There are movies you watch and move on before the closing credits have finished rolling.
There are others that linger, refusing to leave because they have touched a nerve or struck a chord.
Mide Martins’ ‘Iya’ belongs in the second category.
By the time I finished watching both parts, I understood why millions of people had flocked to it. At the time of writing, the film had attracted well over four million views on YouTube, a remarkable feat that says as much about the story as it does about the audience. People do not gather in such numbers merely because familiar faces appear on their screens. They come because they recognise themselves, their neighbours, their families and, sometimes, their deepest regrets.
The title suggests motherhood and promises sacrifice. It delivers both. But beneath the sacrifices and the tears lies another story, one that is perhaps even more important. It is the story of bitterness and the quiet destruction it leaves behind.
Bitterness is one of those emotions that seldom announces itself with loud footsteps. It slips into the heart after betrayal, disappointment or injustice. It often arrives disguised as self-respect. It tells its victim that forgiveness is weakness and that remembering every hurt is a sign of strength. Before long, it begins to demand attention.
The mother at the centre of ‘Iya’ has every reason to be angry. Life has not treated her kindly. She struggles to raise three children almost single-handedly. Poverty becomes her unwanted companion. Every meal is earned through sacrifice. Every school fee is paid with tears. Every day is another battle against despair.
It would have been easy for the audience to crown her a saint. That is where the film becomes brave. It reminds us that victims are not always innocent in every chapter of their lives.
The mother’s bitterness towards her former husband becomes a prison from which she cannot escape. Rather than separating her pain from her children, she pours it into them until it becomes their own inheritance. She tells them their father is dead. The lie grows with them. They mourn a man who still breathes. They build their identity around an
absence carefully manufactured by the person they trust most.
Children often believe what their parents tell them because they have no reason not to. Their parents are their first teachers and historians. They are their first judges of character.
When those lessons are built on resentment, children often become soldiers in battles they neither started nor understand.
One of the most painful moments in the film comes when the children begin to discover that the man they were taught to bury in their minds is, in fact, alive. The possibility of a relationship begins to emerge. Healing appears within reach.
But bitterness is seldom willing to surrender quietly.
Instead of allowing the past to remain in the past, the mother chooses violence which then becomes the language through which old wounds seek fresh expression. It is a desperate attempt to keep yesterday alive. Eventually, the truth surfaces, but as truth often does, it arrives late.
By then, damage has already found fertile ground. Watching those scenes reminded me that bitterness is like a poison you drink hoping that someone else will die.
Many families live inside this reality. There are fathers who have become villains in stories their children never had the opportunity to verify. There are mothers whose names have been erased from family conversations because someone decided revenge should outlive marriage. There are children who grow into adults carrying borrowed hatred, only to discover decades later that they never knew the complete story.
Our courts dissolve marriages, but they do not dissolve parenthood. A marriage may fail, but fatherhood and motherhood should not. The end of love between adults should never become the end of love between parents and children. Yet this happens every day. One parent weaponises access and children become trophies to be won instead of lives to be nurtured. By the time they become adults, many children discover they have spent years hating the wrong person. That discovery rarely comes without emotional scars.
Bitterness has an unusual appetite. It is never satisfied with hurting the person who caused the original pain. It demands collateral damage, it wants children, siblings, relatives and friends enlisted into its army and it seeks applause for revenge masquerading as justice.
What makes ‘Iya’ particularly effective is that it refuses easy moral arithmetic.
The father is not presented as a flawless hero and the mother is not reduced to a stereotypical villain. Instead, viewers are invited into the complicated terrain where human beings make disastrous decisions while believing they are protecting themselves.
That complexity explains why conversations around the film have spread far beyond movie circles. Viewers have argued passionately online. Some defend the mother because they understand the wounds she carries. Others condemn her for turning innocent children into casualties of an internecine emotional war. Perhaps both sides are right.
Pain deserves empathy. But pain does not deserve permission to become cruelty.
There comes a point where every wounded person must decide whether the next generation will inherit healing or hostility. That choice is one of life’s greatest responsibilities.
Forgiveness, contrary to popular belief, does not erase history. It simply refuses to allow history to become destiny. It acknowledges the injury without giving it permanent control over tomorrow.
Many people misunderstand forgiveness. They think it means pretending nothing happened. It does not. It means refusing to allow what happened to continue happening through you. That may be the greatest lesson hidden inside ‘Iya’. Bitterness can survive for years. It can survive divorce, it can survive poverty, it can survive loneliness, but it should never be allowed to survive inside children.
Every parent writing the story of the other parent on the tablet of a child’s heart should remember one uncomfortable truth; children eventually grow up and they ask questions, they compare stories, they discover documents and they meet people and they uncover facts. Truth has remarkable patience. It waits. Then it arrives.
When it does, bitterness often stands exposed, not only as an enemy of the person against whom it was directed, but also as an enemy of those it claimed to protect. Perhaps that explains why ‘Iya’ has resonated with millions. Beneath its emotional performances and domestic conflicts lies a mirror held before countless homes. Some viewers watched a movie, others watched their childhood and a few, perhaps painfully, watched themselves.
***Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of two novels: In The Name of Our Father and After The End; a collection of short stories: Vaults of Secrets; and a travel book: United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales. He is concluding work on his third novel. He lives in Houston, Texas.