Bel review: Posthumous tribute to singer Beldina Odenyo — SkimNews
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- Beldina Odenyo died by suicide in October 2021, aged 31, two weeks after headlining Edinburgh's Usher Hall in what the Guardian review calls an 'instantly legendary, bone-shaking' performance
- Leah McAleer, Odenyo's older sister and a 'mother figure' who treated the project as grief work, drives the documentary and its independent posthumous album release, saying bluntly: 'I need to finish her album'
- Odenyo, born in Kisumu, western Kenya, was taken from her mother by her father at around age six or seven and raised in the Dumfries and Galloway village of Kirkconnel, where she was the only Black child at school and was once set on fire and had a chain wrapped around her neck, per her best friend Frances
- During a Glasgow mental health episode in which an ambulance was called, police arrived first, broke down her door, threw her down the stairs, and demanded to know if she had HIV because 'people from where you're from do,' Odenyo recounted in the film
- Odenyo performed as Heir of the Cursed, a name she said came in a dream and that translates to the Tetela name of assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba
- Tributes in the film come from poet Jackie Kay, who praised Odenyo's 'self-possession,' and Scottish singer-songwriter Kathryn Joseph, whose song 'The Bird' Odenyo covered at the Usher Hall gig
- The documentary, directed by Louise Lockwood, aired on BBC Four and is available on iPlayer
Why it matters: The documentary reframes Odenyo's death as the product of compounded trauma — childhood exile from Kenya, racist violence at her Scottish school, and a Glasgow police response during a mental health crisis in which she said officers threw her down the stairs. McAleer's release of the unfinished posthumous album keeps that record of failure publicly visible alongside Odenyo's voice.
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