Durable Dreams:Dissent, Critique, and Creativity in Faat Kin� and Moolaad�

Abstract

Ousmane Sembene's oeuvre, in many ways, grants African feminism a legitimacy of its own, denying recurrent attempts to fit it within valorized, largely Western, templates for liberation. Not surprising, Faat Kine' (2001) and Moolaade (2004), the first two films in a planned triptych that, according to Sembene, honor everyday heroism, challenge certain assumptions about African womanhood, and remarkably demonstrate a range of contexts and indigenous precepts from which alternative modes of dissent, being, and liberation can spring. By and large, these heroines, Kine (of Faat Kine) and Colle (of Moolaade), are not spit-and-polish characters shone to perfection in the virtual world of imagination or the screen. Firmly anchored within the quotidian, Sembene significantly imbues their experiences and radical potentials with necessary qualifications. Relevant here, too, is Sembene's concept of cinema as night school, a vision of African cinema firmly tied to a transformative function. As such, Sembene's creative intervention does not depend on self-conscious puttering with narrative forms but in advocating an explicitly elucidative, provocative, activist cinema. Not surprising, Sembene attempts, in both films, to register the meanings and nuances of social transformation. As will be argued, therefore, opening up the women's cultural worlds to concerted critical reappraisals affords Sembene the necessary latitude to formulate transgressive frameworks with which