FAQ
Moolaadé: Film and Discussion in the Forum this First Saturday!
(Film Still from Moolaadé (2004), directed by Ousmane Sembène.)
This month’s Target First Saturday events at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art here at the Brooklyn Museum includes a screening of the film Moolaadé. Directed by Ousmane Sembène, this award winning film tells the tale of six young girls who are about to be circumcised and the subsequent attempts to protect the girls from this trauma. “Moolaadé” is the name for the magical protection one of the village women uses on the girls to prevent their imminent circumcisions.
The showing of the film begins at 6pm and is followed by a discussion with Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, who has worked extensively with, and as an advocate for, circumcised women. If you can’t make it at six for the film, stroll on over to the galleries to see Ladan Akbarnia, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art here at the Brooklyn Museum, give a talk on Ghada Amer: Love Has No End at 7pm. Free tickets for both of these events are available at the Visitor’s Center at 5pm!
(Film Still from Moolaadé (2004), directed by Ousmane Sembène.)
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
July 7th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I can’t help wondering if indeed Sembené did not in fact ‘pander’ as the introducing host, Dr. ____ was quick to declare as precisely what Sembené himself declared against. As I listened to the Americans unite past colour against the ‘mutilations’ by ‘the primitive people’, the discussion had gotten beyond heated into weary. Moolaadé was not in their eyes, cinema, but the documented truth of Africans chopping off genitals of growing girls. For the director’s overt desire to “educate his people” (as the hosting Dr. ____ puts it), what could have been a startling masterpiece is instead a message-driven gesture to educate. This was not a discussion of any cinematic considerations: the ‘educating’ aspect of the film was all too present and for the selfrighteous audience, rather selfsatisfying. How is not being a panderer different from works that invoke smug but pity-filled responses of the sort pandering incites? I really don’t know. But like a poor joke, the room seemed transformed into past experiences where (white) people feel called to express shock at practices of (African) others, their faces raising higher, full of pity and suitable concern, vindicated by what they feel to be the contrast between kindly sounds of their very own charity and ‘well-meaningness’ and the horrible lives of others. At the discussion, the faces were both white and black, though mostly white, and the vehemence coming soundly from the corner was from a black lady of uncertain age and a particular rage: IT IS MUTILATION THEY ARE DOING AND NOT CIRCUMCISION. A mere case of semantics perhaps? No, this is about the lives of those poor African girls being mutilated even as we speak! The contortions of the well-contoured brown-complexion face of vehement-lady-in-the-corner rose in perfect alignment with the crumbling ones of white-woman-photographer-of-the-Kenyans-and-their-practice. Displaced anger and guilt make a fast boiling stew and the unanimous agreement stood up united to say how aghast was it that the word ‘circumcision’ is being used when it ought to be MUTILATION. Neither film nor its director offended its audience it seems: it was the primitive practices of the Africans that did.
The cut genitalia of growing girls is no pleasant matter but in my mind, what could have been a great movie had been ruin for the director own gratifications (at being the educator). Who failed whom: Is it the director? Or the audience? For its audience, every dialogue, every character, every troupe was a fact of the lives of Africans. As Africans, we see the artistic exagerations. Perhaps. However, to see the movie as possible within a complex of other considerations, whether of aesthetics or of meaning, is considered simply irrelevant to the evidential fact of a continent teeming with horrors of botched genital mutilations. Does this mean Molaadé achieved Sembené’s aims, which after all was to educate? The introducing moderator Dr. ____’s plea that the matter be within context because that was what the director wanted as she explained, made little difference. It was interesting and to hear an African woman raised her hand to ask a question, her West-African accented voice shamed and anxious to separate Islam from Sembené’s indictments. It was sad that the reasons behind the word ‘purification’, Islam and local customs were not better understood. The education here certainly failed.
Oh, our selfserving denouncement. Clearly, the self-serving distortions supported by archaic primitivism has mutated with glee it seems into perverted human rights concerns and the denouncement of the other that feeds its ‘great’ sense of self. Similarly, the pitisome contortions supported by an inert neocolonial desire to explain one’s self has graduated into a complex denouncement of pandering. No intercourse but violent assertions and denouncement. The worrisome love affair may never end. We may never truly touch each other, see ourselves in each other.