Emitai
Emitai is the thunder god in the pantheon of Diola deities. He signifies the power of the storm and, therefore, change and revolution. In Ousmane Sembene’s Emitai, the 1971 film named after this god, a clap of thunders resurrects a dead man; the ensuing storm involving the resistance of Diola villagers to the French colonialist regime in 1944 prefigures the later struggle from which the modern nation of Senegal would be born.
World War II in Senegal was a catalyst for political change. Sembene, drafted to serve as an infantryman in the French army, later wrote that his wartime experiences showed him that the French colonial administrators were not demi-gods but fallible humans, prone to fear and homesickness just like their African recruits. Seeing Frenchmen panicked in combat or vulnerable in other ways taught Sembene that the colonial regime could be toppled.
Emitai is set in a Diola village near the southern border of Senegal, likely in the Ziguinchor region of Casamance province. This is an area in which the ethnic groups, the Diola (Jola) and their closely allied Serer people, are dominant. Ousmane Sembene was born in this area in a coastal village where his father worked as a fisherman. Sembene’s father was a Wolof-speaking Lebu (a tribal group that specialized in fishing off the Atlantic coast), but his mother was Serer. The Serer are closely related to the Diola people shown in the film – the Serer and Diola have what is called by anthropologists “a joking relationship”. So-called “joking relationships” are very common in Mali (Senegal’s neighbor to the East) and West Africa in general. In such a relationship, groups tease one another, engage in ritualized banter and exchange of insults but are not permitted to take offense. (The model for these relationships between ethnic groups is the way West African men are supposed to interact with their mothers-in-law – they release tension and express conflict by vulgar joking.) As a consequence of his upbringing, Sembene regarded the Diola with great affection but, also, considered them somewhat backward, dim-witted, as country bumpkins in other words. This attitude is on display in Emitai, particularly in the way that Sembene portrays the rather feckless village elders and the settlement’s hapless warriors. We are familiar with variants of “joking relationships” in our society – consider Ole and Lena jokes, jests involving ignorant Iowegians as well as jokes about Polacks. As a boy, Sembene was initiated into certain Serer tribal rituals and, therefore, had connections with Diola villagers of the kind shown in the movie.
The Diola were primarily animist (fetish worshipers) until urbanization attracted many of them to Dakar, emptying out the little villages of the kind that we see in the movie. Prior to their diaspora, the Diola dwelled in small independent villages, controlled by village elders (some of whom were women). They practiced “wet rice” agriculture, that is, growing rice in impounded “paddies” or pools. This sort of agriculture is very labor-intensive and requires much manipulation of terraces, river-front terrain, and impounded water. Rice cultivation was primarily women’s work; hence, the saying in the movie that “rice is a (Diola) woman’s wealth.” An aspect of Emitai that is not immediately apparent to Westerners is that the Diola regard rice as the property of their gods. (Thus, the film’s title: the French levy imposed on rice, therefore, has a sacrilegious aspect – the French require the Diola to pay tribute out of stores of rice that are commended to the gods and, theoretically, under their control.) The Diola were not polygamous and didn’t practice female genital mutilation. However, these customs are now more common among Diola people who have left their villages to live in urban centers such as Dakar. (The Diola language is called Fogun; Fogun is one of the six tribal languages spoken in Senega.)
Islamic missionary work among the Diola was conducted primarily by the Mandinka people, residents of the Gambia river basin. In Mandinka, the Diola are called the Jola, a cognate word that means “payback”. The Mandinka believed the Diola (Jola) were particularly inclined to “pay back” wrongs inflicted upon them by tit-for-tat violence, although equally characterized by repaying favors and kindnesses with reciprocal acts of friendliness.
The geography of Senegal is peculiar. The country surrounds a former British colony (called The Gambia) along the lower reaches of the Gambia River. This country is only 31 miles wide at its broadest point and runs for several hundred miles on both sides of the river to its outlet in the Atlantic Ocean (where The Gambia boasts 50 miles of coastline.) The Gambia is mostly Mandinka and officially English-speaking. South of The Gambia is the Senegal province of Casamance (and its western administrative region Ziguinchor where Sembene was born and where the action of the film takes place.)
Sembene uses the kajandu, a tool used in rice cultivation, as a metonym for the Diola villagers. We see kajandu, for instance, stacked around a tree in the village; the first conscript kidnaped in the movie is carrying a kajandu when he is snatched off the road. The kajandu is a type of fulcrum shovel attached to a stave four to ten feet long. The shovel’s working end is sort of paddle edged with iron on both sides. The shovel is used for stirring rice paddies and excavating shallow trenches for water impoundment. The worker uses the shovel by resting it over the knee and prying clods of earth up out of the ground.
