Promised Land/Black Girl Ousmane Sembene\'s Short Story

Promised Land/Black Girl

Ousmane Sembene's short story "The Promised Land," which was later adapted into a film called Black Girl, asks its audience to step into the life and subjectivity of a young Senegalese woman working in France, and attempts to demonstrate the isolation and persecution she experiences. The story opens with police arriving at the villa where the main character, Diouana, has killed herself, and immediately the story reveals the distinct divide between the French and Diouana, as nearly everyone calls her "the black woman" (Sembene 85). From this introduction, Sembene returns to Diouana's origins and traces how she went from an excited young woman to a disillusioned and ultimately suicidal servant, and the result is a tragic, though ultimately enlightening look at the ramifications of colonialism and the implicit racism it leaves as a legacy. Even though it was first published in 1974, the story is still relevant to this day, when immigrants still make up a large proportion of the service and housekeeping industry even as immigration and immigrants are largely discussed in terms and discourses that would not seem out of place in colonial Europe. By examining how Sembene uses Diouana's story to reveal the legacy of colonialism, one is able to see how little has changed in the intervening years, because one could tell the same story today without having to change practically anything about it, to the point that one could even switch out Senegal and France for Mexico and the United States and the story would still retain its resonance.

That Sembene is concerned with the legacy of colonialism is obvious in the first sentence of the story, when the narrator relates how "on this morning in late June 1958 the thoughts of the people in two cars speeding towards Antibes were not on the fate of the French Republic nor on the future of Algeria, nor on the other territories under the colonial yoke" (Sembene 84). This sentence helps demonstrate Sembene's cutting satirical edge even in a story so steeped in tragedy, because by pointing out how the French police are not thinking about France's colonial legacy, Sembene is able to get the reader immediately thinking about that legacy while demonstrating the comfortable domestic complacency that is a necessary part of maintaining foreign colonies and empires. In a single sentence, Sembene is able to convey the sense of colonial indifference that will play a large part in Diouana's despair and eventual suicide.

Diouana's isolation becomes apparent the moment she arrives in France, as the narrator notes in a characteristically tragic-comic line:

'Did you have a good passage?'

'Yes, Missie,' she would have answered if he had asked. (Sembene 94)

From that point on, Diouana undergoes a kind of transformation from "a lively, laughing young woman" into someone with "sunken and dulled eyes," better fed than when she was in Senegal but "worked off her feet" as she is forced to care for four children while maintaining an entire household (Sembene 95). The "promised land" of the French Riviera turns into a kind of prison, where she is surrounded by people but completely isolated from them.

That her mistreatment and isolation is a direct result of France's colonial history and the racism it engenders is made evident by the children's taunts, to the point that "her wide outlook in the past was narrowed down to the color of her skin, which suddenly instilled her with terror. Her skin; her blackness" (Sembene 95). When she goes to France, Diouana is reduced to nothing more than her skin color precisely because the colonial mindset depends on such distinctions to justify the colonization and disempowerment of other people. Diouana is not a person, or even a woman, but rather a "Negress," because while one might be expected to treat a person or woman with at least some basic level of decency, a Negress is an entirely different animal altogether, and thus in the eyes of the French family, she can be treated differently.

The final straw comes when the Madame of the family accuses Diouana of lying when Diouana says that the children made a mess in the bathroom and not her. This scene is particularly important because Madame says "You may be fed up, that's quite likely. But I'm not having you telling lies, just as the natives do" (Sembene 99). This line is notable because it represents the full and total dehumanization of Diouana. Whereas before the family's racism mostly presented itself in condescension and, in the case of the children, songs and taunts, here Madame explicitly uses the term "the natives" as a way of categorizing Diouana and the rest of the colonized people of Africa as something other than people by suggesting that they, more so than any other humans, lie.