On the other side of a moving train, there are two women; one with head covering, one without, squabbling like how only best friends can squabble. A disembodied voice calls out for Souleiman(Ibrahun Traohe). In the countershot, it's unclear as to who the day laborer is looking at: Mariama(Mariama Gassama), the devout and pious girl, or Ada(Mame Bineta Sane), the lapsed and secular counterpart, who looks so westernized, only her Wolof-wise tongue breaks the illusion of her American-like otherness. Ada returns the stare. Mariama stares off into space, as if appalled at the notion of walking home with a young man who carries a backpack around. It makes him look like a boy. Ada's casual wear, a loose-fitting blouse and blue jeans completes the geographically-dislocated picture of puppy love. Can this relationship survive in this complicated place where lions roam and roar, just like fathers? Mariama can't believe her friend is "still seeing that guy". Quite pointedly, the color of her hijab is purple.
Celie(Whoopi Goldberg), in Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple", an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker, reads one in a series of letters from Nettie(Akousa Busia), her stolen sister, staggered in time by Mister(Danny Glover), Celie's husband, who hid the hand-written communiques from Africa in a metal box under the a loose floorboard. Another continent is made portable, revealing the possibility of a life different from the living hell Celie endures as an indentured wife. Is the grass greener on the other side of the Atlantic? Olivia has more freedom, that's for sure, but she's a missionaries' daughter, adopted by Americans, therefore not subject to the tribe's social and cultural norms. She is blind to the everyday reality of being female in the Pilinka order. Nettie describes how Olivia(Lelo Masamba), her older sister's long-lost daughter, relays each day's school lesson to Tashi(Lilian Njoki Distefano), a village girl, since females are categorically denied an education. "The Color Purple" never answers the question as to what would happen if the Pilinka elders discovered this secret arrangement. But that was then, this is now. Mati Diop's "Atlantics" offers a glimpse at contemporary Senegal, a moderately-wealthy third-world country. Would an African-American woman, fed up with living in a colony within a nation, want to live there?
Ada walks about the Senegalese urban landscape with a delusional sense of independence, and even worse, entitlement; it's a matrix she built from accruing material possessions and free will envisioning. As if learned from American films, because she and Souleiman look like young Americans, the lovers make out at the beach as if they never saw the inside of a mosque. It's not the idea of disappointing her God, or Mariama, or her parents that stops Ada from going further, it's a security guard's footsteps which disbands the seaside rendezvous. He shoos the unabashed secularists away from the shelter, adding an unsubtle parting shot, directed at Ada, about her abberrance from orthodoxy with a gender-related slur. Mariama, too, judges Ada, when she asks her best friend if she "lost her...on the way," and for good measure, disparages the company she keeps as bad influences. Mariama's words are harsh, but they're words that communicate a palpable reality of their situation. Ada's feminism is pretend. Down deep inside, she knows that the "Grease"-like scene at the beach is just play-acting; a simulation of the summer fling, a fantasy, because in the real world, Ada was raised in a traditional family who values fealty to the patriarchal construct of an arranged marriage. Home or abroad, not a long has changed for Senegalese women it would seem in the interim between "Atlantics" and Ousmane Sembene's "Black Girl", also set in Dakar, whose protagonist, Diouana(Mbissine Therese Diop), an au pair who gets bamboozled into following a French family back to Paris, where her job description changes from child care to domestic. The daily drudgery of cooking and cleaning humiliates Diouana, making her feel less like a woman than a girl, hence the title. And furthermore, Madame(Anne-Marie Jelinek), Diouana's boss, and Monsieur(Robert Fontaine), her husband, show her off to friends at a dinner party, as if the maid was the latest acquisition to their African collection of wall art and knick-knacks that decorate the villa. "Do you mind? I never kissed a black girl before," an old male guest informs Diouana, and before she gets a chance to even acquiesce, he helps himself to both cheeks. Another country affords both Diouana and Nettie, but Ousmane Sembene understands better than Steven Spielberg that it's a hard life wherever a woman of color goes, or stays. Unwittingly, "The Color Purple", otherwise a book and film with good intentions, created a colonized colonizing the colonized situation; a black woman in "white face".