Marshal Petain (1856 - 1951) was the President of Vichy France, the French regime that collaborated wtih the Nazis during World War II. The conscripts in the film, claimed to be “volunteers”, are pressganged to fight for the Vichy regime in France.
Petain was the commander of the French army during World War I and the architect of the attritional cataclysm at Verdun. After the War, he was regarded as a military hero, the man who had, albeit at great cost, saved France. During the inter-war years, Petain was an influential politician. (He had some experience with Africa, commanding French troops during the so-called Rif War against the Berbers in the mid-twenties.)
German armies invaded France in 1940 and the fighting was over in June of that year, the French government capitulating to the Nazi forces and entering into an armistice with them. In July 1940, the German installed Petain as Prime Minister of occupied France. Petain was a willing and enthusiastic collaborator – he signed anti-Semitic decrees and persecuted resistance fighters. In late 1944, Vichy France collapsed and Petain moved the collaborationist government into exile in Sigmaringen in southern Germany. (You can read about the Sigmaringen enclave of extra-territorial French government in Celine’s 1957 nightmare novel Castle to Castle.) Ultimately, Petain was detained by the Free French under Charles de Gaulle, a military officer who had served under Petain in World War One. Petain was tried for collaboration and sentenced to death, this sentence commuted to life imprisonment. (Curiously, President Truman and Generalissimo Francisco Franco offered him asylum in the USA and Spain respectively.) Petain was briefly released from prison before he died in 1951.
The villagers in Emitai are puzzled by the posters replacing Marshal Petain’s image with a portrait of Charles de Gaulle. These posters date the action of the film to sometime after September 8,1944 when the Vichy Republic collapsed and Petain was moved by the Germans to Sigmaringen.
The Third Cinema was a movement defined by various manifestos written by Latin American film makers in the late sixties. Emitai and Xala are often regarded as “Third Cinema” movies. The most prominent directors of Third Cinema films were Fernando Solas (Hour of the Furnaces 1968) and Glauber Rocha (Antonio des Mortes 1969), both Argentines. The “First Cinema,” as defined by these practitioners, was Hollywood. The “Second Cinema” was the European Art film represented by Fellini, Godard, and Bergman among others. (Godard later was recruited to the Third Cinema cause). The Third Cinema was anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, avowedly Marxist in its ideology, and revolutionary. It practiced quasi-documentary style “guerilla” film making. Sembene’s revolutionary films, particularly pictures like Emitai and Ceddo, are often regarded as exemplary of Third Cinema practices.
The Third Cinema advocated that movies be brought to the people and shown to them outside of conventional theaters and distribution patterns. A Third Cinema screening began with recitation of poetry, song, and the display of politically themed art works. “Disinhibition” was accomplished by serving mild intoxicants such as yerba mate or wine and beer. A chairperson was appointed to introduce the film and, then, conduct discussions as to its political and ideological content. Sembene attempted to follow this practice in Senegal and took his films to the people, showing them in small towns and villages. He continued this practice until the late eighties when he was (rightly) accused of misappropriating funding earmarked for one of his protegee’s movies and had to flee Senegal. (He went to the United States where he was a mentor to Spike Lee.)
