Xala

Ousmene Sembane's Xala (1979) is a savage allegory about post-colonial Africa.  In some descriptions, Sembane's picture sounds like a raunchy farce about an impotent kleptocrat.  The film is very funny, but also quite disturbing and it's far more challenging with respect to its themes and imagery than you might expect.  In some ways, the movie resembles pictures by Peter Greenaway that have amusing, and stylized, plot lines but that carry things to logical, but intolerable, extremes -- the parable's metaphors are realized in ways that make the viewer very uncomfortable.  For Sembane, the stakes in Xala are very high, matters of life or death, and there's a sharp edge to the comedy -- it carries a cruel and vicious bite.  Sembane's movies have not interested me over the fifty years that I've been aware of his work -- summaries of his films tend toward piety with respect to the director's socialist and feminist tendencies; in actuality, the pictures are far more interesting than most capsule reviews suggest.  Overlook the tired and trite discourse about Marxism and women's rights; as far as I can see, Sembane's films contain a lot more than what might seem to be mere Leftist and sophomoric social critique.  The texture of these pictures is a lot tougher, more disturbing, and radically uncompromising than you expect.  Xala is a good example:  Sembane uses the sexual impotence of Xala's hero as an allegory for the moral impotence of post-colonial Senegal, a place that the director sees as overrun by particularly loathsome grifters.  This seems to be a relatively simple (if ingenious) satirical conceit -- but the way that Sembane works out the implications of his allegory is uncompromising and disturbing; extreme imagery of mutilation and a particularly vivid and disgusting scene of humiliation seem to exceed the requirements of the allegory..  Film is spectacle and the greatest directors often indulge in imagery that is over-charged and excessive -- this seems to be an integral aspect of cinema, the temptation of going too far.  Sembane is a great visual director, notwithstanding the somewhat pedestrian camerawork and the nonchalant documentary style of his work -- in this respect, he resembles Bunuel:  for distressing imagery to be effective, it has be presented in matter of fact way.  Sniff the air -- you can smell Xala.

Xala opens at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce, an august assembly that apparently runs the country.  A bunch of native Africans march into the conference room (it's like a conference room in a rural or suburban bank) and force out the rather pallid and feckless Frenchmen on the council.  Their busts of famous French politicians and what look like boots (together with a bucket) are carried out and unceremoniously deposited on the front steps of the building.  The Africans, formerly colonial subjects swagger into the chamber and power is transferred to them by a wormy little Frenchman who hands each councilor a briefcase; we have previously seen the French officials departing comically burdened with briefcases -- one of them carries four of them.  Of course, the Africans are delighted to find the briefcases are packed with greenbacks.  A radio announcement playing over this scene tells us that the new regime has instituted, for the first time on the continent, pan-African socialism.  So, Senegal (and the movie) are off to a good start.

One of the kleptocrats on the ruling council is a mild-mannered and well-tailored middle-aged man, probably about fifty-five with a dignified demeanor and a fringe of greying hair.  This is El Hadji, a prominent businessman who runs what seems to be an import-export business (he sells Coca-Cola for instance) out of a nondescript warehouse in a poor part of town.  Muslim men are entitled to wed up to four wives.  El Hadji has two and is excited to marry a beautiful young woman as this third wife -- one of the women says the nubile girl could "arouse a dead man."  This picture shows in detail why polygamy is not a good idea.  El Hadji's first wife, like him, is middle-aged, a handsome woman whom we see chewing what looks like a cheroot; she is named Adjo Ada and has produced a daughter, Rama, who is a political radical.  Adjo Ada is resigned to her husband's third marriage, but seems somewhat embittered -- "(one) must be resilient," she says.  Possibly because, El Hadji had only one child, a daughter, the man has a second wife -- the two women live in separate luxury houses.  The second wife, Oumi, has, at least, three children, two of them boys it appears, and she is flamboyantly voluptuous and aggressive.  El Hadji fears her and she is enraged about the third marriage.  She openly declares that El Hadji is too old for a young third wife and that he is fat, useless man -- all the while, demanding large amounts of cash from him.  (Her sullen teenage son literally blocks the door to his mother's quarters demanding cash in exchange for access.)  Oumi doesn't get along with the first wife, Adjo Ada, but, then, she doesn't get along with anyone -- she's too demanding; "you have too many questions," Adjo tells her. By contrast with Adjo, who wears traditional African gowns, Oumi is clad in the most expensive Parisian fashion.  (Oumi is fearsome -- El Hadji's time with his wives is scheduled and, when its Oumi's turn, she says in a threatening voice that he had better get over to his house because "as you know, I can be very wild", suggesting, it seems, some scary sexual depredations.)  Rama, Adjo's daughter denounces poor El Hadji to his face saying that any man who would take more than one wife is a "liar and a hypocrite", an assertion which she repeats on her father's dare and, thereby, gets slapped down,  The wedding to the third wife is portrayed at length and it is grotesque.  All the parasites and sycophants attend, Senegal's president dances a little too closely with Oumi, suggesting that he may be having an affair with her.  A Citroen on a flat bed trailer is a wedding present and the cake is a weird towering assembly topped with a model of a Caucasian bride and groom.  The various members of the criminal regime swill champagne and make vulgar remarks about El Hadji's first night with his new, young bride, who is reputedly a virgin.  Several men offer El Hadji potency pills and the bride's aunt (she comes equipped with two frightening aunts) orders the groom to sit astride a mortar with the pestle protruding between his legs as a warrant of his sexual potency -- El Hadji who believe himself to be a modern European despises African superstition, at least, on the surface and refuses.  Needless to say the wedding night is a disaster.  The aunts don't find any blood on the sheets -one of them has brought a cock apparently to slaughter in the bed,  The women all mock El Hadji and he's disconsolate.

