Woman Is the Future of Man:
Ousmane Sembène on Moolaadé
By Ray Pride
The 81-year-old Senegalese writer-director Ousmane
Sembène has made a career of creating sharply satirical dramas
about the effects of African patriarchy on its civil society. In
movies like Black Girl (1966) (about an exploited maid), Xala (1975)
(wherein a man with two wives and an angry daughter is cursed with
impotence on his third wedding day), and Faat
Kiné (2000)
(about a 40-year-old single mother’s rise in business), Sembène
has created some of the most indelible portraits of womanhood in
the cinema anywhere over the last 40 years.
This political attitude stems from Sembène’s pre-cinema
career. Before turning to film in his 40s, Sembène worked
as a union organizer, a newspaper publisher, and a novelist, among
other jobs in both his native Senegal and in France, and these professions
were a factor in converting him into a particularly intense political
activist. Sembène’s latest film, the stirring, sumptuous,
and even buoyant Moolaadé, is perhaps his smoothest blend
of politics and entertainment to date. It debuted at this year’s
Cannes film festival, getting the festival’s best reviews,
and winning the Grand Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It
makes for unlikely pleasure, this keenly empathetic, dramatically
shapely polemic.
Moolaadé is a rousing Brechtian spectacle that feels like
an oral history of a distinctly unpleasant topic: the all-too-common
practice of female genital mutilation, still held by many in 39
African countries, under the auspices of Islamic tradition. Set
in a colourful Burkina Faso village dotted with immense, man-tall
anthills, and a mosque that resembles a gigantic hedgehog, four
small girls resist “purification,” or going under the
knife, by strident women practitioners who had the same damage done
to them years earlier. Fatoumata Coulibaly is magnificent as the
powerful woman who takes the girls into her home, stringing a rope
across her doorway that symbolizes the “moolaadé,”
or traditional protection, against the patriarchs who run the town.
Feeling their power infringed upon, they soon begin to confiscate
the women’s most prized objects, their radios, and the fight
between tradition and modernity comes to a jarring head.
The New York Times’ literary-minded A.O. Scott was representative
with his almost over-the-top rave: “Mr. Sembène addresses
this upsetting subject with unflinching candor, but he also portrays
African village life with such warmth, humor and generosity of spirit
that you leave the film feeling both horrified and exhilarated.”
At its New York Film Festival debut, one US critic reduced the film
to an African Norma Rae (1979), but there’s much more at work
in this splendid portrait of a culture clash that starts at the
conflict between men and women and eddies outward to a rousing conclusion
that remains intensely hopeful about modernization and the future
of women’s rights in Africa.
In the forthcoming Ousmane Sembène: The Life of a Revolutionary
Artist, Samba Gadjigo writes that “for Sembène, in
both literature and film, the work of ‘art’ should not
be a mere re-presentation of ‘reality,’ or ‘une
pancarte,’ a political banner. In order to capture the imagination
of the people they ‘speak’ to and for, those symbols
first must be intelligible to them. They must stem from and reflect
their cultural universe. At work in Sembène’s art is
to project a genuine African film language that also entertains
a dialogical relationship with other world cultures.” Moolaadé
may speak volumes to its intended African audience, but there is
no doubt as to its universal appeal.
Cinema Scope: I’m intrigued when a film has a singular voice,
but also has the offhanded, inhabited air of an oral history. Moolaadé
feels timeless, but it also has the character of a memory. Do you
view storytelling as an extension of oral histories?
Ousmane Sembène: Of course, there’s an influence drawn
from oral storytelling, but my aim, my purpose, is to have it be
an atemporal film.
Scope: Timeless?
Sembène: Yes, timeless. Because I think that timelessness
is very important to Africa. Because excision—female genital
mutilation—remains a reality. Even today it continues. We
are doing everything we can to put an end to it. But it is very
hard to accomplish.
Scope: Historically, has there been rebellion against excision
of the sort we see by the young girls in the story? Is this uncommon?
Sembène: Each year we witness this kind of thing, women
standing up against it. And children are afraid of blood. That’s
in all countries in the world. They don’t want to get cut
or hurt. Each year, there are many little girls who run away from
the operation, who sometimes end up in the cities. Some of them
also wind up being prostitutes, because they have left their families
behind.
Scope: If I understand it, then, this story’s village is
kind of composite of villages across your part of Africa.
Sembène: Oui. Not just in West Africa, it goes all the way
to East Africa, to Kenya. If you forget about the architecture of
the mosque in that village, it could be set anywhere. Of course,
I don’t approve of the way the surgery is done across all
of Africa. Actually, the way it is done in West Africa is less severe
than the way it is practiced in East Africa. In those countries,
in addition to just cutting the clitoris, they cut the clitoris,
and then they sew everything together.
