Review of Moolaadé (2004) by Edith N — 15 Dec 2011

It Must Start With One Woman If It Is to Start at All.

I will pretty well guarantee you that a large percentage of the reviews of this movie have the word "patriarchy" in them. This is a sure sign that the person writing the review hasn't watched the movie carefully enough. After all, the whole point of the movie is that it isn't just the men who keep these traditions going. It's the women, too. After all, in the village where this movie is set, it is the women who run the whole show, unto doing the cutting. It's true that the men all agree that they would never marry a woman who hadn't been "purified," but the women are put in charge of the actual work and are just as adamant that every girl must undergo the ritual. In part, I suspect this is because they believe their suffering would be for nothing if they didn't prolong the tradition. Of course, it already was; they are told the Koran requires it, and it doesn't.

Collé Gallo Ardo Sy (Fatoumata Coulibaly) lives in a small village in Burkina Faso, one of those African countries few Americans can find on a map. And then one day, four of the village girls come to her in search of [i]moolaadé[/i], magical protection. They and two others have run away from the purification ritual. Collé had refused to let her daughter, Amasatou (Salimata Traoré), undergo the procedure, and the girls think that she will protect them. Collé underwent it, and she was unable to deliver a live child without a caesarian; Amasatou is her only living child. It is a busy day in the village; Amasatou's fiancé, Ibrahima (Moussa Théophile Sowié) is to return from Paris the next day, and Mercenaire (Dominique Zeïda), the local traveling merchant, has arrived. And the whole of the town is in an uproar over Collé's dangerous actions.

The men blame the radio, proving that blaming the media is a universal. And it's true that it is in part because of the radio that Collé knows that "purification" isn't in the Koran at all. However, there is also the issue that she loves her husband and wants to enjoy sex with him instead of suffering through it. She wishes she had been able to give birth without the luck of having a doctor coming through at just the right time. She remembers the pain of the procedure, and she remembers the pain she has felt over and over since that day. She wants better for her daughter than she experienced herself. That it's been a tradition for years without number is not, to her, the point. She's going to protect her daughter, and she's going to protect the other four girls who came to her. she would have protected the remaining two runaways, but they went and drowned themselves in the well instead.

The two best-drawn of the male characters are Mercenaire and Ibrahima, and the important thing about both of them is that they have left the village. Ibrahima has been all the way to Paris. He is the son of the village chief, the richest person in the village. And a lot of those riches come from the work he was doing in Paris. He has been exposed to a lot beyond his tiny village, and it has changed his way of thinking in ways his father could not have expected. Mercenaire fought in wars, met UN troops. He spends his time traveling between villages and into the city, picking up his wares and selling them all around. And what both men know is that large amounts of the world think of the activities of the village are backward and shameful. The old men say that no one will ever marry an uncut woman, but Ibrahima and Mercenaire know that billions of men will, and even more people are looking down on them over it.

The world is changing. Even in those little villages in Africa, the wider world is invading. I'm midway through [i]Sahara[/i], and Michael Palin travels to a village where female genital mutilation is still performed. And in the village, they don't believe there is any future for girls who do not have the operation performed. However, as the film makes clear, a lot of the girls who do have no future in a rather more literal sense. After all, the equipment they use isn't sterile. I've just finished a book about the life and death of James Garfield, and he might well have survived had he not had the medical treatment he was given. Garfield, as well as many girls who have had this awful procedure performed, died of infection. A lot of other girls would die in childbirth, because the procedure does not exactly make a difficult process any easier. Any girls spared the process are spared more than a few minutes of pain.