Re-Imagining West African Women’s Sexuality: Jean Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and the...

Routledge African Studies

Facts, Fiction, and African Creative Imaginations Edited by Toyin Faiola and FallouNgom

2 The Darfur Con.Oict Geography or Institutions? Osman Suliman

3 Music, Performance and African Identities Edited by Toyin F alola and Tyler Fleming

4 Environment and Economics in Nigeria Edited by Toyin Faiola and Adam Paddock

5 Close to the Sources Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy Abebe Zegeye and Maurice Vambe

6 Landscape and Environment in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa Edited by Toyin Faiola and Emily Brownell

7 Development, Modernism and Modernity in Africa Edited by Augustine Agwuele

Development, Modernism and Modernity in Africa

Edited by Augustine Agwuele

i~ ~~~;!~n~~~up NEW YORK LONDON

168 Naminata Diabate

Les Saignantes and Quartier Mozart, the pervasiveness of questions regarding the body and its disintegration reflects the postcolonial African culture's fascination with bodies. In the cultural world of the film, female sexuality is always in danger of pathologization and objectification. However, the film empowers women by turning them into agents of positive change.

Set circa 2025 in an unnamed postcolonial African state, the film opens with a sexual encounter between the protagonist, Majolie, under the spell of the Mevoungou, and the secretary general of the Civil Cabinet (SGCC). But the scene ends with the death of the SGCC, a hiBh-ranking official. Panicked and frustrated over the loss of her sexual investment, Majolie calls her best friend Chouchou to help her dispose of the body. In the process, the women are led to explore the various socioeconomic strata where corruption and death lurk. Following their beating of the corpse, the titular characters take it to the butcher shop and have the butcher decapitate it while attempting to convince him that it is a "load of fresh meat, prime beef." But the butcher recognizes the body of the SGCC by tasting it. Upon realizing that they can land other business deals during the SGCC's funeral, the young women reconstitute the body by visiting a mortuary, where the bribed mortician provides them with a body to match the head. The reconstitution of the SGCC's body with a random and unnamed body suggests the interchangeability of bodies in the postcolonial state. In this way, the film begins to destabilize the exceptionality of the ruling body.

To strike a business deal at the funeral, Majolie and Chouchou attempt to seduce the state minister. An intelligent person, a sex maniac and a voodoo adept, the minister proves to be more insightful and challenges them. At the end of the film and with the help of the Mevoungou, the women use their supernatural powers in a type of martial arts dance scene to defeat

Figure 10.1 Opening scene of Les Saignantes. Courtesy of Quartier Mozart Films.

Re-Imagining West African Women's Sexuality 169

the state minister. Through the invisible force that flows through their bodies, they throw waves of energy at the minister, weakening him and, by extension, the corrupt elite. Les saignantes wrest away from him and his decadent entourage a van load of cash, but they roam the streets of poor neighborhoods to escape state-sponsored forces. Although the film does not feature the final victory over the corrupt ruling class, it succeeds in showing empowering female characters and the positive powers of their bodies. The processes that led to African women's alienation from their sexuality partly originate from three historically contingent forces: the Atlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism.

EUROPEAN MODERNITY, EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE AND AFRICAN WOMEN'S BODIES

That there exist multiple modernities sounds tautological, especially after the development of postcolonial theories. Amid a myriad of articulations, forms and meanings, it appears expedient to delimit how this chapter employs the term, with reference to the imaginary of postmedieval Europe that conceived modernity as an ideology of universal development, an endpoint to which "universal others" should aspire.7 This line of argument was used to justify the colonial enterprise. If for Europeans modernity was an ideological tool that promises ideas of development, for Africans it was an epoch of barbarism and of denial of subjectivity. Indeed, the epistemic violence that accompanied and continuously supported the "civilizing mission" was enacted through the institutional violence of the Atlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism. These historic forces predominantly displaced African norms and cosmologies and radically disorganized African societies. Even worse, colonialism discursively conceives the colonized as "absence," "lack," and "non-being."8

Doubly negated because of their gender, African women's bodies bear the inscriptions of pathology and hypersexuality in racist colonial and in indigenous patriarchal discourses. The South African woman, Saartjie Bartmann, known as the Hottentot Venus, exhibited in Europe as a freak, remains the most (in)famous example of European pathologization of the black female body.9 During the early nineteenth century, the fledgling era of race science, the supposedly disproportionate sizes of Bartmann's buttocks and genitalia came to support the narrative of black degeneracy and sexual deviance. Missionary writings contributed to the discursive construction of the hypersexual African woman; for example, nineteenth-century Baganda women of Uganda were described as "suffering" from "uncontrollable sexual drive," "free, yet 'beast of burden,' ignorant and diseased."10 Within this trope is the erasure of individual identities of African women.

However, a closer examination of the material or discursive overexposure and double-thingness of African women's bodies in European modernity


indicates a certain ambivalence. The black female body is both hypervisible and never really seen, a borderline contradiction between "super sexedness'' and "double nothingness." In that context, the female body becomes this enigmatic figure that seems subjugated yet defies a singular meaning. This proliferation of impossible figurations tests the limits of the colonialist discourse about the natives; and within the interstices of these disjunctions, a colonized female subjectivity emerges. However, to consider racist Euro-Americans as the exclusive oppressors of black female body would be to ignore the economy of excision that indigenous patriarchal institutions have (with women's collaboration) written on it. Indeed, local versions of patriarchy have subjugated female bodies to female genital surgeries, thus justifying violence by stigmatizing female bodies as terrifying.

INDIGENOUS INSTITUTIONS AND THE MISUSE OF FEMALE BODIES

With shifting histories and meanings, clitoridectomy is a highly contentious subject in African studies.11 Suffice it to say that whether the practice is part of an initiation ritual or not, it somewhat unpleasantly impacts how a woman interacts with her body. Circumcised or not, women's bodies have also been used by local political and literary discourses to either advance decolonizing agendas or to critique the failures of the postcolonial state without any regard for the interests of women chemselves.12

In decolonization and late postindependence works by African male writers, female sexuality was almost always associated with prostitution, their metaphor for moral contamination.13 Female prostitutes as metaphors place women's images in a double bind because they are representations that are not representations. The hypervisibility of prostitution and clitoridectomy-all undeniably overshadow empowering images of female sexuality in the African discursive context. Emphasis on the prostitute consequently places images of female sexuality somewhere between the unsexed mother and the hypersexualized prostitute.

DESEXUALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In reaction to the widespread dissemination of disempowering images of female sexuality, there were attempts in pre-1990s fictional narratives to sanitize female bodies through the equally problematic venture of desexualizing them. It is interesting chat the era of desexualization corresponded to the period of economic recession in most African countries, where survival issues were identified as food, housing, health care and employment, rather than sexuality. Subsequently, scholars and fiction writers focused on questions such as motherhood, spirituality, economic


freedom and nation building, and disregarded questions of emancipating sexuality. Privileging motherhood potentially assigns to women's sexuality, or more accurately, to women's "genitality" the exclusive purposes of procreation in a bid to maintain a patriarchal gender hierarchy. It has to be noted that whereas motherhood is celebrated in fiction, in the postcolonial state it is under threat because of imported and international institutions' mandated family-planning and child-spacing programs.

The historical imperative to "sanitize" women's sexuality as an attempt to undo the representational violence enacted by structures of domination remains a problematic venture for three reasons. First, female bodies were simultaneously desexualized and sexualized; they were desexualized in the sense that they could not be means of self-empowerment and sites of erotic pleasures, but they were sexualized in the deployment of the rhetoric of pain, cutting and pathology. Second, the attempt was problematic because it was divorced from West African women's embodied experiences and failed to reflect their diversity. Finally, by eliding the analytical category of sexuality from their emancipatory ventures, women were denied a crucial aspect of their liberation: the power of the erotic.14 Responding to the biased representation, the closing remarks of the 2003 Sex and Secrecy Conference in South Africa invited scholars "to look into sex and the publicness of sex, the public faces of sex, and sex in the public imagination."15

Les Saignantes heeds chis call by bringing into focus female sexuality as a form of constructive power, producing an image that resists negative stereotypes of women's sexuality.

