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My Father's Shadow: My Reading While watching My Father's Shadow, I kept feeling that Fola wasn't alive, and by the end of the film I was sure of it. For me, this is an akudaya story. Fola is already dead, and what Remi and Akin spend that day in Lagos with is his shadow. In Yoruba belief, an akudaya is someone who dies, often suddenly or far from home, and keeps living somewhere else among people who don't know he is dead or who never knew him at all. Once I started reading Fola this way, everything in the film began to make sense to me. The foreshadowing starts before Fola even shows up. Ants crowd the house and a raven circles overhead, both old signs of death. The boys are home alone because their mother has gone to the village, and my reading is that she went there to prepare for his burial, leaving Remi, the eldest, in charge. Then the boys walk back into the house and Fola is simply there. He doesn't arrive the way a living man would. He just appears. The burial cloth tells the same story. Fola holds it and looks confused about what it is for, like a man who hasn't yet accepted his own death. He also leaves without waiting for his wife, which makes sense to me if she already knows the truth. When he decides to take the boys to Lagos, it feels strange, because he has never taken them to his place of work before. I saw that break from the family's normal pattern as the first sign that this day was a farewell. On the bus, the symbols start to pile up. His nose bleeds, and the radio reports that men were killed at Bonny camp ten days earlier, a piece of news that clearly startles Remi. When someone asks who farted, I read it as a dark joke about the smell of a corpse riding along with them. The soldiers on the bus also keep staring at Fola, as if they can see something the boys can't. The nosebleed is, for me, the most important motif in the film, because it shows up every time death or the military comes into the story. At the checkpoint, a soldier recognises Fola from the camp, his nose bleeds again, and the birds return to circle the sky. Whenever anyone mentions Bonny or death, Fola goes quiet and sad, and I felt his body was giving him away even when his words did not. The way people react to him says a lot too. Everyone he meets tells him it has been a long time. Sis Seyi hugs him like someone who feared he had died at Bonny, and when Mekus checks the roster, Fola's name isn't on it. He hasn't been paid in six months, and I believe that is the reason he came back, to collect his money for his family before he finally goes. Since his body hasn't been identified among the dead, akudaya logic allows him to keep walking around and speaking with people.