'Moolaade': A Harsh Look At a Brutal Ritual

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 3, 2004; Page C05

There is a crisis in the village: Six young girls who are to undergo the traditional rite of "female circumcision" have fled the ceremony. Four take shelter in the compound of a strong woman who doesn't believe in the practice; two are missing.

From this portrait of ritual life in an unnamed village in an unnamed country in present-day rural West Africa, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene has fashioned his latest polemic with "Moolaadé." The story is a brutish confrontation of the ancient and modern, between the way things have always been and what they might become.

And the village in which Collé Ardo Gallo Sy offers sanctuary, or moolaadé, appears almost unchanged over the ages: polygamous marriages, mud-walled huts, magical spirits, no electricity, no lights, no running water and a marital system in which husbands do not simply beat their wives, they are expected to. In public. With a whip. The only contact the women appear to have with the outside world is through battery-powered radios -- which the men soon confiscate and burn.

Collé (played well by Fatoumata Coulibaly) has had about enough of all this, tradition-bound as it might be. The junior wife in a polygamous marriage is resolute in her opposition to this practice: She had persuaded her husband to allow their daughter, Amasatou, not to be "cut" some years before -- though this renders the girl unfit for marriage (upon reflection, considering the treatment wives are given, this might be the best bargain going). Collé knows, from her own experience, that the cutting is dangerous, potentially deadly and a way of keeping women in check.

She pulls a rope across the open entrance to her compound and invokes the ancient protection of moolaadé, which can only be broken by her utterance of another magic word. Fearful of the ancestral spirits that might descend upon them if they dare cross this mystical line, the village elders curse her -- but stay outside.

A showdown develops as the son of the village chief returns from Paris. He's a modern man, wearing a western suit and tie, dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief. He wants to honor his family's pledge of marriage to Collé's daughter, despite her uncircumcised status.

Circumcision isn't quite the right word to use here because the practice, still carried out in parts of about three dozen African countries, bears no resemblance to its male counterpart, and is most often referred to in the West as female genital mutilation. It involves cutting out the clitoris of girls, often with unsanitary sharp objects, for the purpose of reducing their sexual pleasure, which, the logic goes, will make them more likely to be faithful wives. The fact that some girls often die from the procedure, or suffer from horrid infections or childbearing complications, is viewed as an acceptable societal risk. In the film the elders bill the practice as "purification," and in many countries women view it as a rite of passage.

But it's a nasty piece of business when you get into the particulars and it often inspires outrage. Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker made millions of Americans aware of it in her 1992 novel "Possessing the Secret of Joy," and any number of international aid agencies say it is a violation of the most basic of human rights.

Sembene, 81, a novelist and social critic who has become the dean of African filmmaking, doesn't wrestle with subtlety here. It is an unapologetic manifesto against the practice and a call to arms for African women's rights in general.

His script bears this weight most directly, as Collé and other villagers seem to address the historical record as often as they do one other. It almost seems beside the point to note that the plot has a gaping hole toward the end, and one wonders if a documentary might have been a better vehicle for a small-budget film in which the message is this obvious.

Still, for those interested in Africa as it is -- and not how Hollywood so often has it -- Sembene provides lasting insights into village life.

More importantly, he portrays the role of African spirituality in daily life without apology or explanation. It simply is, the way that it exists across the continent, and it is telling that even in a film devoted to eradicating a centuries-old African tradition, no one questions the power of the ancestors, the sanctity of moolaadé, and the shelter that it can provide a strong woman and frightened little girls in their hour of despair.

Moolaadé (124 minutes, in Jula and French with English subtitles, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated, and contains nudity, violence and sex.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company