Awam Amkpa: What’s Missing Will be Found

Photo Courtesy Nathalie Handal

Awam Amkpa is as eclectic as the highlife music of 1960s Nigeria—a fusion of African rhythms played with Western instruments. It is in this spirit of merging that he directed The Man Died, inspired by Wole Soyinka’s prison memoir.

The Man Died connects Soyinka’s heartbeat to Nigeria’s. The past to the present. The film’s intuitive quality makes us ponder on what a country means to a man. In the metaphorical opening scene, the protagonist, played by Wale Ojo, is on a lyrical hunt. His enduring footsteps become the hum of the story and establishes the pulse of the film—in conflict the daily recurrence of death is an act of rebirth. The film’s photography, a subtle palette of amber, pewter, and midtone rust, accentuate each composition.

Amkpa is unstinting, and the intricacies of his artistic vision are bold offering a lens to see imprecisions as a way of understanding discord and harmony. The film captures Soyinka’s resilient spirit—through solitary confinement, torture, and voluntary starvation—stirringly.

“It is a story whose theme still haunts Nigeria,” Amkpa tells me. “It is an African story because of ethnocentrism as one of the most divisive ways of organizing African countries and societies. It is a global story because it’s centered around injustice and concerns for human rights.”

In Yoruba culture, the person telling a story starts with a call, and the audience responds. The storyteller says, Àlọ́ ọ́oo to which the listeners respond, Àlọ̀ọ̀ọ̀ (both meaning story). Soyinka and Amkpa have been practicing a version of this call and response for the past four decades.

A New Yorker and nomad with the ancient beats of Africa resonating through him like the immeasurable and poetic Sahel, Amkpa was born in Kano, capital of Kano State in northern Nigeria, of parents from Lokoja, capital of Kogi State, central part of the country. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, a Master of Arts in Drama from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, and a PhD in Drama from University of Bristol.

Like the meaning of Sahel in Arabic, shore or edge, Amkpa takes us to the edges of multiple spaces—vibrant, tragic, opaque. He translates, builds, expands and moves between and through physical and metaphorical spaces. And does it with the same fervor as that of love letters that wandered ancient worlds, or the Onitsha Market of Eastern Nigeria, where a powerful vernacular epistolary literature was produced. And everything Amkpa creates merges to transform our vision of the world and of ourselves.

He tells stories through myriad mediums. His films include Winds Against Our Souls; It’s All About Downtown; National Images and Transnational Desires; A Very, Very Short Story of Nollywood, and the feature film Wazobia! He has directed and written over 100 plays including Rebecca in Four Stanzas, Ajasco, and the epistolary play Not in My Season of Songs. Among the numerous visual arts exhibits he has curated globally are Black Portraitures; ReSignifications; Africa: See You, See Me; and AfroEuropa: Incontri; and he has published articles on representations in Africa and its diasporas, modernisms in theater, postcolonial theater, and Black Atlantic films. He was a lecturer at King Alfred’s College in Winchester in England, a professor a Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and joined NYU in 1999. He started contributing to NYU’s global network over two decades ago, and with Manthia Diawara and others, established the Ghana site. He is currently Vice Provost for the Arts, and Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi.

The following interview took place over many months and various cities—Abu Dhabi, Accra, Lagos. Each time we part, the scraps of paper Soyinka wrote on, smuggled out of his prison cell re-appear in my mind, like letters never sent. No wahala, Amkpa tells me, what’s missing will be found.

 —Nathalie Handal for Guernica

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Guernica: How did you come to know Wole Soyinka?

Awam Amkpa: He received a letter about me from one of my high school teachers in England, Derek Bullock. When I was admitted to the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, where theatre was innovatively studied as an intersection between dramatic literature and performance traditions, and where Wole was head of the Dramatic Arts Department, I sought him out.

