Workin’ Hard: Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl (La noire de…) and Borom Sarret

The plight of the working person makes for good drama. From novels like Of Mice and Men that follow the tragic trajectory of two ranch workers to films like Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, a portrait of the ho-hum life of a New Jersey bus driver, the concept of the everyday laborer continues to grab artists and audiences alike. Maybe it’s because a majority of people in the world had, or continue to have, these types of jobs? Maybe there’s something intrinsically appealing about seeing someone go to a menial job, put their head down and do it, and remain the main character—a feeling that real life never seems to give to the actual people who do these jobs.

Whatever it is, films about the laborer grant creators and consumers a moment to live in the worlds of these workers. Senegalese fiction writer-turned-filmmaker Ousmane Sembene certainly found something alluring in the lives of these workers, as displayed in two of his works screened this month at AFS Cinema: the 18-minute short Borom Sarret and the just-over-an-hour-long feature Black Girl.

As the presenter for the night noted, Sembene in many circles is dubbed as the “Father of Senegal Filmmaking.” This is an impressive feat considering Sembene was already considered a successful book writer. But life has funny ways of working out, and Sembene eventually drifted into making films—an art that he viewed as, according to the AFS presenter, something that could allow audiences of any racial, religious, or economic background to take in. It’s fitting that Sembene’s first work, Borom Sarret, gives a glimpse into the life of a person some would deem as being at the bottom of life’s ladder: a wagon driver in the city of Dakar.

Borom Sarret roughly translates to “The Wagoner”, and that’s what the short is all about. Sembene follows this worker (played by Ly Abdoulay) as he wakes up, drives his cart around town picking up random strangers of various backgrounds, before, through a series of events that the protagonist deems as karmic, ending his day with less than what he started with. Through it all, we hear Abdoulay’s character’s inner thoughts, all of which show a man filled with worries and opinions and jokes that he never lets show in his cool and quiet exterior.

Whether due to the film’s restoration or it being Sembene’s first work, Borom Sarret is a bit rough around the edges production-wise. This is mainly noticeable in the film’s audio, where, during the few moments of actual conversations between characters, the dubbing and ADR seems off. From another angle though, this mismatch between moving lips and spoken words that follow seconds after adds a dreamy edge to the short. 

Visually, Christian Lacoste’s cinematography puts audiences in the passenger seat of our protagonist’s cart, capturing 1960s Senegal as it was: a gentrified city where the cramped home of Abdoulay’s character is a block away from the seashell-white multi-story apartment buildings found closer to the city. Constantly making its presence felt is the catchy soundtrack, which combines beating drums and shaking strings to bring a perpetual symphony to our protagonist’s journey. Its sounds—like our struggling protagonist—get caught between the notes of the old world and that of the new colonized one. 

Sembene positions his protagonist on a journey of destined ruin, brought on by his bad choices and the constricting effects of a city on a mission to push the lower rungs out, and efficiently ties events in the short together to create a silently defeating ending.

This connection between low caste workers and tragedy bleeds into the following feature, Black Girl, also known in French as La noire de, which translates to “A Black Girl of….” As the AFS presenter for the night pointed out, this title leaves room for interpretation beyond its generalized descriptor.

The eponymous Black girl, Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop), fits into the title in many ways. She is a Black girl of France, where she finds herself working for a high-class French couple (Anne-Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine, respectively). She is also a Black girl of Senegal, her home where limitless dreams and possible love existed. Between a suffocating present filled with servitude and memories of a home hundreds of miles away, Sembene looks at the internal plight of a young woman caught between far-away hopes and bitter realities.

Just as in Borom Sarret, Black Girl finds power in the inner thoughts of its working-class protagonist. The moment Diouana is brought to France to become her employers’ new maid/nanny/house pet, she ceases to speak, instead relaying thoughts of anger and regret to herself and the audience internally. In the few moments Diouana does talk with her employers and their friends, it’s all discolored by the latter’s penchant for casual racism and overbearing expectations. Therese Diop conveys her character’s roiling emotions  through various internal monologues, but she displays the character’s true sadness in a face that slowly becomes overwhelmed with the realization that a life of servitude in France is a fate worse than death.

Sembene doesn’t bog down his characters with overdramatic or overlong speeches, instead finding power in their simple declarations. Indeed, in a lot of moments in life, there aren’t a lot of monologues flying around. Sometimes the most beautiful or hurtful comments come across in one sentence. By granting his characters more space to react to simple lines, Sembene once again brings audiences into the everyday, but still emotionally devastating, realities of their lives. The story heads into tragedy towards its conclusion, but the aftermath of the tragic act, in a small but powerful way, turns the tables on the Diouana’s oppressors.

In Black Girl, Sembene once again views the working person as a pawn at the mercy of destiny and colonialism. Even when small victories arrive for the laborer, death still operates in the background. In Black Girl’s quiet and unsettling final moments, Ousamne Sembene unearths the connective feeling—this time of silent somberness—that emerges in the varied audiences found in a quiet and dark movie theater.