Black Flight

The following was written as a prompt in response to Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl for a graduate seminar on surveillance. The song used in the accompanying video is Moore Mother’s “Black Flight” from her excellent Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes album. Originally written in Spring 2020.

Lisa Park’s writings on antenna trees not only highlights the ubiquity of invisible surveillance structures, but, alongside Black Girl (1966), can also illuminate the material forms of surveillance that predate the rapid technological advancements of the 21^st century. This is to say that surveillance has long existed before it became synonymous with cyberpunk imagery and if we were to strip away these associations, we can understand how surveillance has existed in texts we would otherwise ignore. Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl provides a perfect example because it illustrates how surveillance exists within non-machinic technology, and through Diouana’s interior monologue, the subsequent harmful psychic effects. To explain, let us examine the scene in which Diouana receives a letter from her maman. Unable to read or write, Diouana is incapable of responding, thus, her boss takes it upon himself to assist her. Yet here, we must also understand that throughout the film, Diouana has only been able to express herself within her thoughts; like the Little Mermaid, Diouana has no voice although this isn’t to say that she doesn’t have thoughts or emotions. Recall that the French government was wary on how providing films with soundtracks potentially endowed them with subversive capabilities (Diawara, 22). The point here being that by scripting Diouana’s internal monologue, Sembene highlights the impossibility for Diouana’s freedom within the film while also drawing the audience’s attention to her imprisonment. To return to the topic at hand then, it is that Diouana sitting at the table with her bosses does have a voice, but that the colonial effects stemming from surveillance and subsequently oppression has rendered her incapable of speaking out loud. She thus appears to be emotionally distant prompting her boss to pen the letter himself. It is in this act of penning that Sembene structures the relationship between surveillance, colonialism, non-machine technology (paper and pen) and communication infrastructure (the postal service). It is as if to say, “Dear maman, I am not Diouana. I am her boss. Diouana herself is miserable, but we mustn’t let you know that, so here I am instead to write a letter full of lies. Why, you ask? Because we must keep our hegemony intact, and so we surveil. I, pretending to be Diouana, am doing very well.” So on and so forth.