My fascination with the location of that university was that it was far from my northern part of the country. This was what people would deem the center of Yoruba civilization. Topographically stunning and carved within a luxuriant tropical rain forest, deeply mythical and heavily endowed with ancient and new history. The south was exuberant. I’d never seen so much beauty, especially the women, and I felt I’d come to another universe.

Guernica: How did the African playwrights of the 1970s inspire you?

Amkpa: There were many in Africa, Nigerians were the majority, and Wole was one of them. Their works were transnational because they were translating indigenous storytelling into literature, especially European literary forms, and then they brought in performance traditions into that mix. The Dramatic Arts Department was also supporting this generation of educated Africans who were a melding of cultures, had access to European culture, and spoke European and indigenous languages.

That generation inspired me to study dramatic arts. But I was also desperate to know everything. I took philosophy, religion, literature, linguistic and theater classes. I learned to be a carpenter, I learned to weld, I learned to light. I was the electrician in the theater. I moved sets, painted, became a stage manager. Everybody in my cohort at that time wanted to be a filmmaker, and I just wanted to be a storyteller. I needed to know how to tell stories, weave the narrative, structure the settings, set up emotions in the narrative.

Guernica: You told me for you that theater became a principle, a vehicle for decolonizing reform. How did you integrate your dramatic skills to your filmmaking?

Amkpa: The principle of what the theater engaged with in the Nigerian space is still the same thing that the Nigerian film industry continues to engage with. In other words, theater is not simply an illustration of culture in Nigeria but a set of practices that produces culture. It’s a lexicon, a language that Nigerians use to understand the space they live in, the conflicts in that space, the ethical. Films expanded that. As a matter of fact, most people like me who trained in the theater were the intellectuals of that film industry.

Guernica: They are interconnected.

Amkpa: They are, and my own directorial focus is the audience. I wanted to make a film that was quintessentially Nigerian, that’s oversaturated with multiple genres of filmmaking, and find out how I land in that space. I’ve been a scholar of that space and wanted to know how I transition creatively from theatre to filmmaking. I was talking to an audience that’s familiar with the language of filmmaking, which is different from the language of theater. I felt the best people to help me talk to that audience would be people who live in the industry.

Guernica: You have mentored, launched and introduced many artists to the world. This is apparent in who you decide to work with in this film. For the past 14 years, you, Femi Odugbemi, a leading producer of film and television content, and producer of The Man Died, along with associate producers Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo and Makin Soyinka, have produced IRep, a documentary film festival in Lagos. You are invested in the younger generation of storytellers, tell us more about the young screenwriter Bode Asiyanbi.

Amkpa: First of all, the premise was this film should be as Nigerian as it can be and using the language of filmmaking as a medium of articulating social reality. That cultural and visual literacy was critical for me as a pool to draw on, a place to get the technicians, actors, writers, and everyone who knows that lexicon.

Beyond the memoir, was the book’s translation in the language of a very visible and highly dynamic and innovative Nigerian film industry, which came out of television. That industry, socially speaking, recruits more diverse skills than the oil industry, which provides the country’s main revenue. And it employs people into what we largely can call an informal economy.

In regard to the specifics, I wanted a writer who was intellectually adept and able to translate Wole Soyinka’s thinking into a more popular medium. Femi, who was also commissioned by MultiChoice, a South African television and film company, to set up an institute for training young filmmakers from Africa, introduced me to Bode. He had just finished his MFA from Lancaster University and read everything Wole wrote.

The conversation between Bode and I centered on what kind of genre the movie could be imagined in? Wole kept giving us backstories, things he couldn’t write in the book, because of people who were still alive, people who helped him, people he conspired with, people he had all kinds of relationships with. When Bode asked if he had salacious stories. He told us about his story with the nurse. That conversation set so many fires into our imagination, because the book as we knew it became different. That’s when we decided to fictionize, and the film became inspired by the book.

