Criticizing The Black Girl in Ousmane Sembene's Movie

The Black Girl (1966) is a film directed by Ousmane Sembène which tells the story of a young Senegalese woman, Diouana, working as a nanny for a white French family in Dakar (Langford 13). She shows satisfaction while playing with the white kids in the garden and walking around the streets with them. The French family also seems happy to be in Africa and to be surrounded by the local people. Even so, this happiness is interrupted in the aftermath of Senegalese independence when the family decides to return to France and to take the African girl along with them to act as a domestic worker for them.

As a matter of fact, their apartment in Cote d’Azur has changed since the arrival of Diouanna: therefore, she is expected to do a lot more heavy domestic chores, including cooking for the guests and other employers, and she is to remain home all day. The relationship she had with her employees was quite harmonious in Dakar, turns out to be conflictual and challenging, particularly with the French woman (Parascandola 367).

Diouana suffers from not being understood any longer by her female employer; the good times they spent together seems far gone; her identity as an African woman is repressed on daily basis and the more the employers applaud her exoticism, the more denigrated she feels. This deep alienation forces Diouana to kill herself. When the film ends, her male employer brings the body of the girl back to her village, a lifeless body that can now only testify in a painful way to the end failure of hopes of Senegal to find a better future in the former colonizers' land.

Importantly, Diouana’s heartbreaking story brings the issue of slavery for a migrant to the front, an issue discussed not only in academic environments but also in newspapers, novels, and movies. Recently, migrant women have played a role in most western middle-class households taking care of and ensuring the cleanliness of the house in a way that has raised attention, for most gender and migration scholars (Bâ, Saër Maty n.p).

The experiences that these female migrant workers undergo speaks of the issue of globalization of care whose functioning has been considered interjectionally through categories of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. But what Sembène’s tale gives us demands more. The story she tells demands more interrogation about the representations that surround domestic work experiences which descends from colonialism.

At one point in the movie, the house on French Riviera where the French family resides with their maiden is made as place where the colonial power structure is re-enacted on daily basis. Diouana, accompanied with the couple's collection of African masks, is simply another trophy of their neo-colonial conquest. Notably, Sembène used a dual-narrative structure.

All through the film, the audience is given two conflicting narratives: the family’s discussion of Africa and colonialism that often ignore and hush Diouana, and the internal monologue of Diouana. Through changing the post-colonial voices people and particularly post-colonial women, Sembène believes that the French were capable of retaining most of their colonial power. As an alternative, Sembène allowed the voice of Diouana to be heard entirely, and frame the story of a single typical French family in the context of postcolonial effort. The film gave voice to a specific subjectivity, but at the same time offered a different manner of telling stories.

Themes of alienation, disappointment, and displacement in post-independence Senegal recur in Sembene's film, often with a specific politically tough humanism. In the film Diouana's status is relatively uncertain in traditional society, and yet she is set up for both a greater expectation and a greater disappointment. In the line where Diouana declares that "Never ever will I be anybody's slave again,"at that moment she understands herself as a slave and not an employee; that is, she understands herself to be fundamental without the right to control her labor in any meaningful sense.

The white French couple, however, is shown as unmoored, bereft of the traditions which had initially given meaning to their lives. Even though Madame has power in Dakar, and can have her choose her maidens from women who go on daily basis and wait to be chosen, in France, she seem bored, ill-equipped for or not interested in caring for her own children, concerned about her status and her husband who, like Diouana, is almost certainly mute.

Colonialism, the root of their initial power, is gone, leaving in its wake turmoil and uncertainty. They cannot comprehend the reason behind Diouana's unhappiness, the reason she wishes for death. They do not understand why she would take back the mask she first gave Madame as a token of friendship, despite the fact that they already have several masks, or why she would deny payment. The cinema at this point is geared onto catching a historical shift in progress. Although the film can be read in terms of native-foreigner, colonizer-colonized, traditional-modern contexts, doing so misses the way his films implicates each pole in the other and displays people struggling to anchor their traditions as well as their hopes in a world that has little place for them.

Nevertheless, native-foreigner repressing relationship is almost impossible to ignore in the film. Figures such as the one of Diouana stand as the pioneer protagonist native-foreigner relationship. The story draws attention to the roots of native-foreigner employment in western households, which requires us to explore the origins of its ways of representation and functioning. The film leads in exploring the role of colonialism in shaping the contemporary forms of foreigner domestic work.

In other words, it draws the importance of looking back for purposes of understanding what is going on. As such, noting that domestic work is seen as different from other jobs in consideration of the character of its performance should be a strong gendered construction, and the uniqueness of the relationship of the employer and employee should not be ignored.