Scope: Is this done in a crude fashion? It seems that the people—women,
yes?—who are doing it would be less trained than a doctor
or a surgeon.
Sembène: They don’t have any training. It’s
done in a crude way. They just inherited the practice. Some of them
are very well known, actually. Some of them are very famous, celebrated.
And some of them even pretend that they have a nice hand, so to
speak.
Scope: It’s frightening: the idea of the trade of being an
anti-midwife, in a way.
Sembène: Oui! Sometimes also they are midwives. They also
know all the folk medicine. For example, take Egypt: excision is
an illegal practice there. But it is not practiced in a traditional
way. It is performed at health centres or hospitals. But to take
in the entire continent, I should just say sweepingly, it is a bad
practice. We should not lose sight of the fact that it is performed
on children. It’s not adults who have the operation: it is
children. For me, that is the most criminal, the cruelest aspect.
Scope: There have been reports of parents in other countries, including
the US, choosing to bring that tradition along with them and to
perform the excision illegally.
Sembène: Yes, they do it underground, in a clandestine way.
That’s why I think that the fight to eradicate it is very,
very difficult. But I think a film like mine can provoke discussions
and the exchange of ideas, to show the very negative aspects. And
the uselessness of it, actually! And that is a tradition that should
be done away with.
Scope: The Hippocratic Oath begins, “First, do no harm.”
It’s chilling to think that a midwife would also do this sort
of damage. I’m from a different culture, of course, but the
combination of giving and taking is unthinkable from my experience.
Sembène: Yes, yes. Well, it dates back in time. I should
confess that I did not have the courage to put all my findings in
my film. Because then it would become propaganda. I have been investigating
this issue with these women for a long time. It’s very difficult
in Africa for women to talk to you about their intimate lives, their
private lives. But once you manage to have their confidence…Myself,
until eight years ago, I used to find excision to be the normal
practice.
Scope: How long had you been listening and shaping this story,
so that it would be more than propaganda?
Sembène: Oh, years ago. I cannot put a date on it. The idea
came to me when I had an idea of making a trilogy. That’s
when the issue of female genital mutilation came up. We started
talking about the practice. I knew a woman who had undergone the
operation. We had discussions around the topic. But I also talked
to woman doctors who have had the operation themselves, but did
not want their daughters subjected to it. These are women well positioned
to explain the issue.
Scope: But Moolaadé is far removed from being a documentary.
Sembène: I’m just happy to touch on the surface of
things, and content to trigger discussion without humiliating anyone,
without being graphic about it. There is another reason for this:
because the woman playing the practitioner in the film also underwent
the excision. In fact, all the women in the film have undergone
the surgery. But they agreed to play these roles, which I find very
courageous.
Scope: So in discussing the material and in casting these roles,
with women to whom this had happened, was there more discussion,
more input from which to shape the story?
Sembène: Yes, very much. A lot of discussion, I like to
ask questions very much! And especially in this area. But it is
so intimate, very personal. But at my age, they trusted me. My way
of doing things, I think, disarmed them and made them trust me.
I can ask people questions and they will trust me.
Scope: What way of doing things do you mean? That they trust your
skills as a storyteller? A particular way you would pose questions?
Sembène: It could be both. In Africa, I am known as a storyteller.
For instance, when I made Faat Kiné, a woman told me that
I did not go deep enough into the reality of what women go through.
I chose to do that—not to go deeper—because cinema,
for me, is an evening school, it’s an instrument for education,
and you have to provide people with food for thought. But you also
have to entertain people. I did not invent that. The best storytellers
back in Africa also do that. People sit around the fire and tell
stories. For us, the storyteller is the one-man show. He is the
scriptwriter, the director; he is everything.
Scope: You’re describing the parable, a divertissement to
illustrate a moral concern.
Sembène: Yes. You’re right. It’s plentiful in
the Bible, realities that are even crueler. But it’s also
more daring than most storytellers. After reading the Bible, you
find that we have not invented anything. Maybe the modern tools
of film.
Scope: How do you strike the balance between pageantry and politics,
of being an intellectual aware of Brechtian staging but also of
folklore, dealing with a subject as stirring and disturbing as this,
yet told in a manner that takes the form of a beautiful entertainment?
Sembène: I think that is the role cinema should play. The
cinema can advocate political goals, but it should not be a political
banner. That is my conception of cinema. I think people ought to
be entertained, laugh a little, and also relax. And even sometimes,
maybe, identify with the characters. When I first showed the film
at Cannes, many people came out of the room crying. I did not understand
why they were crying. In New York, women left the theatre crying.