The Man Died was the first written testament of the kinds of political risks that Wole takes. It was one of the grandest ways of experiencing reprisal from the Nigerian state. The book is a historical monument. It’s about a country in the making during the height of the Cold War, where oil becomes a critical source of revenue. In the making of this new independent country, the question of the rights of people, the question of the genocidal impulse, had to be resolved. He was adamant that people should go to war for resource, that was the basis for the book.

Guernica: Such powerful performances by stars such as Sam Dede, Norbert Young, Francis Onwochei, Edmond Enaibe, Segilola Ogidan, Abraham Amkpa, Christina Oshunniyi and Simileoluwa Hassan. Can you speak about the cast.

Amkpa: They are multi-generational from the well-established Nollywood actors to a newer generation. You also find actors of Nigerian origin who trained overseas. We created a hub of styles and traditions. It is a subject matter that taps into their various skill sets. The subject matter and the production set also brought a certain discipline in production. They were all there on time, well-rehearsed, and ready to roll.

Guernica: Can you speak about the visual translation and the director of photography, critical to the patina of the film.

Amkpa: Agbo Kelly, the director of photography, was originally the lighting designer. It wasn’t just about the skillset, it was also about the responsiveness of that person to my directorial outlook. I wanted to focus on the length, height, and varieties of angles on the shots.  He knew my directorial approach was not going to be simply based on the story, but the photographic techniques of telling it.

The other thing—which is something I teach to my students at NYU—is the history of the technology of filmmaking. In this case, the camera. In that regard, Nigeria became an intriguing platform that arguably decoded the history of the camera in filmmaking.

The varieties of pigmentation that you can put in front of a digital camera at low light and still get an amazing photograph illustrates the claim. In the analog days, you couldn’t put people of two different skin pigments in one shot. It was expensive. One person gets too light, one person gets too dark. That’s why the patina of earlier filmmaking preferred light-skinned people in early 20th century films.

Guernica: You play the saxophone, and music is an important part of your creative life. What role did music play in the film?

Amkpa: The kernel to that answer would be about language. Nigeria is a polyglot environment, and language is musical in the Nigerian space. We speak English differently. We bring different tonalities to the way we speak, and it makes sense because of the heterogeneous nature of that environment. Music becomes like an impulse. The musicality of communication is what carries the emotion, the logic, the highs and the lows.

So yes, I’m fascinated by music, it’s an obsession, and a primal way of accessing emotions. I use it to process things, to imagine how I would deliver meanings to my audiences, even to my students. I pay attention to the musicality of my delivery and Femi knows that about me. But could we afford the kind of music we wanted for the film, and was that music just an ornament, or something that has continuity, like the story?

The music of that period was called highlife music, a very eclectic kind of music—about cities, the anxieties of living in a city, the anxiety of being lonely in a city when you’ve left your family in the rural area. Highlife music was critical in the early 1960s in Nigeria. It started in Ghana and Sierra Leone. It was a West African coastal music. Some of the musical skillsets was learned from the church, some from the military. It was the music of urban life. The foundation of Afrobeat today came from highlife music. I listen to it every day. 

Guernica: Nigeria is an intensely musical space.

Amkpa: It’s a place where you can’t walk by in silence. Even within chaos, you will hear strings and other competing musical trends. Music was part of the fabric of the audience that I wanted to access, so I needed a musician or a set of musicians that would give me that raw aspect that I could build on.

Guernica: How did you find Afolaranmi Olaoluwa Abiodun aka Afowoslide (Abbey Trombone)?

Amkpa: I went out with friends for a drink one night. In the distance, this guy was playing the trombone and these days it’s a rarity. The trombone is like this hidden prince. The image was cinematic, and I loved his theatricality—a man playing an instrument that, when he stretches it out, is taller or as tall as him. I told my producer I wanted to work with him.

Like everyone else on the film set, he was an enthusiastic collaborator. Why go for big names when I can create something fresh with this guy. He and seven other musicians went to his studio, mixed things up beautifully.

