Black Girl--Melissa Hurley

The film Black Girl really made me think about at what point for a person is enough enough? What is the breaking point? Diouana really put up with a lot, ultimately leading her to suicide. However, how would another person react to that same situation? Would it be enough to make them end their life? Maybe and maybe not. I drew some parallels between this film and the novel and film version of The Help, which takes place in the US, but the themes are the same. Black servants and housekeepers are getting fed up with their racist, demanding, and unsympathetic bosses. Fortunately, in The Help, no one is brought to the point of suicide. Instead, they “fight” back by playing pranks on their white bosses and publishing their stories in a novel. I guess since I saw this American film before I watched Black Girl, I was rooting the whole time for Diouana to fight back and claim her independence and walk away with her head held high from the situation. I was very disappointed and almost a little bit angry with her when it showed her dead in the bathtub. I thought to myself, “That is way too drastic, why couldn’t you have just done x, y or z…etc”, but that is only my personal white American point of view. Maybe her situation really was her breaking point, whereas to me, it didn’t seem so dramatic.

The mask, I think, represents Diouana’s culture and her freedom. When she gives it to her French mistress after she is hired, it is like she is selling her soul and all her cultural ties away in order to work for this privileged white family. They hang it on the wall, almost in mockery, like they are dangling her freedom over her head. Diouana looks at the mask on the wall almost as if she was looking at an old photo. It’s just a symbol of what used to be. When she takes the mask down at the end of the film, she is symbolizing claiming her freedom back, which at first got me excited because I thought she was going to leave the house. Instead, the mask sits on top of her suitcase after she dies, representing that the only true freedom she felt she could have was in death. Totally tragic, and very sad.