Emitai is very cheaply made. Notwithstanding its economy, he film is extremely lucid in its representation of space and action. Everything in the movie takes place in carefully separated and compartmentalized spaces: there is the village, associated with the women in the community and the outback or bush (where the men hide). The village elders, a group of five men in red hats, occupy a temenos, a roughly circular enclosure with flimsy thatch walls and a door panel – this sacred space is dominated by a scary-looking baobab tree, dead, with a cleft in which the gods hide, and short, crooked arms that rise up as if to petition the heavens. A couple of short scenes involve a colonial headquarters somewhere (probably Ziguinchor), some dusty roads on which the soldiers march, and a couple of unimpressive monuments (a ridiculous shrine to Marshal Petain and an equally risible bronze statue dedicated to the “glory of Black West African Army”.) The women in the film seem to be generally capable of moving between these spaces – in an enigmatic early scene, we see an attractive woman dreamily crossing a field of tall grass (who is she and where is she going? – I think this is Mbissine Therese Diop, the star of Sembene’s first feature picture La Noire de – (Black Girl). I have no idea what this shot means – it seems Sembene just wants to include the heroine of his famous previous film in a cameo this picture.) In the opening sequence of the film, two sisters paddle a canoe across a big river or lagoon to compel their brother, who is on the lam, to return to the village to be conscripted. Later, in the picture, the women march out into the bush wearing fluffed-up raffia hats to initiate funeral ceremonies for the boy shot in the village – he is one of two mysterious youths who view the action from afar and, sometimes, intervene (for instance, bringing shade and water to the women sitting in the sun in the village square.) Although the men are, generally, confined to the bush or their sacred precinct, the temenos that I have earlier mentioned, the women have greater latitude of action. In general terms, the film’s paucity of locations and its tendency to cut back and forth between these places without establishing spatial continuity creates an impression of confinement – the villagers are locked into certain locations from which they can not free themselves. In general, the movie documents a sort of surrealist paralysis – the village elder tied to a stick in the town square, silent, mostly motionless groups of women watching him as he bakes in the sun, the elders confined in their grass-walled enclosure, the large group of women and infants drowsing in the shadows and, then, overnight in the village, opposed by a group of soldiers who are similarly inert, squatting in a lane in front of the grass huts.
Sembene’s economy of means is apparent in the scene in which the women cross the body of water to roust their brother out of the bush. We don’t know where the water is located. (A later scene makes it appear that it is about a hundred yards from the village, but there is no clear spatial contiguity between the lake or lagoon and the village.) We see an initial shot of the women rowing their canoe taken from some kind of rowboat about eight yards away. (Werner Herzog has said that you can feel shots taken from boats or rafts floating on the water “in your ass”, that is, at fulcrum of your body – this is true to some extent: the shots showing the canoe taken on the water, as opposed to the shore, have a distinctive “presence” in the film.) It’s expensive and difficult to shoot on water and, so, Sembene avoids this approach to these scenes as much as possible – the succeeding images documenting the women’s crossing of the lagoon are either full frontal or close shots taken by handheld camera from the canoe itself in which the women are rowing or images captured from the adjacent dry land. When the women return to the village with their brother, a trip that obliges them to retrace their path to the brush where the man was hiding, Sembene simply takes a couple of shots from the prow of the moving canoe (handheld camera again it seems) without even showing any figures in the image – this is masterful and sufficient to establish that the women are again crossing the body of water to return to the village. There is something peculiar and dream-like about the fact that the women have to travel by canoe over a body of water that is otherwise never shown in the picture, particularly in relationship to either village or brush or sacred precinct, to retrieve the man – the viewer intuits that there is a big watery gulf between the men and the women, a divide or “watershed”, that also characterizes the gendered space inhabited by the villagers.
The dreamlike aspect of the film resides, as well, in its oddly uncanny or surrealist imagery. Strange mammary-shaped gourds hang in trees; people drink from utterly inefficient dippers that result in much of the precious liquid being spilled (for instance, a woman who drools much water from the dipper while she is sitting in the sun in the village or one of the elders who spills about half of the palm wine that he is trying to drink from his dipper.) In an image worthy of Lautreamont, a bike hangs from a tree, also adorned with breast-shaped gourds. Strangely withered, bare trees decorate the landscape: the sacred Baobab tree looks like a worshiper petitioning the heavens, tortured sepulchral trees stand around the battlefield where he men wage their pathetic war on the French and a tree that is beaked and twisted like a dragon is prominently shown in one frame. The women who are supposed to be tortured by the blazing sun, just fall asleep, drowsing in the mottled shadows – the soldiers haven’t really forced them out from under the shade of the trees in the village. French troops are shown crossing a landscape full of elephantine trees with enormous grey buttress roots. The women march in an angry procession wearing weird bundles of fluffed up grass on their heads and, then, put the hats down on the ground by the two corpses awaiting burial. The body of Djimeko, the elder who doubted the efficacy of prayer and the existence of the gods, is swathed in red cloth decorated with sequins that outline in cartoon-form his arms and legs and torso as well as his doll-like face. Two lone soldiers guard the corpse that lies inside a palisade of spears stuck in the ground. The gods appear as weird bundles of grass sprouting little mask heads or what seem to be rods shaped like candlesticks. The hostage-taking scenes don’t make any sense because the women seem free to depart whenever they muster the energy to move. After they sit for 24 hours, first in the sun and, then, overnight, a single shot fired suffices to cause them to bolt, all of them darting away from the village square in defiance of the black colonial soldiers who are supposed to guard them. The village is crisscrossed with flimsy fences made of twigs and grass. We have no idea what these enigmatic barriers are supposed to mean. But it doesn’t matter – when the women bolt from their captivity after the boy is shot, they simply crash through the barricades and knock them to the ground as if they were never really in existence or, of any significance, at all. (Much of the village, the women’s hats, the mats, and the flimsy walls are made of raffia fiber, a product extracted and woven from the raffia palms that we see in the film, trees that also produce the “palm wine” that people drink – the raffia palm in Senegal is scientifically described as Raphia fannifera.)
