity of this region and succeed in sharing a skewed identity of the Nembe people with millions of viewers.
DEITIES; DEFIED AND DEFILED
In the bitter ensemble of cultural mishaps, one error manages to stand out as a malicious onslaught. Less than 30 minutes into the narration, a fretting character has emerged with a python around their neck. Viewers are sold the idea that the snake is a harmless deity, and not wrongly so. Adumu, as Oyinbraekemi (Adaobi Dibor) referred to it, is an age-long belief by itself and arguably at the fore of Nembe tradition. Yet it is only a few seconds before this deity is playing dinner in the mouths of its own worshippers. Viewers are to understand that these fugitives who have not been fugitives for two complete hours have undergone as much tribulation as wrecks their sense of spirituality.
If nothing else, agitators, or Niger Delta militants as they are popularly known, are among the most devout of deity worship in Bayelsa. This is so for many reasons, one of which is the spiritism associated with their unpopular methods of requiring fairness in the Niger Delta oil struggle. So how come about Boma (Jidekene Achufusi) and Degbe (Levi Chikere), both of whom ostensibly mirror these agitator roles, being the first to insinuate the delicious nature of this god on the tongue and organize its sacred flesh against a spit like an action performed countless times already?
A loose-fit explanation for this profanity comes many scenes later in a plugged-in flashback. Abbey (Ezekiel Daniel) sets out to convince his love interest, Oyinbraekemi (Adaobi Dibor) that it is rather the belief in spirits and prophecies that make them ‘real’. It is not obvious what the filmmakers aim to convey with this backhanded deprecation, but if Blood Vessel has ridden on this idea to advance its plot, it has only proven to be nothing more than a mischievous enterprise. While the random distribution of fates at the end of the movie balks from complementing the shoddy idea and exposes the filmmaker’s inadequacy the cultural upset instigated therewith remains untenable.
Except the Okpalekes harbour subtle motives to denigrate the very culture they appear to want to represent, the fact ought to remain that the python, even under the circumstance of biting hunger, is not a delicacy anywhere in the length and breadth of Nembe.
CENTRALIZING CULTURE
The world is at a critical stage in its political and social orientation, where what may have been too primitive for the screen is fast becoming the selling point for emergent societies. It must therefore be drummed that the appreciation of culture is beyond plucking a pricey Nok Head from the dirt in Jemaa in Kaduna and polishing it to decorate a shelf in Ikoyi in Lagos.
Culture is a people’s manner of thriving. It defines and marks them in a culturally overwhelmed world. Its application in any context must avoid being in conflagration with that from which it originates. The makers of Blood Vessel did not appear to have paid attention to this important bit of information.
ARTISTIC FREEDOM VERSUS COMMON WISDOM
It is easy to link this abuse to another recent fiasco; the gun-wielding Eyo masquerades in Jade Osiberu’s
Gangs of Lagos and the
backlash from the Isale-Eko Descendants Union. While the Okpalekes make nonsense of a revered deity, Osiberu rebrands Eyo Masquerade to her taste by taking away its staff and replacing it with an active gun.
Gangs of Lagos, in advancing its plot, strips the Eyo of its ultimate spiritual significance and shrouds it in the red cloth of street-side criminality.
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