In the film narrative, Tamari is an embodiment of pain and of ‘sexploitation’ that economically disadvantaged women are bound to suffer. Her encounter with the shopkeeper testifies how some men use vulture-like tactics to pounce on unsuspecting young girls. With the cunningness of a fox, the shopkeeper tells Tamari that: ‘With the right man you can be happy. I don’t want you to be sad Tamari. Select a dress that you want there. At night I’ll make a surprise for you’. Young as she is,
156
Tamari is unaware that a ‘gift’ of a dress is a cultural as well as an economic symbol that goes with strings attached to it. Referring to the etymology of the term ‘gift’, Derrida pointed out its ambiguity as always implying elements of harm (Kohler, 2005).
Men are viewed as the ‘givers’ of gifts while women are viewed as the ‘receivers’ of gifts. The harm caused by the gift is that it bestows on men the power to demand sexual favours from women in order to reciprocate the action of giving.
Fig 8: Shot from Everyone’s Child(1996)
The above shows Tamari begging for food from the shop-keeper as she cannot fend for the family.
She is taken advantage of and sexually abused. Instead of the community members to blame the shop-keeper who is abusing the vulnerable and defence-less, they accuse Tamari of leading a promiscuous life. The community’s members are limited in their understanding of the problems that are are afflicting Tamari’s family.
During the conversation with the shopkeeper, when Tamari replies that, ‘Please I’ll do what you say, I’ll come during the night’ , she is uttering these words from the position of powerlessness; a position that depicts Tamari being strung and bound by her own words as well as the power of money and material resources from the shopkeeper. In the process, Tamari fails to evolve plausible means of surviving without sacrificing her sexuality and dignity. As a metaphor of ‘the impossible’
(Kohler, 2005:37) the gift alienates Tamari from being a producer into a passive consumer. By extension, the gift inflicts harm in that it can whet the appetite of the receiver and actually turns a
157
person into a perpetual receiver or beggar limited or restricted in his/her capacity to become the sole producer of gifts.
Evidently, in the film narrative Tamari’s impoverished condition has turned her into a continual receiver of gifts from the shopkeeper. For example, after her younger sister is send home by the headmaster for failure to pay school fees, Tamari is given twenty dollars by the shopkeeper for her sister’s school fees. In the film, camera motion tracks her movement from the shop to her home with a group of boys following behind shouting that she is a prostitute. Even the village women concur with the boys when one of them says: ‘There she is taking up diseases. Prostitutes should go to Harare. You want to take away our husbands’.
Tamari replies back: ‘I never saw you when my mother was ill’.
From the speech by the village women, the word ‘prostitute’ is used to refer to a woman who has gone beyond ‘unmarked territories’. A prostitute has deviated from the, ‘…imagined woman of rural tradition, who should be ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ in order to give pleasure to the man’ (Muponde, 2005:
25). The village women are limited in their definition of a prostitute. The women’s understanding of how female identities fail to reveal that their own views are inhabited by the disabling values informed by patriarchal images that associate women but not a man, with prostitution. Expressed in a different way, the village women cannot imagine that it is their husbands who should be reprimanded or even be sued in the courts of law for using their economic power to abuse young girls such as Tamari.
As a meta-narrative, the word ‘prostitute’ can confirm as true and unassailable, the fixed cultural beliefs that women can never stand on their own; they need a male figure-head to support them or otherwise they are doomed to a life of moral degradation. Such a viewpoint underestimates the realism that culture is dynamic and that the same values embodied in people’s myths, beliefs, fantasies, norms and prejudices are not static( Rwafa, 2008). In their dynamism, the values in culture can assert the need for a new way of thinking. However, there is also the possibility of cultural implantation in which the film narrative of Everyone’s Child can be used to suppress ‘other’ certain meanings in the process of consolidating preferred values. The preferred values promoted through
‘Everyone’s Child’ are meant to show that orphans can be a subject of ridicule and abuse if community fails to take the responsibility of looking after them. This didactic motif is confirmed
158
when the shopkeeper is shown violently pushing Tamari on the shop floor. He rapes her shouting obscenities: ‘You take my money, you bitch’.