THE MEVOUNGOU IN/ AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL TEXTS

The recovery, adaptation and larger circulation of an extinct womencentered ritual speaks to the social and political intervention of the film. Bekolo, himself a Beti, never experienced the ritual or heard about it because German missionaries abolished it in the nineteenth century. But he discovered it in a novel, Le tombeau du soleil, by French anthropologist Phillipe Laburthe-Tolra, who taught at Yaounde University and worked extensively on the Beti. Ironically, Bekolo's contact with the ritual became possible via a French anthropologist, which suggests the possible nonlinearity in the perpetuation and transmission of cultures. Choosing co use the Mevoungou as a ritual allows the director to reclaim an aspect of his culture that has been denied him. By making contact with and reclaiming the ritual without the stigma of backwardness, Bekolo gives similar opportunities to those previously unfamiliar with it.16

From the 1950s onward, French anthropologists and Cameroonian intellectuals published extensively on the Beti and the Mevoungou. One ethnography includes seventeen interviews conducted with Beti women in 1967 and 1971.17 Because the first German missionaries abolished the practice, only three of the


interviewees who described the ritual, mostly in their sixties, actually participated in it. Most of the accounts were therefore based not on firsthand experiences but on reports. Consequently, interviewees differ on the significance of the ritual to the point of contradicting one another. One interviewee thinks the ritual and its festivities were a way for women to eat meat-based meals as men regularly enjoyed those meals at the expense of women and children. Others define it as a ritual of purification, initiation, protection against evil eyes, celebration of femininity and resistance against male domination.

According to Beti cosmogony, the Mevoungou is built around the cult of the evu, a gland embodying good and evil and that is located in women's uteruses. When activated, the gland is capable of giving life or taking it. The location of the gland explains why the power of the Mevoungou is predicated upon the clitoris, considered the exterior physical site of this gland. The leader of the society, the Mother of Mevoungou, is chosen based on the largeness of her clitoris. She is past menopause and no longer engages in heterosexual intercourse. Although the society is forbidden to men, the entire community of men and women reap its benefits. Its rituals, performed at the request of men and women, aim to settle cases of thievery or witchcraft, for personal crises and prosperity and during moments of drought and calamity in the community. The ritual is divided into two ceremonies (public and private); the public one reunites the entire village whereas the secret one is exclusively attended by the initiated and the mvon Mevoungou, candidates for the secret society. The secret ceremony starts with the Mother of Mevoungou undressing and inviting participants to undress before she swears them to secrecy. Later, women invoke the ceremonial package composed of roots, ashes, medicinal leaves and centipedes. The composition of the package known as mbom Mevoungou reinforces the belief in women's connection to nature. The rest of the ceremony consists in transmitting the power of the package to the clitoris of the Mother of Mevoungou and to those of other women. If the Mevoungou is performed to unmask wrongdoers, the village expects them to confess, or else, it experiences an outbreak of diseases ranging from swelling to various skin conditions.

The criteria for choosing the Mother of Mevoungou led to the observation that the Mevoungou is a "celebration of the clitoris and of feminine power."18

Adoration of the clitoris explains why, in Beti culture, its excision is the ultimate punishment for adulterous women. After the transmission of the power of the clitoris to the package, women rub, massage, admire, tickle and stretch out the clitoris to give it the allure of a virile organ.19 Participants then mimic intercourse with older women in the conventional masculine roles and the younger ones in the feminine. Throughout the ritual, women make fun of men's genitals, degrading them while celebrating women's genitals. In the middle of the night, the package is burnt and its ash is divided into three portions. The first portion is buried with a centipede in front of the hut of the organizer, the second is made into a package to represent the Mevoungou, and the third is sprinkled on rooftops and around the village. Thereafter, the women spend the rest of the night celebrating and praising members with prominent clitorises.

R e-Imagining West African Women's Sexuality 173

Overall, the ritual consists in establishing a communion among the different entities: the package, the clitoris of the Mother of Mevoungou, and clitorises of other participants. Whereas modernity and its attendant institutions pathologize women's bodies, Beti cosmology venerates them for their spiritual and healing dimensions.

DESEXUALIZING THE MEVOUNGOU: CULTURAL AND GENDERED BATTLES

At times, the Mevoungou is described as women's mode of resistance against male domination. The ritual functioned, among other uses, as a means of "affirming [women's] personality, of reinforcing their productivity, and of engaging in a double sexuality."20 However, most male anthropologists and intellectuals, French or Beti, dismiss those subversive goals to which the ritual may have been put. The debate surrounding it is often cast between its cultural value, its sexual components, and its significance. For example, Bekolo subscribes to the desexualization of the ritual. In the 2005 interview with Olivier Barlet, he claims that the ritual focuses on a force of nature, women's sexual organs, to heal the community and did not implicate sexual relations: "in Beti, the same root [Mevoungou] refers to cohabitation, offspring, progenitor ... at least around fifteen words with no relation to the sexual" [translation mine].21

Nevertheless, Les Saignantes still shows women engaging in joyful sexual intimacy with one another for purposes of their own pleasure and self-discovery.

It is intriguing that those who desexualize the ritual happen to be men even though the ritual is forbidden to them. I would argue that the desexualization transcends the cultural battle between French feminist anthropologists and Beti intellectuals to enter a gendered landscape. Although the research necessary to argue the connection between rubbing the clitoris and pleasures lies beyond the scope of chis chapter, I would say that by desexualizing the ritual, male observers discursively deny women who performed the Mevoungou the possibility of experiencing physical pleasures. Women's enjoyment of sexual pleasures during the ritual should not be contradictory to or annihilate its "spiritual" or even patriarchal aspects. To completely evacuate possible pleasures associated with the ritual is to "hijack" Beti women's bodies. And as a postcolonial African feminist, I seek here to reclaim the power of sexuality without its stigma. Whatever the purpose of the purification, Bekolo's film shows the positive and constructive nature of Beti women's bodies.

THE MEVOUNGOU ON THE SCREEN

To recreate the surrealist atmosphere and the participants, various parts of the film such as lighting, the off-screen voice, and les saignantes' body movements are tailored to mimic the "original" ritual. The necessity for


performing the ritual is unequivocal as the viewer hears the off-screen voice gravely declaring after a shocking first scene: "Mevoungou has fallen on us like a bad dream. Now this country has a chance to escape from the darkness" and "Mevoungou was inviting us to join the dance." Here, fear of the ritual emerges through the word choice: "fallen on us like a bad dream." The juxtaposition of coercion and invitation, of a ·frightening event and a joyous celebration, is unmistakable. The use of the communal plural is an invitation to the viewer to join the community of men and women who need purification through women's creative and healing powers, even if the film at times degenders and defeminizes the ritual.

The Mevoungou is central to the film as it controls, predicts and guides all the characters. It is introduced after a blackout, following the sexual scene between Majolie and the SGCC, a moment of heightened expectation and confusion when the viewer is more receptive to the off-screen voice:

Mevoungou is neither a living being nor a thing. Mevoungou is not a place much less a moment. Mevoungou is neither a desire nor a state of mind. Because Mevoungou is something we see, we live and experience but cannot quite define. We don't decide to see Mevoungou. Mevoungou appears to you. Mevoungou invites itself.

Like a dormant entity ready to intervene in unforeseen and challenging circumstances, the spirit takes possession of /es saignantes for the ritual of purification. Unlike the tangible ceremonial package in the historical ritual, the Mevoungou is defined in intangible terms. It is no longer time and place-specific; from its original setting, the village, it is now relocated in the postcolonial city where corruption reeks and women lose their bearings. As a metaphor of West African mothers' genitalia, the Mevoungou is invoked and performed to cure the ills of the found(l)ing fathers.

