Remembering isn’t just about freezing time, it’s about letting memory evolve, the way grief turns into gentleness.
By Joseph Jonathan
I watched Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow with the kind of stillness that comes when you recognise something of yourself flickering on screen. The film doesn’t hurry. It breathes. It watches. It remembers. In the rhythm of its silence, I could hear the quiet grief that lingers long after the mourning is over — the kind that no one talks about because life has already moved on. The story, told through fragments of image and feeling, is not just about fathers. It is about the echoes they leave behind, how their presence shapes us long after they are gone, how their absence becomes a kind of inheritance.
It’s been seventeen years since I lost my father, and yet there are mornings when his voice feels near, as if it had been waiting behind the thin wall between memory and dream. I do not remember the sound of his laughter in its fullness anymore; time has taken that. But I remember how it felt to make him laugh — that small triumph of a child who believes love is measured by attention.
My father was not a man of many words, and I often wondered if silence was his way of saying he cared. It’s strange how you only begin to understand your parents once they’re gone, when their gestures start to mean something different in retrospect.
Watching Davies’ film, I thought about how memory distorts and heals at the same time. The director’s gaze lingers on gestures, on the spaces where people used to be. There’s Remi and Akin, whose perception of their father, Folarin has been shaped into a mystery because of his repeated absence.
As for Folarin, his best efforts to provide for his family yields nothing but unpaid salaries. And there’s Lagos — vast, humid, unrelenting — moving on as though nothing has happened. But something has. Something always has. Beneath the noise, there’s a stillness that feels familiar to me, like the silence of my father’s old room, untouched yet alive.
Once, when I was a child, my father took me to the Moshood Abiola National Stadium to watch the Super Eagles of Nigeria play. I remember the day not for the match itself but for the moment afterward — the sound of fireworks, the smell of roasted groundnuts and sweat, the swelling noise of a nation briefly united by victory.
He lifted me onto his shoulders as we made our way out, and I saw the whole stadium from above — a sea of joy, green and white flags waving like promises. That moment, that feeling of being carried, of being higher than everything that could harm you — it’s what I think of when I think of him. Protection, pride, presence. The trinity of a father’s love as seen through a child’s eyes.
But memory is a trickster. It reshapes itself each time you recall it, softens the edges, edits the pain. Sometimes I wonder if that moment happened the way I remember it. Maybe he never lifted me that high. Maybe the noise was too much and I cried. Maybe I only remember what I need to. Davies’ film feels like that too — a meditation on what remains when the details fade. The camera doesn’t chase truth; it lingers in its uncertainty. It understands that love, like grief, cannot be neatly told. It can only be felt in the quiet gestures; a hand brushing over a photograph, the weight of an unspoken name, the light that falls on an empty chair.
In Nigerian families, fathers often exist at a distance — not always by choice, but by culture, by duty, by the quiet belief that affection must be earned through provision. They are the first figures of authority, the ones whose approval feels like sunlight. And yet, so many of us grow up learning our fathers through absence — through the sound of their cars returning late at night, through the weight of expectations they never explained, through the way our mothers spoke of them when they were not in the room. When they die, it feels as though a door has closed on an entire language we were still trying to learn.
For years after my father’s death, I tried to recall his face without the aid of photographs. I thought that would make the memory more mine, less mediated. But as the years pass, I’ve noticed how memory behaves like water — slipping through your fingers no matter how tightly you try to hold on. Faces fade first. Then voices. Then the small gestures you once thought unforgettable — the way he greeted neighbours, or how he adjusted his cap before stepping out.
I sometimes worry that I am building my father again from fragments, like a story told too many times by someone who wasn’t there. What if I’m no longer remembering him, but only remembering the remembering?
I used to be ashamed of forgetting. Now I see it differently. Memory, like film, is not about accuracy but emotion. What you remember says more about who you are than who they were. That’s what My Father’s Shadow illuminated for me — the impossibility of full remembrance, and the beauty that lies in trying. Remembering isn’t just about freezing time, it’s about letting memory evolve, the way grief turns into gentleness.
I no longer try to remember my father as he was. I remember him as he feels — an unfinished story, a presence half-light and half-shadow, a silence that still holds me when I close my eyes. Perhaps that’s what all children of loss carry: not a memory, but a rhythm. Something that pulses softly beneath the noise of living. Something that says, even after all these years, I am still here.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big