Poco response 1

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Joshua Jackson
African Diaspora via Lens and Word Response Paper #1
For Black Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When Neocolonialism is Enough: Gender and Empowerment in African Cinema
In Ntozake Shange's groundbreaking "choreopoem" for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, she gives voice and vision to the experiences of black women in America. By combining movement, music, and poetry, she stages their frustrations, joys, and pains while simultaneously innovating Western dramaturgical form. Similarly, Francophone and Lusophone African filmmakers revise the rules of cinematic convention and present nuanced and complicated black women at the center of their narratives on the screen (as well as the page). Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood and La Noire de…(Black Girl), Djibril Diop's La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil, and Flora Gomez's Mortu Nega all show flawed yet resilient women who act as central agents of social change in the fight to eradicate neo-colonialism in their respective African communities.
Sembene's God's Bits of Wood as a Proto-Feminist African Novel
There are many novels in the American canon of literature that are often defined as proto-feminist works of art. Whether they address women's oppression head on or cast strong women as their protagonist, novels like Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God display the range of emotions and possibilities for women living in repressive circumstances. Both of these novels happened to have been written by women and present patriarchy as the major barrier to women's liberation and sense of wholeness. It is only in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter that we find what might be considered a "male feminist" approach to literary art-making in its indictment of Puritanical social mores about gender and sex. Other examples of such an approach are far, few, and in between. The African canon of literature, however, couldn't be more diametrically opposed to the Western canon in its openness to see women as not only equals to men but as active participants in the overthrow of colonial rule and subjugation. One such novel is Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood. Sembene's magnum opus documents the events surrounding a railroad strike in 1940s Senegal. The novel also exemplifies Sembene's belief that if African women were not free within African society, Africa itself could not be free from colonial oppression. His ethos echoes that of the Combahee River Collective. A group of radical black feminist lesbians who organized from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, they believed that "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression" (Combahee River Collective 369). Named after the military raid led by Harriet Tubman that helped to free more than 750 slaves, the collective laid the foundation for modern black feminist thought in the United States. Across the Atlantic, Sembene was invoking similar ideologies in his creative work.
Just as women were taking over factory jobs in the U.S. when men were called on to fight overseas in World War II, the women in God's Bits of Wood take on more social responsibilities out of necessity: "And the men began to understand that if the times were bringing on a new breed of men, they were also bringing forth a new breed of women" (Sembene 34). Senegalese women took over the markets while still maintaining the home as the Senegalese men worked at the factory jobs provided for them by the railroad. The role of these women typifies Toni Morrison's sentiments in a 1981 interview in Essence magazine in which she says that black women have always been both "the ship" and the "safe harbor" in their communities. She goes on to say that black women have always been people "who could build a house and have some children and there was no problem" (O' Reilly 20). Black mothering has historically been seen as pathological. From Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on the state of the black family to the pervasive welfare queen stereotype, black have been seen either as unfit mothers or castrating matriarchs. Sembene, however, portrays a progressive view of black womanhood in general and black motherhood in particular. Not only are his female characters strong and resilient in their public lives, their private spheres of home and family are not neglected. This view of womanhood is not only progressive but uniquely African. A nuclear family need not be present for African people to thrive. The matrifocality of traditional African society shines through in spite of the European patriarchal indoctrination of colonialism that might impede upon such an African rooted belief system.
To be nurturing and to be anarchic are not dissonant personality traits in the women of God's Bits of Wood. Two characters who best display "the ship" and "the safe harbor" are Penda and Maimouna, the blind woman. Penda is the outlaw figure. She is the transgressive woman warrior who dares to defy the social scripts reinforced by patriarchy:
She kept the women in line, and she forced even the men to respect her. She came to the union office frequently to help with the work, and one day, when one of the workmen had stupidly patted her on the behind, she gave him a resounding smack. A woman slapping a man in public was something no one had ever seen before. (Sembene 143)
Penda's assertiveness and tenacity cannot be squelched by male authority. She is also the one who leads all of the women to march from Thies to Dakar and it is because of them that the French concede to the strikers. Had the women not proven their strength, the French would have continued to think of them as "concubines." Penda captains her "ship" to shore safely where Maimouna waits at the "harbor" to nurture the next generation of Africans.
