Black Woman

“Black Woman” is a poem that reflects the commitments of Négritude, a philosophical, political, and artistic movement that Senghor played a key role in founding with Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and French Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas in the 1930s. The movement was a response to the alienation of artists, students, and thinkers who left the Caribbean and African continent for Paris because of French colonial rule. The French model of colonialism emphasized assimilation to French culture; colonized peoples could only participate in the intellectual and political life of the French Empire by adopting its values and aesthetics. By contrast, Négritude centered the experiences and culture of African peoples. Négritude was an aesthetic that celebrated the sophistication and complexity of African culture, making it a counter-discourse to French representation of Africa as a primitive place devoid of culture and thus in need of civilizing by the French.

In “Black Woman,” Senghor uses direct address to portray the figure of the African woman as a person who is worthy of reverence. Traditional European and Eurocentric poetry cast Black women at best as exotic for the consumption of the European gaze or at worst as so degraded that they deserved the abuse of Europeans.