The ritual of female genital mutilation is a rite of passage for young women, marking their movement from childhood to womanhood. Unfortunately, its effects are extremely problematic, from decreased sexual pleasure to extreme pain during sexual intercourse, infertility and making it hard for vaginal births to take place; up to and including actual death from factors including blood loss or infections caused from improperly sanitized knives. The practice grows out of the usual patriarchal ideas about guarding women's sexual purity. If one makes sex painful, then women are less likely to go out and seek it outside of community prescribed norms, which are usually marriage. Several years before Moolaade begins, Colle Ardo Gallo Sy, the second wife of a respected village memebr, Cire, lost two children and had to have a Cesarean section in order to birth her daughter Amasatou. She decides then that she will not allow Amasatou to be mutilated in order to spare her the problems that she has gone through. Her husband is fond of her, and so backs her decision. Although the ritual is a prerequisite for adulthood and marriage, Amasatou still catches the eye of the heir to the village throne Ibrahima, and is engaged to be married to him. One might surmise that the villagers decided to let the situation be, considering the circumstances and the fact that Amasatou is the only person who has been opted out of the practice.
Amasatou, however, is a threat to the social order, because she is a symbol of a possible different way. And so it is that a few days before Amasatou's fiancee is due home from working in France, six little girls escape their appointment with the knives of the Salindana, four of whom ask Colle for sanctuary. Colle decides to give it, and invokes Moolaade (magical protection). By placing the symbolic rope across the compound, the Salindana, (the ceremonial group of women in charge of the rite) are unable to get the girls, and so they are safe...as long as they do not cross the rope. Moolaade lasts for the duration of the circumcision rite, and so if the girls manage to stay inside, they will be safe from the rite for the next seven years, when it comes around again. The other two girls drown themselves in a village well in order to avoid the rite. Colle is now in complete rebellion against community mores and values, and thus there are consequences. The Salindana petition the community elders, who authorize increasingly harsh measures to break her rebellion. Amasatou's engagement to Ibrahima is broken, the radios of all the village women are taken away and piled up for burning in the village square because the elders think that Colle's rebellion was inspired by the radio programmes. Colle refuses to break, aided by her powerful older sister-wife. Therefore, Amath, Colle's brother-in-law, exercises his power as elder brother over Colle's husband Cire and goads him into whipping her, and Colle defies this too, and get most of the village women on her side. The whipping is then interrupted by itinerant trader Mercenaire, and he is murdered by a mob of village men for his pains.
As Colle recovers from her wounds, she is made aware of one more tragedy. One of the mothers managed of the children seeking sanctuary lured her daughter out and took her to fulfill the rite. The child died. Colle, backed by the grieving mother and the rest of the annoyed village women, defy the village elders and the Salinada and declares the practice of female genital mutilation ended in their society. Her remorseful husband and Ibrahima join the rebellion by telling the village council to shove it and deciding to marry Amasatou, respectively, and the film ends triumphantly with the celebration of the women. The circumcision knives are burnt in the same fires that are consuming the village women's radios.
The supplemental texts for the most part focus on the extraordinary activist filmmaker behind the story, Sengalese director Ousame Sembene. Unfortunately, most of the articles were published on the occasion of his death in 2008. Nevertheless, a portrait of the man emerges from the remembrances, which might help to contextualize the film. Mr. Semebene was born poor, and proceeded to embark on a lifelong journey of self-education. Contact with the working world through a series of manual jobs informed his politics and he proceeded to become an advocate of social justice for the marginalized. He turned to writing as a form of activism, and his output included novels and short stories. He decided to try film in the 1960s as a way of reaching more of the masses, since illiteracy necessarily limited the number of people his words could reach, and thus he went to Russia for a year to learn how to make them. Then he decided to make said films using Africa's indigenous languages of instead of the colonial European languages that were imposed upon them. Mr. Semebene critiqued the problems that both colonialism and traditional beliefs caused and thus he annoyed both Europeans and African governments in equal measure. Mr. Semebene was a firm disciple of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and he continued to advocate for the marginalized until he died. His significance to the people who miss him however, is not only rooted in his work. Who he was while doing this work, that is, the fact that he was a politically aware Senegalese man, advocating from a position of intimate knowledge of both colonialism and tradition made his artistic choices authentic and thus a needed bulwark against a long, ignoble and continuing tradition of problematic Western storytelling and activism about Africa.
