Screaming Mother and Silent Subaltern in Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de…

Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 La Noire de…, the first full-length feature film by an African director, follows a young Senegalese woman who works for a French couple as a maid. With the exception of answering “Oui, Madame” or “Oui, Monsieur,” Diouana, the protagonist, does not speak in the space of the couple’s home; however, throughout the film, the voice-over discloses her inner monologue. Unable to express her outrage through language, she commits suicide to silence her female boss. Recent scholarship on this film qualifies the couple as her oppressors without exploring their vastly different interactions with her. In this essay, I show how the relationship between the three protagonists’ speech and silence reveals gendered differences in neocolonialist motivations. In contrast to the husband, neither Diouana nor the wife achieve recognition of their speech acts. Characterized by their silence and screaming, these two women lack the acknowledged authority necessary to enact performative utterances. I argue that the wife oscillates between the roles of the civilizing missionary and the slave master in a futile attempt to gain acknowledgment for her speech. This essay shows how the film’s juxtaposition of a white European woman screaming to be superior and a black African woman making her silence heard through suicide underscores the complexity of gendered relations between neocolonialists and women from formerly colonized countries. In a film critiquing the desires of all its characters, Sembene points to the limits of screams, silence, and the overvaluation of male voices in bringing about change for post-colonial institutions and relationships.