黑女孩

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An Embodiment of Colonial Subject’s Regret and Shame:

The Mask in Sembene’s Black Girl (1969)

In this scene (figure 1), Diouana powerlessly pushes against the wall and looks at the mask face to face. The huge shadow that she casts on the wall is positioned in the middle of the picture and occupies a significant amount of space, generating a depressing atmosphere. Before this moment, the camera follows Diouana’s movements and presents several point-of-view shots to demonstrate what she sees; after this short lingering, Diouana walks out of the screen, while the mask stays in the center. By cleverly arranging the camera movement, the mask is emphasized and temporarily becomes the protagonist in this scene.

Figure 1, Black Girl, Diouana looks at the mask with accompanied monologue.

As a key motif of the film, the mask is the embodiment of multiple complex emotions. Diouana firstly brought the mask from a boy in Dakar as a gift to her new employers, a signal of gratefulness for hiring her when she needs a job. Then, when she the mask to the French couple’s home in Senegal, several fixed camera shots demonstrate an excessive number of African artifacts. It not only ironically implies that the French couple, who latter caused Diouana’s death, appreciates exotic arts, but also makes Diouana’s sincerity an ornament, especially when they focuses on its commodity value, saying “(it) looks like the real thing.” When Diouana works in France, the mask is placed on near the entrance of the house, both symbolically introducing her into the exploitation that she can no longer escape and guarding the door to her lost and hoping freedoms, Senegal and a fantasized France. Like the monologue of this scene says, “France for me is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and my bedroom.” Diouana’s workplace (i.e. the entire house) and Senegal’s colonizer (i.e. France) combines together, while Senegal and her shares the same fate: a silent subject, an exotic other, an inescapable labor force, and a fool.

Sembene always had a complicated feeling for his people: he bitterly regretted about the anti-Africa traditions and a prevailing worship of French life in Africa, especially himself had contributed to the colonization by shortly participated the Senegalese Tirailleurs; meanwhile, he deeply loved the continent and felt obligated to awake and enlighten his people with his films. Diouana’s monologue with this scene (figure 1) conveys the same information. In contrast to her original excitement and somewhat cocky feeling when arrived in France, she now silently scorches herself, “back in the Dakar they must be saying, Diouana is happy in France, she has a good life.” She has to check if her master has fallen asleep, even before she silently interacts with the mask, as if they have controlled her thoughts. The dark mask is conspicuously placed on the white wall, always watching her, mocking at her, humiliating her about her naïve kindness and blind faith in classy French colonizers, and haunting her about the never-return life in Dakar. This soul communication between Diouana and the mask, accompanied with her monologue, thus marks a turning point of the film, that she starts to use “laziness” as a means of rebellion and eventually committed suicide to combat the antagonism. Her body is the only thing that she can control, and she must fight back even at the price of destroying herself.