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Speaking recently at the first African Women in Film Forum in Lagos, Abena Busia had the audience laughing when she said that cars were better treated than women in Nollywood. ‘Of Cooking, Cars and Gendered Culture’ was the title of her lead presentation. After the first day’s series of events, everyone wanted a word with Busia, a poet, performer and an associate professor at Rutgers University in the United States. She spared a few lively and enlightening minutes with NEXT.

Born to do it

Abena Busia, a poet, teacher and performer is sister to actress Akosua Busia, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s epochal ‘The Color Purple’ with Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. Their father was former Ghanaian Prime Minister Kofi Busia.

“We grew up in a family that loved literature and loved hymns and treasured the spoken word,” she said, when asked if a performance trait runs in the family.

“We had family praise on Sunday evenings and our father would make us each read a Bible verse. At one point when we were in Mexico, we weren’t in regular school (we were being home-schooled for one semester), Father bought poetry anthologies and he said, ‘You can choose any poem you want from any of these anthologies but every Sunday after lunch you have to recite to me a poem you’ve learnt.’ Mother was a wonderful singer, her father was a chorister. I’ve been writing poetry all my life I’ve been writing since I was six.”

The Busia children were introduced to literary classics at an early age. “I had read every novel Jane Austen had written except ‘Emma’ by the time I was 13,” Busia said. “Our father loved ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and Keats. I remember him reciting Tennyson and so on. So we grew up in a family where you heard the word, either the Word of God or the word of the great writers.”

Busia has herself performed her poetry globally at Jazz and poetry festivals, conferences and churches.

The early introduction to Western literature and cultural traditions did adulterate the family’s ‘Africanness’, Busia was quick to point out.

“There isn’t a disconnect. I was lucky that even though we were in exile, my father still got ‘Transition’ (an African literary magazine published in the 70s). It was really when you get to college that you start to discover African and African American writers. Each one of us has to have the courage and integrity to know ‘My people are out there. What are they doing?’ I say there’s not a disconnect because I think it supports dichotomy to think we are either westernised or traditional. It’s not the case. We have been colonised; the legacies are also part of us. We have also gone over there and made ourselves part of them and so there’s a kind of melange and hybridity,” she said, citing the example of modern dressing as cutting across cultures.

Being African

On both days of the WIFF forum, however, Busia was consciously dressed in West African attire. “That was a political decision I made in the United States that I would not speak wearing European dress. So when I am on stage, I always wear West African dress. It’s not a contradiction. For me in the academy in the United States where I know being an African has a form of resonance that I want to resist and have critiqued, I want them to know, ‘This is my heritage.’ I want them to know when they look at me that I have roots and a culture, otherwise it‘ll be easy for them to think I don’t; and I don’t want that.”

This unavoidably brought up the question of being an African writer and the different responses it has generated. “Well I think that’s the answer, ‘I write and I’m an African’ When you say you don’t want to be put in a box, that’s a two-edged sword. I get disturbed when we resist being called African writers because then you sort of fall into the trap of limiting the meaning of African writing to the socio-political novel in English or whatever it is that is the dilemma and I want people to recognise that there is a diversity and ethnicity of African writers,” Busia replied.

“Now you might want to say that if you cannot write in an African language then you are not an African writer, I could understand that but then that would have excluded me and I would be very hurt by that. It could also exclude Chinua Achebe’s great novels and he is revered around the world because he managed to manipulate the English language so that when you read him, you think you are reading Igbo. He managed to style it, phrase it, transliterate the proverbs and use the imagery, so that when you read Chinua Achebe you forget that you are reading English. I don’t speak Igbo but I hear it when I’m reading him.”

Busia also has ears for other languages. “I speak French, I speak Twi, but not as well as I would like. I understand Ga because it’s my mother’s language but I can’t think in it.”

She gives English its due in the midst of Africa’s rich tongues. “Every language has its own richness. Every language has its own ideology. I love the English language because it’s impure. It absorbs everything. What is English? Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, French. You name it, it takes it. Look at the number of words in English that come from Hindu because they (the English) were there?”

Busia lists ‘cricket and ‘veranda’ as words with Hindi etymology. “When I say I love the English language, I love it because it’s malleable. I love French too but for different reasons but I think the French academicians are crazy, trying to purify it. ‘Le Weekend’ is here to stay,” she said of neologisms that French academicians were having a hard time accepting. “It wouldn’t occur to [the English] to purge the English language of its ‘French-isms’ or ‘Spanish-isms’ or what have you. So that’s why all of the world you have variations of the English Language. Jamaican English is not the same as Liberian English. They are almost mutually incomprehensible, but they are both English.”

A Feminist

Abena Busia’s lead presentation was well received at the Women in Film Forum. Her suggestions on Nollywood should not raise any conflict. “Whatever aspect of filmmaking you are involved in, treat it with integrity and do your work to make it the best. Don’t take anything less.”

The gender expert’s message on the Forum’s theme was lucid enough for the most pedestrian filmmaker. “Don’t be glib. Don’t shove in just because it’s easy. If you are going to write about a prostitute, give her complexity. She has a life. Every character should have a life. Treat your art as an art that is ennobling and we will get noble films. Some of the best female characters in literature are prostitutes. But that’s because they weren’t treated as flat characters,” she said with passion.

The fire of feminism comes across and she is not in denial about her stance. “That’s an easy one. I’m a feminist.” And on being a woman? “I don’t know how to be anything else,” she said with a laugh, before heading off for her appointment.