“If there’s one thing you do not do, it’s turn your back on family.”
– Mark Crowley, “Esther” (2013).
The writing of the dialogue quoted above was something of a baptism of fire for me; there had been a number of false starts and bitter disagreements within the creative team during the filming of the 48 Hour Film Festival’s Cape Town entry “Esther” in October of 2013, and following yet another fiasco, I was called upon to rewrite a series of lines solo as they were being filmed in the literal room next door… This was my earliest experience of a truly guerilla film set, one where just about anything and everything that could possibly go wrong in filmmaking did as a matter of course. The fact that what my co-writer Ariel and I ultimately created during that anarchic weekend makes any kind of sense at all is in itself something that I am thankful for today.
The film, once it was finished, was shown as part of the Cape Town series of shorts in the 48 Hour Film Festival class of 2013. Telling the story of a troubled young woman – the eponymous Esther – who found during its duration that the “sins” of her past were resolved to come to the fore once again and claim their pound of flesh in the present, it was a beautiful film (even if also an uneven one), and so it went on to win the award for best cinematography at the close of the festival in that year.
My work in drama has largely moved into more explicitly Afro-affirming territory in the time since, but looking at the piece in relation to works like the teaser episodes for “Eko” and “Palm Oil and Ash” (both of which I co-wrote with my sister Bebe Ominira-Bluejack, who is also a 48 Hour Film Festival alum) shows the early manifestations of some of my perennial artistic signatures; brave women that are up against immeasurable odds, the conflict of duty and desire, dark secrets and how they affect contemporary living, and existential dread. These are some of the things that have stayed with me over the years as I have grown.
In this article, I’m going to look at a few more selections from my Juvenilia in this way in the hopes of showing how I have changed over the years as a creative and as a man, how I have stayed the same, and how I will hopefully create art in the future.
A Beginning
Although my practice is primarily literary today, it has historically encompassed illustration in a major way. Some of my earliest artistic expressions (if imitation is genuinely the sincerest form of flattery) were copies of fashion design sketches that I got from my mother Maryanne Ominira-Bluejack’s old student portfolio. I would later continue drawing, and in 1995, again under the name that I was using at the time (which I shared with my paternal grandfather F.A.S. Ogunmuyiwa and which I also used at film school a number of years later), I had some of my drawings professionally published in a big way.
Peggy Cripps Appiah, a famous British Ghanaian children’s book author, came to Windhoek International School in Windhoek, Namibia (where I was living at the time), and requested that a panel of child artists from our school provide illustrations for her latest book. I was one of those students whose works were chosen for inclusion during this, and so my earliest published work is actually a children’s book from 1995 that bears the name “Rattletat”.
A story about a Namibian mouse who goes on an epic adventure, one of my illustrations for the project was a picture of said mouse in a human being’s breast pocket. I have attempted to recreate this image here in the accompanying picture; to my eye, my illustrations haven’t changed much over the years… Whether drawing my own comics as a teenager or my own storyboards at film school in my twenties, they still carried elements of the same childlike whimsy that I always thought I needed to get rid of while aspiring to realism. As can be seen, they are still much the same. The subject matter might be different, but ultimately, they are the parts of my art that show signs of where they originated… In the past few weeks, I am happy to say, I have begun exploring methods of embracing my drawing ability for what it is. The difference, after all, between a strength and a weakness is perspective. There’s no reason why I can’t draw in a professional capacity on some level once again. If my work was good enough for someone like Mrs. Appiah in this regard, it really should be good enough for me.
The public attention that the publication of the Appiah book brought to my early work (or would have done, if my family and I hadn’t returned to Lagos the very next year) predated a conscious decision to begin to work in an artistic profession… I have my sister Bebe to thank for that, and I am going to explore the chain of events that led to it in the next section.
So Yesterday
One day in the early noughties, after myself writing and/or drawing for many years without any idea of doing it for a living, Bebe came to me and said that she had been reading a teen magazine and the American actress and singer Hilary Duff was talking therein about how she got into show business. What she described sounded a lot like what my sister and I did for fun day-to-day in Lagos anyway, and so Bebe got the notion that we could easily do that ourselves.
My knee-jerk reaction to this was to tell her that that was a stupid idea; becoming a performer wasn’t something that I thought that it was viable for us to want, and so I told her that it made no sense. As often happens with me though, after she stormed off in a huff, I thought about it some more and decided that she might have been onto something. We played make-believe as children as most children did, giving our family lots of money again at a time when we no longer had it, and from fictional news spots (in which the newscasters that we were acting as physically pushed and pulled each other onscreen in an attempt to hog the camera) to more elaborate fictional sequences later on in which the most irreverent takes on living in 2003 (such as celebrity banality, the notion of the consolidation of stupidity and a number of other satirical explorations of life that seemed so clear to a 17 and a 14 year old), everything was fair game.