Nighttime, in which the entire film is shot, is the conventional time to perform the secret Mevoungou ritual. The entire movie creates a paranormal and gripping atmosphere that unsettles the viewer. In addition, the thrillerlike mood, created through the simultaneous use of diffuse shadows and pools of light thrusts the viewer into an atmosphere of instability and chaos. The off-screen voice, as a device that forces the viewer to consider the larger implications of the issues tackled in the film, is doubled by the omniscient narrator who informs the viewer of the plot development while giving the film a haunting mood.

During periods of hardship in the Beci community, men confess their inability to solve problems and resort to women's creative powers by requesting that they perform the Mevoungou ritual. So while women tirelessly invoke the spirits, symbolized by their clitorises, men await the fruits of their labor. To recreate the passivity of men and the activity of women, several scenes of the movie show men sitting in maquis22 drinking and engaging in lighthearted conversations. Long shots of men in maquis


drown out their voices, suggesting the fruitless and irrelevant nature of their conversations. The opening scene with Majolie and the SGCC reflects that passivity of men and the activity of women.

In the upper position, Majolie is literally and metaphorically looking down on the SGCC. After a moment, she springs on him and jumps away. The dynamic of teasing, so manifest in the scene, mimics the director's play with received norms and comfor table expectations. Using the prerogatives of the empowered position; la saignante finally chooses the moment of contact between the bodies, which turns out to be unusual. Her shooting position and her gyrating, violent, engulfing and virile hips take the obedient old male organ from the terrain of the superficially pleasurable into that of war, submission and death. The new terrain represents the erotic, where death is a constant presence. 23 Of course, Majolie's position is contrary to the prescribed norms in the African context, where the woman, the one who should be actively penetrated and dominated, is physically placed underneath her social superior. The reversal of the conventional gender dynamic with the male in the bottom position destabilizes normalized hierarchies of gender and seniority. Obviously, the SGCC's death subverts the image of the beautiful and sexy young woman as a source of pleasure for the affluent. With death, what began as a sexual encounter turns out to be a purification ritual in which it is the powerful male authority figure that is sacrificed.

No ritual is complete or effective without the assistance of initiated members, represented here by five elderly women in red and blue head scarves with serious and authoritative demeanors. Under their guidance and watchful eyes, Majolie and Chouchou dominate and appropriate public spaces traditionally considered to belong to males. As already described, elderly women share their experiences with and initiate younger ones. In the film, through the use of visual effects, the five women support and protect Majolie and Chouchou.

To perform the purification, Majolie and Chouchou must undergo several rituals of cleansing and purging. The first of these is a ritual bath that Majolie takes after the SGCC's death. She impulsively and vigorously scrubs her body, and after the physical cleansing, she undergoes an internal purging. Still possessed, Majolie walks into a bar and grabs a bottle of hard liquor, "a sacred liquid," from which she drinks. With the physiological mind-altering effects of alcohol, believed to facilitate the interaction between the physical world and spiritual world, Majolie accesses the spiritual world, the higher truth. 24 Her rite of passage continues through the uncontrollable consumption of alcohol, after which she urinates and simultaneously experiences orgasmic spasms outside the bar, a foot away from other bar patrons. The background shot in the urination scene suggests the publicness of purification, which was invested with transformational powers, as Majolie groans and seems to be pushing out of herself the creeping stains of pervasive corruption. This first stage of the purification


strengthens Majolie and allows her and Chouchou to dismember and dispose of the SGCC's body.

PERFORMING A CLITORIS-FREE MEVOUNGOU RITUAL

To consolidate the success of the ritual, the initiated need to appreciate Chouchou's clitoris, an aspect of the film that departs from the historical description of the ritual. After reconstituting the SGCC's body, Majolie and Chouchou go to Chouchou's house where the initiated are waiting to examine Chouchou's clitoris. In the film, the examination and possibly the rubbing, feeding and stretching of the clitoris will empower Chouchou. But Majolie mocks the practice by teasing Chouchou, saying, "They want to see your clitoris," to which Chouchou answers in a song, "They can't see my clitoris." Chouchou's refusal to respect a central aspect of the ritual is symptomatic of contemporary continental young women's rejection of most traditional cultural practices. So she succeeds in avoiding the conventional clitoris-centered ritual and instead dances to Brenda Fassie's "Vuli Ndlela" as an alternative method of purification.

Through the most elaborate frenzied dance scene, Majolie and Chouchou come out transformed and equipped with what the off-screen voice calls their integrity. Consistent with anthropological descriptions of the ritual, dance moves permeate the performance. From the first scene to the last, Majolie and Chouchou dance and engage in ritualistic movements. Although they may appear terrifying and zombielike, they are conforming to the demands of the ritual. Such movements are "not used in the representational mode, that is, to signify but instead to create psychological states. These elements are the inevitable elixir, as it were, for the performers' transition into liminal states of trance and religious performance."25 Once in Chouchou's bedroom, the powerful voice of the iconic Brenda Fassie singing "Vuli Ndlela" throws them into a dancing frenzy in which they change several outfits and embody several types of women. Vulindlela, a Zulu word that means "to open the way," seems the most suitable incantation for a transformational session. At a dizzying pace, created by the doubling and tripling of the shots, the viewer sees Majolie and Chouchou metamorphose from sexy to demure, from young to old, and from trashy to respectable. The doubling and tripling effects condense time and space and reject the comfortable position of sameness and immobility by creating an uncanny sense of estrangement and familiarity. The movements take Majolie and Chouchou into the spiritual realm, where they embody .several beings and live several lives, continuously creating and evacuating identities.

The power invested in songs and dances becomes obvious when the off-screen voice announces, "Our Mevoungou had rediscovered its integrity. It could no longer accept the slightest insult. We were ready for the final phase." Through the dancing frenzy, the protagonists recover their


subjectivity, come out as newly born women, ready to deliver the last blow co the enemy. Following the purification, they attend the SGCC's funeral and subsequently disarm the minister.

The disappearance of the clitoris from the purification ritual, as a result of the protagonists' choice to undergo their own initiation under the guidance of the late South African singer Brenda Fassie instead of the five elderly women, constitutes a double-edged undertaking. The director moves away from the clitoris-centered ritual and instead makes the choice of a performative cliche of female sexuality, trying on clothes rather than praising the clitoris. In that context, the movie desexualizes what had been, at least physically, an exclusively female genital ritual. However, as shown earlier, the film is not devoid of sex. It seems to avoid female same-sex sexual gestures as prescribed in the ritual to reclaim a more acceptable heterosexuality, despite the reversed sex position of the opening scene. One can argue that the disappearance of the clitoris answers the director's need to get around the challenges of representing the clitoris on the screen, which amounts to divulgating the secrecy around the ritual or violating women's bodies or both. Perhaps Bekolo is echoing his fellow film director Anne-Laure Folly, who argues that "African culture is more secretive, less expressive, more prudish and chaste. Any action of unveiling the phenomenon amounts to violating it. In that sense, cinema is transgression" [translation mine].26 Furthermore, Chouchou's rejection of the clitoral inspection may suggest the filmmaker's rejection of a singular and nativist view of precolonial rituals and practices. He delocalizes and transforms the ritual, adapting it to a more global audience and to the demands of the screen. Against die-hard "traditionalists" with their to-the-letter prescriptions regarding anything r itualistic, Bekolo decides to break loose from agelong constraints. Whether the ritual is clitoris centered or not, there is still something retained about female sexual power by undergoing purification at the hands of powerful older women, seen as artists and healers.

EMASCULATION, DECAPITATION: PURIFYING THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE

The Mevoungou often requires the sacrifice of a chicken or goat whose blood is used for purification. In the film, the sacrifice of the SGCC becomes the sine qua non for a more prosperous state. As the young women undergo their own purification, they are also purifying the community by extracting and sacrificing a member of the corrupt ruling regime. The title of the film, Les Saignantes, means "cruel women" or "those predisposed to inflict pain" in French, and that resonates with the mission of Majolie and Chouchou to purify the diseased state through bloodletting. Their mission suggests the English translation of the title as "the bloodletters" rather than the


bloodettes. At times, the film portrays les saignantes as vampires, operating at night and wearing colored contact lenses and with reddish, prominent lips. They represent positive vampires working to save the postcolonial state and lead the community to a prosperous future.

