Rupture and Resistance: An Analysis of Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de...
By Zoë Hopkins
In less than an hour, Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 film La Noire de…. (Black Girl) excavates an ontology of Black female resistance that is at once deeply nihilistic and powerfully sympathetic. The film tells the story of a young woman named Diouana who is from Dakar, Senegal. Diouana works as a caretaker for the children of a wealthy white family that lives in Dakar for part of the year, upholding the presence of French colonialism in a post-independence Senegal. Most of the film takes place in Antibes, France, where Diouana has moved to continue working for her employers. But the film is marked by Diouana’s mental flashbacks to her time in Senegal, each of which invites the audience into her interior. In telling a transnational story that oscillates between memories of Diouana’s home and the reality of her situation in Antibes, the film potently pulls back the layers of neocolonialism, slavery, and the grip of death these two forces hold on Black people across the diaspora.
La Noire de... opens with Diouana arrival in Antibes. This is the film’s only scene in which imagery is captured in color. As one of her employers drives Diouana to their home from the port at which arrived, sappy, romantic music interacts with idyllic scenes of the French coastline. Close ups of Diouana’s face manifest her joy and excitement at the new life she will be leading in an ostensibly beautiful place. But after only a few minutes into her life in Antibes, this colorful realm of hope and possibility quickly turns to black and white--literally and metaphorically. Diouana soon arrives at the understanding that for her, Antibes will not be a site of pleasure, freedom, or colorful glistening water. Rather, she is enslaved to a life of cooking, cleaning, and confinement within the house that everyday undercuts her sense of personhood. Diouana begins to refuse to do work, and even refuses pay from her employers. Roughly 45 minutes into the film, Diouana packs up her belongings as if she is going to run away, but instead takes her own life.
The film’s approach to uncovering the deep cuts of racial capitalism reveal a deeply existential response to trauma--one that also rings bells of striking similarity to the experiences of Black people enslaved in the Americas. Diouana’s repeated assertion that she exists in Antibes as a slave is a striking remark on the predicament of blackness as it relates to racial capitalism. Blackness in the world of the colonizer and the enslaver is shaped by estrangement, by a forced distance from heritage. Importantly, the film was set in the period after Senegal liberated itself from France. But of course, as Diouana’s story testified, this independence is only nominal. The perpetuity of colonialism beyond its de jure grave manifest in de facto slavery. This also works to disrupt our understanding of enslavement as isolated, a phenomenon whose violences were not experienced in Europe. Diouana’s departure from Africa is not entirely dissimilar from the displacement of enslaved Africans from their homelands--a displacement that was marked with death and suicide along the Atlantic Ocean. This parallel is particularly striking given the centrality of water in the film’s opening scene--waters which initially hide from Diouana the hellish reality which she is about to enter. Thus, the film builds a diasporic understanding, one that reaches through several echelons both of space and time, between enslaved African people in the Americas and those still enslaved by neocolonialism.
Diouana’s suicide locates disillusionment as decolonization as death. Diouana arrives in France under the trance of a colonial mythology of hierarchy of space: the understanding that what is North is superior to what is South. When the veil is lifted and Diouana realizes the misery of her enslaved existence, death is the only option for her. While Rachel Langford reads Diouana’s suicide as an a “struggle for African agency,” (Rachel Langford, Black and White in Black and White, p. 19), it is also an escape from enslavement that bares haunting resemblance to the littany of suicides along the Trans-Atlantic slave routes. On many levels, Diouana’s death is an act of resistance and rebellion. In taking her own life, she makes herself unusable to the white neocolonialists who seek to exploit her and her labor. In defiance of the neocolonial structures that chip away at her freedom and agency, Diouana makes the most absolute claim to her agency and livelihood that cannot be reversed. In so doing, she also leaves her employers with the guilt of blood on their hands that they cannot wash off. However, while Diouana’s suicide is an act of “ipséite,” or a claiming of the self (Langford, p. 14), it is one imposed on her by conditions of enslavement, the ultimate antithesis of agency because it that denies its subjects self ownership. Thus, the film drive us to an understanding of the entangled historical violences of colonialism and slavery--systems of domination that have built the foundation of racial capitalism.
Diouana’s suicide is also necessarily gendered. Sembene does not overlook the importance of the female body--particularly the Black female body--as a site of trauma and resistance. Of course, Diouana’s gender is critical to the way she experiences neocolonialism and enslavement: domestic labor, particularly childcare, is a yoke that Black women have burdened with for centuries. Additionally, it is her white female employer, rather than her husband, who exhibits the most violent behavior towards Diouana, constantly yelling at her and hitting her. Diouana’s submission is marked by her verbally repeating “Oui madame,” until at the end of the film, before killing herself, Diouana declares in a voiceover “Non plus ‘Oui Madame’!” When the camera cuts to bleeding, naked black body lying in the white bathtub, it is calling specifically to the experience of neocolonial violence as one that is explicitly physical and material, explicitly gendered. The intermingling of blood and nudity, the body’s greatest vulnerabilities, is a shocking one.
An understanding of Diouana’s liberation through death can also be accessed through a Fanonian analysis of anticolonial struggles. In his seminal work Wretched of the Earth, Fanon posits the following dialectic of decolonization: initially, under colonization, those in a colonized nation will assimilate to its structures and alienate themselves from their precolonial cultures (Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence:” Wretched of the Earth). Following a period of consciousness raising, they will begin to long for a reclamation of their selfhood and subjectivity as it is tied to their culture. And finally, a revolution--necessarily a violent one based in a longing to fight for one’s culture--will lead to said reclamation of culture.
The first piece of this dialectic is evident in Diouana’s initial excitement to go to France. In fact, after the family she works for asks her to move to Antibes, she dances on a monument to a liberated Senegal in Dakar’s Place de Independence. The irony here is ripe: Diouana is so blindly eager to move to the colonial metropol that she expresses so at a site that is meant to commemorate freedom from this very same metropol. The second phase of this dialectic becomes relevant when Diouana realizes her situation. This part of the film is marked by her reminiscence of Senegal and the life she had there, which is embodied in a Senegalese mask that she gave to her employers as a gift and hangs in their living room for most of the film. Diouana regularly gazes at the mask as a site of memorial until she finally takes it off their wall at the end of the film, even fighting with her mistress to reclaim the mask as her own. This fight delineates the beginning of the final phase of the dialectic: decolonial revolution, which culminates in Diouana’s decision to violently end her own life as an act of resistance.
Diouana’s life is one of various violences, constant rupture. Rupture from her homeland, from her free personhood, and finally from her own body and the physical world. While Sembene’s Afro-pessimism is unsettling, it is also part of diasporic consciousness. We must contend with death as rebellion and rebellion as necessity and thus--what it means when liberating the self means leaving the self.
Works cited
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Langford, Rachel. “Black and White in Black and White.” Studies in French Cinema, Routeledge, 2001.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1968.