Black Woman

Published in his first collection of poetry, Chants d’ombre (Songs of Darkness or Shadow Songs), “Black Woman” is a short praise song to the beauty of Black women. Moreover, like other poems in Chants and throughout the canon of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poem celebrates Blackness itself, as well as African landscape and culture, thereby revising pejorative evaluations. It is therefore characteristic of Senghor’s early poetry and of the manner in which it undertakes the projects of the Negritude movement that Senghor helped to found and define, and it remains widely anthologized.

“Black Woman” is divided into four short stanzas that alternately begin “Naked woman, black woman” and “Naked woman, dark woman.” Throughout the poem, the persona speaks directly to the title subject, the “black woman,” using imagery and metaphorical language (particularly mixed metaphors) to depict both her and her Blackness as beautiful. The Black woman is “[d]ressed in” a “color that is life” (Stanza 1, l. 2) and has a “form that is beauty” (1.2). She is “discover[ed]” as a “Promised Land” (1.5) and is a “[r]ipe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of black wine” (2.2). Such language simultaneously pays homage to the beauty of Black women and also (re)defines Blackness itself as beautiful, life-giving. In fact, even in death, while her “passing beauty” has been “fix[ed] . . . for all Eternity” (4.2) by the poet, the Black woman is “reduce[d] to ashes to nourish the roots of life” (4.3).

In addition to such poetic technique, Senghor also uses imagery of African land, culture, and fauna to depict the beauty of Black women. The Black woman is a “savanna quivering to the fervent caress / Of the East Wind, sculptured tom-tom, stretched drumskin” (2.4–5); she is “oil soothing . . . the thighs of the princes of Mali / Gazelle with celestial limbs” (3.2–4). Such imagery concurrently etches the beauty of Black women while also valuing and valorizing Africa and African culture, which here situates the Black woman within a broader cultural milieu and also becomes the touchstone for the poet’s very definition of beauty, thereby rendering in poetic form the African aesthetic that Senghor strove to define in his essays. Moreover, in a broader metaphor, the Black woman may be seen as Africa itself.

At the same time, while Black Woman celebrates its subject, it also clearly depicts Black womanhood through a perspective coded as male by the language of the poem. Though the speaker “grew up in [her] shadow” (1.3), as the “Promised Land” “discover[ed]” by the speaker, as the “drumskin / Moaning under the hands of the conqueror” (2.5–6), as the “oil soothing . . . princes,” the Black woman depicted here is viewed by, acted upon by, or acts for a male figure who, in the imagery of the poem, is colonizer, “conqueror,” ruler.

Her beauty, while it is potentially maternal in early lines (1.3–4), is highly eroticized throughout the piece. In addition, even though imagery evokes the voice of the Black woman—who is “[m]outh that gives music” (2.3) and whose “voice is the spiritual song of the Beloved” (2.7)—her voice is not heard in the poem, and the larger portion of the imagery pertains to her physical body (skin, hair, eyes). Such a reading, however, does not mitigate the Negritude ideals expressed by the poem.

Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s New York

Works Cited

Senghor, Léopold Sédar. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Melvin Dixon, University Press of Virginia, 1991.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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