The space of grief between us
Responding to Back on Home Soil by Ofem Ubi
Back on Home Soil, 2023 (Film still)
I was a thirsty traveller in the bustling city of Benin, Nigeria, when I was sent Back on Home Soil to watch. At first, unable to wait, I skipped through the reel, and then finally home, sitting in my parlour after dinner, I settled to watch it.
Back On Home Soil is a short film written and directed by Ofem Ubi. It seeks to explore the complexities of grief through a visual-poetic installation that connects nostalgia, personal narratives, histories, imaginaries and experience. For both the poet and the viewer, it’s a form of catharsis. As with the struggles of memory against forgetting, Back on Home Soil poses questions about recovery and healing after one has been seared by loss.
As a multidisciplinary artist working with poetry, photography and film to preserve memories, history is closely intertwined with Ubi’s process. The imagery in Back on Home Soil was initially examined using deftly crafted poetry in a mixed photography installation in the last time I called the first thing I heard was, as-salamu alaykum. For myself, Back on Home Soil is a documentation of our personal, historical and cultural milieu with all the grief, homeland and heartache it includes. The film sheds a new light on processes of adaptation and offers shapeshifting introspection on absence and loneliness. Here, memory becomes a threshold that sprouts from the celebrations of love or death.
Watching the film, after my frantic frame skipping, exceeded my expectations. I mean, it changed the entire direction of my artistic vision and birthed within me a sense of empathy; the realisation of a particular part of my identity that I choose to hide hits me. The film acted as a portal to my childhood. I will always miss my mother, our former compound in Zaria, the football pitch in Sabon-Gari and everything in between.
At the core of this work is Ubi’s powerful use of words to cut through the silence and disrupt grief, creating a place for healing and re-imagination. Rather than telling us what to think about “the sorrows of others” and the memory of forgetting and transcendence, the poet sets us down in multiple scenes, inviting our gaze to ponder on difficult conversations. The film ensures utmost participation in its progression as we draw our conclusions through the space of normalcy. What I have mostly recently discovered about being a child at the receiving end of loss was something I realised while watching this film: I have not really mourned my mother. Partly, because her death came as a rude shock, forcing me to pretend that she was still alive somewhere. Every time I tried to reclaim some of her memory – and to forge a connection with motherhood – I would break down crying. These feelings can be painful and somehow inadequate. Hence, remembrance proves to be my only strategy and choice, if I must survive her absence.
Though influenced by the sickness that comes from missing home, Back on Home Soil captures the trajectory of memory as it falters, like an afterimage before our eyes. By creating a realistic window into the Nigerian family memorial experience, Back on Home Soil has placed a mirror before me, or perhaps given me a cultural and emotional revelation to hold on to. It made me think about the relationship between expression and catharsis, and it cemented the gap between vulnerability and identity in the emotional landscape of grief and its Nigerian portraiture. Above all, the film prompted me to dig further into my own grief through my response, and to explore how my multicultural identity changes with longing, as I encounter my late mother’s seemingly ordinary mementoes –her type of shawl, the udala tree, skillets and china plates – that stretch all the way back to the places where she once lived.
