Mother of George by Andrew Dosunmu (review)

Ayodele, who runs an African restaurant with his carefree brother, Biyi, in Brooklyn, is married in a resplendent traditional ceremony to Adenike, newly arrived from Nigeria. At the wedding, attended by extended family and community members, the couple receives gifts, blessings, invocations, and counsel. The supplications of May Ayo, Ayodele’s mother, are for a grandchild, preferably a grandson, to be named George Babatunde after her late husband. Things sour when, after eighteen months, Adenike is not pregnant. She confides in her worldly friend Sade, who suggests fertility treatment. Ayodele balks. Torn, Adenike succumbs to her mother-in-law’s pressure for Biyi secretely to impregnate her. According to Ma Ayo, “It is the same blood.” It works and all are happy, but late into the pregnancy Adenike confesses to Ayodele, with disastrous consequences. She ends up in a hospital where Ayodele, Ma Ayo, Biyi, and Sade congregate, dazed. As Ayodele is summoned by an expressionless doctor, the spectator is left to imagine the outcome and its ramifications.

Mother of George won the “Excellence in Cinematography Award” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. Like the whirl of psychic tensions around Adenike, colors and sound are key parts of the film’s representational strategy, which gives new hues, textures, forms, and tangents to a universal and age-old dilemma. The compositions and colors, insofar as the narrative has troubling contours, add much needed subtleties, even radical dimensions, to its poetic visual register, rhetoric, and appeal. Facial expressions, nonverbal communication, extreme close-ups, mirror reflections, maverick compositions, blurred lights, and ambient sounds, including dialogue, voices, and eclectic background music, are used to draw effective parallels between Adenike’s tribulations, emotions, and the outside world. Against Biyi’s girlfriend Sade’s cosmopolitan flair Dosunmu counterposes Adenike’s colorful Dutch-wax print clothes. References to the oeuvre of the illustrious Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare add to the film’s opulent visuals, all of which evoke issues of cultural identity, negotiation, and hybridity.

In chronicling Adenike’s struggle for dignity, fulfillment and, crucially, autonomy from the social confines of the home and heart, Dosunmu dramatizes nuanced scenes that elicit Adenike’s keen sensibilities. Affectionate, loyal, and enterprising, Adenike brings Ayodele home-cooked meals at his restaurant and suggests initiatives to augment the household income. While deferential to Ayodele’s wishes and Ma Ayo’s goading, she is aware of the patriarchal burdens and expectations placed on women in her circumstances, and during a poignant phone call she asks her mother, “But why? Why is it always the woman?” This question, a critical acknowledgment of her situation, underscores her body as a site of ideological investments and social and moral tensions.

Questions of origins, heritage, marriage, maternity, matriarchy, and widowhood, along with paradigms of power, privilege, and kinship networks marked by new dynamics of intergenerational and interfamilial relationships, are elicited by the portrayal of Ma Ayo. Symbolically, she presents Adenike with an heirloom, the cloth she had used to brace Ayodele on her back, with the kindly words, “Carry my grandchild with it.” While the child may be a stabilizing element in Adenike’s marriage, for Ma Ayo it is of paramount importance to honor her late husband whose reincarnated spirit would be signified by the appearance of a grandson with the middle name Babatunde (“Father returns,” in Yoruba), thus soothing her own fears about the lineage and successorship.

The film’s title underscores the significance of motherhood in African cultural systems, within which a marriage may be considered unfulfilled, irrespective of personal prerogatives, if there is no child. While cultural constraints rule out artificial insemination as a solution to infertility, an equally powerful social taboo is infidelity, which might result in Ayodele’s becoming violent and exposing Adenike to sexual assault or torture. Such paradoxes underscore the predicaments of tradition, and this is all the more the case as Adenike’s pregnancy, initially met with excitement, turns into a nightmare. Hence the...