17 pages • 34-minute read
Black Woman
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Background
Literary Context: Négritude
“Black Woman” is a poem that reflects the commitments of Négritude, a philosophical, political, and artistic movement that Senghor played a key role in founding with Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and French Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas in the 1930s. The movement was a response to the alienation of artists, students, and thinkers who left the Caribbean and African continent for Paris because of French colonial rule. The French model of colonialism emphasized assimilation to French culture; colonized peoples could only participate in the intellectual and political life of the French Empire by adopting its values and aesthetics. By contrast, Négritude centered the experiences and culture of African peoples. Négritude was an aesthetic that celebrated the sophistication and complexity of African culture, making it a counter-discourse to French representation of Africa as a primitive place devoid of culture and thus in need of civilizing by the French.
In “Black Woman,” Senghor uses direct address to portray the figure of the African woman as a person who is worthy of reverence. Traditional European and Eurocentric poetry cast Black women at best as exotic for the consumption of the European gaze or at worst as so degraded that they deserved the abuse of Europeans. Senghor reverses this representation in his poem by invoking the regal past of Africa, recasting his African woman as heir to “the princes of Mali” (Line 21).
Originally published in French, the poem claims the language of the oppressor in service of proclaiming the beauty of Blackness. In this, the poem exemplifies a key element of the Négritude movement: using language and imagery to resist colonialism and to reclaim the history and dignity of Africa.
Historical Context: French Colonialism in Senegal and West Africa
An important context for understanding “Black Woman” is the history of French colonialism in Senegal, Senghor’s birthplace, to which he dedicated a lifetime of political involvement. France established a foothold in West Africa in the late 16th century by creating trading posts at the mouth of the Senegal River. These posts facilitated French trade in enslaved people and material resources such as gold. By the early 17th century, France’s control over Senegal was complete, and France imposed its own system of governance on the Senegalese people.
Colonial rule over Senegal and large portions of Western Africa wasn’t just a matter of political control over land. Instead, France embraced a so-called “civilizing mission” to transform its African subjects through forcible assimilation into French customs and culture. Over the centuries, this assimilation in practice meant the denigration and suppression of African culture, language, and history. A key element of assimilation was the movement of French colonial subjects to France—the idea was that in cities like Paris, these people would be remade by participating in the French educational system. Senghor lived out the diasporic experience of moving from Senegal to France.
What France did not count on was that colonial subjects would encounter and be inspired by each other in France. While studying in Paris, Senghor established lifelong friendships and collaborations with other sojourners from French colonies. These relationships gave him the tools to reimagine a West Africa that wasn’t valuable because its people had assimilated to French culture, but rather because it had its own art, culture, and history.
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