Two scenes define Akorede Azeez’s With Difficulty Comes Ease. In one, the protagonist Zainab (Doris Uzoamaka Aniunoh), a newly widowed designer, decides to model her own work and asks a male friend, Rayyan (Caleb Richards), to photograph her at a lake park. They are two young Muslims converted from Christianity for near-opposite reasons: Zainab, because she fell in love with her Muslim husband, and Riyan, incredibly, only two weeks to his wedding, forcing his fiancée to leave him. And so they are also two people seeking comfort, Zainab in what she thinks is only friendship, Riyan in what he thinks could become a romance.
During her marriage, Zainab suffered six miscarriages, drawing the spite of her mother-in-law Hajiya (the consistent Ummi Baba-Ahmed), and when she again is pregnant, after her husband’s death, she stays in Riyan’s apartment — Riyan sleeping elsewhere. Hajiya’s discovery of that, and immediate presumption of an affair, is what leads to the second striking scene in the film. Zainab is sitting on her bed and bursts into tears. “Nashide,” she cries. “Nashide.” It is his. The pregnancy is her husband’s. Moved, the hitherto hostile Hajiya kneels before her daughter-in-law, crying with her.
Those scenes delimit the two relationships pulling and pushing Zainab in her lonely widowhood. The common ground she finds with Rayyan is because he can see her struggling, and, being a good Muslim, he wants to help. “The last thing I want to do is offend another Muslim,” he tells her after they got off on the wrong foot. Zainab is open to his assistance but unmoved by his motive: “I feel bad for your non-Muslim customers then.”
With her mother-in-law, things are more complex but also half-centered on religion. Zainab’s Igbo mother cut her off when she crossed both ethnic and religious lines and became Muslim, and died before they could make up; and if Zainab wanted a mother figure, it would not be her Egbira mother-in-law, already distrustful of a woman from a different ethnic group and religion. Yet, between them, there is care, or least duty, even if grudgingly administered. It is a nuanced depiction of a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law who love and would fiercely protect the legacy of the same man.
Where the focus falters, it is in minor but frustrating camera choices. When Zainab visits her sister and is speaking, for a time, we see only her sister, who gives no reaction to warrant the focus. It happens again when Zainab asks Rayyan about his own family, when Jonathan Ainwokhai and Rex Ricketts’ capable score changes in anticipation but nothing happens and we never see Rayyan’s reaction.
I like when Nollywood does stories of unvarnished realism, and With Difficulty Comes Ease reminds me of This Lady Called Life, about another hassled widow finding love, but Azeez’s film stays firmly within its characters’ options. Zainab’s is a life in which everything, small and large, is difficult: buying mints, bargaining with a keke driver, coming home, taking over her late husband’s business.
The role feels written for Aniunoh, whose striking, hard face alone gives Zainab instant personality — a huge edge over most actresses. Zainab’s every glance, every facial expression, carries meaning, and Aniunoh grounds her intelligence with that lurking disrespect in her eyes. It is hard to tell if she’s naturally impatient or if grief made her so, because she is layered, real, like a person. ♦
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