Mami Wata

Mami Wata, a film by Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, is subtitled “a West African folklore,” and it does explore the tension between ancient myth and the secular realism of the modern world. In the village of Iyi near the Atlantic Ocean, an older woman named Efe acts as intermediary between the people and Mami Wata, a water goddess or spirit. For generations this role has been passed down through the women. Efe has two daughters who help her in her ceremonies and healing rituals. All three wear headdresses, seashell jewelry and tribal face paint which the high contrast black and white photography lends a striking effect. The villagers supply food and money to support them and to win favor with the goddess, but trouble is brewing.

Mama Efe’s daughter Zinwe, who is destined to inherit the role of intermediary, becomes angry when her mother says she cannot help a woman find her missing daughter. Zinwe has struggled to believe in Mami Wata, and now her doubt drives her into exile. We see her standing on the seashore, trying to make contact with the goddess, and giving up in despair. Meanwhile, things come to a head when Mama Efe’s efforts to cure a sick village boy fail and the boy dies. There’s a group of men who want the village to enter the modern age and get roads, schools, and hospitals. They accuse Mama Efe of cheating everyone by promoting baseless superstition.

All this seems very plausible, and Efe’s other daughter Pesca, who is adopted, wavers in her belief as well. But she had fled from violence as a child, and Efe had taken her in, nurtured her, so out of a sense of love and duty she remains loyal. With so much of the drama about Mama Efe and Zinwe in the early going, it’s a surprise when we notice the second daughter Pesca, played by Evelyne Ily, taking center stage in the story. It is she who rescues a stranger from drowning, a man named Jasper, that she thinks might be an answer to her dilemma from Mami Wata. Jasper acts grateful and respectful to her and her mother, but he also agrees that the region needs schools and hospitals. An attraction develops between Pesca and Jasper, but the story never goes the way we might expect it to.

And that’s one of the strengths of Obasi’s filmmaking—we’re always being thrown back on her heels, never really sure of the truth, living in a kind of  suspended mystery state, until our eyes are opened to new insights at the end.

To reveal any more would be to spoil things. Suffice it to say that the stakes are higher than a simple conflict between religion and science. Without special pleading or romanticism, Obasi explores a matriarchal way of feeling and seeing, and its conflict with male power reveals a social reality that is deeper even than the injuries from the colonial past. The characters speak a mix of Fon, a major West African language, and a pidgin English clearly inherited from their former British colonizers. The story, suffused with a mystical sense of connection to the sea, escalates from one unexpected emergency to the next, ultimately reaching an epic scale. Although not everything Obasi tries to do works, the act of trying shows courage. Mami Wata is an impressive stylistic feat, resonant with meaning.