The fact that Penda is a barren woman may give her more freedom to lead and be as tenacious as she is. But, as discussed earlier, motherhood in the private sphere and the ability to be a powerful force in the public sphere are not at odds with one another. No woman lives out this principle more than Maimouna, the blind woman. She, in many ways, embodies the ideology of "Mother Africa." Scientists have proven that the origin of humanity can be traced back to one black African woman. Not only are black diasporic women mothers of the race, they are leaders of the tribe as well. Their mothering is revolutionary in that it is an instruction guide for the progeny in hopes they will have a better life:
She still had milk and had begun to nurse the baby called Strike. 'I am nourishing one of the great trees of tomorrow,' she told herself. At night she liked to sit in the courtyard, surrounded by the children, singing one of her old songs to them or telling them the story of the girl and the curious little man who had lost their lives on the road at the entrance to the city. (Sembene 221)
One of the main motivations for colonizing Africa was the reaping of Africa's natural resources. Maimouna's act of giving milk to Strike is symbolic and radical. Black mothering in itself is radical. By giving Strike her "natural resources," her radical mothering breathes new life into the movement. Children are the symbol of hope for a more prosperous tomorrow in many African films and novels. They personify the seeds of change that can only be watered by the matriarchs of the community in order for a post-colonial future to blossom.
Maimouna can also be interpreted as a griot, or djeli. Like the singing poets of traditional West African society, she is a keeper of the sacred, tradition, and memory as well as a guiding force in the lives of the youth. She is the Mother Spirit whose blindness juxtaposes the fact that she sees beyond the veil of the dismal present into the luminous tomorrow.
Singing a Black Girl's Song
Sembene's fiction is not the only place where he places complicated women at the center of his narrative. The fact that he chooses to make a black woman's story the focus of the first major African film is testament to the fact that Sembene is committed to the uplift of Mother Africa's daughters and that he sees race struggle, class struggle, and women's struggle as all interlocking systems of oppression.
La Noire de… (Black Girl) follows the story of Diouana, a Senegalese woman who leaves Dakar to work as a nanny for a wealthy French couple. The title of the film implies that Diouana could be any black girl from any place and makes her a representative of black women worldwide under a neo-colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal gaze. Ntozake Shange makes a similar statement in for colored girls… by naming each character after the color of clothes they wear (i.e. lady in red, lady in blue, etc.) Sembene uses the cinematic technique of Italian neo-realism infused with traditional African griot storytelling to show the iniquities of neo-colonialism in general and black working-class women's struggle in particular. Diouana's employment situation mirrors that of many U.S. black women domestic workers. Diouana becomes relegated to the role of "Mammy," the self-sacrificing servant of whites. Diouana, however, quietly rebels by refusing to speak to her neo-colonial oppressors. As audience members, we are only privy to Diouana's thoughts through voice-over. Sembene gives voice to the voiceless and nameless black women of Africa and its Diaspora just as Shange implores audience members and readers of for colored girls… to "sing a black girl's song" because she's been "closed in silence so long/she doesn't know the sound/of her own voice" (Shange 4). A sense of displacement and recreating the fragmented self pervades many black diasporic women's narratives. Sembene inserts this theme in La Noire de… though it is only in death that Diouana is completely freed from neo-colonial captivity.
It may seem that because Diouana never speaks up to Madame or Monsieur that she never reclaims her voice. Madame is the cruelest to Diouna and takes on the role of the plantation mistress. It is through the interactions between Diouana and Madame that Sembene exemplifies the racial differences between black and white women. In Toni Morrison's essay, "What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib," Morrison comes to the conclusion that the starkest contrast between black women and white women is that white women have historically occupied a privileged space of "ladyhood" while black women were merely biological creatures who reproduced (which is the definition of womanhood under patriarchy). Not only are the privileges extended to white women not existed to black women, heterosexual white women have been able to marry into white patriarchy and be co-conspirators with white men in black oppression.
