Black Woman

In his free-verse poem “Black Woman,” Léopold Sédar Senghor centers the figure of the Black woman to celebrate the reclamation of African culture from colonialism. The poem engages with the tenets of Négritude, the literary and political movement Senghor helped found. Senghor variously portrays the Black woman as a maternal figure, a muse, an object of exploitation, the African homeland itself, and a source of renewal for African civilizations prepared to resist colonial domination. Through imagery, repetition, and metaphor, Senghor crafts an ode to a figure often denigrated in colonial narratives.

The opening—”Naked woman, Black woman” (Line 1)—is a stark image that initially echoes the way Western literature has depicted Black women: sexualized and exposed to the colonial gaze. Senghor immediately reframes this image by describing the woman’s skin as clothing—a “robe” (Line 2) that is big enough and potent enough to represent life itself. The color of the woman’s skin is a symbol of vitality, power, and dignity. Far from portraying the Black woman as an object exoticized by Europeans, Senghor renders her as a nurturing mother who protects and sustains the speaker amid the harsh realities of colonialism.