El Hadji is said to be suffering from xala ("temporary sexual impotence" in Wolof, the principal native language in Senegal).  This condition presages a general failure and collapse in all aspects of his life.  El Hadji's business is insolvent.  He has made some kind of deal in which he cornered the market on rice, the food staple in Dakar and Senegal, and failed to pay taxes on profits from the transaction, a purchase that also was covert and apparently illegal.  He can't pay his bills and comes under political scrutiny from his fellow corrupt henchmen.  El Hadji consults a marabout, some kind of sorcerer and magician, and is told to creep on all fours up to his bride in his bedroom holding a strange red and orange talisman in his teeth.  Needless to say, this fails.  His chauffeur transports him to a village in the country where he consults another marabout, also to no effect -- he doesn't get to try out the remedy because the bride has her period. These events are embedded in a larger narrative in which El Hadji's business, a sort of large garage full of crates of Coca-Cola and other European and American products, is besieged by a group of about twenty horribly maimed cripples, street beggars who are like figures from the old movie Freaks -- they creep around on all fours, some of them with their limbs on backwards it seems.  (This is pretty scary stuff because the crippled beggars, of course, are, obviously, all real -- there's no special effects or CGI with respect to their deformities.)  Out on the street, a couple of musicians perform a keening ballad to accompaniment of a sort of lute -- the song is about injustice and how it would be better for a man's son to die in infancy than to grow up to be corrupt.  El Haji's secretary, an attractive woman who flirts with his customers, is appalled by the street beggars and tells El Hadji to get rid of them.  El Hadji calls his buddy the president and the cops, an ominous militarized force, appear to arrest the cripples and the griots on the street singing their ballad (as well as a couple of other people who just get swept up in the arrests.)  But the cripples will not be deterred and, after being released, they have a sort of weird last supper in which they share drinks like milk shakes (made from cans of sugary condensed milk).  The cripples symbolize the vengeance about to befall the unjust and greedy El Hadji.  El Hadji meets again with Rama, but they remain estranged -- El Hadji is angry that Rama insists on speaking Wolof instead of French -- and we see a man selling copies of a periodical called Kaddu, a Wolof-language newspaper.  El Hadji says that he drinks two bottles of Evian water daily -- Rama says that she won't drink any imported water preferring Senegalese products. The kleptocrat even washes his Mercedes in Evian water.  A man has come to Dakar from the county to buy rice for his village -- there's a drought in that part of Senegal.  His pocket gets picked and he can't buy the rice, and, in any event, there seems to be no rice to purchase because El Hadji has cornered the market on the commodity.  The Chamber of Commerce learns of El Hadji's illegal rice transaction and boots him off the council -- he remarks that they are just as greedy and bad as he is.  (El Haji's replacement is the man who picked the pocket of the rube from the country -- he used the proceeds to buy a beautiful tailored suit and a cowboy hat, apparently all that's needed to become a member of the ruling class.)  El Haji loses everything; his xala is all-encompassing.  His second wife gets booted out of her luxury mansion and the third new wife's aunts return the wedding presents and spirit off the girl -- the wedding was never consummated and El Hadji no longer has any money and, therefore, has lost his usefulness to the young woman's family.  The beggars invade the house of El Hadji's first wife and his daughter.  El Hadji is revealed to have stolen his fortune from his own family members, one of whom has pronounced the xala on him as a curse.  (El Hadji initially thought the impotence stemmed from a curse put on him by one of his first two wives.)  Although he has lost everything, El Hadji may regain his "manhood," but, at the cost of participating in a disgusting ritual.  My wife wasn't able to watch this scene and I had to tell her when the movie was over.   

What are we to conclude from this series of events.  First, post-colonial Senegal is just as corrupt as colonial French West Africa, its predecessor regime.  In fact, the French masters seem to retain some sort of economic power -- we see one particularly unprepossessing Frenchman, a bald guy with nerdy glasses, hovering around the Africans and serving as their factotum; his role is ambiguous.  Second, French-educated and Francophone Africans are neither "fish nor fowl" -- they aren't really African and, certainly, not Europeans.  (Although one young man says he won't vacation any longer in Spain because there are "too many Negroes", to which someone replies that it's the result of creeping "Negritude.") Pan-African socialism is a fraud.  Well-meaning people like Rama are incompetent to change anything for the better.  The kleptocracy is reared on the backs of the poor who are not merely economically disenfranchised by the wealthy crooks but actually starved and horribly maimed by them.  But, in the end, the poor will have their revenge, something that is horrible in its own right.

El Hadji's attractive secretary opens his shop every day, that is, until the place and its wares are foreclosed upon.  She smells that something is amiss in the shop and keeps spraying air-freshener all over.  Out in the street, there's an open drain to which women come with big buckets of slops that they pour into the drain in the road.  This stuff stinks.  The woman takes a whole bottle of air-freshener and pours it down the drain.  But it doesn't seem to have any effect.  The sewer drain reminds me of the business with the sewer in Erich von Stroheim's 1919 Foolish Husbands.  In fact, von Stroheim's enraged social criticism, a mixture of grotesque comedy and savage satire, evinces a sensibility very similar to Sembene's remorseless dissection of the evils of post-colonial Senegal.  All great films are different, but great film makers, I think, often display strange affinities -- I have no reason to think that Sembene ever saw any films by von Stroheim, but the two men, by independent means, seem to have reached similar conclusions about the societies in  which they lived.