Week of June 9, 2005, Issue #503
FILM
Against Purification
By DARREN ZENKO
The West African village setting of Moolaadé—shot
on location in Djerisso, Burkina Faso—with its bright colours, alien architecture,
wandering livestock and people going about preindustrial business as ancient
as civilization itself, is thrillingly foreign and exotic to first-world Western
eyes... but it only stays that way for a few moments. This is the film’s
first triumph: director Ousmane Sembene taking this half-understood (if that)
world, so distant in time, space and culture from our own, and quickly but gently
turning easy exoticism into something like familiarity. Inside of 10 minutes,
you’re drawn into the place and the pace, ready to care.
With light-handed speed, Sembene wastes no time in introducing the conflict
that’s going to divide and devastate this green and sunbaked corner of
nowhere. Into the courtyard of Collé Gallo Ardo Sy (Fatoumata Coulibaly),
second wife of a prosperous and respected farmer, come four distraught young
girls seeking her protection. They are what’s left of a group of six fugitives
(two others fled to a nearby city) on the run from a seemingly unavoidable fate,
a bloody ritual often fatal and always painful, and the formidable, iconoclastic
Collé is their only hope.
The pain they’re fleeing is “Purification”—ritual genital
mutilation. Performed without anesthesia or sterile tools, the procedure commonly
produces serious infections, uncontrolled bleeding, long-term pain and scarring
and lifelong psychological damage. Collé had undergone the Purification
herself, and the result was two babies dead due to her inability to birth naturally,
and a disfiguring abdominal scar from the rough C-section that brought her daughter
Amasatou (Salimata Traoré) into the world. Her refusal to subject Amasatou
to the same procedure has made her somewhat notorious, and brought the fugitive
girls to her door.
With her husband away and thus unable to countermand her, and with the implicit
if not enthusiastic support of the household’s elder wife, Collé
takes the girls in and invokes moolaadé, sacred sanctuary. Under moolaadé,
the girls are unreachable, Collé’s compound a taboo precinct from
which they may not be taken—and from which they may not leave. A thin
strip of dyed cord across the doorway is all that separates Collé’s
charges from a society unanimous in its desire to see them cut according to
custom. Unpurified, they are disreputable, unclean, unmarriageable.
The moolaadé itself is Sembene’s second triumph. In his capable
hands, the taboo of protection fills the film, becoming a character in itself.
That braided red rope across the threshold is acknowledged by everybody; all
who enter or exit the compound pause and regard the barrier, thinking their
own thoughts on its significance before stepping over. Even the red-robed women
who form the Purification posse, adorned with their regalia of office and fairly
crackling with psychic energy and magic power, can do nothing but crowd against
the invisible wall of the moolaadé like angry vampires outside a church;
only animals pass the threshold casually. Sembene creates in this film a powerful,
tangible ritual space; the symbol of Collé’s sanctuary is as real
as any door or drawbridge—and the irony of relying on the force of one
piece of folk magic to defy another is not lost.
Though they can do nothing in direct violation of the moolaadé, the village
powers-that-be—the male hierarchy—are not without recourse. Their
first action is the confiscation of radios—first Collé’s,
then those of other women as Collé’s not-so-quiet revolution slowly
spreads—as the proximal source of the iconoclastic contagion. Steadily,
these cheap plastic symbols of (and gateways to) a progressive, questioning
wider world pile up in the square outside the village mosque in a sacrificial
heap, still muttering pop songs and news snippets. When silencing the voice
of the world doesn’t make their problem go away, the forces of reactionary
conservatism return, as they always do, to their reliable old arsenal—threats
and beatings, mobs and murder.
It all culminates in the kind of People Power message that gets boilerplated
with the term “uplifting.” The climactic showdown is indeed electrically
tense, but when push comes to shove, the film’s natural language turns
to a mode which smacks of manifesto-reading to a Western ear... until you consider
just how much power there is in the simple act of saying “female genital
mutilation” in a society where the euphemistic “Purification”
has been exclusively used. In the end, as welcome as it may have been in the
West (winner, Un certain regard, Cannes ’04), Moolaadé is aimed
squarely at Africa, where Sembene’s work has always been aimed; it’s
a lyrical call to resistance and revolution. V
Moolaadé
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembene • Starring Fatoumata Coulibaly,
Dominique Zeïda and Maimouna Hélène Diarra • Zeidler
Hall, The Citadel • Fri-Mon, June 10-13 (7pm) • Metro Cinema •
425-9212