In their journey to purify the state, the empowered women and the Mevoungou deploy an array of modes of purification including emasculation, corporeal dismemberment, and sacrifice. As transformed women they threaten authorities to such a degree that the police officer inform~ the minister of Homeland Security of the women's imminent plot against the state: "I've [sic] to warn the minister of state that a danger is menacing the republic." The supposed threat to the state suggests that women possess the power to undo the corrupt postcolonial state. After all, they did decapitate and reconstitute the body of the SGCC. In fact, toward the end of the film, women's erotic autonomy proves deadly for the minister of state and, by extension, the ruling body. In the fierce battle, they tap into their sexual powers, release supernatural forces, and lift him off the ground, presumably killing him. Women's orgasmic release means the temporary demise of evil in the film. In that sense, their sexual agency cannot be separated from their political strategies as it offers the potential to undo the postcolonial state. 27

The scene of Chouchou and Majolie's degradation of the SGCC's testicles is another moment of women's empowerment that is consistent with anthropological descriptions of the Mevoungou. After the protagonists have the butcher decapitate the body, they take a break from their macabre experiences and use the package representing the SGCC's testicles as their toy; Majolie asks, "The secretary general of the Civil Cabinet's balls?" Toying with the SGCC's testicles indicates how young women dare disrespect old men, supposed possessors of social and political powers. Bekolo's adaptation of the abuse of men's genitals is interesting because it goes beyond the insult to have Majolie and Chouchou literally toy with and kick a small package shaped like male testicles. Kicking the SGCC's balls, insulting his manhood, constitutes his ultimate defeat as a man in a system where men's genitals are invested with the power of a weapon. African male anxiety over the loss of genitals reflects the fear of extinction of the self and the species. The genitals are not only crucial in reproductive functions, they also play a defining role in the power dynamic between men and women. Their disappearance, a recurrent allegory in West African films, is synonymous with the collapse and failure of the postcolonial state. Les Saignantes' symbolic emasculation of the ruling class is in itself a painful and humiliating blow to the imaginary patriarchy and dictatorship, and the use of young women as the agents of emasculation constitutes humiliation of the highest order.

The scene at the butcher shop is Bekolo's version of theophagy, especially if we consider that the corrupt postcolonial elite m~taphorically and literally feed on the resources of the state and its people. Here, theophagy seems necessary to turn the postcolonial state into a self-sufficient and organic


one; one that is capable of flourishing without the handouts of international financial institutions. By choosing female characters as active agents in the administration of such a cure, the film empowers women and reclaims their sexual bodies without the stigma of pathology and/or degeneracy.

CONCLUSION

The use of the precolonial cultural ritual geared toward women's self-empowerment is remarkable because it contradicts mainstream Western feminists' view of "tradition" as the locus of women's subordination and modernity as the path to their l~beration: "the general idea is that women's subordination belongs to tradition and to the past, whereas women's emancipation or gender equality, belongs to modernity and to the future."28 This bifurcation has never served African women nor African feminist theory well.

In the postcolonial and globalized context, despite strides made in women's rights, century-old constructions of women's bodies as inferior and soiling persist. As a consequence, women continue to struggle against cultural, political and physical assaults. However, in Les Saignantes, Bekolo imagines a world in which through the corrective and purificatory ritual, Majolie and Chouchou rediscover their integrity. The film seems to suggest that an intelligent return to the past can remind us that women's bodies and sexuality are positive forces. On a larger scale, the selective return may also deepen our understanding of the West African present and help us face the challenges of both present and future.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Lisa Moore, Neville Hoad and Helene Tissieres of the University of Texas at Austin for their insightful comments and encouragement on the drafts of this article.

2. See Kenneth Harrow, "What's an Old Man Like You Doing with a Saignante Like Me?" in Facts, Fiction, and African Creative Imaginations, ed. Toyin Faiola and Fallou Ngom (New York: Routledge, 2009), 190-206; Olivier Tchouaffe, "Homosexuality and the Politics of Sex, Respectability and Power in Postcolonial Cameroon," Postamb/e 2, no. 2 (2006): 4-15, http://www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za/postamble/vol2-2/homosexuality. pdf (accessed July 23, 2008); and Taiwo A. Osinubi, "Cognition's Warp: African Films on Near-Future Risk," African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009): 255-74.

3. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 100.

4. Ketu Katrak, Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World {New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

5. Olivier Barlet, "Etre a la fois africain et contemporain: Entretien avec JeanPierre Bekolo," Africultures, July 2005, http://www.africultures.com/php/ index.php?nav=article&no=3944 (accessed Aug. 5, 2009).


6. Akin Adesokan, "The Challenges of Aesthetic Populism: An Interview with Jean-Pierre Bekolo," Postco/onia/ Text 4, no. 1 (2008), http://postcolonial. org/index.php/pct/article/view/771/538 (accessed Dec. 2, 2008).

7. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Introduction," in Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), xi-xxxv.

8. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony: Studies on th! History of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 4.

9. For more on the black female as hypersexual, see bell hooks, "Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 61-77.

10. Nkanyike Musisi, "The Politics of Perception or Perception as Politics? Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1990-1945," in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 93-115. See also Naminata Diabate, "African Women and Missionary Writings: Nineteenth-Century Boloki Women of the Congo in John. H. Weeks' Among Congo Cannibals (1913)," Intersections 5 (2007): 44-51.

11. See also Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (2003); Signe Arnfred, ed., Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa (2004); Obioma Nnaemeka, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005).

12. Ella Shohat, "Imagining Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire," Public Culture 3 (1991): 41-70.

13. Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Po"/itics of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1994).

14. Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984), 53-60.

15. Achille Mbembe, quoted in Graeme Reid and Liz Walker, "Conference Report: Sex and Secrecy: The 4th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society," Sexuality Research and Social Policy 1, no. 1 (2004): 98-103, 101.

16. Barlet, "J'ai decouvert le Mevoungou a travers un roman, Le Tombeau du soleil de Philippe Laburthe Tolra (Le Seuil/Points Odile Jacob) qui enseigne a la Sorbonne," in "!tre a la fois africain et contemporain."

17. Jeanne-Francoise Vincent, Traditions et transition: Entretiens avec des femmes beti du Cameroun (1976).

18. Phillipe Laburthe-Tolra, "Le Mevungu en revanche, se presente clairement, du moins pour ses adeptes, comme une celebration du clitoris et de la puissance feminine." "Le mevungu et !es rituels feminins a Minlaaba," in Femmes du Cameroun: meres pacifiques, femmes rebel/es (Paris: Khartala, 1985), 234. .

19. "Les femmes vont !'admirer (le clitoris) et se frotter contre Jui ... , on va enfin le chatouiller, le masser OU l'etirer; 'jusqu'a !'amener a la longueur d'un membre viril.'" Ibid., 238.

20. "Pour elles, c'erait le moyen d 'affirmer leur personnalite, de renforcer leur fecondite et de realiser une double sexualite." See Marie-Paule Bochet de The, Rites et associations traditionnelles chez Jes femmes beti du sud du Cameroun." Femmes du Cameroun: Meres pacifiques, femmes rebel/es, ed. Jean Claude Barbier (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 248.

21. "En beti, la meme racine designe le concubinage, la descendance, le procrea· teur etc.: au moins une dizaine de termes sans rapport avec l'acte sexuel." Barlet, "Etre a la fois africain et contemporain."


22. The word maquis in Francophone West Africa refers to a bar, usually frequented by men for drinking beer and engaging in lighthearted conversations.

23. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Ballantine 1962, 1969).

24. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993).

25. John Conteh Morgan, Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31.

26. "La culture africaine est plus secrete, moins exreriorisee, plus pudique et plus retenue. Tout devoilement de la chose est viol de la chose. En ce sens, le cinema est transgression." Alexie Tcheuyap, "Hors cadre: Le sexe clans le cinema africain," CinemAction 106 (2003): 37-40.

27. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

28. Signe Arnfred, "Simone de Beauvoir in Africa: 'Woman= The Second Sex?' Issues of African Feminist Thought," Jenda: A journal of Culture and African Women Studies 2, no. 1 (2002), http://www.jendajournal.com/vol2.1/ arnfred.html (accessed July 22, 2006).


Les Saignantes and Quartier Mozart, the pervasiveness of questions regarding the body and its disintegration reflects the postcolonial African culture's fascination with bodies. In the cultural world of the film, female sexuality is always in danger of pathologization and objectification. However, the film empowers women by turning them into agents of positive change.

Set circa 2025 in an unnamed postcolonial African state, the film opens with a sexual encounter between the protagonist, Majolie, under the spell of the Mevoungou, and the secretary general of the Civil Cabinet (SGCC). But the scene ends with the death of the SGCC, a hiBh-ranking official. Panicked and frustrated over the loss of her sexual investment, Majolie calls her best friend Chouchou to help her dispose of the body. In the process, the women are led to explore the various socioeconomic strata where corruption and death lurk. Following their beating of the corpse, the titular characters take it to the butcher shop and have the butcher decapitate it while attempting to convince him that it is a "load of fresh meat, prime beef." But the butcher recognizes the body of the SGCC by tasting it. Upon realizing that they can land other business deals during the SGCC's funeral, the young women reconstitute the body by visiting a mortuary, where the bribed mortician provides them with a body to match the head. The reconstitution of the SGCC's body with a random and unnamed body suggests the interchangeability of bodies in the postcolonial state. In this way, the film begins to destabilize the exceptionality of the ruling body.

To strike a business deal at the funeral, Majolie and Chouchou attempt to seduce the state minister. An intelligent person, a sex maniac and a voodoo adept, the minister proves to be more insightful and challenges them. At the end of the film and with the help of the Mevoungou, the women use their supernatural powers in a type of martial arts dance scene to defeat

Figure 10.1 Opening scene of Les Saignantes. Courtesy of Quartier Mozart Films.


the state minister. Through the invisible force that flows through their bodies, they throw waves of energy at the minister, weakening him and, by extension, the corrupt elite. Les saignantes wrest away from him and his decadent entourage a van load of cash, but they roam the streets of poor neighborhoods to escape state-sponsored forces. Although the film does not feature the final victory over the corrupt ruling class, it succeeds in showing empowering female characters and the positive powers of their bodies. The processes that led to African women's alienation from their sexuality partly originate from three historically contingent forces: the Atlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism.

EUROPEAN MODERNITY, EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE AND AFRICAN WOMEN'S BODIES

That there exist multiple modernities sounds tautological, especially after the development of postcolonial theories. Amid a myriad of articulations, forms and meanings, it appears expedient to delimit how this chapter employs the term, with reference to the imaginary of postmedieval Europe that conceived modernity as an ideology of universal development, an endpoint to which "universal others" should aspire.7 This line of argument was used to justify the colonial enterprise. If for Europeans modernity was an ideological tool that promises ideas of development, for Africans it was an epoch of barbarism and of denial of subjectivity. Indeed, the epistemic violence that accompanied and continuously supported the "civilizing mission" was enacted through the institutional violence of the Atlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism. These historic forces predominantly displaced African norms and cosmologies and radically disorganized African societies. Even worse, colonialism discursively conceives the colonized as "absence," "lack," and "non-being."8

Doubly negated because of their gender, African women's bodies bear the inscriptions of pathology and hypersexuality in racist colonial and in indigenous patriarchal discourses. The South African woman, Saartjie Bartmann, known as the Hottentot Venus, exhibited in Europe as a freak, remains the most (in)famous example of European pathologization of the black female body.9 During the early nineteenth century, the fledgling era of race science, the supposedly disproportionate sizes of Bartmann's buttocks and genitalia came to support the narrative of black degeneracy and sexual deviance. Missionary writings contributed to the discursive construction of the hypersexual African woman; for example, nineteenth-century Baganda women of Uganda were described as "suffering" from "uncontrollable sexual drive," "free, yet 'beast of burden,' ignorant and diseased."10 Within this trope is the erasure of individual identities of African women.

However, a closer examination of the material or discursive overexposure and double-thingness of African women's bodies in European modernity


indicates a certain ambivalence. The black female body is both hypervisible and never really seen, a borderline contradiction between "super sexedness'' and "double nothingness." In that context, the female body becomes this enigmatic figure that seems subjugated yet defies a singular meaning. This proliferation of impossible figurations tests the limits of the colonialist discourse about the natives; and within the interstices of these disjunctions, a colonized female subjectivity emerges. However, to consider racist Euro-Americans as the exclusive oppressors of black female body would be to ignore the economy of excision that indigenous patriarchal institutions have (with women's collaboration) written on it. Indeed, local versions of patriarchy have subjugated female bodies to female genital surgeries, thus justifying violence by stigmatizing female bodies as terrifying.

INDIGENOUS INSTITUTIONS AND THE MISUSE OF FEMALE BODIES

With shifting histories and meanings, clitoridectomy is a highly contentious subject in African studies.11 Suffice it to say that whether the practice is part of an initiation ritual or not, it somewhat unpleasantly impacts how a woman interacts with her body. Circumcised or not, women's bodies have also been used by local political and literary discourses to either advance decolonizing agendas or to critique the failures of the postcolonial state without any regard for the interests of women chemselves.12

In decolonization and late postindependence works by African male writers, female sexuality was almost always associated with prostitution, their metaphor for moral contamination.13 Female prostitutes as metaphors place women's images in a double bind because they are representations that are not representations. The hypervisibility of prostitution and clitoridectomy-all undeniably overshadow empowering images of female sexuality in the African discursive context. Emphasis on the prostitute consequently places images of female sexuality somewhere between the unsexed mother and the hypersexualized prostitute.

DESEXUALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In reaction to the widespread dissemination of disempowering images of female sexuality, there were attempts in pre-1990s fictional narratives to sanitize female bodies through the equally problematic venture of desexualizing them. It is interesting chat the era of desexualization corresponded to the period of economic recession in most African countries, where survival issues were identified as food, housing, health care and employment, rather than sexuality. Subsequently, scholars and fiction writers focused on questions such as motherhood, spirituality, economic


freedom and nation building, and disregarded questions of emancipating sexuality. Privileging motherhood potentially assigns to women's sexuality, or more accurately, to women's "genitality" the exclusive purposes of procreation in a bid to maintain a patriarchal gender hierarchy. It has to be noted that whereas motherhood is celebrated in fiction, in the postcolonial state it is under threat because of imported and international institutions' mandated family-planning and child-spacing programs.

The historical imperative to "sanitize" women's sexuality as an attempt to undo the representational violence enacted by structures of domination remains a problematic venture for three reasons. First, female bodies were simultaneously desexualized and sexualized; they were desexualized in the sense that they could not be means of self-empowerment and sites of erotic pleasures, but they were sexualized in the deployment of the rhetoric of pain, cutting and pathology. Second, the attempt was problematic because it was divorced from West African women's embodied experiences and failed to reflect their diversity. Finally, by eliding the analytical category of sexuality from their emancipatory ventures, women were denied a crucial aspect of their liberation: the power of the erotic.14 Responding to the biased representation, the closing remarks of the 2003 Sex and Secrecy Conference in South Africa invited scholars "to look into sex and the publicness of sex, the public faces of sex, and sex in the public imagination."15

Les Saignantes heeds chis call by bringing into focus female sexuality as a form of constructive power, producing an image that resists negative stereotypes of women's sexuality.

