Beldina Odenyo alchemised the pain of exile, loss and racism into music as Heir of the Cursed before her death in 2021, as this attentive tribute explores
Instead of an artist in a booth, a lone amplifier plays the music of singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo for a cluster of microphones to pick up during the posthumous recording of her debut album. It is a haunting encapsulation of the absence and presence at the heart of Louise Lockwood’s documentary, which makes a commendably thorough exploration of the mental illness that led to Odenyo killing herself in November 2021, and its roots: exile, loss and racism.
Performing under the moniker Heir of the Cursed, a translation of the Tetela name of assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, Odenyo was on the verge of bigger recognition at the end of 2021 after a successful performance at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. But hemmed in by successive Covid lockdowns, the 31-year-old is clearly unwell in a discomfiting backstage interview. Squirming, monosyllabic, she seems to be regressing to the non-verbal state of shock in which she arrived in Dumfriesshire from Kenya as a young child.
Lockwood’s film plays as if Orpheus was the one being rescued from the underworld. As well as gathering Odenyo’s demos into a finished album, her half-sister Leah attempts to reconstitute her sibling, her traumas and her life force. Being ripped away from Kenya and her mother, who later died prematurely, is clearly at the heart of things. The harassment and violent physical abuse, including being set on fire, that she encountered in the village of Kirkconnell and nearby Dumfries deepened the wound – as did losing another sister to leukaemia. She might have been a born musician, but having to alchemise this pain gives Odenyo double the force; her keening top range recalls PJ Harvey, but she frequently dips into the kind of baleful quaver Nina Simone once knocked audiences flat with.
With her singing face sometimes a rictus, Odenyo felt no obligation to pander to her audience, as poet Jackie Kay notes here. But visibility – part of her curse growing up in Dumfriesshire, but a source of connection on stage – remained a profoundly ambivalent matter. She wrestled, like Kurt Cobain, with the idea of commercialising her inner woes. Compelled to keep mining that source, especially in the pandemic pressure cooker, she starts to experience music as a chore. In the end, it’s not enough to save her; the Usher Hall triumph seems like it happened by dying force of will. As well as being an attentive tribute, Lockwood’s film weighs up the compulsive and healing halves of art; it is Orphic to a fault.
Bel is at Filmhouse, Edinburgh, from 4 September, then tours.
