Nothing will make me fall apart faster than someone asking me “are you okay?” when I am not, in fact, okay. Is there any worse question? Even when the intentions are entirely loving, at least part of what I hear in that question is “I can tell you’re not okay.” And when the intentions are less than entirely loving, what I hear is “stop making it known that you’re not okay.”

The question comes up a lot in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming A Guinea Fowl1, a movie that lit up the 2024 festival circuit2. The movie opens with Shula, dressed as Supa Dupa Fly-era Missy Elliott, driving past her uncle’s body lying on an empty road.

The emotional dissonance inherent in the visual I just described courses through the entire movie, as the family elders appear more devoted to elaborate mourning traditions than to the actual wellbeing of their children. Because we learn quite quickly that Uncle Fred was an unrepentant sexual predator, victimizing his young nieces in particular, and none of his peers and family members did a thing to stop him.

At first, Shula holds herself at serious remove from everyone she encounters, in a way that reads as snobbishness to her family. After Uncle Fred’s body is finally taken off the road, Shula violates mourning protocol by staying at a hotel away from her family. And it’s in her hotel room that we get a fuller picture of why Shula has been so determined to keep everyone at arm’s length. Because her hotel room is where her aunties descend on her and drag her back into all the traditions and expectations that Shula’s place in her family confers.

The aunties berate Shula for showering3, for taking a work call, and for appearing insufficiently traumatized for finding her uncle’s body in the road. (Meanwhile, her actual trauma at the hands of said uncle went unremarked upon for Shula’s entire life, but I digress!) They also fight each other, and Uncle Fred’s widow, over who is performing their mourning most appropriately. Naturally, this is an un-winnable competition for everyone, but especially for the widow. Beyond the fact that Shula is the only one who clocks that she was one of Fred’s former victims as well, the poor girl gets yelled at for crying too loud, but also for even considering the idea that she should eat while mourning. At the wake, Shula’s uncles keep giving her their complicated dinner orders, as though she’s waitstaff and not a family member.

Even worse, Shula’s parents refuse any responsibility for her safety. Her father keeps asking how they can interrogate a dead man, and urging Shula to leave the past in the past. Her mother admits that she never told Shula’s father about what Uncle Fred did, and firmly changes the subject to the breakfast that Shula must help prepare for the mourners. Traditions must be respected, even though children’s safety is not. All of the elders display an insistent lack of curiosity, and therefore of empathy. They’re not even capable of asking “are you okay?” in a passive-aggressive way. They simply insist that their daughters and nieces be okay.

The instinct to keep the elders at a distance makes sense for Shula from a survival standpoint. But keeping everyone out also means keeping Shula’s cousins out, which maroons Shula in a misguided belief that she was Fred’s only victim. Once she finally gets a second to breathe, she can gravitate towards the family members she can start to let her guard down with: her cousins, who refer to their Fred as a pervert so quickly that it’s instantly clear—Shula was never alone in this.

While the elders never ask how anyone is doing, least of all their children, the cousins are regularly asking each other—are you okay? The curiosity is there. The empathy is there. But it’s actually such an inadequate question in the face of such massive and ongoing trauma. Especially since so many of us are so well trained to say “yes, I’m fine” in response. I want to be okay. And in order for the world to keep spinning, I have to be okay.

The generation who raised Shula and her cousins, and who abandoned them to suffer repeated violence, don’t even know how to ask “are you okay?” And when someone tries to tell them “I am not okay,” they respond with anger, or dismissal, or weaponized guilt. These women are fighting for their lives within a family (a culture, a planet) that mourns their abuser’s death more openly and sincerely than it mourns their own children for being his victims. That the cousins can even ask each other “are you okay?” with genuine care and concern is borderline miraculous. It’s an inadequate question, and one they’re generally incapable of answering, but it’s more than their elders let themselves be capable of.

By the time Uncle Fred’s funeral begins in earnest, Shula concedes that there’s no way for her and her cousins to get the justice they deserve. All they can do is to be there for each other, find joy in each other, and protect the children in their lives the way their elders failed to protect them. This, to me, feels like the most urgent call: to make our world better for our children, and to protect them from harm in the meantime. And if you were to ask me right now, I’d say “no, I’m not okay,” because I feel like we’re failing all of our children, like, all of the time. I feel unsure of how to go about feeling okay. But I want to be okay.

Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed this essay, please take a second to like and share it—it makes a difference.