Jillian Turner Blog # 6: Freedom from Violence

Ousmana Sembene's film Black Girl highlighted many of the issues of race we have discussed in class. Diouana, a senegalese woman, was brought to France to work for a family as a nanny... or so she thought. Once there, however she realized that she was being exploited as a domestic slave. After struggling with her predicament, she committed suicide by cutting her throat in her master's bathtub. After Diouana's death, her master returned her belongings to her family and offered Diouana's mother monetary compensation. She refused the money and the man left, followed by a boy wearing a tribal mask.

As many of my peers agreed in class, this even-keeled story offered many sobering points. For the most part, the movie was bland: little music, little excitement. Despite this fact, Sembene manages to make a crucial point about society. Because of her race, Diouana was treated like a second class citizen. She was taken from her home, hoping for a better life for herself, but was unpleasantly surprised when she realized her real role in her new household. This is a universal theme: excitement and optimism that is drowned by cynical reality. In addition, I found it particularly interesting that she killed herself rather than just ran away. Granted, that most likely was not an option but I thought that her suicide was unintentionally profound.

Diouana's suicide connected to a theme of violence that has been constant in our cultural studies in this course. The Rodney King beating, the LA Riots, and now the murder of Vincent Chin are the results of a constant unrest in our country, but relate to global issues of social and cultural injustice. This newest film introduced Detroit, Michigan as the home of Vincent Chin. Soon after, we saw both a juxtaposition of a woman saying "you just don't walk away after you kill a man" and another of four men singing an upbeat tune. Needless to say, this stirs the plot line of the film. The woman's factual statement gives us insight into what actually happened while the men singing seem out of place but clearly serve a purpose. Like Diouana's death, the death of Vincent Chin had an apparent purpose. It was later stated in the film that his killers murdered him because they thought he was Japanese. This at first confused me, but when I realized that this was Detroit Motor City Michigan, it grimly made sense that the men would take out their frustration of their shrinking business on someone whom they believed represented the competition.

According to David Kessler, such violence is the result of "a profound desire to keep the order of binary gender natural or necessary, to make of it a structure, either natural or cultural, or both, that no "human" can oppose and still remain human." I take this to mean that violence is used by one human against another as a means of power that cannot be opposed. If this is true, however, what the significance of self-harm? Yes, this theory applies to the case of Vincent Chin, but does it apply to Dionana's suicide as well?

On another hand, both examples of violence were brought on by racial issues. With Diouana, she struggled with language barriers between herself and her master along with the domestic slavery. This language barrier was understated in the film but, when related to Anderson, poses a greater question. In Chapter 4, he discusses Creole Pioneers and, like chapter three, stresses the importance of language in a community. Language differences often serve to exacerbate existing racial tensions.

Similar issues of language as it pertains to racial differences exist today. In particular, the argument to make English the United States' official language is hotly contested simply because of the high number of non-English speaking people in the country. In Arizona, a state that is home to many Spanish-speaking people, it is against the law to teach in spanish in a public school. This perpetuates the racial and language barriers. Is this also a form of racial violence?



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/arizona-ethnic-studies-cl_n_558731.html