Comments on: Moolaadé: Film and Discussion in the Forum this First Saturday! /2008/07/02/moolaade-film-and-discussion-in-the-forum-this-first-saturday/ Technology blog of the Brooklyn Museum Fri, 04 Apr 2014 18:28:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 By: Barbara C. /2008/07/02/moolaade-film-and-discussion-in-the-forum-this-first-saturday/comment-page-1/#comment-1629 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:18:47 +0000 /feministbloggers/2008/07/02/moolaade-film-and-discussion-in-the-forum-this-first-saturday/#comment-1629 I wish I could have been present for this screening of Moolaadé and the open forum that followed. I did however, recently view the DVD in my San Diego home, and was so moved by it that I began searching commentary on the film.

I can’t comment on what clearly sounds like a dynamic discussion which followed the film’s screening, however I will say that I personally felt the film was exceptionally well done; particularly in its realistic depiction of what daily life is like in small villages throughout West Africa. I spent one year in Kadiolo, Mali (Sikasso region; 1996), and had the opportunity to visit several of the small villages that surround Kadiolo as well as neighboring Burkina Faso. While I can’t claim to have seen every film that’s been set in this region of the world, of those that I have seen this production clearly stands out as a quality film, with an exceptional representation of every-day life in West Africa.

The film’s main topic is in fact a heated issue, and one that for obvious reasons I agree needs to change. As a woman, and one who befriended many women in Kadiolo, I have deep feelings against this cultural practice and a strong opposing viewpoint. As an individual greatly interested in learning about and understanding different cultures around the world, I also do my best to appreciate that it is their cultural reality that makes this practice ‘acceptable’ to a great part of West African society, including a strong percentage of its female population.

In Moolaadé, it is ultimately exposure to modern technology and modern medicine that leads some village woman to begin to realize the many reasons why excision is hazardous, cruel, and detremental to their lives and their health, as well as that of their offspring. Progress itself can often be a controversial topic, as its presence often annihilates the beauty and uniqueness of individual cultures throughout the world, however, where improved health and well-being is at stake, I believe most people do agree that introducing such progress is a positive element.

Inevitably, this film does ‘educate’ its audience on some level, on the various aspects of West African life and culture. Society in this region, like all societies throughout the world, is multi-faceted, and Moolaadé can only show its viewers one perspective–that of its creator.

In regards to quality film-making, actor performances, and realistic representation, I found Moolaadé to be an exceptional film production. I am grateful to have found it, and plan to purchase my own copy immediately. Thanks to Ousmane Sembène and his vision, I now have a visual aide to go with my verbal description of what my year in Mali was like.

I ni ce.

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By: The Artist /2008/07/02/moolaade-film-and-discussion-in-the-forum-this-first-saturday/comment-page-1/#comment-1626 Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:15:53 +0000 /feministbloggers/2008/07/02/moolaade-film-and-discussion-in-the-forum-this-first-saturday/#comment-1626 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.

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