Black Girl Reviews

(MU) Touching, ironic, tragic in the end, poetic in the narration in off, maybe too hard on the french woman (the man is 'pardoned') personalizing her injustice instead of depicting a general problem of identity...

Ousmane Sembène’s first feature film is a searing indictment of the stain of colonialism, of how it continues to infect us in ways both crystal clear and subterranean. Black Girl is a brief but powerful debut feature film, and a modern classic worth discovering.

 

Sembène’s political fury is Spartan here. It manifests an entire country’s identity crisis in a singular story and positions the promises of Western comforts and lifestyle as unattainable by those that do not conform to the easily identifiable conventions. The tale concerns Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young Senegalese woman who finds a job with a white family as a nanny in Dakar before finding herself working as a de facto slave for them on the French Riviera. Diouana finds herself increasingly isolated, frustrated, and depressed, and through flashbacks we glimpse her initial enthusiasm that intercut numerous scenes of her alienation and entrapment.

 

Technically, she is a free woman, but her illiteracy and constant barrage of personal attacks and chores keep her locked into one tiny space, all at once emotionally, politically, and physically. She longs for glamor and the unintentional promises made, but quickly becomes disillusioned and unbalanced by her actual lived-in experience. Her subjugation to this family becomes total, and the worst of it is when she’s treated as a passive object by a group of their friends which includes a kiss from a lecherous old man that’s waved away as him just making a joke. Diouana tries to rebel as best she can, but the limited options available to her make her rebellion limp.

 

It isn’t that Black Girl is heavy on symbolism, but rather that is quite literally watches as the casual racism and disorientation of post-colonialism drain the life out of this woman. She becomes a fixture and not a person as time goes by, and her final rages have the air of a forgone tragic conclusion. The only major symbol here is an African mask that comes to represent everything to Diouana during the final moments, and then her haunted spirit chasing down the white man she worked for as he tries to throw around money at the problems he’s played a passive role in causing.

 

Sembène’s argument here appears to be that history is strangling all of these characters equally but in different ways. It is the ultimate tragedy of Black Girl that no one is able to escape the caste system where certain expectations are met (the wife’s constant outrage feels like a byproduct of France’s casual exploitation of African labor), certain promises are made regardless of any intention to keep them, and the whole system becomes a self-sustaining machine.