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 French family white in Dakar (Langford 13). She shows her satisfaction by playing with the white children in the garden and walking through the streets with them. The French family also seems happy to be in Africa and to be surrounded by the local population. But this happiness is interrupted the day after Senegalese independence when the family decides to return to France and take the young African with them to serve as their servant. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay Indeed, their apartment on the French Riviera has changed since Diouanna's arrival: she is therefore expected to She does a lot more heavy household chores, including cooking for guests and other employers, and she has to stay home all day. The relationship she had with her employees, quite harmonious in Dakar, turned out to be conflictual and difficult, particularly with the Frenchwoman (Parascandola 367). Diouana suffers from no longer being understood by her employer; the good times they spent together seem to be over; her identity as an African woman is repressed on a daily basis and the more employers applaud her exoticism, the more she feels denigrated. This deep alienation pushes Diouana to suicide. At the end of the film, her male employer brings the young girl's body back to her village, a lifeless body which can only bear painful witness to the final failure of Senegal's hopes of finding a better future on the land. former colonizers. Importantly, Diouana's heartbreaking story brings to the forefront the issue of migrant slavery, an issue discussed not only in academia but also in newspapers, novels and films. Recently, migrant women have played a role in most Western middle-class households, caring for and keeping the house clean in a way that has attracted the attention of most gender and gender scholars. migration (Bâ, Saër Maty np). that these female migrant workers endure speaks to the issue of globalization of care, the functioning of which has been considered interjectively across categories of age, gender, race, ethnicity and class. But what Sembène’s story gives us requires more. The story she tells demands further interrogation of the representations surrounding experiences of domestic work that descend from colonialism. At one point in the film, the house on the French Riviera where the French family resides with their young daughter is presented as the place where the colonial power structure is implanted. replenished daily. Diouana, accompanied by the couple's collection of African masks, is just one more trophy of their neocolonial conquest. Sembène notably used a double narrative structure. Throughout the film, the audience is presented with two contradictory narratives: the family's discussion of Africa and colonialism which often ignores and silences Diouana, and Diouana's internal monologue. By changing the voices of postcolonial people and particularly postcolonial women, Sembène believes that the French were able to retain most of their colonial power. As an alternative, Sembène allowed Diouana's voice to fully express itself and frame the story of a single, typical French family within the context of the postcolonial effort. The film gives voice to a specific subjectivity, but at the same time offers a different way oftell stories. Themes of alienation, disappointment, and displacement in post-independence Senegal recur in Sembene's film, often with a specific politically harsh humanism. In the film, Diouana's status is relatively uncertain in mainstream society, and yet she faces both greater expectations and greater disappointment. In the verse where Diouana declares that "Never ever" will I be someone's slave again", at that moment she understands herself as a slave and not as an employee; that is, she sees herself as fundamental without the right to control her work in any meaningful way. The white French couple, however, are shown unmoored, lacking the traditions that had initially given meaning to their lives. Even if Madame has the power in Dakar and can make her choose her young daughters among the women who go there daily and wait to be chosen, in France, she. seem bored, ill-equipped or uninterested in caring for their own children, preoccupied with their status and with their husband who, like Diouana, is almost certainly mute. Colonialism, the root of their initial power, has disappeared, leaving turmoil and uncertainty in its wake. They do not understand the reason for Diouana's misfortune, the reason why she wishes to die. They don't understand why she would take back the mask that she first offered to Madame as a token of friendship, when they already have several masks. , or why she would refuse payment. Cinema, at this point, strives to capture an ongoing historical change. While the film can be read in terms of indigenous-foreign, colonized-colonized, traditional-modern contexts, this misses the way his films implicate each pole within the other and show people struggling to anchor their traditions as well as their hopes in a world that has little room for them. Nonetheless, the repressive relationship between natives and foreigners is almost impossible to ignore in the film. Characters like that of Diouana