Guernica: The radio is a critical character in the film. A variety of radios are part of the setting.  We hear broadcasts from the small transistor to the furniture in the living rooms. We hear voiceovers from the radio. It made me think of Boubacar Boris Diop’s quote: “I don’t listen to the radio to find out what’s happened, I listen to it to find out how the happenings have been distorted.” Can you speak about the role of the radio.

Amkpa: I can’t believe you even asked this question because this was a big obsession for me. I was going to be working with a crew that was brought up on television and did not really understand the significance of the radio.

The visual language of my generation was heavily influenced by television but the radio played a big role in my childhood. It was the soundtrack of my house. My parents would listen to the BBC. I knew all the jingles.

The radio in the film gave an expansive idea of the context of the time because you’re hearing things being reported from elsewhere. But you’re right that the radio is also very subjective because those who are broadcasting are giving you their subjective view of a reality. As a matter of fact, some of the things that were not in The Man Died, which we gleaned from other biographical details, involved the radio, with Wole Soyinka helping the dissidents set up a pirate radio station, which could not be found. This became a medium to express himself later on.

The radio broadcast gave people a sense of country.

Guernica: Speak more about the scene in the film where Wole Soyinka goes into the radio station at gunpoint and threatens a technician to replace the broadcast with his own tape.

Amkpa: He literally took over the broadcast. He was subsequently arrested for this act because he took hostages. He was tried, but on several technicalities, they couldn’t convict him. If you ask him that question, his response will be, “I was accused, I was arrested, but I was not convicted.”

This story is not in the original prison memoir, but we added it as part of the buildup to what got him into political trouble.

Guernica: This idea of the radio delivering truth and lies prompts us to ask questions, and makes me think of the Nigerian proverb: You know who you love but you don’t know who loves you.

Amkpa: Absolutely. In the Nigeria’s political space and history, the radio played a big role. It played a role with military coup d’états.

Guernica: To you personally, the radio story-wise was what gave the illusion of a community?

Amkpa: Yes, I needed the radio to play that role as the community was precarious, fragmented and in conflict.

For me, audiences can use these platforms of primary communication to reimagine and reinvent a country. If you go to the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation radio stations, you will see military tanks parked there. This is an effigy of the past where soldiers could drive into a radio station and broadcast to the entire nation that the country is being taken over.

Guernica: Speaking about community reminds us that all great social justice groups in society had the principle of love. bell hooks said that “The word “love” is mostly defined as a noun, yet… we would all love better if we could use it as a verb.” Love being an action, how does that come into play with what you’re talking about in relation to Nigeria.

Amkpa: The film is a love story of Nigeria where justice emerged as a theme of conflict between the rulers and the ruled. It is a love story, distraught, disappointing, tragic, painful, like most love stories can be, but it is what drives the protagonist. It was the ethic of a love story that’s fulfilling for everyone, rather than one that is sectional and impartial. If you go back to bell hooks, that’s really when love is a verb, because the human impulse is to create community—where justice is elusive, it leads to the bestial aspects of human relations. Wars come out of that.

Guernica: Nigeria is multiethnic. You are multiple. We’ve had vivid discussions about temporality, belonging, cultural pluralism, nomadism, the art of wandering.  And here you are going back to your country of birth, and diving into its soul. Can you speak about routes and rootedness.

Amkpa: Like the tension between roots and routes. If I use that as an analogy, it’s about going back towards roots, but really the roots were not real roots, they were a constellation of routes. It’s like going back to a moving stream. You’re not really going back to the original, it’s always changing.

You can never go back to it, but you can always be part of it. It always influences you. I think that’s the way I’ve rolled in the world, that sense of becoming, rather than a sense of belonging.

I didn’t necessarily go back to Nigeria, Nigeria put in me the resources of who I’ve become today, as somebody who’s always going through the world with that evolutionary mindset. Whether people are conscious about it or not, the human impulse is to go back to the roots. It’s easy, it’s emotional. Everybody talks about roots and uprootedness, and that’s a conflict between place and spaces. I emphasize spaces rather than a place.