Diouana’s silence in Black Girl is beyond a language barrier that results from exile. In the film, female muteness functions semiotically, it forms a case, one scene after the other, against gender exploitation in a postcolonial context proving merely as a variant on colonial power relations. To the point that the other characters notice that she does not speak, they attribute her silence to a poor grasp of French and not the refusal to speak. Using a flat black and white film stock, plain photography, slow-paced editing, and a plot drained of action, the film makes no concession to its audience.

The film angrily connects to its audiences in Diouana's suffering. Such recasting of women's silence and voices as the site of political struggle are not often seen in a feature-length narrative. While her silence increasingly gives her power, her inability to communicate through her own voice is disabling. Diouana receives a letter from her mother in the course of the film, chastising her for not sending money back home.

Unable to read it, Monsieur reads it for her, then offers to respond. When she does not provide words for the letter, he writes it himself, telling her to stop him if he says anything false. She decides to tear in pieces the letter from her mother, undoubtedly written by someone else on her behalf, and parts of the room.

Earlier on when Diouana is seen mopping while putting on heels and earrings underscore the contrast between what she believed she had come to French for –attending the family's children and exploring France as a modern place of various possibilities, and her role on arrival: a maid or as she later understands for herself, a paid salve (Bradbury 11). While she longs for status items like shoes, pretty dresses, and pretty wigs that she imagines will make her friends, relatives and acquaintances back in Dakar jealous, it starts to dawn on her that she is a status symbol for her white patrons: a sign that clearly states their sojourn in Senegal and a reminder of the recent colonial past, who shows her off to guests and insists that she coos ‘native' Senegalese food for them.

At one point during lunch hours, she is humiliated when one of their guests forces her to kiss him for her first time because he had never before kissed a black woman. When she visibly shows her upset nature, they complain that independence has made Africans less natural. The frustration she perseveres builds through her time in France until she denies work or food, eventually taking her own life, pledging never to be a salve again.

Based on the tone of the story, her suicide is recounted in the newspaper's faith divers – a section that is kept aside for briefing sensational or lurid stories assumed to be of no consequence. Monsieur returns her effects to her mother who, like Diouana, refuses to take the money. One of the themes that stands out in the film is distant tone. The story is told in a wry, objective, journalistic prose style, adopting a grave and a more subjective perspective.

At this moment, the movie presents the audience with a steady stream of various close-ups, monologues, and the expressive gestures and face of Diouana. The expressive but of Diouana to the white French family, her intractable face and the motives she has makes the analog to the indigenous mask she initially gave to Madame.

In the ending scenes in Dakar, after failing to resolve things with the family of Diouana, Monsieur finds himself the object and not the subject that is being looked at. The whole town looks at him with open contempt after learning his identity. Apparently, the boy wearing the mask holds the mask over his own and follows Monsieur to the edge of the town. Although Monsieur's spell, is broken, like the allure France had held for Diouana, there is still power in that mask, in the presentation of Africa, in the present.

Beyond this, it makes the Africans alone subjects and not passive objects of looking from a viewer standpoint (Davis n.p). Monsieur cannot know what has been said of him, if anything and an ironic twist that can only refer to him by a formal title objectifies him, denying him backstory and imaginable future while the people of Dakar, especially the boy with the mask who looks off is the last image in the film, is one whose future audience are invested in. He is free and independent from France.

While Diouana is not shown as a politically aware person, she is very much informed that the end of colonialism has not had many changes in terms of the attitude of the French from her experience. Her sound when she makes comments shows her resentment at being considered and treated as a slave. Her sense of lack of freedom leaves her without any apparent choice. Unable to take it anymore, she removes the mask she has been putting on, carefully packs her suitcase, and commits suicide by cutting her wrist in the bath tub. While Diouana’s story is moving and can lead to understanding of the relation of politics in Senegal, these problems are examined more deeply in the films where Sembene's female characters express their views in an active manner and in a language of their own.

Sembene's films are normally held as a model for African filmmaking, with roots in early traditions of various world cinemas, but also in the postcolonial examination of identity and racism after the end of French rule (Fernández 317). The post-colonial era precipitated an intense scrutiny of issues of debate and power relations in film and theatre. These concerns remain of major significance in analyzing transitional cinemas, which continues to engage with ways in which power imbalances are negotiated and constructed with stories of people crossing borders.

The idea of postcoloniality gives an essential space of elaborating in the attempt to show the existence of colonial legacies in a globalized form of commodification of women's labor and in the symbols and values that accompany them. The notion of continuity between the time before and after colonization and globalization is present in the film.

In almost an apparent manner, the film shows the continued privilege of colonial Europeans in the post-colonial era, but at the same time residual self-Europeanising of the subjects after the end of the colonial rule, retaining the Frenchness and the symbol of France as a kind of promised land, elegant and prosperous.

The film could teach audiences about the damaging effects of colonialism and also demonstrate to Africans strategies of political resistance against imperialism. Black Girl can be viewed as a pedagogical engine through which films teach about the profoundly debasing effects of colonial service accompanied by enforced isolation from one's own country, culture, and language.