Children of Blood and Bone: Of Verisimilitude and the Uneasy Marriage Between Film and Literature

Whenever I see movies/series that stand out, I am often tempted to look up the writers of the scripts. Many times, I have found it appealing that the brains behind the productions' stories were literature-inclined. Other times, I found that some of the cine watches were either inspired by a work of literature or were actual adaptations of literary works. But this quest is not always satisfied, and this is where I identify with the many readers of Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone and Tomi Adeyemi herself.

On the one hand, there is the crowd of readers who are disoriented by the adaptation, especially after the release of its trailer; on the other hand, there is the author, Tomi Adeyemi, who said she would not watch the adaptation of her own novel. If the readers' concerns were anything to dismiss, Tomi Adeyemi's publicly stated views and worries about her work have ensured that they are sustained. For the readers, adaptations of Nigerian literary works have not particularly been done well, although scanty reviews exist to establish what the misses are in the adaptation. That is why it is already a project met with scepticism, the same scepticism that exists for the movie adaptation of Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segis's Wives due for release late this year.

This cloud of disagreement and mixed feelings about a work of literature being adapted for screen is not new. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka had a similar relationship with his work being adapted for screen. He publicly critized and wrote against the adaptation of Kongi's Harvest, accusing the producers of "butchering" his work. He also took an opposing stance against the adaptation of his prison memoir The Man Died. The aforesaid factored in, the common thread between Soyinka and Adeyemi is that an artistic work repurposed for another creative medium is inevitably going to lose something. It is not just about adaptation, it also includes translation and transference. Yet, a work of art does not exist in a vacuum, and sometimes it travels through media other than its original.

Robert Escarpit, in his seminal work, Sociology of Literature, justified the place and practice of literary works as materials belonging to a three-corner world of the author, the text itself, and its audience. Adaptation intrudes upon the three. The readers of Children of Blood and Bone have long existed in the make-believe world of the novel, one that is more preternatural, unlike what is obtained via cameras, lights and actions. Now, the cinema world brings to viewers (some of whom may never read the book) the limitations of acting and faces to characters otherwise imagined— not that this is necessarily bad, it is that this new layer offers a dilution to the selfhood of the characters in the sense that the actors now own shares of mannerisms associated with them. In other words, just like you cannot imagine the Black Panther without thinking of Chadwick Boseman, you may soon be unable to imagine Zélie Adebola without giving a true human face. For many readers of the novel, this is where the issue lies. It comes to this question: is the casting fair and justifiable?

For some other readers, it is not just about the casting; it is also about the scripts. Adaptations are not a hundred per cent recreations of the originals. Principles and concepts of directing, of acting, and audiovisual effects tamper with the behavioural setting of the novel. Some words do not make it to the final dialogue in the production; some get inserted to form a simulation that satisfies the objective of the production, which is easier said than done. For instance, how is the stream of consciousness in a literary work to be preserved (if to be preserved) in its adaptation? How do the paraphernalia— clothing, houses and how they are set up, etc —added on set eliminate or re-present the paratexts of and in the book? To what extent should fluidity or rigidity be respected or discarded when adapting a literary work?

For another set of readers, it is simply the very act of intrusion of adaptation. The cultural memory of a work in adaptation is tainted, ambivalent and consumerist— box office numbers, quality deterioration and temporal fracture happen to visual works. The adaptation lodges itself into a separate condition, one that no author can control any more than a producer can control a movie on millions of screens. It is hard to tell what worries Tomi Adeyemi as an author, but it is possibly inclusive of the very act of unoriginality that the movie adaptation has over her work. Does the work now seem political in a war she does not want? Does it appear too performative? Is it a contractual problem? It is hard to tell, but perhaps time will tell.

While we wait with bated breath, one question that we should perhaps ask is this: what implication does this have for literature and film as relative media for creative expression in Nigeria and, because of the reach of Children of Blood and Bone, for Africa and the world? Answers vary. Perhaps the best answer to this would be to say that the implication is subjective, depending on who is answering the question. For many readers of the novel, it is most possibly another reason to keep literature away from film. For those who may have seen JK Rowling's Harry Potter adapted and loved, those who loved the adaptation of Sui Nyathi's The Polygamist or the lovers of "Game of Throne", which was made from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, having a wedge between literature and film is not necessary.

For me, movie adaptations are a necessary social and political tool. My reasons are mainly three. For one, I am displeased with the quality of production in Nollywood, and I am convinced that literary works offer a treasure trove that could give serious movie makers materials to work with. Many recent Nollywood films seem no more than expanded memes to me; some of them are clearly made for the money (which is good) but never for the arts (which is sad). Cultural and artistic depths in such classics as Baba Wande's "Ti Olúwa Nilẹ̀," Tunde Kelani's many Mainframe productions such as "Óleku," "Arugbá" are a rarity these days.

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The literary space in Nigeria is also being taken up by a foreignness that is easier to sense than to express, and I loathe this. When Oris Aigbokhaevbolo declared Nigerian literature dead, it was for me a kindred moment of validation of my privately held belief about Nigerian literature. To a great extent, Aigbokhaevbolo's essay resonated with me, even though I could not at the time marry my thoughts with the disenchantment I was having with Nollywood. Now, I can. Not to mention the existentially necessary nomadism of contemporary Nigerian writers, the affectations in Nigerian literature are becoming too foreign in a way that confirms that they are more accepted by outsiders than by Nigerians.

I cannot place Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone as a member of Nigerian literature (as problematic as saying that is), but I can certainly point to the quality that it offers, something that Nollywood lacks, yet fails to tend to. And it is this failure that necessitates the cultural appropriation of Adeyemi's novel in the Wakanda-verse, a situation that we are not sure the author likes. But even in this condition, it is, to me, more preferable than Funke Akindele's "Behind the Scene", which, in my opinion, is an average movie sold, not for its quality, but for an impressive run of social media dance trends and other attention-grabbing sensational marketing efforts.

My third and final reason is that arts is an open-ended field and artistic experimentations are necessary too. If we are to take anything of the philosophy of the death of the author seriously, then we can step Adeyemi aside and say that the adaptation deserves a life of its own. That is not particularly fair, I must admit. Why should Tomi Adeyemi's work be a cinematic lab rat treated as the movie makers like? But I am open to the conversations that come from this, especially the ones that point out the complicity of the Nigerian stakeholders in the creative ecosystem to chart necessary courses between literature and film. Sentimentally so, I absolve the movie makers of any blame for cultural or literary misrepresentation (accidental ones, I mean). All things considered, the movie adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone is not Nigerian or African, it is American, which means it is saturated with the commercialism of American cinema, and that is more worrisome to me than anything else.