Guernica: That’s also what the film and the protagonist is saying, if we want this place, it must be a place that accommodates multiple spaces, where the relationships between those spaces enhance each other, rather than diminish each other.

Amkpa: Exactly, and it’s the same ethos that influences who I am as a person, an artist and a scholar.

Guernica: Edward Said said, Human identity is not only natural and stable, but constructed, and occasionally even invented outright. How has your identity evolved?

AW: I went through an identity crisis, belonging everywhere and nowhere. I encountered people who celebrated their belonging and rootedness. I was rootless and bouncing. It was much later that I came to understand that kind of rhizomorphic idea of identity, that you can plant roots everywhere, you can uproot and go somewhere and replant.

Guernica: Where were you when Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize in 1986, and what did you do?

Amkpa: I was enroute to Bristol to do my PhD in Drama. I sent him a letter.

Guernica: Can you remember what it felt like writing to him?

Amkpa: More like what it felt like receiving a letter, letters from him in general. What was unique about his letters were not so much the content, but his handwriting. He wrote in a kind of scattered way. You can see they were written in hurry, but I was always fascinated to receive them as they acknowledged the receipt of my letter.

Guernica: Circa 2017, you started curating the visual arts—the photography of the Pan-African world, the African diasporic world. How do you approach curating?

Amkpa: My curatorial practice reflects my training as a theater director. Because of the visual perspectives that I impose and the performativity of even static objects. Every time people walk into the space I curate, they feel like they’re walking into a staging of this work, and they become part of the work. That it is an extension of my storytelling skills from theater and filmmaking.

Every exhibition I’ve done is an extrapolation from an ongoing project. I explore how to structure, manipulate, and present them to varieties of audiences.

This was what I taught at Tisch School of the Arts. I was fascinated by its interdisciplinarity. I wanted to bring together storytellers who used photography, performance, dance, film to create this kind of motif.

Guernica: Africa: See You, See Me is a striking exhibit on the history of African photography and its influence on non-African views of Africa. How seeing can be imposed and alter reality seem to captivate you, as well as the mystery of photographs—subjects seeing themselves as they’ve never before?

Amkpa: Seeing is framing history.

I was commissioned by the city of Lisbon to do a retrospective of African photography that didn’t just look at Lusophone African photography, but a new idea of Africa and how photography helps to take us there. I looked at it through the motif that migration invented Africa, and that motif of migration became the essence of Africa: See You, See Me.

Ai Weiwei and the Africa-China Chamber of Commerce saw the work in Lisbon and invited it to the Caochangi Photo Festival in Beijing and then to the National Museum of Macau.

Another version of that show went to Florence and Rome. In both cities it was in photography schools and their galleries hosted this kind of counter-ethnography. Photography vis-a-vis Africa had a colonizing history which flattened and primitivized the continent. The exhibition decided to reverse that trope with a counter ethnography. I was interested in how African photographers changed the gaze and started telling their own stories. The way they composed the picture, the way they used visual art traditions to even inform composition of their photographs. Through patterns, structures, rhythms as backdrops to tell the stories. And the way they did portraits.

Guernica: How has Black Portraitures, an academic conference series that studies African diasporic art and culture, which you started working on 14 years ago, evolved?

Amkpa: My colleague and friend Deb Willis initially started it at Harvard, and it has since grown with more collaborators, created more platforms for artists and scholars, and traveled around the world.

Guernica: What are portraitures to you?

Amkpa: That’s an interesting question. It is textual. I don’t mean literary. I mean, it’s a visual text that combines the setting and the subject within that setting. I keep using the word subject rather than object in the setting, so it’s really the composition of a setting that accentuates the subject of the portrait itself. The portrait itself resonates outwards, so the spectator is framed by what the spectator is looking at.

