What The Woman King is Really About

Though the slave trade between West Africa’s warring tribes serves as foreground in ‘The Woman King,’ the film’s main message to me it seems is about womanhood and sisterhood, it’s about the roles that women play, and the heights that women can climb in a society dominated by an almost exclusively male rule, a rule in which women were treated as the property of men. 

Toni Wolfe, prominent Jungian scholar of the 20th century wrote about some of these roles in her essay, ‘Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche;’ she depicted at least 4 of those personas, arguing that every woman contains all four: Mother, Hetaira, Amazon, and Medial. In ‘The Woman King,’ three of these four are prominent. 

First, there is the obvious Amazon persona. Many films and tv shows in the past decade have depicted this archetype which suggests that this idea of a powerful fighter woman is looming large in our collective unconscious. From Gal Gadot’s character in Wonder Woman to, one of my personal faves,  Lagertha in the History Channel’s Vikings series, to Galadriel, hero of the newest ‘Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power’ series.

The Amazon Woman who fights to free her people is the central motif of ‘The Woman King.’ Nanisca, as played by the lovely Viola Davis is the leader of the Amazonians, and is as brave as she is cunning, as skilled as she is decisive, and it is these traits that earn her the title of Woman King. Toni Wolfe points out that the Amazon woman is “independent of the male because her development is not based upon a psychological relationship to him.” We can see this in the rules the Agoji warriors have for themselves, which include not taking a husband or bearing children. Many of these women become part of the king’s guard after having been captive themselves in a previous life. In Nanisca’s case, she was a slave of a warring local tribe, and was raped several times after which she gave birth to a daughter, who would grow to be Nawi, the young woman who proves herself in the great Agoji games. 

Which brings me to the second persona depicted in Woman King, that of Mother. We’ve seen lots of Mother-Daughter films of late, including the lovely,’Everything Everywhere all at Once,’ which is basically if Kung Fu Hustle and Daoism had a child and that child was the answer to the perennial problem of mother-daughter angst. There’s also ‘Turning Red,’ Disney’s latest Pixar films that uses turning into a giant fluffy red panda as a metaphor for what it feels like to experience a range of emotions that conventional society constantly pushes you to suppress. And speaking of suppression, that exactly what Nanisca felt she had to do as a young woman who discovered she was pregnant after being brutally raped. She gave up her child but made sure to mark her just in case she wanted to try to find her again. And lo and behold she did when Nawi showed up 19 years later wanting to become just like her mother. 

Wolfe writes that ‘“the mother finds her fulfillment in her relationship to that which needs protection, help, and development by endeavoring to strengthen it so that in the normal case, it can be dismissed from her care, or,  if this is not possible, it can be granted maximum security.” And in the case of the Agoji warriors, their kingdom has become fraught with dangers. A warring competitive tribe wants to sell members of the kingdom to European captors, to the highest bidder. To stop this from happening, the Agoji sisters must test their mettle and increase their strength. This includes, according to some, not babying those who would be left behind in their battles. Hence Nanisca chides Nawi after she goes back to help one of her sisters in a practice round battle. 

The true mother principle, which is to say the one that is aligned and integrated, mothers in order that her children may grow to independence. And so when Nanisca complains to Nawi about her arrogance and, at first, refusal to follow the rules, this is in a sense proof that Nanisca has done her job. Curiously, there is no real arc that I can see that Nawi travels. She is not suffering psychologically from having lived without a mother all her life nor does she have any real reason to change her ways besides the plot. And while I appreciated the reunion-like mother daughter scenes at the end of the film, I thought that these were too easily arrived at, and therefore a bit contrived. This was, for me, where the movie fell flat. 

And finally, for the third persona, the Hetaira. The Hetaira is probably the persona I often relate to the most and is a companion to Men. She is according to Wolfe interested in the personal psychology of the male and interested primarily in relationship — the art of relating. I couldn’t help but laugh when I read that. As a young teen in high school I kept swooning over Anakin Skywalker whose strange turn from Jedi prince to dark Sith Lord had me completely perplexed and also intrigued about just what in the world was wrong with this man, and how I might save him. (For the record this is never a good posture to have, ladies. We can’t save him. He has to save himself.) 

Anyway, while the Hetaira isn’t meant to save a man, her role is to awaken the individual psychic life in the Man and lead him through and beyond his so-called male responsibilities towards the formation of a total personality. We see this in cult classic films like Dangerous Beauty and Far from the Madding Crowd through the lens of women who enjoy the company and companionship of men with a vibrancy but whose very way of being challenges the man to become his higher self. Steve Harvey’s cult classic, Think Like A Man portrays this to a tee. 4 Women get their hands on a book that teaches them to demand more of their men while so that their relationships can actually be sustained.  

In The Woman King, we see this play itself out a bit in Nanisca’s companionship she has with the King, in her encouraging him to rethink the slave trade and in Nawi’s brief flirtation with Felix, a man who is both Agoji and Portuguese. Still, like the mother principle, this theme seemed to be a bit half-assed and thrown in for good measure, particularly when it came to Nawi’s relationship with Felix. It made for a good Hollywood scene or two but that was about it. 

Overall, while I appreciated this film’s attempt to bring color, texture, and depth to story of the Agoji tribe, I’m thinking the film tried to do too much. Though the trailer makes you think this is a film about fighting against race-based slavery, it’s actually more about fighting against being enslaved as a woman. Far more than it is commentary on the European slave trade — a trade that African tribes themselves participated in, something the film makes very clear — this film is about the perils and promise of womanhood and sisterhood. By failing to fully focus on that, the plot became a bit messy and laborious. 

Is it worth seeing? Yes, and you should see it in theaters. I hope this will be one of many films that sheds light on the historical complexities of a continent whose contours have been flattened and caricatured since the days of the slave trade and I especially want to salute the director Gina Prince Bythewood for tackling the slavery issue honestly, and boldly portraying West Africa’s participation in it. 

But I want to caution you, please do not be swept up by the culture wars and react to things you see online about this film, not even my commentary I’m giving you right now. Go and see it for yourself. Form your own opinion. But whatever you do, please avoid the reactionary counterdepenent takes, don’t make it so that your identity becomes dependent upon countering something you see in the media. 

That is a prison and a kind of slavery in and of itself.