As I have said we did this for fun, and to this day my sister and I continue to play scenes like this on occasion for work or simply to let off steam. In the time that has passed since, we now write much more than we perform (we did act a bit in film school, but generally we don’t want to do that professionally anymore). What this has caused is the creation of a situation where much of my satire from youth can’t be shared publicly any longer, because what I always say as the adult that I now am is that it is not yet uhuru… The world is bleak enough without me adding anything to it that the ‘bad guys’ can use to do their terrible things. This now informs everything that Bebe and I put into the world, and we have refused work in the past that we didn’t find edifying because we have no wish to do that. Deciding to do this as a conscious decision was an ‘Aha’ moment in and of itself.
Ultimately, my sister has grown to become a truly complex woman. Our disagreements about our joint works can sometimes get very intense as a result. Still, she features in my life in a way that only my mother and my dearest friend can rival, and as I have grown into the writer that I now am, she has grown with me. Like these aforesaid other loved ones, she has had the most profound effect on my current work. This is most evident in my non-fiction, which I will now write about at length in the next section.
Heavenly Creatures
Between a series of posts on my personal Facebook profile that I refer to as the Prophecy posts (which are an omniist’s explorations of the theologies of various world religions), the posts and articles on African Royal Families (or ARF, a genealogical, anthropological and historical service that Bebe and I run), and the essays, articles and reviews on “The Kalahari Review”, “African Writer Magazine” and other literary outlets (which I have largely composed over the course of the past two years), my more recent non-fiction work has focused on African culture, my personal experiences, and reviewing some of the aspects of living that have had an influence on my development.
So far, this is the area of my work that has had the biggest impact outside of my immediate circle, but it all goes back to a lot of the themes already seen in my drama, illustrations and games from childhood… I still imbue much of what I do today with whimsy, and darkness, and humour as a matter of policy, and although I try to pull up wherever possible much more than I pull down, I nevertheless see my function as being to serve the divine through the truth of the art that I put out in a manner that is in keeping with my pantheistic beliefs. I have Bebe to thank for this too, because it was an extended period in India as a medical tourist when she got very sick in 2011 that led me to see the world the way I now do.
For example, in “About Fashion”, a post from ARF’s Substack, I look at African traditions regarding sartorial demonstration. In doing so, I effectively pay homage by way of this to my mother Maryanne’s background as a trained fashion designer… By the same token, the Prophecy series as a whole owes much to the fact that she is also a Pentecostal minister, and her mother-in-law Mrs. Emmanuella A. Ogunmuyiwa was a Catholic papal honouree, and her paternal grandfather Chief Joshua O. Shadare was a Methodist chief… In addition to these Christian antecedents, I also have or have had Muslims and followers of the traditional Nigerian religions for relatives, and I have been exposed to everything from Sikhism to Judaism during my travels. This has all had an effect on me, and as a result I often write today about spirituality that is dogmatic in its basic non-conformity… In my essay “When Oduduwa Met Rama”, I use this quality to explore the varied ways in which Nigeria and India are similar to one another… All peoples everywhere actually have more things in common, I feel, than those things that aren’t. It is this quality, in fact – an understanding that God can be found everywhere, in everyone that is good and that actively tries to be, and that the world is edified when it emulates the glow of the divine that this said God routinely sheds – that I am proudest of.
I’m still growing as an artist – and in the coming months, my poetry, photography and illustration will be strengthened further in the hope of someday being a significant part of my practice. My writing, meanwhile, will also be developed as I do so. In doing all this, I acknowledge that my journey from here to wherever there is is a long and winding one. With any luck, that fact will prove to be part of the fun of getting there once I do, and my orphic devotion will continue to typify the work that my family and I create moving forward.
“You’re right… Heaven must have many sons.”
– Rama, “When Oduduwa Met Rama” (2024).
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Photo Index
The “Esther” Title Card, a screenshot of the beginning of the 48 Hour Film Festival short film “Esther” (2013). Following its creation, this image was edited by the artist Bebe Ominira-Bluejack using Photo Gallery.
“Rattletat 2025”, a drawing by ‘Shèun Ominira-Bluejack that was created in 2025. A version of an illustration that he first made in 1995, this image was edited by his fellow artist Bebe Ominira-Bluejack using Photo Gallery.
“OduRama II”, a work of digital art by the artist Bebe Ominira-Bluejack. Its raw components, the pictures “The Statue of Oduduwa Ile-Ife 04” by the user Abby’s Lens and “An Early 20th Century Hindu Deity Rama Painting” by the user Ms. Sarah Welch, were both obtained from Wikimedia Commons. They exist there under a free-use-in-exchange-for-attribution protocol. Ms. Ominira-Bluejack used the Photo Gallery and Collage Maker apps for Android to make this image.