The Black Diaspora in Conversation: From Ousmane Sembène to Marilyn Cooke

The film’s protagonist, Keity Richardson (Schelby Jean Baptiste) is forced to intern at the morgue when she cannot find a vacancy in her preferred field of surgery shortly after the death of her grandmother. Schelby Jean Baptiste is a convincing actress; she drowns us in her discomfort at the sight of a dead body. In one scene, the only sound we can hear is the sound of Keity’s nervous breathing, and we, too, find ourselves momentarily struggling for air. When the opportunity to transfer to a different hospital and department, Keity decides to continue working at the morgue. This is a significant and surprising decision, not simply because she is choosing a specific career path, but also because she is seemingly straying from the path her mother and grandmother had imagined for her.

I was struck by Keity’s features; her dominance as the central figure of the film evoked memories of Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film Black Girl [La Noire de…].  The third film by the “Godfather of African Cinema, Black Girl is a primarily first-person narration of the events leading to the protagonist Diouana’s suicide. The story begins with Diouana being hired by a white French family in Dakar as a house help. Eventually, the family returns to France, and Diouana is invited to join them. Diouana grows disillusioned with her new life and dies by suicide.   

I reached out to Marilyn Cooke, to discuss her short film. When I shared my desire to connect her film to Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), Marilyn responded, “I love that you made a parallel with Sembène’s work. It wasn’t a direct influence for the film, but there is a similarity, in that it’s a young black woman in an all-white world.”¹Cooke’s found inspiration for her film in Mati Diop’s Grand Prix award-winning feature film Atlantics (2019).²Atlantics (2019) tells the story of a young construction worker Souleimane, and his girlfriend Ada. Souleimane is part of a group of construction workers who are building a tower in the Senegalese Capital, Dakar. After months of not receiving their wages, Souleimane and other construction workers are forced to embark on the treacherous journey from Senegal to Europe in search of better opportunities. The construction workers die at sea after encountering rough sea conditions. Shortly after Souleimane’s death, Ada is married off to a wealthy man; this triggers a series of mysterious events as Souleimane and the dead construction workers seek revenge and reconnection with their loved ones.

Mati Diop has downplayed Sembène’s influence on her work in favour of her uncle, Djibril Diop Mambety’s filmography. Samba Gadjigo, the foremost scholar on Sembène, argues that  Sembène paved the way for filmmakers like Diop Mambety, so Atlantics is a beneficiary of the house Sembène built, which builds a kind of connection between the two films.³ Sembène was an atheist, and it seems likely that his definition of “real” quotidian stories did not include mysticism. Unlike Sembène, Diop Mambety believed that humanness is something that animals could also possess. This idea is known as Animism, and it is a widely held belief in Senegal and the rest of West Africa that “natural physical objects of the earth hold a spiritual power and that two worlds exist: the physical one of man and earth, and the invisible one of spirits and god.”⁴

There are two obvious points of connection between Cooke and Diop’s work. Firstly, Cooke is of Afro-Caribbean descent; Afro-Caribbean culture has its roots in West African culture brought to the islands by African slaves during the Transatlantic slave trade. On the other hand, the island of Gorée in Senegal was a major slave trade port. Independently, both filmmakers draw from similar and connected cultural practices. Thematically, the films are also similar; both deal with death and grief and are portrayed through a similar cultural lens. The plot of Atlantics rests entirely on the idea that the spirit world is just as real as the physical world. Spiritual power is exercised and manifests as physical symptoms of an unknown illness that plagues some of the characters in the film. In No Ghost in the Morgue, a parrot appears in Keity’s dreams alongside her grandmother. In her final dream, her grandmother disappears; upon waking, the same parrot is seen through Keity’s window, indicating that the parrot hosts her grandmother’s ancestral spirit in the physical world. These two examples highlight the influence of animism in the filmmakers’ cultural conceptions of death. 

Independently, both filmmakers draw from similar and connected cultural practices. 

Diop’s influence on Cooke’s storytelling is undeniable. Although Cooke welcomed the comparison between her film and Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), the relationship between the two films is based on similarities I identified as a viewer. French literary theorist Roland Barthes asserted that literary criticism should not rely heavily on the reader’s knowledge of the author. Once the text is opened by readers, it is deconstructed and reconstructed through the various interpretations drawn by them. Barthes' argument that the artist’s intention is secondary to viewer interpretations lays the groundwork for this comparative analysis. Although I consider the notion to be partially true in so far as the memory of the work becomes part of the work; this memory work is a collaborative practice between artists and consumers/observers.

Unfortunately, Sembène’s films are characterized by tragedy, which has made them more susceptible to politicization. The idea that Sembène’s work is Africa in conversation with the West, rather than Africa in conversation with itself, is a matter of global political circumstances and not a reflection of Sembène’s intentions. Before the advent of African Cinema in the 1970s, “Senegalese” cinema consisted of anthropological films made by the French about Senegalese cultures and American movies dubbed in French. The tendency to see Sembène’s work as merely responding to colonialism is a scion of the anthropological genre that dominated pre-independence Senegalese cinema. 