Ada had a choice; marry for love or security, but then Dior(Nicole Sigour), the owner/bartender of a nightclub, gives her patron the bad news. Souleiman and his coworkers boarded a small boat destined for Spain with nary a goodbye. She never got the chance to consummate her outlaw relationship. Now the reality of her surroundings comes into sharp focus. The matrix goes up like smoke. Raised by parents who abide by religious tradition, Ada is faced with two new choices; get married or get disowned. The first world was only in her mind. Ada is not a woman, after all; she's a girl, a paradox, because for a female, reaching adulthood means forfeiting both your agency and self-determination in a ritualistic unmaking that infantilizes and subordinates; the arranged marriage, a ceremony beyond the woman's control in which the father hands off the daughter to a father figure, the groom. Omar(Babacar Salia), a wealthy businessman, is the end-result of procedural matchmaking orchestrated by Grand Mere Ada(Ya Arame Mousse Sene), the unhappy bride's father. Although the family is beneath Omar on the social-economical stratum, Ada's natural beauty overcompensates for her poor stock, similar to Nettie, the daughter Pa takes off the market from Mister, who is offered Celie, the "ugly" one, instead. Beautiful women are commodities. This reality never changes for some. The name of the film, mind you, is "Atlantics", plural, not "Atlantic", as in two oceans, meaning, perhaps, that only one pair of eyes remain to document the incoming and outgoing tides from a lonely shoreline. Tragically, the boat capsizes; there are no survivors, including Souleiman, presumably, but his whereabouts becomes a raised question when Mariama, inexplicably, claims to have spotted him at the wedding party, fleeing the scene of a crime; a fire in the master bedroom caused seemingly by spontaneous combustion. Is it arson, or magical arson? The mattress is blackened; a dead man, the only suspect with a motive; post-mortem jealousy, a crime of passion. Issa(Amadou Mbow), a bilingual detective, throws Ada in jail, charged with harboring a fugitive of the law. His fluency, perhaps, gives the lawman a chip on his shoulder. He treats both Ada and her mother with little respect. "Atlantics", both as a police procedural and ghost story, depicts how little has changed in Dakar when "Black Girl" made a splash on the international film festival circuit. Without their consent, the deceased seamen violate the womenfolk by occupying their bodies as a vehicle for recovering lost wages from Mr. Ndaiye(Diankou Sembene), a dishonest contractor who sentenced them to the indignity of a Viking funeral. Whereas Mister, in "The Color Purple", answers to his didactic tyrant of a father(Adolph Caesar), who clearly takes delight in emasculating Albert, and coward that the father's son is, weaponizes his inferiority complex by browbeating Celie; the Senegalese laborers, in life, shortchanged by their grifter boss, who refused to pay for a honest day's work, twenty-one-times over(three weeks pay), possess the women in death as they did in life. Their lifeless bodies, meat for sharks, lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, whatever is left of them. As a soul, you have two options; be a ghost or shelter at home in a host body. They're angry. Drowning, the experts say, is a painful way to die. Their homecoming turns into a haunting. They're angry, however, at the wrong people. This long-standing hegemony takes place on a new battlefield; an astral plane. The feminine soul fights for control over its motor and bodily functions and loses to her masculine counterpart. Rather than confront Mr. Ndaiye as ghosts, the dead men exploit their women to recover blood money in a home invasion, using co-opted feminine wiles and ventriloquism. Mariama is one of them. When this fundamentalist girl wakes up the next morning, she discovers feet bloodied by unpaved roads with a repelled look of apperception. Mariama knows that she was in Souleiman's thrall, as retribution, in life, for her low opinion of him; another local boy with no future. One down, one to go on his list, or is it two; a matter of killing two birds with one stone? Souleiman uses Issa, the detective, as a host body in order to be with Ada. The scene plays out as romantic. But is it really? Souleiman burned Ada's honeymoon bed. This is one angry ghost. The policeman, virtually a stranger, in essence, commits a crime. Arguably, as retribution for Ada's marriage to Omar.
And just as Mariama predicted, he leaves.
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