"Warrior Marks" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5Tampa, FL October 15, 1994 As a follow-up to last week's Pride Film Festival I want to talk today about one of the sessions of film screenings I was particularly glad I saw-- and one that you might not have expected to find at a gay/lesbian/bisexual film fesival, the Evening with Prahtiba Parmar. It featured her 1991 documen- tary "Khush" about Asian lesbians and gay men in Britain, Canada and India, and the 1993 documentary she made with Alice Walker, "Warrior Marks," which is not on a gay/lesbian theme at all, but which I am grateful the festival planners had the breadth of vision to schedule. There was also an all-too-brief opportunity to hear Parmar talk about these films and for audience members to pose questions. While "Khush" was seen at last year's festival and thus was not new to many of the audience members, it was for most of us the first opportunity to see "Warrior Marks" and we owe a debt of gratitude to the Festival and to the evening's sponsor, Tampa NOW, for making it possible. It was very interesting, in particular, to see the two films back-to-back, for despite the fact that they are thematically diverse ("Khush" about gay/ lesbian lives and "Warrior Marks" about female genital mutilation) the juxtapo- sition allowed the audience to see both the cinematic connections and the political connections between the films and the oppressions they address. In "Khush," for example, Parmar repeatedly uses scenes in which a dancer in Indian clothing is dancing or striking poses in front of a screen on which archival film footage of Indian women doing what seemed to these Western eyes to be an Indian version of a Busby Berkeley musical number. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. But then when the same technique is em- ployed in "Warrior Marks" you can see clearly how it is used to depict and/ or comment through the dance on the material being presented. The most brilliant instance of this is a sequence in which a woman who experienced genital mutilation as a girl describes in detail what was done to her and how it felt, while the dancer is dancing the pain and terror of the girl's experience. It is, I believe, even more effective than it would have been if they had filmed the actual procedure--which Walker and Parmar refused to do, because to do so would have made them complicit in mutilating a child. (Parmar told us afterward that a U.S. tv crew had filmed such a procedure in the same village shortly before they were there, paying several thousand dollars to have it staged for them). The idea for this project was Alice Walker's and it was she who recruited Parmar to direct. Walker was particularly concerned not to be the "outside expert" coming in to tell these African and Asian women what their moral duty was. Instead, she came as one who herself had known what it was like to be mutilated, albeit in a different way, as a child. (Her mutilation was her brother intentionally shooting out the pupil of one of her eyes with a BB gun). I thought her way of interviewing the women connected with the practice of genital mutilation (both proponents of and participants in the tradition and as grass-roots activists working to bring it to an end) was extraordin- arily loving, respectful, and without arrogance. Though this film is a call for political action to support the curtailment of this practice as a human rights violation (a kind of terrorism against female children), the individual women who participate in it are not condemned. In one particularly telling sequence a mother is celebrating "the happiest day of life" because her daughter is having the operation and she has fulfilled what she sees as her duty to her religion and tradition. Yet when Walker asks her whether she would change the tradition if she had the power to do so, she thinks about it for a bit and then says, yes, she would. This is a remarkable example of complex, beautiful, politically committed, feminist documentary filmmaking. If I had the power to do so I would see to it that a copy of this film was available to every women's studies program in the country--and a lot more places than that, as well. For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. ---------- Linda Lopez McAlister is professor of women's studies and philosophy at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the express permission of the author.