No Ghost in the Morgue (2022) is not subject to the same scrutiny; the film's running time makes it challenging to decipher racial and/or political themes, and Cooke intentionally resists the pressure to create films steeped in Black pain and tragedy. Cooke had the opportunity to incorporate an “immigrant child” trope, which highlights the tension between racialized immigrant children and their parents. This phenomenon is well-documented in academic literature and pop culture. In the TV series The Brothers Sun (2024), Michelle Yeoh plays a strict mother who forbids her son from pursuing improv in favour of a career in medicine. As a result of this trope, racialized people, especially immigrants, are treated as specimens rather than individuals with unique experiences that are taking place within a shared cultural context. 

Based on the viewer’s knowledge of Keity’s motivations for taking an internship at the morgue, Cooke removes any exploitation of the tension between mother and daughter as part of the larger immigrant child trope. These stereotypical stories paint broad strokes over the complexity and diversity of lived experiences. Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates resists memory generalization in the context of slavery in America, stating that “slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.”⁵Professor of English literature and Black Studies Christina Sharpe goes further in her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, to ask, “how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are still ongoing…How does one memorialize the everyday?”⁶

In addition to having a young black female lead in their respective films, Cooke and Sembène successfully “memorialize the everyday” by disregarding the white gaze. The distinction between the everyday and the unique is also the difference between Black stories and stories about blackness. Stories about blackness often tackle the more significant socio-political questions rather than the mundane, and as a result, they relegate black characters to a monolithic other. Black Girl in particular, features among Sembène’s early works focused on individual stories. The two films focus on a single black protagonist. As a result, the viewer is more attuned to the feelings of these characters. In Sembène’s own words, Africa was his audience. Some critics decry that Diouana’s employers in the film, the white French couple, are unreasonably flat characters. This criticism achieves the opposite effect by proving that Sembène was indeed successful in averting the white gaze. In philosophical terms, Sembène makes Diouana a subject rather than an object by limiting our knowledge of these side characters’ inner worlds and focusing on her. The same is true for Cooke’s protagonist; despite sharing some of these scenes with other characters, Keity’s inner world is reflected in the lighting, score, and how the film is shot rather than through dialogues with other characters. Early in the film, Cooke uses a full shot to show Keity standing across from a dead body on a gurney in a dimly lit morgue to reflect the character’s anxiety. After her anxiety lifts, we see a close-up shot of Keity under a bright surgical light; unable to see anything beyond Keity’s face, we become ignorant of the possibility that the morgue may still be dimly lit as this environment no longer reflects her mental state. In one of Keity’s dreams, her grandmother sings along to “Chante Haiti—A Voodoo Experience” as performed by Martha Jean Claude. Here, Cooke particularizes the universal to honour the humanity of black women in particular. Stripped of a political context, a film like No Ghost in Morgue illuminates this aspect of Sembène’s storytelling, which has been severely tempered to avoid confronting the individual human cost of neo-colonialism. As some scholars have identified, the protagonist in Black Girl does not strongly identify with the nation-state of Senegal. Diouana's boyfriend is a foil character that foregrounds Diouana's political apathy.⁷During a visit to her boyfriend's apartment, we see a poster of pan-Africanist politician Patrice Lumumba in the background.

The distinction between the everyday and the unique is also the difference between Black stories and stories about blackness.

I was first introduced to Black Girl as part of a Politics in Film university course where we watched The Battle of Algiers (1996), a film about the Algerian anti-colonial resistance and Flame (1967), a film about women ex-combatants who fought in the Zimbabwean liberation war. These films portray in greater detail the process of anticolonial resistance and decolonization that also imprinted Lumumba's name in history. It is a male-dominated history. In both films, the term "nationhood" appears neutral. Upon further examination, it is evident that the term "nationhood", despite the connotations of an amalgamation of different individual identities, is an unmarked term referring only to the emancipation of men. These two films did not successfully affirm my personhood despite the overt symbols that signified that I belonged to the represented collective identities. I was still only viewing myself in relation to others.  

The absence of a male love interest and a romance subplot in Black Girl and No Ghost in the Morgue is critical in eclipsing the male gaze in addition to the white gaze. Cookes’ film reminded me of Black Girl because Keity, like Diouana, is a young black woman exercising her agency and asserting her individuality. This theme of agency and individuality, particularly in the face of familial pressures and responsibilities, is a thread that flows through Cooke's filmography. Cooke's work feels solidly grounded in telling black stories; in those stories, she reminds me that my blackness is not an alternative to whiteness. Blackness is not a performance but a state of being imprinted on every part of our existence including the mundane.