In "Female domestic labor and Third World politics in La Noire de…," Lieve Spass states that "In France, the white woman is depicted as the manifest oppressor, openly hostile and overtly disrespectful." Monsieur is much milder in his dealings with Diouana. He does not take on the role of white male exploiter of exoticized black female bodies. His houseguest, however, hypersexualizes Diouana by kissing her on the cheek and exclaiming that he had "never kissed a black woman before." This act of corporeal invasion cages her gender into a space of the exotic. Throughout the course of the film, Diouana begins to slowly unravel. She becomes more and more disillusioned with her life in France. The penultimate scene in the film is when Diouana commits suicide in the bathtub. Her speechlessness and lack of voice throughout the film becomes exacerbated when she is unable to communicate with her mother after receiving a letter from her. Monsieur ends up writing the letter back to Diouana's mother and speaks on Diouana's behalf. He colonizes her voice and misrepresents her actually lived experience in France. Diouana's illiteracy and not having access to language to tell her own story leads her to do the only thing she feels she can do to be free from neo-colonial oppression: she takes her own life.
Diouana's suicide represents her movement from submission to rebellion. It is a victory and not a defeat. In an African cosmological framework, her spirit lives on. Diouana's rejection of Monsieur's money early on in the film mirrors her mother's rejection of Monsieur's money later on in the film. They are both rejecting white, Western values. A white, European value system privileges the material (i.e. currency) over the spiritual. Diouana's mother knows that her daughter's life is priceless. A traditional African way of looking at the world sanctions a balance between the material and the spiritual. This is evidenced by the presence of the mask throughout the film. The boy taking back the mask from Monsieur is reminiscent of Diouana's earlier struggle with Madame over the mask. Both of these acts symbolize a reclaiming of African values and beliefs. Diouana is able to be her own hero and save herself. Many enslaved African women in the U.S. and Jewish women in the Holocaust killed their infants; they strongly believed that the souls of their children would ascend to heaven and escape the hell they endured on earth. Sadly, Diouana's salvation is also in her suicide. But not all female protagonists in African cinema end their lives to be free. The fierce heroines in Djibril Diop's La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil and Flora Gomez's Mortu Nega prove salvation can come in the land of the living.
Sistas of the Yam: African Women's Authority and Authorship in African Cinema
"She had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may have well have invented herself."-Sula, Toni Morrison
When Toni Morrison published her second novel, Sula, in 1973, she proclaimed that the titular character represented the "new world black woman." In the wake of the Civil Rights and Women's Movements, this new age black woman was one who eschewed restrictive notions of traditional femininity. She behaves, as Morrison has said in interviews, "like a man." Conversely, her best friend (and later her worst enemy) Nel is loyal to her community and chooses to settle down, marry, and have children. Sula is the embodiment of the "ship" and Nel is "safe harbor." It would seem that African women would have fewer choices than black American women, but the female protagonists in African cinema reject a gendered binary way of thinking and make themselves whole by self-invention while concurrently positioning themselves as heralds in their respective communities.
Black women and girls have been historically gendered differently from white women and girls. While white femininity has been held up as ideal, black women and girls have occupied an almost androgynous space that is in opposition to the fragility of white womanhood/girlhood. Black women occupy a third space of gender outside of Western notions of gendered behavior and they collapse the male/female binary. Sili and Diminga are leaders and power players. Unlike the Western film industry that positions white men as the leaders and heroes of Western narratives, these "new world black women" emerge as the authors of their own stories and lives.
