The Black Girl (1966) is a film directed by Ousmane Sembène that tells the story of a young Senegalese woman, Diouana, who works as a nanny for a white French family in Dakar (Langford 13). He shows satisfaction while playing with the white children in the garden and walking with them in the streets. The French family also seems happy to be in Africa and to be surrounded by the local population. However, this happiness is interrupted the day after Senegal's independence, when the family decides to return to France and take the African girl with them to work as a domestic worker. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayIn fact, their apartment on the French Riviera has changed since Diouanna's arrival: therefore, she would have to do a lot of heavier housework, including cooking for guests and other employers, and she will have to stay at home all day. The relationship he had with his employees, quite harmonious in Dakar, turns out to be conflictual and challenging, particularly with the French woman (Parascandola 367). Diouana suffers from no longer being understood by her employer; the good times spent together seem distant; her identity as an African woman is repressed on a daily basis, and the more her employers applaud her exoticism, the more she feels denigrated. This profound alienation forces Diouana to kill herself. At the end of the film, her employer brings the girl's body back to his village, a lifeless body that can only painfully bear witness to the definitive failure of Senegal's hopes of finding a better future in the land of the former colonizers. Importantly, Diouana's harrowing story brings to the fore the issue of migrant slavery, an issue discussed not only in academic circles but also in newspapers, novels and films. Recently, migrant women have played a role in most Western middle-class families, caring for and ensuring the cleanliness of the home in a way that has attracted the attention of most gender and migration scholars (Bâ, Saër Maty np). these migrant workers undergo speaks to the issue of the globalization of care whose functioning has been considered interjectively across categories of age, gender, race, ethnicity and class. But what Sembène's story offers us requires more. The story it tells requires further interrogation of the representations surrounding experiences of domestic labor that descend from colonialism. At a certain point in the film, the house on the French Riviera where the French family resides with their young girl is transformed into a place where the colonial power structure is located. recalled daily. Diouana, accompanied by the couple's collection of African masks, is simply another trophy of their neocolonial conquest. In particular, Sembène used a double narrative structure. Throughout the film, the audience is given two contrasting narratives: the family discussion about Africa and colonialism that often ignores and silences Diouana, and Diouana's internal monologue. By changing the voices of postcolonial people and particularly postcolonial women, Sembène believes that the French were able to maintain most of their colonial power. Alternatively, Sembène let Diouana's voice be heard entirely and framed the story of a single typical French family in the context of the postcolonial effort. The film gave voice to a specific subjectivity, but at the same time offered a different way of telling storiesstories. Themes of alienation, disappointment and displacement in post-independence Senegal recur in Sembene's film, often with a specific politically harsh humanism. In the film, Diouana's status is relatively uncertain in mainstream society, yet she is primed for both greater expectation and greater disappointment. In the line where Diouana declares that "Will I never be someone's slave again?", in that moment she understands herself as a slave and not as a worker; that is, it understands itself as fundamental without the right to control its own work in any meaningful sense. The white French couple, however, are shown as unanchored, lacking the traditions that had initially given meaning to their lives. Although Madame has power in Dakar, and can make her choose her maids from among the women who go daily and wait to be chosen, in France, she. they seem bored, ill-equipped or disinterested in caring for their children, worried about her condition and her husband who, like Diouana, is almost certainly mute. Colonialism, the root of their initial power, has disappeared, leaving turmoil and uncertainty in its wake. They cannot understand the reason for Diouana's unhappiness, the reason why she desires death. They don't understand why he would take back the mask he first gave to Madame as a sign of friendship, even though they already have several masks. or why he would deny payment. At this point, cinema is oriented towards capturing an ongoing historical change. While the film can be read in terms of native-foreign, colonizer-colonized, traditional-modern contexts, doing so fails to capture the way his films implicate each pole in the other and show people struggling to anchor their their own traditions and their own hopes in a world context in which there is little place for them. However, in the film it is almost impossible to ignore the repressive relationship between natives and foreigners. Figures like that of Diouana stand as pioneer protagonists