Abstract
Chapter 3 draws on the oral archive of Nder, psychoanalysis, and the black feminist tradition to reread perhaps the best-known suicide in Francophone African cinema and literature: that of Diouana Gomis, the protagonist of Ousmane Sembène’s film La Noire de . . . / Black Girl (1966) and the eponymous short story from 1962 on which it was based. This chapter surfaces the real-life tragedy that inspired Sembène’s text and film, showing how La Noire de . . . has functioned as a “screen memory” (Sigmund Freud) that has both concealed and conserved traces of a real suicide buried in French archives. Weaving together a complex story that straddles Senegalese independence (1960), this chapter reads Sembène’s Diouana as an instantiation of Saidiya Hartman’s “Black Venus,” the “dead girl” in the archive of colonization.
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