La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil and Mortu Nega are two more examples of African male filmmakers giving voice to female characters who are irrepressible despite being emotionally wounded. Their emotional scars, however, do not prevent them from self-creation. Where Diouana authors herself into being by taking her own life, Sili and Diminga author themselves into being by assuming roles of authority in their communities. In La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil, Diop gives us a portrayal of black girlhood in Senegal as he uses soundscapes, gesture as a counterpoint to the dialogue, and arresting visual imagery to tell the story of Sili as she dares to challenge patriarchal notions of a girl's place in the world. Although she is crippled, Sili insists on selling newspapers in the male-dominated world of street vendors. Diop dedicated his film to "the courage of street children," but he chooses to make his child protagonist female and afflicted with polio. This is a significant casting choice and reemphasizes Sembene's ideology that Mother Africa could not be freed from her chains if her daughters remained in bondage. Sili is an unlikely heroine and as a poor disabled black girl in Senegal, she occupies a space at the very bottom of the social totem pole. Having limited mobility does not stop Sili from pursuing economic independence. She not only challenges restrictive gender roles, she defies society's expectations of what a child can do in a world of limited possibilities and hopelessness.
Sili's determination is not limited to her own gain. In Western society, the individual is exalted. In African society, the tribe is the main concern. By helping the so-called "crazy woman" who talks to herself get out of jail, Sili shows solidarity and sisterhood for a fellow daughter of Africa. The woman being behind bars is metaphoric for the way black womanhood is seen in the "new world." Black womanhood is seen as something to be locked up and punished by the system. Black women are seen as invaluable, malignant and distrustful. By liberating the woman from her "shackles," Sili shows her commitment to freeing all women and girls, not just herself. Diminga is similar to Sili in her determinism to free her whole community.
In Mortu Nega, Flora Gomes fuses ritual, African myth, and history to document the effects of the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence. Like his fellow African filmmaking brethren, Gomes positions a woman as the protagonist of his narrative. Diminga not only assists the soldiers in transporting supplies during the war, she has to care for her husband when he becomes sick after the war has ended. Diminga shares traits with Sili, Diouana, and Penda in her willfulness but where she differs is in her ability to assume spiritual authority in her community. The very important role that African spirituality plays in this film is evident as it culminates in a ritual "rain dance" that ends the drought Guinea-Bissau had been experiencing since the end of the war. The women are the center of this ceremony and their chanting and dancing commands the rainfall. Much like the diviners and healers of African traditional religions, the women become the spokespeople for the community in appeasing the ancestors and the spirits so that they allow rain to replenish and ressurrect the war-torn country. This act reflects the cosmology and belief system of most African indigenous spiritual traditions that place women at the center and privilege their closeness to nature and power to make things happen. There are many names for these women throughout the African Diaspora: conjure women in Afro-American lore, obeah women in Afro-Caribbean mythos, mama ngangas in the Kongo belief system. But what remains consistent is the idea of nature and female not being separate. Just as Maimouna's act of giving milk to Strike was a radical act of rejuvenation, the children dancing in the rain and rejoicing that the drought is over represents Mother Africa taking back its pillaged natural resources and giving them to the next generation so that there might be hope for the future.
Decades before Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" to describe the ways that racism and sexism overlapped in the legal arena, Anna Julia Cooper declared that black women occupied a very unique space in the American body politic. Cooper, the mother of black feminist thought in the U.S., theorized that this space was one that differentiated them from white women and black men and that it was through black women that the whole race would find liberation. Ousmane Sembene, Djibril Diop, and Flora Gomes exemplify this belief through their portrayals of Africana womanhood (and girlhood) in their respective narrative forms. They portray heroines who are like the great baobab tree whose roots are firmly planted in the soil while steadily reaching towards the future. The black women (and girls) represented in their films (and book) are truly daughters of the Diaspora through whom all things can happen.










Works Cited
Combahee River Collective. "The Combahee River Collective Statement." Homegirls: A Black
Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 264-274. Print.
Morrison, Toni. "What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib." New York Times
Magazine 22 August 1971: 14. Print.
O'Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. New York: State
University of New York Press, 2008. Print.
Sembene, Ousmane. God's Bits of Wood. Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers, 1995. Print.
Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is
enuf. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print.
Spass, Lieve. "Female domestic labor and Third World politics in La Noire de…" Jump
Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 27 (1982): 26-27. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.