of the native-foreigner relationship. The story draws attention to the roots of native-foreign employment in Western families, which requires us to explore the origins of its modes of representation and functioning. The film explores the role of colonialism in shaping contemporary forms of foreign domestic labour. In other words, it highlights the importance of looking back to understand what is happening. As such, noting that domestic work is seen as different from other jobs in view of the character of its performance should be a strong gender construction, and the uniqueness of the relationship between employer and employee should not be ignored. Diouana's silence in Black Girl is beyond the language barrier that comes with exile. In the film, female mutism functions semiotically, it constitutes a denunciation, one scene after another, against gender exploitation in a postcolonial context, revealing itself simply as a variant of colonial power relations. To the point that the other characters notice that he doesn't speak, they attribute his silence to his lack of knowledge of French and not to his refusal to speak. Using flat black and white film stock, simple cinematography, slow-paced editing, and an action-free plot, the film makes no concessions to its audience. The film angrily connects with its audience in Diouana's suffering. Such reframing of silence and women's voices as a site of political struggle is not often seen in a narrative feature film. While her silence always gives her more power, her inability to communicate through her own voice is disabling. Diouana receives a letter from her mother during the film, scolding her for not sending the money home. Failing toread it, Monsieur reads it to him, then offers to answer. When she doesn't provide the words for the letter, he writes it himself, telling her to stop him if he says anything false. He decides to tear up his mother's letter, no doubt written by someone else on his behalf, and parts of the room. Previously, when Diouana was seen drying herself while putting on heels and earrings, she highlighted the contrast between what she believed she had come to the French to – look after the family's children and explore France as a modern place with varied possibilities, and her role at 'arrival: a maid or, as she later understands, a paid ointment (Bradbury 11). As she covets status items like shoes, nice dresses, and pretty wigs that she imagines will make her friends, relatives, and acquaintances in Dakar jealous, she begins to realize that she is a status symbol to her white clients: a sign that clearly affirms their stay in Senegal and a reminder of the recent colonial past, which shows her off to guests and insists that she cook "native" Senegalese food for them. At one point during lunch, she is humiliated when one of their guests forces her to kiss him for the first time because she has never kissed a black woman before. When he visibly displays his troubled nature, they complain that independence has made Africans less natural. His persevering frustration grows throughout his stay in France until he is denied work or food, ultimately taking his own life, vowing to never be a balm again. According to the tone of the story, his suicide is chronicled in the newspaper's Faith Divers - a section that is set aside to tell sensational or scary stories that are supposedly of no consequence. The lord returns his belongings to his mother who, like Diouana, refuses to take the money. One of the themes that stands out in the film is the distant tone. The story is told in an ironic, objective journalistic prose style, adopting a serious and more subjective perspective. At this time, the film presents the audience with a constant stream of various close-ups, monologues, expressive gestures and faces of Diouana. Diouana's expressive expression towards the white French family, her intractable face and her motivations make her analogous to the indigenous mask she initially gave to Madame. In the final scenes in Dakar, after failing to resolve things with Diouana's family, The Lord finds himself the object and not the subject being looked at. The entire town looks at him with open contempt after learning his identity. Apparently, the boy wearing the mask holds the mask over his and follows Monsieur to the edge of town. Although Monsieur's spell is broken, like the fascination that France had exerted on Diouana, there is still power in that mask, in the presentation of Africa, in the present. Beyond that, it makes Africans merely subjects and not passive objects to be looked down upon. a spectator's point of view (Davis np). Monsieur cannot know what has been said about him, if anything, and an ironic twist that can only refer to him by a formal title objectifies him, denying him a backstory and imaginable future while the people of Dakar, especially the boy with the mask looking out are the last image of the film, is the one in which the future audience is invested. It is free and independent of France. Even though Diouana is not shown as a politically aware person, she is very knowledgeable that the end of colonialism did not have much change in terms of the attitude of the French from her experience. Her sound when she makes comments shows her resentment at being seen and treated like a slave. Her sense of lack of freedom leaves her with no apparent choice...