I don’t think there’s has been a movie about this topic that I haven’t seen. Most are documentaries made by women outside of the culture unaffected personally by the trauma of the excision or “purification”ceremony.
Director Osmane Sembene’s “Moolaade” is a fresh treatment of the topic. The angle at which he positions his camera is cinematically new and all the more welcome now as excision continues to be “used in more than 38 nations out of the 50-odd African nations which use the ritual cutting to ‘subjugate women,’” Sembene states, a practice that “goes a long way back. Before Jesus, before Mohammed, to the times of Heredotes,” his biographer Samba Gadjigo writes.
The father of African cinema, at 81, hasn’t lost his ability to capture within his heroines the soul of the African woman. This soul is reflected in the land which Sembene says is inherently “maternal.”
“According to our traditions, a man has no intrinsic value; he receives his value from his mother. … Every man loves a woman. Besides, more than 50 percent of the African population is women. More than half of the 800 million that we are. This is a force we must be able to mobilize for our own development. No one works harder than the rural woman.”
It is this respect and love of Black women and Black people that shines through a Sembene story, whether it is the betrayal Senegalese soldiers felt once Germany was defeated and Jim Crow colonialism was reinstituted back home (“Camp de Thiaroye”) or the daily struggles of a liberated African business woman who has two children in college and an elder mother to support (“Faat Kine”). Sembene takes his cues from his surroundings and his people still reeling, like Black folks everywhere, from low self-esteem and poor self-image.
Sembene’s heroine Colle is an ordinary woman, no different from her neighbors who decide to join her once they see how the events surrounding her life affect them all. Colle Ardo Gallo Sy’s fortitude is born of conviction and knowledge that right is on her side, something proven later on. Excision is not condoned by Islam. It is not Islamic to mutilate little girls, our heroine gives the girls “protection” and all hell breaks loose.
Sembenites will recognize the master at work as he weaves the stories of several minor characters – the chief’s son who has returned from abroad to marry Colle’s daughter and is forbidden when moolaade is invoked. Uncut girls are not considered clean.
“Mercenaire” (Dominique T. Zeida) is another great character. He’s a shopkeeper who flirts with Colle’s daughter as he overcharges the villagers for merchandise. And finally, the head wife, who supports her co-wife Colle in the protection she extends to the girls, shows how an elder can take direction from a younger co-wife.
The pace is slow and easy as radios blare the latest music, a soundtrack for life in the compounds where women wash clothes, cook and tend the children while the men hunt, farm, trade or pray nearby in the mosque.
Rather than showing the ritual cutting itself, Sembene leaves that to his viewer’s imagination. One sees the results of the excision on Colle’s body – genital tearing after intercourse evident in the red bathwater she soaks in and her tentative tread later on. Sembene doesn’t have to call such a man, who in one scene tells Colle she’s “his favorite wife,” then in the other inflicts such harm, a “beast.” Nor does he have to say any practice that terrifies children to the point of suicide needs reexamining. The cries of the mothers whose daughters are found in the wells are enough.
The women with knives are cast as villains. Dressed in red, these demonized caricatures seem to drip blood from their coarse attitudes and unflinching adherence to the harmful tradition.
As in all his films, Sembene uses language and motifs specific to the region and people in his audience. For the Western viewer, language of colonized West Africa is the afterthought here literally when over 50 percent of the Senegalese population cannot read. Wolof, Diola and Bambara enable Sembene to reach his target audience, more specifically folks living in Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire – the African peasantry: workers, women, and children - stance, his biographer states, that “often puts the director at odds with his country’s elite. Most of Sembene’s films were either banned or censored by Leopold Senghor’s regime.”
What I appreciate most about a Sembene film is an aesthetic independent of the West. African artistry has primacy – the film an extension of the oral tradition, one where the djali has a microphone and on film can reach folks in remote areas such as Djerisso, where “Moolaade” takes place. As such, Sembene has schooled many younger African cinematographers who also place themselves at the nexus of the cultural milieu that nourishes their work.
The fact that “Moolaade” was touted as the best film of the entire festival by prominent critics and was the winner of the Grand Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival keeps Sembene in the money so he can tell our stories. What is more important though is that African people in the Diaspora go see his films. These are our people. These are our stories.
“Moolaade,” which runs 124 minutes, is unrated, but I wouldn’t take a child to see it, though I’d say it’s appropriate for boys and girls 13 years old and up.