present themselves as the pioneering protagonist of the native-foreigner relationship. The story draws attention to the roots of native-foreign employment in Western households, forcing us to explore the origins of its modes of representation and operation. The film explores the role of colonialism in shaping contemporary forms of foreign domestic work. In other words, it highlights the importance of looking back to understand what is happening. Thus, finding that domestic work is considered different from other jobs in consideration of the nature of its performance should be a strong gendered construct, and the uniqueness of the relationship between employer and employee should not be ignored. Diouana's silence in Black Girl is beyond the language barrier that results from exile. In the film, female muteness functions semiotically; it constitutes, scene after scene, an argument against the exploitation of gender in a postcolonial context, revealing itself to be only a variant of colonial power relations. To the point that the other characters notice that she is not speaking, they attribute her silence to a poor command of French and not to a refusal to speak. Using flat black and white film, simple cinematography, slow-paced editing and a plot stripped of action, the film makes no concessions to its audience. The film angrily connects with its audience in Diouana's suffering. Such a transformation of silence and women's voices as a site of political struggle is not common in a narrative feature film. If his silence gives him more and more power, his inability to communicate through his own voice isdisabling. During the film, Diouana receives a letter from her mother reprimanding her for not having sent money home. Unable to read it, Monsieur reads it to him, then offers to answer it. When she fails to provide words for the letter, he writes it himself, telling her to stop him if he says anything false. She decides to tear up her mother's letter, probably written by someone else on her behalf, and parts of the play. Earlier, when Diouana is seen cleaning while putting on heels and earrings, this highlights the contrast between what she thought was coming. to French for – caring for the family's children and exploring France as a modern place with diverse possibilities, and her role upon arrival: a maid or, as she later understands, a paid ointment (Bradbury 11). While she yearns for status items like shoes, pretty dresses, and pretty wigs that she believes will make her friends, relatives, and acquaintances in Dakar jealous, she begins to understand that she is a status symbol to her white guests: a sign that clearly tells of their stay in Senegal and a reminder of the recent colonial past, that shows her to guests and insists that she prepare “native” Senegalese food for them. At one point during lunch time, she is humiliated when one of their guests forces her to kiss him for the first time because he had never kissed a black woman before. When she visibly shows her upset character, they complain that independence has made Africans less natural. The frustration she perseveres builds throughout her stay in France until she refuses to work or eat, eventually committing suicide, vowing never to be a balm again. In keeping with the tone of the story, his suicide is recounted in the Faith Miscellaneous newspaper - a section which is reserved for reporting sensational or sinister stories supposedly of no consequence. Monsieur returns his belongings to his mother who, like Diouana, refuses to take the money. One of the themes that emerges from the film is the distant tone. The story is told in an ironic and objective journalistic style, adopting a serious and more subjective perspective. At this point, the film presents the audience with a constant stream of close-ups, monologues, gestures and expressive faces. from Diouana. Diouana's expressive purpose towards the white French family, her intractable face and the motivations she has are analogous to the native mask she initially gave to Madame. In the final scenes in Dakar, after failing to resolve the problems with Diouana's family, Monsieur finds himself the object and not the subject being viewed. The entire town looks at him with open contempt after learning his identity. Apparently, the boy wearing the mask holds the mask over his and follows Mister to the outskirts of town. Even if Monsieur's charm is broken, like the attraction that France had on Diouana, there is still power in this mask, in the presentation of Africa, in the present. Beyond that, it makes Africans alone subjects and not passive objects of the gaze. from the viewer's point of view (Davis np). Monsieur cannot know what was said about him, if something and an ironic turn of phrase which can only designate him by a formal title objectifies him, denying him a history and an imaginable future while the people of Dakar, in particular the boy in mask looking away is the last image of the film, it is an image in which the future audience is invested. He is free and independent of France. Even though Diouana is not presented as a politically conscious person, she is very aware of the fact that the end of colonialism did not have many consequences. changes in terms of French attitudes..