THE MEVOUNGOU IN/ AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL TEXTS

The recovery, adaptation and larger circulation of an extinct womencentered ritual speaks to the social and political intervention of the film. Bekolo, himself a Beti, never experienced the ritual or heard about it because German missionaries abolished it in the nineteenth century. But he discovered it in a novel, Le tombeau du soleil, by French anthropologist Phillipe Laburthe-Tolra, who taught at Yaounde University and worked extensively on the Beti. Ironically, Bekolo's contact with the ritual became possible via a French anthropologist, which suggests the possible nonlinearity in the perpetuation and transmission of cultures. Choosing co use the Mevoungou as a ritual allows the director to reclaim an aspect of his culture that has been denied him. By making contact with and reclaiming the ritual without the stigma of backwardness, Bekolo gives similar opportunities to those previously unfamiliar with it.16

From the 1950s onward, French anthropologists and Cameroonian intellectuals published extensively on the Beti and the Mevoungou. One ethnography includes seventeen interviews conducted with Beti women in 1967 and 1971.17 Because the first German missionaries abolished the practice, only three of the


interviewees who described the ritual, mostly in their sixties, actually participated in it. Most of the accounts were therefore based not on firsthand experiences but on reports. Consequently, interviewees differ on the significance of the ritual to the point of contradicting one another. One interviewee thinks the ritual and its festivities were a way for women to eat meat-based meals as men regularly enjoyed those meals at the expense of women and children. Others define it as a ritual of purification, initiation, protection against evil eyes, celebration of femininity and resistance against male domination.

According to Beti cosmogony, the Mevoungou is built around the cult of the evu, a gland embodying good and evil and that is located in women's uteruses. When activated, the gland is capable of giving life or taking it. The location of the gland explains why the power of the Mevoungou is predicated upon the clitoris, considered the exterior physical site of this gland. The leader of the society, the Mother of Mevoungou, is chosen based on the largeness of her clitoris. She is past menopause and no longer engages in heterosexual intercourse. Although the society is forbidden to men, the entire community of men and women reap its benefits. Its rituals, performed at the request of men and women, aim to settle cases of thievery or witchcraft, for personal crises and prosperity and during moments of drought and calamity in the community. The ritual is divided into two ceremonies (public and private); the public one reunites the entire village whereas the secret one is exclusively attended by the initiated and the mvon Mevoungou, candidates for the secret society. The secret ceremony starts with the Mother of Mevoungou undressing and inviting participants to undress before she swears them to secrecy. Later, women invoke the ceremonial package composed of roots, ashes, medicinal leaves and centipedes. The composition of the package known as mbom Mevoungou reinforces the belief in women's connection to nature. The rest of the ceremony consists in transmitting the power of the package to the clitoris of the Mother of Mevoungou and to those of other women. If the Mevoungou is performed to unmask wrongdoers, the village expects them to confess, or else, it experiences an outbreak of diseases ranging from swelling to various skin conditions.

The criteria for choosing the Mother of Mevoungou led to the observation that the Mevoungou is a "celebration of the clitoris and of feminine power."18

Adoration of the clitoris explains why, in Beti culture, its excision is the ultimate punishment for adulterous women. After the transmission of the power of the clitoris to the package, women rub, massage, admire, tickle and stretch out the clitoris to give it the allure of a virile organ.19 Participants then mimic intercourse with older women in the conventional masculine roles and the younger ones in the feminine. Throughout the ritual, women make fun of men's genitals, degrading them while celebrating women's genitals. In the middle of the night, the package is burnt and its ash is divided into three portions. The first portion is buried with a centipede in front of the hut of the organizer, the second is made into a package to represent the Mevoungou, and the third is sprinkled on rooftops and around the village. Thereafter, the women spend the rest of the night celebrating and praising members with prominent clitorises.

R e-Imagining West African Women's Sexuality 173

Overall, the ritual consists in establishing a communion among the different entities: the package, the clitoris of the Mother of Mevoungou, and clitorises of other participants. Whereas modernity and its attendant institutions pathologize women's bodies, Beti cosmology venerates them for their spiritual and healing dimensions.

DESEXUALIZING THE MEVOUNGOU: CULTURAL AND GENDERED BATTLES

At times, the Mevoungou is described as women's mode of resistance against male domination. The ritual functioned, among other uses, as a means of "affirming [women's] personality, of reinforcing their productivity, and of engaging in a double sexuality."20 However, most male anthropologists and intellectuals, French or Beti, dismiss those subversive goals to which the ritual may have been put. The debate surrounding it is often cast between its cultural value, its sexual components, and its significance. For example, Bekolo subscribes to the desexualization of the ritual. In the 2005 interview with Olivier Barlet, he claims that the ritual focuses on a force of nature, women's sexual organs, to heal the community and did not implicate sexual relations: "in Beti, the same root [Mevoungou] refers to cohabitation, offspring, progenitor ... at least around fifteen words with no relation to the sexual" [translation mine].21

Nevertheless, Les Saignantes still shows women engaging in joyful sexual intimacy with one another for purposes of their own pleasure and self-discovery.

It is intriguing that those who desexualize the ritual happen to be men even though the ritual is forbidden to them. I would argue that the desexualization transcends the cultural battle between French feminist anthropologists and Beti intellectuals to enter a gendered landscape. Although the research necessary to argue the connection between rubbing the clitoris and pleasures lies beyond the scope of chis chapter, I would say that by desexualizing the ritual, male observers discursively deny women who performed the Mevoungou the possibility of experiencing physical pleasures. Women's enjoyment of sexual pleasures during the ritual should not be contradictory to or annihilate its "spiritual" or even patriarchal aspects. To completely evacuate possible pleasures associated with the ritual is to "hijack" Beti women's bodies. And as a postcolonial African feminist, I seek here to reclaim the power of sexuality without its stigma. Whatever the purpose of the purification, Bekolo's film shows the positive and constructive nature of Beti women's bodies.

THE MEVOUNGOU ON THE SCREEN

To recreate the surrealist atmosphere and the participants, various parts of the film such as lighting, the off-screen voice, and les saignantes' body movements are tailored to mimic the "original" ritual. The necessity for


performing the ritual is unequivocal as the viewer hears the off-screen voice gravely declaring after a shocking first scene: "Mevoungou has fallen on us like a bad dream. Now this country has a chance to escape from the darkness" and "Mevoungou was inviting us to join the dance." Here, fear of the ritual emerges through the word choice: "fallen on us like a bad dream." The juxtaposition of coercion and invitation, of a ·frightening event and a joyous celebration, is unmistakable. The use of the communal plural is an invitation to the viewer to join the community of men and women who need purification through women's creative and healing powers, even if the film at times degenders and defeminizes the ritual.

The Mevoungou is central to the film as it controls, predicts and guides all the characters. It is introduced after a blackout, following the sexual scene between Majolie and the SGCC, a moment of heightened expectation and confusion when the viewer is more receptive to the off-screen voice:

Mevoungou is neither a living being nor a thing. Mevoungou is not a place much less a moment. Mevoungou is neither a desire nor a state of mind. Because Mevoungou is something we see, we live and experience but cannot quite define. We don't decide to see Mevoungou. Mevoungou appears to you. Mevoungou invites itself.

Like a dormant entity ready to intervene in unforeseen and challenging circumstances, the spirit takes possession of /es saignantes for the ritual of purification. Unlike the tangible ceremonial package in the historical ritual, the Mevoungou is defined in intangible terms. It is no longer time and place-specific; from its original setting, the village, it is now relocated in the postcolonial city where corruption reeks and women lose their bearings. As a metaphor of West African mothers' genitalia, the Mevoungou is invoked and performed to cure the ills of the found(l)ing fathers.

Nighttime, in which the entire film is shot, is the conventional time to perform the secret Mevoungou ritual. The entire movie creates a paranormal and gripping atmosphere that unsettles the viewer. In addition, the thrillerlike mood, created through the simultaneous use of diffuse shadows and pools of light thrusts the viewer into an atmosphere of instability and chaos. The off-screen voice, as a device that forces the viewer to consider the larger implications of the issues tackled in the film, is doubled by the omniscient narrator who informs the viewer of the plot development while giving the film a haunting mood.