I did not understand why. Because people are more sensitive to certain
things? Around us, there are more violent things happening.
Scope: You’re capturing the more intimate forms of violence,
but in an entertaining fashion.
Sembène: In the cinema you have two hours to tell your story—and
people become sensitive. The African public is very, very talkative.
You have to keep them quiet for the first ten minutes of the film.
Then you have to capture and hold their attention. Sometimes have
some comic relief and then come back to your story. But that is
the classic, tested way. If you take the Brechtian approach, you
do have to distance yourself from the story sometimes. The Italian
cineastes, like Pasolini, who I met when I was making Mandabi in
1968, were able to strike that balance. But I learned from everyone.
I do think in Africa, we have to always invent a new writing. But
I also take something from other cultures.
Scope: The merchant, the womanizer who gets called Mercenaire,
is very funny, the volley of teasing insults.
Sembène: That is one of the roles I assigned to Mercenaire.
The only person who could provide that comic relief would be a merchant.
Like any merchant in any village, he plays that role. And to refer
to the Bible, the passage where Christ throws the moneylenders from
the temple.
Scope: He’s not insulted when the women react to his desire
and knowledge of women.
Sembène: That is his pastime. For entertainment’s
sake. But he’s also a war veteran turned merchant who’s
introducing all this plastic junk to the village. He was sent elsewhere
on peace missions, but yet he cannot make peace at home.
Scope: Ironically, that junk is as brightly and boldly coloured
as the magnificent costumes.
Sembène: True. This is the modern world. If you think of
modern Africa, then you have to think of this kind of thing. And
I’m very happy with the reception I’ve gotten in Africa.
I don’t think it’s extraordinary or unusual. It’s
the kind of work that any artist must do, a filmmaker, a musician…
Scope: You were how old when you made your first film?
Sembène: I started studying at 40. I made my first short
when I was 43. There is no age for learning. You can learn at any
age. You simply must do it. I think part of life is to proceed as
if you are charmed, held in the spell of a beautiful image. For
me, that is the pleasure of life.
Scope: Did it take a long time to finance this film? Are you involved
in those details?
Sembène: Yes, but filmmaking in Africa is cheaper than it
is elsewhere. But doing the job is twice as difficult. In Africa,
you have very few people in the film industry. There is the desire,
but you have to keep an eye on everything, and help everyone. It
is also a source of pleasure, to train people into the trade.
Scope: The use of so many exteriors in a movie like this seems
pragmatic, using daylight to compensate for fewer technical means.
Yet this also affords you such a sense of the motion of the street,
of the quotidian of the community.
Sembène: There is also a setback. It is the sun! The sun
will not wait for you. In a studio, you can shoot anytime you want
to because you are in control of lighting. But making a film in
Africa, you are racing against the sun. Another issue is that film
stocks are not meant for black faces. If you have to film a black
face under the shade of a tree, you have to capture the face and,
at the same time, not erase the shade. There lies the creative genius
of African cinema. Before you get on the set, you must calculate
the course of the sun across the day.
Scope: Tell me about the phrase “the heroism of modern life.”
You’ve described that as intrinsic to your recent films, as
well as your next one, The Brotherhood of
Rats.
Sembène: I say that because in Africa there is a lot of
daily heroism. For instance, we have seen on television many stories
about refugees. If you look at those refugees, there are more women
than men. In the cities, it is also the women who carry the weight.
They take care of the education of the children, and they do that
on a daily basis. Life is so harsh. People just get by one day at
a time. As you know, the majority of Africans live on less than
a dollar a day. For someone to go through that each day, and to
keep her sense of honesty, is something very heroic. To manage to
feed your children? That is heroic. To find clean drinking water?
Also heroic.
Scope: Did you arrive at this by observation and analysis, or do
you personally have an affinity for strong female figures?
Sembène: In Africa, we have a lot of strong women. I think
that without that, we would have gone down the drain a long time
ago. We have very, very strong women. They are the people who hold
society together.
Scope: There’s the line from the poet, “Woman is the
future of man…”
Sembène: From the poem by Louis Aragon, yes. In one of his
poems, Aragon also says, “Woman is half of the sky.”
I think that’s a beautiful sentence. But it also takes a lot
of work, here, somewhere else, say in northern Europe. But I’m
afraid that women in those other cultures also castrate men because
they’re too powerful. In Africa, the challenge is to restore
love to those women. People say a man can accomplish anything when
he finds love in the gaze of his lover. I think that’s all
kinds of love. How can we restore that love to women’s faces?
Scope: You seem to remain an optimistic young man.
Sembène: I don’t think there is anything more beautiful
than life. But you have to be able to share life. That is my conception.
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