Guernica: Many of your paintings are portraits, but most are faceless. Why does this manifest?

Amkpa: That’s a very intriguing question. I play with the motif of the gaze. It feels like you’re gazing at something, but you are looking at yourself.

This was something that I developed in the theater. The performance confabulates a reality which includes the spectator. And the spectator keeps asking, am I in this story? That relationship between what is seen and what is felt and interpreted is critical for me.

Guernica: In all your artworks where does the personal meet the collective?

Amkpa: I’m curious about the individuals that emerge and relate to the collective. It’s like a chord in a music. And it can be contrapuntal or harmonious. And what I told you about the portrait and the spectator is an extension of it too.

I looked at all the continents. Then at how Africa was imagined outside Africa. Because the Africans too reimagined themselves continentally through the African diaspora, especially Haiti. I looked at photographers from the Caribbean, from Europe who were fascinated by African migrants. Some of them were European photographers. I created this big encyclopedic motif with Africa: See You, See Me.

Wole’s art collection—mainly African statues—was a thing of fascination for Henry Louis Gates Jr. He asked Wole if he could exhibit the collection at Harvard, and Wole asked me to curate Wole Soyinka: Antiquities Across Times and Place in 2018. I was asked to curate ReSignifications in the same space that year—the exhibition reframes the history of how African bodies have been represented in European art and culture, and initially premiered in Florence in 2013.

Guernica: A poignant moment in the film was when Wole got out of prison and discovered his statues were missing. Seeing his legendary house and collection in the Abeokuta forest was transcendental. The wood, the carvings, the abstractions, the hums in every statue, sometimes an entire orchestra could be heard in one statue. The exhibition closed at Harvard and was shipped to Haiti [later that year to Manifesto 12 in Palermo]. What was your experience in Haiti?

Amkpa: Wole’s retrospective was exhibited in the Ethnology Museum in Port-au-Prince. He was honored with the Toussaint L’Ouverture Medal by the then president. It was really emotional. Haiti has a lot of resonances for Wole. For me, what started as a particular set of cultural references from Nigeria, got transported to the United States then Haiti, and that gave the experience a different resonance, a kind of depth of meaning and universality.

Guernica: You met the great Frankétienne who writes, “The night is thick, the night is tough. But still our hope is kept safe in the depth of our hearts,” You believe artmaking is hope and a mode of organizing signifiers?

Amkpa: And these signifiers become signified.

Guernica: In one line, Wole to you?

Amkpa: When I was younger, a guiding light; then he represented modes of being in the world; and now, a spirit. His aliveness has a spiritual dimension.

Guernica: What do you think you discovered about yourself that you didn’t know before this journey?

Amkpa: I learned that I was still very focused on these principles—scholarship, art, humanism—but instead of them being different boxes looking for connections, they are whole. I used to think they were separate fragments of my reality, but I realized that they’re not.

Guernica: They are integrated.

Amkpa: Tightly integrated. There’s no space between them. If I pick up a camera, it’s my humanism looking for an expression. If I look through the camera, it’s me looking for the language of capturing different moments in time.

Guernica: Wole turned 90 years old this year. Both of you unstoppable. What next?

Amkpa: Our sails are primed and ships ruggedly afloat the seas of happenings.

Guernica: Onitsha Market Literature captivates me. Chinua Achebe admired these letter writers, and Wole has 90 original copies.

Amkpa: These letter writers wrote mellifluously on behalf of migrants coming from rural parts to the city: Dear 99 and three quarter percent of my heart.

Guernica: It reminds me of contemporary Nigerian singers like Simi. Her song Complete Me, come to mind: “It’s like faith without belief / Like a heart without a beat / What’s a heart without a beat?” As a writer interested in the epistolary, in the history of love, how would your letter start?

Amkpa: Dear Crown on my head, the melody of my songs, what’s a heart without your beat?