The Visit’ reminds me of Adegunju’s home video and also brought to mind Klein. The similarity between ‘The Visit’ and ‘Lagidigba’ is limited to women being in control
By Olukorede Yishau
The woman king sits resplendent on her throne. Palace guards surround her as she dishes out instructions. Chief among her words is the need for her subjects to avoid men, who, in her view, are plagues that must be stoned.
Welcome to Ilubirin.
This town is from a 2000 Yoruba home video titled ‘Lagidigba’. In it, there was a kingdom of women who resented men as a result of past sins committed against them. Everything was controlled by women in the town and men were persona non grata.
The producer, Yemi Adegunju, wrote it in protest against what he felt was men’s treatment of women. He felt women should be encouraged to participate in government.
His motive resonates with what I heard some weeks back. The Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, Jennifer Klein, said studies show that closing gender gaps in the workforce could add between 12 and 28 trillion dollars in global GDP over a decade.
“Expanding access for women to markets and finance fosters entrepreneurship and innovation, with estimates suggesting that gender parity in entrepreneurship could add between 5 to 6 trillion dollars in net value to the global economy.
“Yet, despite the clear benefits of women’s economic participation, too often, social, legal, and financial barriers remain. We know that on the average, women spend more than twice the amount of time than men do performing unpaid care work, and that the annual value of this work is approximately $11 trillion globally. We also recognise that 2.4 billion working-age women still face legal obstacles to their full economic participation, and that dismantling these systemic barriers is necessary to unlock economic gains. And we also know that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on women’s employment, with devastating effects on families, communities, and economies,” she said.
Reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Visit’ reminds me of Adegunju’s home video and also brought to mind Klein. The similarity between ‘The Visit’ and ‘Lagidigba’ is limited to women being in control. Other details are different.
Adichie imagines a spectacular world in which matriarchy wrestles patriarchy and gives it a bloody nose.
Two men, Obinna and Eze — old friends — confront the past and future and both men are made to see what women see daily.
The Amazon Original e-book retells the man-woman experience, the woman is head of family and provider and the man stays home and care for the kids. The wife sees no reason the man should work with all his academic qualifications and he agrees and obeys.
In ‘The Visit’, the author of ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ takes us through the ordeal of Obinna, a once-upon-a-time poet, who is married to Amara, the managing director of a big company.
The story opens with Obinna watching CNN’s broadcast of a female American president’s approval of a law prohibiting male masturbation. Soon, he starts thinking about his life, and his friend, Eze, who is visiting from America. He also thinks about Amara constantly cheating on him and her family telling him not to make a fuss about it; after all she is providing all his needs. They tell him he should be happy she returns home to him every day. He remembers ‘fighting’ one of the boys in her life but is not bold enough to confront her about her cheating.
When Eze arrives, he asks Obinna to go with him to a nightclub. Obinna is reluctant and argues it is wrong for a married man to go to a nightclub without his wife. He also says he needs to be home to take care of their kid.
“I can’t just go to a club. I’m a married man,” he says.
Eze succeeds in convincing him to leave the housekeeper to take charge in his absence. But guilt takes over him all through their outing.
On their way back from the club, a police officer stops them and asks them where they were coming from.
“Is that why you’re dressed like prostitutes?” The officer queries them.
Throughout the story, Adichie turns the table. Men face the hassles women face daily, but she still leaves biological functions such as getting pregnant and keeping humanity going for women. But, all the insults the world heap on women are transferred to men and all the world does to discourage women from dreaming big is reserved for men in this feminist text. Even male masturbation is criminalised and scientific researchers are done using female specimens, making the outcomes not useful to men and thus compounding their woes.
Nightclubbing that men consider their right is presented as something a married man should be ashamed of doing without his wife, an obvious protest against the belief that only loose women frequent nightclubs. A police officer is made to refer to Obinna’s and Eze’s looks as not befitting of married men. In fact, she describes them as looking like prostitutes. Policemen have been known to refer to women driving home after a night out that way. The officer saying she would have respected them on account of marriage is an obvious switch of women’s experience with men’s.
Adichie tells this tale in a sleek language, so sleek even the folks she is taking jibes at will enjoy the tale before her message sinks in and cause them to grimace.
While there is no doubt that some men are a bunch of disappointments, there are good men, millions of them all over the world, men who are not intimidated by their women’s successes, men who look out for their women, men who are fantastic role models to their kids, men who are not bothered about who is the head or the neck, men who are just out for the good of all.
The ones who mess up may turn out to be the vocal minority. Since bad news sells, their bad acts get out before the good acts of the fantastic men who are partners in progress with women.
My final take: Despite biological drawbacks, women have shown brilliance in as many endeavours as possible. They are special and will always be.
* Yishau is a newspaper columnist and author.
