Ouvrir la voix (Speak up) by Amandine Gay, or the Necessity of Afro-Feminism

“For the feminist fight to go on, it’s essential that black women become aware of the unique perspective that marginality can give and that they use this point of view to criticize the dominant hegemony that is sexist, classist and racist, but also to imagine and create something to counter that hegemony. What I imply is that we have a central role to play in the construction of feminist theory and that the contribution we can provide is unique and precious.”

—Bell Hooks

“When I was three, there was a child that did not want to play with me because I was black.” This is the lived experience of this film’s women, which Amandine Gay’s camera captures through an intimate close-up of their personal experiences. They speak of textbook racism, about the daily discrimination faced by black people. Personal experience is different from any other kind of experience, as it is felt more deeply and also signifies the beginning of an internal consciousness.¹ Fanon insists on the fact the black person is not real, nor is the white person. What constitutes blackness is the white gaze. The black person is subject to someone else’s gaze, and that gaze is of fear or disdain.

As noted by Baldwin, if white people need black people as a mean to create a subordinate class, the black people’s revolt will be based on the assertion of their own blackness. That assertion is the basis of this film: the pretty Negress says “screw you” because she wants her beauty to be beyond what image her skin color projects. She asks to be not only black, but a woman as well.

In this film, the women want to be integrated into society in the ways that other groups so seamlessly are. She nonetheless highlights her African lineage (Afro-descendent or Afro-European) which is derived from a cultural diversity that cannot not be reduced to the simple fact that she is black. While these women want success, they try to move away from models of success that their parents instilled in them—a model of success that often involves erasure and invisibility. As the French saying goes, “vivons heureux, vivons cachés,” a happy life must be a discreet one.

They would like to have the opportunity to have skin free of pretense, to have innocence associated with their skin color. Unfortunately, the facts are the facts: like Senghor and Césaire, they are trapped in the common “look, a nigger!” scenario. The white gaze created the black woman as a slave and a savage as a part of this racial imaginary. How does one escape from the complex of being “underdeveloped?” By refusing to be made inferior. As previously theorized by intellectuals from W.E.B Du Bois to bell hooks, the demand to be seen is essential.

But to be seen is to risk exposure to abuse, which necessitates the ability to cleverly protect one’s self against invasive attacks: “Don’t touch my hair!” This includes fetishization, the sexual fantasy of the tigress created by the white males who prefer to see black people as riddles to be solved and as a people to be seen through the lens of stereotypes. Blackness is often treated as an identity that lacks imagination: an example of such can be seen through the systematic casting of black women in roles that only serve to perpetuate tropes and stereotypes.

How can these women impose themselves in a white man’s world? A world that cares less and less about the pain of black people, as the treatment that is evidenced through media coverage. It is hard to ignore a reality in which personal experiences are the makings of racial trauma. Who will speak to in order to make social change? It is up to the Afro-feminists to think about the weapons of their own emancipation.

A limited understanding of gender roles is met with homophobia, as black people are so often only seen as...