I’ve recently decided to broaden my horizons slightly and move out of my comfort zone (even if, based on my diverse taste in a wide-range of genres, I don’t have a well-defined comfort zone). One of my resolutions was to explore some unheralded cinema, such as films made in Africa, which have remained shockingly under-represented in my work. One of the films I endeavored to look at to amend this is Black Girl (French: La Noire de…), the highly-influential film from Ousmane Sembène, one of the most deeply audacious African filmmakers of all time. I chose this film for a number of reasons: the first is that it has always seemed fascinating to me with its thematic content, as well as being of cultural interest, being one of the formative African films to reach a worldwide audience. More than that, it is a film that I personally feel makes many relevant statements. I have resolved to explore African cinema more imperatively now, and there are a number of themes and concepts that exist in the postcolonial literature that are heavily present in Black Girl, which serves to be a meaningful introduction to these themes. In the making of Black Girl, Sembène was not only making a profoundly layered film, but also commenting on twentieth-century postcolonialism – not only the quality of no longer being colonized, but also the opposition towards imperialism that appears bold and stark, and more than anything else, profoundly important.

Black Girl is about Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young woman from Senegal picked out by a bourgeoisie French couple (Anne-Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine), who employs her as a nanny to their three children, and plan to bring her to France eventually to work with them there. Knowing that she can pursue a better life in Europe, Diouana accepts the job and makes the arduous journey across the world, going from poverty-stricken Dakar to the luxurious French Riviera, which holds hope for the young and ambitious woman. However, she soon discovers she has been brought to work for the family under very different conditions, becoming nothing less than a slave, broken and abused by the unreasonable, harsh demands of her employers as well as the fetishization of their wealthy and ignorant friends, who see this “negress” as a novelty rather than a person, asserting their own beliefs on her, and treating her worse than she deserves. Diouana, as we soon discover may be quiet and may be uneducated, but she is cunning, willful and intelligent, and will not let these people take advantage of her. She fights back in her own small ways, and while her story does end in personal tragedy, it does make a considerably profound statement to those who directly mistreated those, as well as the entire mentality that manipulated her so viciously.

There are few performances that have lingered on in my mind quite as heavily as that of Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Black Girl. It is one of the most haunting but mesmerizing performances ever committed to screen, a profoundly moving and shockingly disturbing portrait of someone who is both a well-constructed and complex character, as well as a realistic surrogate for the people of Africa and other impoverished lands, a representation of the hopeful dreamers who move towards the wider world in an effort to improve their lives. Diop gives one of the rare performances in which the majority of meaning is conveyed non-verbally, with her expressions and gestures telling a much stronger story than words could say. Told mostly through narration, Diouana’s testimonials on her life and her position are astonishing and are undeniably indelible. Anne-Marie Jelinek is also excellent as Madame, the unnamed mistress of the protagonist who relishes in abusing and manipulating the young woman, using her as a platform upon which to express her spoiled frustrations. There are few characters as unlikable as this one, and I credit this to Jelinek’s extraordinary performance, who does a fantastic job of construction such an unlikable character.

In the early 1980s, Salman Rushdie, one of the finest postcolonial writers and thinkers, wrote an article entitled “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance”, which also became the title of a theoretical book on postcolonial ideology in literature, The Empire Writes Back. Not only is this is delightfully witty and very profound connection between postcolonial identity and the idea of mainstream culture, it speaks to a wider trend in most of the postcolonial literature, whereby these works are heavily dominated by authors “writing back” to the empire, addressing the effects of imperialism on the postcolonial psyche. The colonial age may, for the most part, be behind us, but the effects are still disturbingly resonant, which has resulted in powerful but disturbing work addressing the linger on. Ousmane Sembène was certainly an artist who was fearless in his depictions of the postcolonial experience and considering he came of age when his country was still under French rule, he had the broad insight into the colonial and postcolonial mentality that many artists do not. Senegal achieved its independence in 1960, and a mere six years later, Sembène made Black Girl, which overtly, but not directly, addresses the freshly independent nature of the country – the statement made, albeit in a very subtle manner, was that politically, the nation was free from the shackles of European rule – but they were still imprisoned by something far more malicious – stagnant mentalities, and beliefs that impinge upon them in increasingly unfortunate ways, which still persist today.

One element of the postcolonial theory that is very prevalent in Black Girl is that of otherness. There is always a strong binary structure present, and our protagonist finds herself an outsider, someone who exists as “the other” in a world of conventions and pre-ordained beliefs. She is black, while those around her are white. She is poor, while her employers are rich. She is perceived as being a savage, and her mistress feels the need to civilize her. The binary nature of colonialism is glaringly clear in this film, and otherness pervades the story, with the divide between Diouana and her employers growing deeper and more cavernous with every harmful action directed towards her. She starts to lose her identity and begins to define herself according to how others perceive her, in the hopes that embracing her status as “the other” will prevent her from going against the standards and conventions of the seemingly idyllic world she has been thrown into, filled with exclusion and the overwhelmingly arrogant beliefs that somehow, being from a more developed nation makes one an authority on what constitutes civilized, and what constitutes primitive.

Another significant theme present in Black Girl is that of the diaspora. This film is a testimony, as I said previously, to the multitudes of people who left their homelands to make better lives for themselves and their family, abandoning their culture and entering into hostile and mysterious new worlds, risking everything in the pursuit of change. Black Girl is not the archetypal “small-town girl moves to the big city to make her dreams come true and never looks back” – quite the contrary. Sembène constructs a harrowing, brutally bleak portrait of the migrant experience, with our protagonist being a lonely, solitary figure who is trapped between two worlds and cannot find any comfort. Abused, battered and broken, Diouana is a stark representation of the individuals who follow their ambitions but cannot avoid the inevitable pull of the homeland. Sembène makes sure to make Senegal appear more alluring and comforting, adjusting the score to be more upbeat, and showing that it is a country growing from its new independence, rather than just being a novelty of “the dark continent”, as the popular mentality at the time seemed to think. The effects of the migrant experience are clearly shown, and a process of transculturation is evident, where the movement of an individual between cultures creates a new hybrid of a person, someone moving towards a different future, but bound by the past. I truly believe this is why the only logical way for Black Girl to end was on the shocking note it did. Brutal and bold, the climax was singularly unnerving and utterly heart-wrenching, but it was necessary. Sembène audaciously concludes his film on a very bleak note, making the broad statement that while the past may haunt us, it is not any better on the other side. Diouana changes as a result of her experiences, and sometimes, change can result in tragedy.

Black Girl is a film that balances cinema and reality with such delicate mastery, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, resulting in an astonishing masterwork of postcolonial literature. At only 55 minutes in length, it is a short but impactful commentary on the migrant experience in a postcolonial world. Absolutely stunning, with gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and an astonishing score, Sembène makes a profoundly disturbing but beautifully complex statement about society, focusing on an ordinary, inconsequential individual, framing her as an unequivocal heroine to the crimes of ignorance and abusive elitism that persists in an age of supposed tolerance. Black Girl is a stunning film, one that moved me profoundly and left me shocked and in complete awe. A beautifully complex but astoundingly simple film, it has a deeply resonant and important message that needs to be seen and understood, not only in the context of film, but in terms of society as a whole.