On Selling Your Skin - Severance and Loss
Part of our But Where Are You Really From? season
We would sometimes go out for dinner and exchange no more than a few words, but there was something about the moments we shared in his car before I went back home that prompted my father to talk, sometimes at length, about the hardships of his life. At the time, I remember treating his monologues as slightly affected moral tales designed to teach me lessons. At the ages of seven and eight I couldn’t fully comprehend the immense loneliness he must have been suffering from since leaving Kingston, Jamaica for the UK at eighteen, only three years younger than I am now. Like many first-generation immigrants who cross oceans in search of a better life, he found himself caught between two places, not wholly present in either.
Throughout Black Girl (1966) we follow our protagonist Diouana from Dakar to France, her fateful decision to become a live-in nanny for a wealthy French family shapes the tragic course of the film. I was lucky enough to see the haunting black-and-white cinematography on the screen at BFI Southbank as part of TAPE Collective X BFI’s ‘But Where Are You Really From?’ Season, the first feature film from the almost mythically revered godfather of African post-colonial cinema, Ousmane Sembéne. The opening scenes show Diouana, played by a contemplative M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, searching high and low for work, going on dates with a handsome young man she’s seeing; she is languorous and has a wistful nature about her, a dreamer waiting for her future to begin. After being told about a spot where wealthy Frenchwomen select eager, elegant girls to become nannies for their families, Diouana bounds down there dressed in starkly contrasting textiles with her hair worn regally above her head. When the mistress finally appears after days of waiting, all girls except Diouana clamber eagerly to their feet shouting “Pick me! Pick me!”, her show of pride and nonchalance impresses her unnamed employer. A mysterious African mask follows our protagonist from Dakar to France, brought to France as a gift for her new employers – originally a token of gratitude for the freedom to travel and earn money to provide for her mum, who remains in the village – the mask increasingly starts haunts the stark, white space in the living room, invoking the sense of the “mask” that Diouana and many other people of colour must wear in order to get by in a white world.
Whilst watching this film I thought of my father, who would explain the relentless pressures of being the only child who had made it to a “rich” country, it had transformed his interactions with friends and family back home into transactional negotiations, he wasn’t allowed to be vulnerable because of his privilege. After studying engineering he joined the British Army, which promised a steady salary, affordable housing, the opportunity to travel and what seemed to him at the time as a form of brotherhood. What they didn’t advertise was the relentless racism he faced as a dark-skinned black man, high levels of aggression and expectation of complete submission to both. He only told me this a few years ago when he had already left the army, but by then he had lost custody of all three of his children and was estranged from my step-mother – the army had turned him into a cold disciplinarian, creating a distance between him and others – this mask he had been forced to adopt had become fixed to his face. I am the child of two first-generation immigrants who have both experienced a ‘severing’ of sorts: my mother’s was a loss of the Goan language, which was discarded in order to assimilate into an unforgiving South London school – my father’s losses were a slower and less visible process, the transactional nature of connections in the UK and back home had hardened him and marked his descent into isolation.
The mask carries a potent energy that is injected into every scene it inhabits, as Diouana comes to feel displaced, it transforms into a symbol of Dakar, their shared status as objects and severance from home. Despite being promised work looking after her employers three children, Diouana is only allowed to do household chores and is racially harassed at a dinner party she is catering for – the grotesque guest leers at Diouana’s body and then forces a kiss on her deathly still face – this happens whilst other guests are discussing Africans with an icy detachment, stating that “with independence, the natives have lost a natural quality”. The most emotionally brutal scenes are juxtaposed with the glacial distance of Sembéne’s camera, the glassy eyed observance of casual violence mirroring the attitudes of postcolonial society towards migrant workers. The mistress, played by Anne-Marie Jelinek, controls what Diouana chooses to wear by belittling her and forcing her to cover up her polka dot dress with a plain apron. Evoking a sense of the psychosexual relationship between white mistress and her black female subject that has been explored in films like 12 Years a Slave (2013) through the relationship between Mistress Epps and Patsey, Sembéne only hints that Diouana is desired by Monsieur and chooses instead to focus on the deteriorating relationship between Diouana and the mistress.
Towards the end of the film, Diouana reclaims the mask and revolts by taking her own life. Wracked with guilt, Monsieur travels back to Dakar to return the mask and clear his conscience by providing Diouana’s mother with money. The offering is rejected and the message is clear: the loss of Diouana cannot be soothed with any amount of money, you cannot throw money in an open wound, but Monsieur knows no other language except the Western capitalist notion of money as salve. In a cyclical fashion, the mask finds its way into the hands of the same young boy who gave it to Diouana at the beginning of the film and he stalks Monsieur through the village until he frantically rushes back to the confines of his car. The last scene is a haunting conjured upon post-colonial Europe and a symbol of the spirit of African resistance.