How Not to Write About Africa - Binyavanga Wainaina - narrated by Djimon Hounsou
Two articles mention the film itself. The new Yorker's article is a brief review, that somehow seems to come to the conclusion that romantic love was the kicker to the rebellion. It does however defend the film as "politically sophisticated" and takes note of the fact that the film portrays the reasoning behind local customs, instead of branding them as archaic and barbaric as so many Westerners and Westernized minds tend to do. The much more in-depth analysis by the absolutely wonderful magazine Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, compares Moolaade to his earlier film Faat Kine, and explains in detail how each film's disrupts of the standard Western portrayal of African Muslim women as victims in need of rescue from a barbaric culture that continues to stultify international discourse. Indeed, the films bring very clearly to the fore that African Muslim women can bring to life indigenous feminisms, womanisms and women's rights activism using material that is culturally-based in order to improve life on their own terms.
As I read through the material there were a couple of questions that I had:
1. What kind of distribution did this film in Senegal and was the film shown in other countries in Africa? Was it ever shown in the village in which it was made, Djerisso in Burkina Faso? And what did they think of it?
2. I noticed that the film brought in a total of $434,553 worldwide, half of which was in the USA. The widest release was 4 theatres, and I am going to guess that those theatres were in New York. Too often, films like this play in elite art movie theatres to those in the know and then disappear, while many of those who would respond to the message are left out in the cold. Many Jamaicans watch Nollywood films, for example, and I am sure that there would be interest in more film from various African nations. What would it take to market the films to more diverse audience who do not know that stuff like this is available?
3. Where are the actors now?
4. What more can we do to support the production of stories about African told by Africans so as to complicate the largely ignorant and stereotypical view that prevails in Western discourse in Africa.
5. How can we support the growth of film industries that is needed for the above goal to be achieved?
Interesting points for discussion include:
1. Comparing and contrasting Hollywood story telling as represented by Hotel Rwanda with Moolaade.
2. The clash between a mainstream view on the part of Westerners that Islam is not able to birth women's rights; and the fact Colle was able to dispute the village elders' claims that female genital mutilation was Muslim tradition by pointing to a iman's sermon she had heard on the radio denouncing the practice as unIslamic.
3. The use of cinema as a tool of activism, especially as a way to reach people who are illiterate.
4. The well-rounded portrayal of women characters in the film.
5. The different ways in which dissidence to the prevailing social order can be expressed depending on one's culture.
6. The clash between Western women's rights activists and African women's rights activists.
7. The complicated politics surrounding the campaign against female genital mutilation. For instance the fact that traditional ideas are sometimes used as a backlash against colonialization and continuing oppression of various forms, thereby making it harder to eradicate the practice.
Since the texts did a great job in analyzing the gender issues in the movie, I wanted to make a quick note about the them of cultural change via internal and external means that under-girded the narrative. Culture is not static. It changes, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly but it changes. Sometimes the change is wholesale and that is usually a result of overwhelming outside forces like globalization and climate change. Sometimes the change is less severe and the culture drops some parts and incorporates new parts into itself. One of the things I noted in Moolaade was the village was undergoing cultural change from many directions. Firstly, the villagers were becoming used to the continued introduction of industrial goods like plastic pans and radios and shoes and white bread brought in from France via the itinerant vendor Mercenaire. It was interesting to see the credit system being applied to the cope with the sudden want of all this new stuff, and to see the chief's son Ibrahima working in France in order to bring home money and even more modern things to the village. Village culture was being changed as all of a sudden people like Amastsou suddenly needed a whole lot of new things for her wedding from Mercenaire, whereas without him, she would have been fine with whatever it was that people used to celebrate weddings in times past.
In addition to this, new ideas and confirmation for ideas that people like Colle were thinking were starting to percolate among the people. And even if they were not paying much attention to the ideas, the habit of listening to the radio had taken hold. I am very sure that with the introduction of television via Ibrahima, village habits and ideas were on the brink of changing even more. So I understand the elders surprise and dismay when they found themselves facing the fight against the circumcision rites.
Yet, this is not the first time that serious cultural change had taken over the village. After all, Islam is not native to the continent of Africa. And the concept of Moolaade is definitely not Islamic. And the elders met several times right in front of the mosque and the symbol of Moolaade, and one of them even told the story of the ritual and why it was that with the coming of the Islam, the villagers chose not to throw away all of their older faiths. The parallels are obvious. Imagine the feelings of the village government at the time when Islam came, and how they probably looked askance at this new threat to established power structures.
Cultures will change, but I like that fact that in this story of an African village, the inhabitants are the ones driving the change, as opposed to the recent history of globalization and colonization and other things leading the whole scale decimation of cultures. Hopefully as they go into the future, they will be able to synthesize the changes to produce something that continues to serve them well. It is unfortunate that Mercenaire's and that child's lives, as well as Colle's whipping and sexual punishment were the prices to be paid.
Dialectician - A philosopher who thins about the world in opposites.
Semiotics - The study of signs and symbols
Reductive - to diminish or make smaller
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