Augmenting the picture’s intrinsic surrealism is its grotesque comedy. First, there is the implicit political parallel between the French sergeant asserting that the colonial administrators should just kill the chief and replace him with a puppet ruler, precisely the thing that has happened in Vichy France where the Nazis have taken control of that country and installed Marshal Petain as their figurehead. Despite the blazing heat, the tough-guy French soldier wears a long white scarf around his neck. When poor Djimeko is carried in his red shroud across a field, one of the village elders repeatedly forces the pallbearers to back up so that he can continue to harangue the corpse. The warriors, who are not particularly fearsome or effective on the field of battle, keep asserting that they must die with spears in their hands. But this is all bellicose show, a false grandiosity – they are most warlike when they threaten the corpse or evil spirits around the corpse with their spears; but, later, when the women do this as well over the body of the dead boy, they put their men to shame. Except when playacting, no one is very fierce in this film – one of the French soldiers is pushed back by a three-year old toddler who wants to play with his carbine. The village elders give grandiose speeches that often deteriorate into collections of folk proverbs that are of doubtful relevance to the situation at hand. The Elders make ridiculous sacrifices, smearing the horns in their shrine with blood, before nonchalantly tossing the dead victims of their rituals into the cleft in the baobab tree. And, of course, there is the ongoing business involving Marshal Petain, the little monument to the French ruler, and, then, the various signs around the town invoking Petain’s heroism that are suddenly replaced with pictures of De Gaulle, much to the utter amazement of the villagers. The conscripts are baffled that their marching song beginning with the words “Marshal, we are here!” will, now have to revised to “General, we are here!”
Emitai’s combination of grotesque and macabre humor with surrealistic elements stamps the film with elements that seem characteristic of Sembene’s ironic approach to his material. The picture ends with a massacre. But Sembene refuses to make the subject matter either sentimental or inspirational – he avoids the obvious pathos of the dire situation and, instead, imbues the proceedings with a blithe and clinical irony.
In a fundamental way, Emitai is about theology. The villagers are not imperiled in their material well-being by the theft of their rice. They seem to be well-nourished and have plenty of other food sources. The rice is sacred, however, and necessary for proper funeral feasting – therefore, the two victims of the French aggression can’t be properly buried since the women have hidden all the rice away. The question that the film poses is: What will people do to preserve religious observances in which they don’t even really believe but which are of cultural significance to them? The gods themselves are distressed by the intransigence of the villagers – one of them is made to ask: “Aren’t we more sacred than the rice?” The somewhat obtuse and buffoonish villagers seem to have mistaken ritual for the actual substance of worship – the women revere the rice more than the gods that it represents. If a dispute over rice results in the slaughter of the villagers, who, then, will worship the gods and give them food in the form of animal sacrifices? Echoing Chinua Achebe’s famous novel Things Fall Apart, one of the elders cries out: “Our world is falling apart!” The gods, it seems, are absent, missing in action: they seem indifferent to the fate of their worshipers. Ironically, the only one of the villagers who can see and converse with the gods is the dead (or dying) Djimeko who has previously announced that he doesn’t really believe in the Emitai (gods) himself. Ultimately, the lethal duel with the French authorities is about nothing of any real significance, the mere occasion for a quarrel which the Diola, or “payback” people, elevate into a war that will result in the destruction of their villages. “Better a live lamb, then, a dead lion,” one of the elders says as he delivers his family’s quota of rice to the village square to ransom his wife and children. But the French act in bad faith – they arrest the man in order to coerce him into telling them where the men are hiding, thereby replicating the stand-off with which the movie begins. And this bad faith illustrates to the villagers that there is no peaceful solution to the impasse in which the French and Diola find themselves. In schematic form, Sembene illustrates the folly that leads to bloodshed – it’s the same in Europe as in rural Senegal, a carnival of false pride and misunderstanding with fatal consequences.
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