The recent Oscar nominated film The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020) is a controversial tale by director Ben Hania, centered around the story of a Syrian refugee who makes a Faustian pact with an internationally renowned artist, similarly to Black Girl our protagonist quite literally sells his back to gain money, freedom of movement, and reunite with his lost love. After Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) is wrongfully seized by the Assad government, he loses the chance to be with his lover Abeer because of an arranged marriage which takes her to Brussels to live with a diplomat – this is the decisive factor that leads him to take such drastic measures to travel worldwide as an art object. At first, he doesn’t truly realise what this choice means for his humanity and from the moment he meets the artist, Jeffrey, he is continually re-realising the new boundaries to his value and autonomy both as a human and a living, breathing piece of art.
In The Man Who Sold His Skin and Black Girl we see the crushing weight of the immigrant experience: becoming an object in the eyes of society after being coerced into labour by a wealthy figure who is not fully disclosing the true circumstances. However, these are not just cautionary tales and whilst the storytelling of Hania’s film is exaggerated and Sembéne’s imagery is permeated by an almost playful magical realism, they show us how immigrants are forced into inhumane binds in a post-colonial work environment. We now know the Windrush generation were lured to Britain under false pretences of comradery and promises of housing – a lie that reverberates through generations with hardworking Caribbean people still having to contest their right to stay in the UK, their home – England stands on the shoulders of immigrants yet is in the continual process of stripping fundamental human rights from those now seen as Other, since the labour they have been reduced to is no longer needed.
Despite being inspired by the true story of a former tattoo parlour manager called Tim Steiner, who agreed to be transformed into a work of art by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, the similarities end there as unlike Ben Hania’s protagonist, Steiner wasn’t under any pressure to enter this arrangement. Whilst a hard-hitting satire about the duplicity of the contemporary art world, it still manages to feel like this film is complicit in the forces that it critiques and Ben Hania shies away from answering the darker questions raised by the end of the film. Unlike Sembéne’s camera work, Hania’s depiction of Sam feels voyeuristic and as if we are forced to view his objectification through a lens that glorifies it, whereas in Black Girl we feel disconnected from the grotesque leers of the diners at the dinner party. The image of the EU visa inked on Sam’s back is a hauntingly potent symbol that allows him to be transported to Brussels under the classification of an art object, but it feels like a manipulative device that allows writer-director Ben Hania to abandon her duty to her protagonists identity as a Syrian refugee. What is the moral responsibility of the director when making a fiction film with politicised content for entertainment value, as an outsider? Whilst Sembéne’s cinematic approach at moments in Black Girl can feel icy and detached, there is no doubt about the seriousness with which he dedicates himself to revealing how the psychology of colonialism has pervaded a post-colonial world – both within the film and in his life’s work, establishing cinema as a vehicle for change and creating a language. Hania’s visually slick and almost gratuitously emotive approach is made to feel exploitative by her reflections on her main characters Syrian background, whilst being Tunisian herself:
“I’ve got a lot of Syrian friends but it’s not even about that. The main character could have been from anywhere, Gabon or Canada. The protagonist’s nationality adds context but is not at the heart of what he is, or stands for. I don’t subscribe to the school that you should only write stories based on your own family or neighbourhood.”
I am also not of the opinion that you have to be from somewhere to make political work about said place, but whilst there is a universality to Sam’s story, the world has categorised him as a Syrian refugee and his nationality is inextricably tied to his human experience. For Hania to refer to such an central focal point as ‘context’ seems to lack the degree of respect that I would expect from the creator of a such a politically charged film.
As Black Girl and The Man Who Sold His Skin have shown us, cinema is a conductor for social change, a rare chance to inhabit another person’s experience vastly alien to our own, but through looking critically at Hania’s approach I also feel you have to honour the story you choose to tell – especially when it is not your own. Where The Man Who Sold His Skin explored the ethics of selling the racialised body and highlighted how society values commodities over a human life, Black Girl also showed us the turbulent emotional landscape of a young Senegalese maid who is subjugated within a master-servant paradigm, but what Sembéne demonstrates is how to make a film politically – not just how to make a political film.
For me, cinema has increasingly been a space to reflect on the journeys of my parents and those before them – to acknowledge the sacrifice that has led me to exist in this portion of the world and to draw out from them memories from lives that have been discarded to assimilate. During lockdown I discovered over one hundred pages of intimate court documents that record the battle for custody between my grandma and father, in the wake of my mother’s mental breakdown when I was age four. It records in startling detail their testimonies for why they should raise me, how my mother and father met, and my social worker’s observations of my emotional state at this time. Whilst holding the potential to trigger me to relive my trauma, I found myself visualising scenes described in the documents and gaining a newfound empathy for the trauma within both of my parents upbringings through this ability to reconstruct real events - which to me is one of the strengths of cinematic storytelling. Our stories as the children of immigrants hold so much power because we now possess the vocabulary to express the effects of trauma through generations, which is a gift most of our elders were never given. Whether this expression is through music, writing or cinema, the multiplicities of our experience as racialized people must not be silenced, which Hania and Sembéne give voice to in their nuanced portraits of the immigrant experience.
Maya Campbell
Instagram: @mayajcampbell @prajnabookshop
This piece is a part of our But Where Are You Really From? season, made possible thanks to the BFI Audience Fund awarding funding from the National Lottery.