During periods of hardship in the Beci community, men confess their inability to solve problems and resort to women's creative powers by requesting that they perform the Mevoungou ritual. So while women tirelessly invoke the spirits, symbolized by their clitorises, men await the fruits of their labor. To recreate the passivity of men and the activity of women, several scenes of the movie show men sitting in maquis22 drinking and engaging in lighthearted conversations. Long shots of men in maquis


drown out their voices, suggesting the fruitless and irrelevant nature of their conversations. The opening scene with Majolie and the SGCC reflects that passivity of men and the activity of women.

In the upper position, Majolie is literally and metaphorically looking down on the SGCC. After a moment, she springs on him and jumps away. The dynamic of teasing, so manifest in the scene, mimics the director's play with received norms and comfor table expectations. Using the prerogatives of the empowered position; la saignante finally chooses the moment of contact between the bodies, which turns out to be unusual. Her shooting position and her gyrating, violent, engulfing and virile hips take the obedient old male organ from the terrain of the superficially pleasurable into that of war, submission and death. The new terrain represents the erotic, where death is a constant presence. 23 Of course, Majolie's position is contrary to the prescribed norms in the African context, where the woman, the one who should be actively penetrated and dominated, is physically placed underneath her social superior. The reversal of the conventional gender dynamic with the male in the bottom position destabilizes normalized hierarchies of gender and seniority. Obviously, the SGCC's death subverts the image of the beautiful and sexy young woman as a source of pleasure for the affluent. With death, what began as a sexual encounter turns out to be a purification ritual in which it is the powerful male authority figure that is sacrificed.

No ritual is complete or effective without the assistance of initiated members, represented here by five elderly women in red and blue head scarves with serious and authoritative demeanors. Under their guidance and watchful eyes, Majolie and Chouchou dominate and appropriate public spaces traditionally considered to belong to males. As already described, elderly women share their experiences with and initiate younger ones. In the film, through the use of visual effects, the five women support and protect Majolie and Chouchou.

To perform the purification, Majolie and Chouchou must undergo several rituals of cleansing and purging. The first of these is a ritual bath that Majolie takes after the SGCC's death. She impulsively and vigorously scrubs her body, and after the physical cleansing, she undergoes an internal purging. Still possessed, Majolie walks into a bar and grabs a bottle of hard liquor, "a sacred liquid," from which she drinks. With the physiological mind-altering effects of alcohol, believed to facilitate the interaction between the physical world and spiritual world, Majolie accesses the spiritual world, the higher truth. 24 Her rite of passage continues through the uncontrollable consumption of alcohol, after which she urinates and simultaneously experiences orgasmic spasms outside the bar, a foot away from other bar patrons. The background shot in the urination scene suggests the publicness of purification, which was invested with transformational powers, as Majolie groans and seems to be pushing out of herself the creeping stains of pervasive corruption. This first stage of the purification


strengthens Majolie and allows her and Chouchou to dismember and dispose of the SGCC's body.

PERFORMING A CLITORIS-FREE MEVOUNGOU RITUAL

To consolidate the success of the ritual, the initiated need to appreciate Chouchou's clitoris, an aspect of the film that departs from the historical description of the ritual. After reconstituting the SGCC's body, Majolie and Chouchou go to Chouchou's house where the initiated are waiting to examine Chouchou's clitoris. In the film, the examination and possibly the rubbing, feeding and stretching of the clitoris will empower Chouchou. But Majolie mocks the practice by teasing Chouchou, saying, "They want to see your clitoris," to which Chouchou answers in a song, "They can't see my clitoris." Chouchou's refusal to respect a central aspect of the ritual is symptomatic of contemporary continental young women's rejection of most traditional cultural practices. So she succeeds in avoiding the conventional clitoris-centered ritual and instead dances to Brenda Fassie's "Vuli Ndlela" as an alternative method of purification.

Through the most elaborate frenzied dance scene, Majolie and Chouchou come out transformed and equipped with what the off-screen voice calls their integrity. Consistent with anthropological descriptions of the ritual, dance moves permeate the performance. From the first scene to the last, Majolie and Chouchou dance and engage in ritualistic movements. Although they may appear terrifying and zombielike, they are conforming to the demands of the ritual. Such movements are "not used in the representational mode, that is, to signify but instead to create psychological states. These elements are the inevitable elixir, as it were, for the performers' transition into liminal states of trance and religious performance."25 Once in Chouchou's bedroom, the powerful voice of the iconic Brenda Fassie singing "Vuli Ndlela" throws them into a dancing frenzy in which they change several outfits and embody several types of women. Vulindlela, a Zulu word that means "to open the way," seems the most suitable incantation for a transformational session. At a dizzying pace, created by the doubling and tripling of the shots, the viewer sees Majolie and Chouchou metamorphose from sexy to demure, from young to old, and from trashy to respectable. The doubling and tripling effects condense time and space and reject the comfortable position of sameness and immobility by creating an uncanny sense of estrangement and familiarity. The movements take Majolie and Chouchou into the spiritual realm, where they embody .several beings and live several lives, continuously creating and evacuating identities.

The power invested in songs and dances becomes obvious when the off-screen voice announces, "Our Mevoungou had rediscovered its integrity. It could no longer accept the slightest insult. We were ready for the final phase." Through the dancing frenzy, the protagonists recover their


subjectivity, come out as newly born women, ready to deliver the last blow co the enemy. Following the purification, they attend the SGCC's funeral and subsequently disarm the minister.

The disappearance of the clitoris from the purification ritual, as a result of the protagonists' choice to undergo their own initiation under the guidance of the late South African singer Brenda Fassie instead of the five elderly women, constitutes a double-edged undertaking. The director moves away from the clitoris-centered ritual and instead makes the choice of a performative cliche of female sexuality, trying on clothes rather than praising the clitoris. In that context, the movie desexualizes what had been, at least physically, an exclusively female genital ritual. However, as shown earlier, the film is not devoid of sex. It seems to avoid female same-sex sexual gestures as prescribed in the ritual to reclaim a more acceptable heterosexuality, despite the reversed sex position of the opening scene. One can argue that the disappearance of the clitoris answers the director's need to get around the challenges of representing the clitoris on the screen, which amounts to divulgating the secrecy around the ritual or violating women's bodies or both. Perhaps Bekolo is echoing his fellow film director Anne-Laure Folly, who argues that "African culture is more secretive, less expressive, more prudish and chaste. Any action of unveiling the phenomenon amounts to violating it. In that sense, cinema is transgression" [translation mine].26 Furthermore, Chouchou's rejection of the clitoral inspection may suggest the filmmaker's rejection of a singular and nativist view of precolonial rituals and practices. He delocalizes and transforms the ritual, adapting it to a more global audience and to the demands of the screen. Against die-hard "traditionalists" with their to-the-letter prescriptions regarding anything r itualistic, Bekolo decides to break loose from agelong constraints. Whether the ritual is clitoris centered or not, there is still something retained about female sexual power by undergoing purification at the hands of powerful older women, seen as artists and healers.

EMASCULATION, DECAPITATION: PURIFYING THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE

The Mevoungou often requires the sacrifice of a chicken or goat whose blood is used for purification. In the film, the sacrifice of the SGCC becomes the sine qua non for a more prosperous state. As the young women undergo their own purification, they are also purifying the community by extracting and sacrificing a member of the corrupt ruling regime. The title of the film, Les Saignantes, means "cruel women" or "those predisposed to inflict pain" in French, and that resonates with the mission of Majolie and Chouchou to purify the diseased state through bloodletting. Their mission suggests the English translation of the title as "the bloodletters" rather than the


bloodettes. At times, the film portrays les saignantes as vampires, operating at night and wearing colored contact lenses and with reddish, prominent lips. They represent positive vampires working to save the postcolonial state and lead the community to a prosperous future.

