Colonial Legacy and Racism in Sembene's "The Promised Land"

Introduction: Colonialism's Enduring Legacy

Ousmane Sembene's short story "The Promised Land," 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 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. 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 remains relevant today, when immigrant labor still makes 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 can see how little has changed in the intervening years — one could tell the same story today without changing practically anything, to the point that one could even substitute Senegal and France for Mexico and the United States, and the story would still retain its resonance.

Sembene's Satirical Opening and Colonial Indifference

That Sembene is concerned with the legacy of colonialism is apparent 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 demonstrates Sembene's cutting satirical edge even in a story so steeped in tragedy. By pointing out how the French police are not thinking about France's colonial legacy, Sembene immediately gets the reader thinking about that legacy while illustrating the comfortable domestic complacency that is a necessary part of maintaining foreign colonies and empires. In a single sentence, Sembene conveys the colonial indifference that will play a central role in Diouana's despair and eventual suicide.

Diouana's Arrival and Transformation in France

Diouana's isolation becomes apparent the moment she arrives in France, as the narrator notes in a characteristically tragicomic 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 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 becomes a kind of prison, where she is surrounded by people yet completely isolated from them. As scholars of postcolonial literature have long noted, this pattern — the migrant who finds not liberation but a new form of captivity — is one of the defining tropes of the genre.

Racism, Dehumanization, and the Colonial Mindset

That Diouana's mistreatment and isolation are 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 peoples. Diouana is not a person, or even a woman, but a "Negress" — because while one might be expected to treat a person or woman with at least some basic level of decency, the racial category she is assigned places her in an entirely different register, and in the eyes of the French family she can be treated accordingly.

This process of racial reduction is central to how colonial systems functioned and perpetuated themselves: by denying the full humanity of colonized peoples, colonial powers created the ideological conditions under which exploitation could be normalized and even justified as natural or beneficial.

Works Cited

Sembene, Ousmane. Tribal Scars, and Other Stories. New York: Inscape, 1974.