HOLTEDAHL, LISBET. Wives. 85 mins. DVD, colour. London: RAI, 2017. £50 (institutional); £5 (Home)
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 27, 1008-1009
The subject of polygamy often evokes mixed sentiments and sometimes outright rage from opponents who hold that polygynous marriages are patriarchal schemes designed to gratify men at the expense of women. A viewer of Wives, Lisbet Holtedahl’s ethnographic film, may easily arrive at this conclusion after 85 minutes spent in the company of the household of Al Hajji, a retired Muslim judge (Alkali) who lives in the northern Cameroonian town of Ngaoundere with his children and wives. Far from being a celebration of patriarchal command, Wives is a nuanced portrayal of what life as a co-wife feels and looks like, what it entails to be the husband of a coterie of wives, and the tensions, ambiguities, and precarity of living in a fast-changing world where one’s values or convictions may no longer hold sway. If anything, Wives may be understood as an ethnographic tribute to women in polygamous marriages, first by witnessing how they make sense of their conditions and then, importantly, by documenting their exercise of agency in creating and recreating the essence of being.
The central subject of Wives, Al Hajji, is a serial polygamist who over his lifetime has married over eleven wives and fathered thirty-two children. Early in the film, he acknowledges the primacy of women and of wifehood in the constitution of social life. ‘A man without a wife has no home’, he tells his interlocutor. ‘Without a wife, even a castle is nothing but a hut with a fence’. As an Alkali and Islamic scholar, Al Hajji always has four wives at any given time, even remarrying Aminatou in his final years, a wife he had previously divorced. He justifies himself by reference to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, who Al Hajji claims left nine wives and two concubines at the time of his death. Except for a few scenes, the film follows Al Hajji around his residence as he attends to his students and interacts with his children and wives, especially Hajja, the head wife. What does it entail to balance relations with wives living in such close proximity to each other? Al Hajji believes the secret is to ‘keep them calm’ at all times by providing for their needs, and by maintaining a fair and balanced schedule in his rotational visits to each wife. With respect to fatherhood, he oversees his children’s religious instruction and leaves their secular training to the state schools. Hajja has been married to Al Hajji for forty-three years and is his most loyal and trusted wife. But even though she undertook the Haj with her husband, she feels long abandoned by him as he seems more preoccupied with his younger wives. Her greatest fear is being thrown out of Al Hajji’s compound by his oldest children upon his death. Two co-wives later reminisce about their younger days when they cooked from the same pot, shared the same room, and undertook regular escapades into town together, leaving Al Hajji wondering about their whereabouts. The older children have migrated to cities in Cameroon and abroad to Germany and France, and Hajja rationalizes their desire for Al Hajji to marry a younger wife; she would assist in looking after the younger children, and Al Hajji especially, as his health suffers.
Shot between 1997 and 2001, and edited over a period of fifteen years, Wives raises several themes covered in the ethnographic literature, such as gender, Islam, power, polygyny, and healthcare beliefs and practices. The latter is particularly salient when Al Hajji’s health begins to suffer and he is believed to have been assailed by an unknown sorcerer. The film also shows that women in polygamous marriages hold differential social power and that ambiguity and vulnerability characterize the lives of all parties involved in such unions. Thanks to his wives, Al Hajji counts himself a highly favoured ‘father’, but he also acknowledges his incompleteness and the indebtedness of his humanity to the interdependent relationships he has forged with his wives: ‘we wouldn’t have children without our wives’, he says, and ‘a man without a wife has no affection’. Holtedahl has successfully assembled a nuanced story that instructs without projecting any assumptions about polygyny’s ‘otherness’. By privileging the women’s voices as they recount the dynamics, woes, fears, and delights of living in a polygamous marriage, we cannot help but see striking parallels between their predicament and serial monogamous arrangements in the West. Al Hajji and his wives, as with humans elsewhere, are implicated in the business of forging ‘affective’ relationships circumscribed, as it were, by the forces of religion and tradition.
JUDE FOKWANG Regis University
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