In yet another disturbing scene in the film, the shopkeeper drives to Tamari’s home at night and forces her into the car so that the two will visit a local pub where the musician Leonard Zhakata is performing. Inside the car, Tamari is forced to drink liquor and smoke cigarettes. Through his song
‘Mugove’, Zhakata criticises people like the shopkeeper with financial power who use it to abuse and exploit those without money and material resources. Zhakata’s lyrics are captivating:
Kana paine pamakandichengetera baba/If there is something that you have reserved for me God/Ndinokumbirawo mugove wangu ndichiri kurarama tenzi/I request for my blessings while I’m still alive God/Tarirai ndosakadzwa sechipfeko nevane mari ndisina changuwo/Look, I’m being abused like a piece of cloth with those with money without what I can call mine/Ndinongodzvinyirirwa, ndinongoshandiswa nhando, ndingofondotswa./I’m oppressed, exploited and over-worked
Zhakata’s song metaphorically decries a condition of exploitation and suppression of the powerless in the Zimbabwean society and culture. Tamari exemplifies those without power to defend themselves; she suffers ‘sexploitation’ under the hands of the local shopkeeper; she is labeled by community members a ‘prostitute’ and she lost her beloved mother and brother. The film uses the rhetorical device of the song as an intertextual narrative that criticises societal hypocrisy.
However, the film narrative contains the principle of self reflexivity. The film director introduces a tone of radical feminism when Tamari violently resists an attempt by the shopkeeper to snatch her away from her boy-friend Thabiso. Actually, in a bar scene Tamari aims a vicious kick at the shopkeeper’s genitals that makes him recoil in pain. At this point, Everyone’s Child desists from
‘naturalizing’ the single identity of being on the margins that children as ‘victims’ are normally consigned to (Nyamnjoh, 2008). Dangarembga deliberately complicates Tamari’s characterisation.
This kind of approach introduces a fresh breath from the stifling discourses of patriarchy that tended to view children as perpetual victims instead of viewing them as agents of social change.
At the funeral of Nhamo, Ozias laments that: ‘It has taken the death of Nhamo for me to realize that these are my children. Also everyone’s children’. The question that the film seems to raise relates to whether or not one has to die for the community to realise that orphans need help. Also within this
159
question lies the unflinching criticism of modern society that has abrogated its collective duty of looking after the vulnerable in life. Tamari’s resilience and inner desire for the family to survive in the face of adversity constructs a supra-narrative of ‘true love and the triumph of human spirit in the face of tragedy’ (Media for development trust, 2010: 12). Also, at a higher level, Everyone’s Child is a rebuttal of the films discussed in this chapter in which the dominant trope assigned to women and girl children was realised through a narrative of loss. In this respect, Everyone’s Child challenges other film-makers to evolve new imagery and symbols that can allow them to side-step the issue of self-censorship.
The imaginative discourse of Everyone’s Child fulfils the r/evolutionary element of ‘Third Cinema’
by questioning the African philosophy of ‘ubuntuism’, which advocates for the sense of African purity, authenticity or indigenous characteristics from what has generally been considered perverse foreign influences (Zacks, 1999). In addition, a question that Everyone’s Child seems to posit is related to the assumption built in the notions that take for granted ideas and the spirit of togetherness or ‘ubuntuism’ as if this idea is automatically found, grafted onto and manifested by everybody in the communities. The film suggests that one important aspect implicated in the language of cultural development is how to raise the collective communal consciousness that can enable the same communities to build capacity in order to re/define their priorities clearly, and act upon those priorities. Everyone’s Child authorises a language of anti-essentialisms that criticise theories which assume that at all times women fight to defend each other. In other words, Everyone’s Child succeeds in revealing the ‘fractal’ and ‘fractured’ nature of the social identity of African womanhood. The film also undermines the theories that promote an uncritical view of women as
‘sisters’ because these views can inhibit viewers from experiencing the class, race and gender conflicts among women in Africa.
To have revealed that women are a differentiated social class is to remove cultural and theoretical encrustations of censorship that dominant discourses impose on film viewers to render them unable to dissect social reality in a dialectical manner. Despite these important rejoinders, Everyone’s Child is also blighted by the fact that it was authorised by donors in so far as they participated in its production through funding.
160