Safi Faye’s cinematic practice as womanist work*
Je ne suis pas du tout féministe. Je suis féminisante. Je defends le cas des femmes… I am not at all feminist. I am womanistic, I defend the condition of women…
Fad signifies ‘arrive’ and Jal means ‘work,’ ‘work’ because when you arrive at this farming village called Fad’jal, you must work. When you work, you’re happy, and if you don’t work, people will mock you.
I interpret Safi Faye’s “feminisant”—from the French word “femme”, feminist, female”—as doing womanist work. Womanist, itself an expression coined by afro-descendant women in order to reconceptualize western feminism as defined by white women, which often does not reflect the realities of women of color.
Safi Faye’s words invoke the often vexed relationship that Afro-descendant women and women of the
South have with Western feminism, fraught with a contentious past, spurned by those who reject its historical practices of exclusion, ethnocentrism and elitism by white women.
Hence by rejecting the feminist label but affirming “womanistic” as the practice of defending the cause of women, Safi Faye is exercising her agency by naming her own experience rather than accepting one based on another reality.
As a further matter, describing the actions of doing “womanist work” renegotiates the terms of this feminism—outlining the tenets of a conceptual framework toward an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and transnational methodology. In so doing, I use the second citation by Safi Faye to place emphasis on the praxis-based approach to her cinematic practice, as she states:
I investigate, inquire, and then I write, and I try to remain faithful to the rural world that I come from, as well as to Africa and the villagers. I admire people who live off the land. In Serer country, the coastal people to which I belong . . . are renowned for the energy they put into their work. The people live within a matriarchal society in which women have more importance than men. Men and women are free thanks to the fruits of their labor. The rural world, the theme that I chose and which corresponds to my cinematic vision, is timeless. It concerns all rural farmers, whether they are Japanese, Senegalese or Singaporean, since we’ve all been rural farmers at one time; the entire world comes from the countryside. I glorify the hard work rural farmers do to achieve food self-sufficiency.
Therefore, Safi Faye’s womanistic act of defending the cause of women is concomitant with her desire to contribute to the knowledge production of Africa and the safeguarding of its culture: "I do what I can for my Africa, to tell how beautiful Africa is."
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