Abstract
At the end of Ousmane Sembene’s La noire de… (Black Girl, 1965), a French colonizer is pursued by an African mask. He has returned to Dakar to bring back the effects of the household maid, Douala, whom he and his wife had brought to Antibes as a nanny for the children, but who was treated essentially as a slave in their home. Although Douala, who eventually kills herself, never confronts her employers openly, she expresses her growing awareness of her hopeless situation in voice-over on the soundtrack. When she arrives, the children are away and she is ordered to cook and clean. Sembene portrays how Douala is treated like an animal, or an object, both in the way she is spoken of and the way she is peremptorily ordered about. She becomes effectively effaced—one shot shows her cleaning a mirror in which she declines to look at her own reflection. The France she can see from her window at night begins to appear to her like a black hole. Faced with the incomprehension of her employers, she takes to her bed and falls into depression. Eventually even her employers notice that she is “declining,” but make no move to talk to her as a human being; for them she is merely the instrument of their comfort.
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Notes
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. and ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2001), 35.
André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 49.
Franklin Rosement, “Notes on Surrealism as a Revolution against Whiteness,” Race Traitor 9 (Summer 1998), 25.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 132–133.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in Chris Turner, trans., Situations III (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008), 295–296.
F. Abiola Irele, The Negritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 150.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 46–47.
Ali Akikam “Où en sommes-nous?” Cahiers du Cinéma 277 (1976): 30–37.
Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina interview with Guy Allembert, “Chronique des années de braise,” La Revue du cinema 300 (1975): 24.
This is another example of surrealism, which, according to Michael Löwy, “re-enchants the world.” See Michael Löwy, L’Étoile du matin: surréalisme et marxisme (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2000), 9.
Benjamin Stora, “Hors-la-loi: enjeux secondaires et enjeux reels,” Cahiers du cinéma 660 (October 2010): 90.
Alistair Horne, “Preface to the 2006 Edition,” A Savage War of Peace (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 13–17.
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Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ibadan, Nigeria: New Horn Press, 1988).
F. Abiola Irele, “The Political Kingdom: Toward Reconstruction in Africa,” Socialism and Democracy 21, no. 3 (November 2007): 5–35.
Ousmane Sembene, Vehi-Ciosane ou Blanche-Genèse, suivi du Mandat (Vienna: Présence africaine, 1965), 16.
Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches by Amilcar Cabral, Africa Information Service, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 66–68.
Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Wood, trans. Francis Price (© 1960; Botswana: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1995), 89 (amended translation).
For a discussion of the role of women in Sembene’s other films, see Sheila Petty, “Towards a Changing Africa: Women’s Roles in the Films of Ousmane Sembene,” in Sheila Petty, ed., A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 67–86.
Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembene, trans. Moustapha Diop (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2010), 131; Sembene compares himself to a griot in his “address to the reader” on the first page of his novel L’Harmattan (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964).
See Philip Rosen, “Notes on Art Cinema and the Emergence of Sub-Saharan Film,” in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), 257
Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992).
Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), 275
See also Inez Hedges, “Signifiyin’ and Intertextuality: Killer of Sheep and Black Independent Film,” Socialism and Democracy 42 (2007): 133–143.
Julie Dash, in an interview with Zeinabu Irene Davis, Black Film Review 6, 1 (1992), 12–17.
Julia Erhart, “Picturing What If: Julie Dash’s Speculative Fiction,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 13, no. 2 (1996): 129.
In the published screenplay, Viola mentions Orisha nicknames: Shango, Obatala, Oya-yansa, Yemonja, Eshu Elegin. See Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film (New York: The New Press, 1992), 139. Dash indicates the corresponding Orisha deity for her characters with annotations throughout the screenplay (75–76, 99, and 107).
Sandra Grayson, Reading Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, & Eve’s Bayou as Histories (New York: Univ. Press of America, 2000), 43.
Charles Burnett, “Inner City Blues,” in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 224–225.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 213.
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© 2015 Inez Kathleen Hedges
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Hedges, I. (2015). Radical Memory: Négritude, Anti-colonial Struggles, and Cabral’s Return to the Source . In: World Cinema and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465122_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465122_6
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