In their journey to purify the state, the empowered women and the Mevoungou deploy an array of modes of purification including emasculation, corporeal dismemberment, and sacrifice. As transformed women they threaten authorities to such a degree that the police officer inform~ the minister of Homeland Security of the women's imminent plot against the state: "I've [sic] to warn the minister of state that a danger is menacing the republic." The supposed threat to the state suggests that women possess the power to undo the corrupt postcolonial state. After all, they did decapitate and reconstitute the body of the SGCC. In fact, toward the end of the film, women's erotic autonomy proves deadly for the minister of state and, by extension, the ruling body. In the fierce battle, they tap into their sexual powers, release supernatural forces, and lift him off the ground, presumably killing him. Women's orgasmic release means the temporary demise of evil in the film. In that sense, their sexual agency cannot be separated from their political strategies as it offers the potential to undo the postcolonial state. 27

The scene of Chouchou and Majolie's degradation of the SGCC's testicles is another moment of women's empowerment that is consistent with anthropological descriptions of the Mevoungou. After the protagonists have the butcher decapitate the body, they take a break from their macabre experiences and use the package representing the SGCC's testicles as their toy; Majolie asks, "The secretary general of the Civil Cabinet's balls?" Toying with the SGCC's testicles indicates how young women dare disrespect old men, supposed possessors of social and political powers. Bekolo's adaptation of the abuse of men's genitals is interesting because it goes beyond the insult to have Majolie and Chouchou literally toy with and kick a small package shaped like male testicles. Kicking the SGCC's balls, insulting his manhood, constitutes his ultimate defeat as a man in a system where men's genitals are invested with the power of a weapon. African male anxiety over the loss of genitals reflects the fear of extinction of the self and the species. The genitals are not only crucial in reproductive functions, they also play a defining role in the power dynamic between men and women. Their disappearance, a recurrent allegory in West African films, is synonymous with the collapse and failure of the postcolonial state. Les Saignantes' symbolic emasculation of the ruling class is in itself a painful and humiliating blow to the imaginary patriarchy and dictatorship, and the use of young women as the agents of emasculation constitutes humiliation of the highest order.

The scene at the butcher shop is Bekolo's version of theophagy, especially if we consider that the corrupt postcolonial elite m~taphorically and literally feed on the resources of the state and its people. Here, theophagy seems necessary to turn the postcolonial state into a self-sufficient and organic


one; one that is capable of flourishing without the handouts of international financial institutions. By choosing female characters as active agents in the administration of such a cure, the film empowers women and reclaims their sexual bodies without the stigma of pathology and/or degeneracy.

CONCLUSION

The use of the precolonial cultural ritual geared toward women's self-empowerment is remarkable because it contradicts mainstream Western feminists' view of "tradition" as the locus of women's subordination and modernity as the path to their l~beration: "the general idea is that women's subordination belongs to tradition and to the past, whereas women's emancipation or gender equality, belongs to modernity and to the future."28 This bifurcation has never served African women nor African feminist theory well.

In the postcolonial and globalized context, despite strides made in women's rights, century-old constructions of women's bodies as inferior and soiling persist. As a consequence, women continue to struggle against cultural, political and physical assaults. However, in Les Saignantes, Bekolo imagines a world in which through the corrective and purificatory ritual, Majolie and Chouchou rediscover their integrity. The film seems to suggest that an intelligent return to the past can remind us that women's bodies and sexuality are positive forces. On a larger scale, the selective return may also deepen our understanding of the West African present and help us face the challenges of both present and future.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Lisa Moore, Neville Hoad and Helene Tissieres of the University of Texas at Austin for their insightful comments and encouragement on the drafts of this article.

2. See Kenneth Harrow, "What's an Old Man Like You Doing with a Saignante Like Me?" in Facts, Fiction, and African Creative Imaginations, ed. Toyin Faiola and Fallou Ngom (New York: Routledge, 2009), 190-206; Olivier Tchouaffe, "Homosexuality and the Politics of Sex, Respectability and Power in Postcolonial Cameroon," Postamb/e 2, no. 2 (2006): 4-15, http://www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za/postamble/vol2-2/homosexuality. pdf (accessed July 23, 2008); and Taiwo A. Osinubi, "Cognition's Warp: African Films on Near-Future Risk," African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009): 255-74.

3. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 100.

4. Ketu Katrak, Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World {New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

5. Olivier Barlet, "Etre a la fois africain et contemporain: Entretien avec JeanPierre Bekolo," Africultures, July 2005, http://www.africultures.com/php/ index.php?nav=article&no=3944 (accessed Aug. 5, 2009).


6. Akin Adesokan, "The Challenges of Aesthetic Populism: An Interview with Jean-Pierre Bekolo," Postco/onia/ Text 4, no. 1 (2008), http://postcolonial. org/index.php/pct/article/view/771/538 (accessed Dec. 2, 2008).

7. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Introduction," in Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), xi-xxxv.

8. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony: Studies on th! History of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 4.

9. For more on the black female as hypersexual, see bell hooks, "Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 61-77.

10. Nkanyike Musisi, "The Politics of Perception or Perception as Politics? Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1990-1945," in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 93-115. See also Naminata Diabate, "African Women and Missionary Writings: Nineteenth-Century Boloki Women of the Congo in John. H. Weeks' Among Congo Cannibals (1913)," Intersections 5 (2007): 44-51.

11. See also Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (2003); Signe Arnfred, ed., Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa (2004); Obioma Nnaemeka, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005).

12. Ella Shohat, "Imagining Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire," Public Culture 3 (1991): 41-70.

13. Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Po"/itics of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1994).

14. Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984), 53-60.

15. Achille Mbembe, quoted in Graeme Reid and Liz Walker, "Conference Report: Sex and Secrecy: The 4th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society," Sexuality Research and Social Policy 1, no. 1 (2004): 98-103, 101.

16. Barlet, "J'ai decouvert le Mevoungou a travers un roman, Le Tombeau du soleil de Philippe Laburthe Tolra (Le Seuil/Points Odile Jacob) qui enseigne a la Sorbonne," in "!tre a la fois africain et contemporain."

17. Jeanne-Francoise Vincent, Traditions et transition: Entretiens avec des femmes beti du Cameroun (1976).

18. Phillipe Laburthe-Tolra, "Le Mevungu en revanche, se presente clairement, du moins pour ses adeptes, comme une celebration du clitoris et de la puissance feminine." "Le mevungu et !es rituels feminins a Minlaaba," in Femmes du Cameroun: meres pacifiques, femmes rebel/es (Paris: Khartala, 1985), 234. .

19. "Les femmes vont !'admirer (le clitoris) et se frotter contre Jui ... , on va enfin le chatouiller, le masser OU l'etirer; 'jusqu'a !'amener a la longueur d'un membre viril.'" Ibid., 238.

20. "Pour elles, c'erait le moyen d 'affirmer leur personnalite, de renforcer leur fecondite et de realiser une double sexualite." See Marie-Paule Bochet de The, Rites et associations traditionnelles chez Jes femmes beti du sud du Cameroun." Femmes du Cameroun: Meres pacifiques, femmes rebel/es, ed. Jean Claude Barbier (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 248.

21. "En beti, la meme racine designe le concubinage, la descendance, le procrea· teur etc.: au moins une dizaine de termes sans rapport avec l'acte sexuel." Barlet, "Etre a la fois africain et contemporain."


22. The word maquis in Francophone West Africa refers to a bar, usually frequented by men for drinking beer and engaging in lighthearted conversations.

23. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Ballantine 1962, 1969).

24. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993).

25. John Conteh Morgan, Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31.

26. "La culture africaine est plus secrete, moins exreriorisee, plus pudique et plus retenue. Tout devoilement de la chose est viol de la chose. En ce sens, le cinema est transgression." Alexie Tcheuyap, "Hors cadre: Le sexe clans le cinema africain," CinemAction 106 (2003): 37-40.

27. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

28. Signe Arnfred, "Simone de Beauvoir in Africa: 'Woman= The Second Sex?' Issues of African Feminist Thought," Jenda: A journal of Culture and African Women Studies 2, no. 1 (2002), http://www.jendajournal.com/vol2.1/ arnfred.html (accessed July 22, 2006).

Re-Imagining West African Women’s Sexuality: Jean Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and the...

Documents

Transcript of Re-Imagining West African Women’s Sexuality: Jean Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and the...