“This House Is Not for Sale”: Nollywood’s Spatial Politics and Concepts of “Home” in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Art

In Lagos, it is common to come upon houses with the hand-painted sign: “this house is not for sale” (Fig. 1). This arises because con artists frequently sell other people’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 “crisis” of the home is symbolic of the “crisis” of the nation. As a visual metaphor, the home or the house is correlated to deception, 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 artworks as well as in Nollywood video-film generally, I explore the way in which sociocultural performance inscribes moral geographies. 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—usually the fantasy bourgeois home—is common. This doubly foregrounds “moral performance(s)” (Kalu 2003) where desire reunites with taboo and with social acceptability. In addition, Nollywood video-film, referred to as “home video,” is generally viewed at home (as well as in cafés and barber shops).¹ The double 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 (place) 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 Nollywood’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), which 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 Parlour (2010) and Mourning Class (2010), I wish to suggest that visual constructions of domestic space in African popular culture are not only settings for melodramatic performances but are a microcosm for the “crisis” in social relations in contemporary Nigeria.

Phyllis (Fig. 2), shot in Lagos Island, depicts a young woman who lives alone in Lagos and spends her days watching Nollywood 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 (Fig. 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 supernatural force—her eyes roll back so that only the whites of her eyes are visible (Fig. 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. There 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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Nomusa Makhubu

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