SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
A contemporary review
It might seem remarkable for Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, to have a film industry, and yet five Burkinabe films were shown at the recent Pan African film festival. And it is not in any way to detract from Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yaaba to suggest that it has partly attracted international attention on this score. The other source of Yaaba’s appeal, however, is its capacity to evoke universal truths by recounting simple events and so to transcend the confines of village, state or even continent.
The ‘Yaaba’ or grandmother of the title is honorary – ‘No one has ever called me that before,’ she says to young Bila who gives her this affectionate nickname. They are not related. Indeed, Yaaba is a village outcast, a wizened, sun-dried old woman who keeps her distance from the cluster of mud huts that form Bila’s village and who is widely believed to be a witch of some kind. Ignoring their families’ injunctions to stay clear, Bila and his cousin Nopoko strike up a friendship with the old lady which is based on the special empathy that often arises between the very old and the very young. This friendship stands them in good stead when, after a fight with some other children, Nopoko is stabbed with a rusty knife and contracts tetanus. Through Bila’s intercession, Yaaba is finally allowed, after other remedies have failed, to introduce her friend the healer to the village and Nopoko is cured.
Of course, part of the fear she inspires is fear of her knowledge, which derives both from her age and her habitation. Hovering just outside the village that excludes her, she is well placed to see the comings and goings others do not see. In particular, the fact that Kougri has become exasperated with her alcoholic husband and has finally succumbed to the advances of Razougou. Everyone knows she owed her husband loyalty, but ‘we should not judge her,’ says Yaaba, ‘she has her reasons.’ In this way, the old woman becomes an otherworldly presence, a serene contrast to the domestic interactions in the village which, though they are observed with considerable affection and humour, are essentially trivial: the women usually retire in mock offence to their huts until they get their own way.
Much of the village business in fact concerns matters of life and death, the arranging of marriages, a wedding party, the fear that Nopoko may die, yet all these things are made relative by Yaaba’s distant and somehow timeless overview. The film is structured in such a way as to suggest the cycle of life, death and renewal. It opens and closes with the identical shot of children running away from the camera across the dusty landscape, a shot which at the beginning of the film is followed, and at the end is preceded, by an episode where they tend a grave. The fact that at the end of the film the grave is Yaaba’s points not to the end of the lifecycle so much as the end of the narrative, the implication being that there is a resemblance between filmmaker and Yaaba that is based on distance or wisdom or both.
This, in turn, introduces another aspect of Yaaba which is both worrying and appealing. Ouédraogo’s slightly distanced and affectionate view of his compatriots may be explained by the fact that he is already in his mid-thirties (not a beginner, therefore) but, more important, by the long training that took him first to Kiev and later to the IDHEC film school in Paris. Like many other African filmmakers – Ousmane Sembène springs to mind – he has benefited from the cultural aid with which France has bolstered her post-imperialist presence in Africa. Further. more, Ouédraogo was not merely trained in France, but he also raised the money for this film from European, and especially Swiss, sources, something for which he has been strongly criticised by other African filmmakers. This has simultaneously ensured adequate distribution for Yaaba and allowed it production values acceptable to European cinema and television.
But it has also made the film strangely anachronistic. Watching Yaaba is like opening one of Jean de Brunhoff’s stories of Babar the Elephant and seeing the colonial experience schematised, sanitised and narrated with affectionate comedy for the amusement of European children. There, as it were, are all the trappings we expect: the oasis, the river to bathe in, the circular houses built from mud, the costumes, the dances, the old lady who is both faith healer and guru. It is the studied innocence, above all, which is part of the charm of both this film and of Babar, lifting them both literally outside time.
There is something both very accomplished and very odd about a capacity to look at one’s own country so dispassionately and to adopt the style and manners of an outsider. The literary genre was popular in the eighteenth century and Yaaba is a not-too-distant descendant of it, hence the classicism of its narrative. However, in this case the relationship between looker and looked-at is not neutral, for in order to portray his people thus Ouédraogo has had to adopt the coloniser’s point of view.
Are we therefore to assimilate the filmmaker and the wise old woman, as the film implies, making the observer’s point of view one of knowledge to which the youngsters aspire? Conversely, do we consider that the African filmmaker has a particularly contradictory role to play in attempting to valorise the simple and the universal by means of the most sophisticated of tools? Looked at in this way Yaaba becomes an even more fascinating film, both a moving and accomplished narrative of life in a poor African village and a poignant image of modernisation.
Jill Forbes, Sight and Sound, Spring 1990
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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