Le Monologue de la muette

The girl with no voice is the maid, a new character in Dakar. At the master’s bidding and dismissible at will, a scapegoat for capricious bosses, subject to all kinds of pressures, threats and arbitrariness, defenceless, without rights, condemned to silent obedience, the maid crystallises the aberrations of a changing Senegalese society and the contradictions of globalisation: the reification of the human being, a precarity of work with the resulting anxiety and suffering, the youngsters’ exodus from villages, women taking on the work of men who can no longer feed their families, exemplary growth and an increasingly impoverished population. “What I don’t do to others, I don’t want people to do to me. Everyone can be in a maid’s position. The one who pays us is a kind of maid. There’s always a boss who pays.” (Or doesn’t pay.)” She is exploited in town, but also by her family back in the village. So the girl with no voice shouts her anger, breaking codes, using all means: recounting with words or acting on a stage, mixing theatre with documentary, acting with objective work situations, fiction with real slum settings, by separating sound and image, spreading her message country-wide, from Dakar to the furthest villages, and by letting the cruelty of words resonate over the beauty of her face, silent with dignity. (Yann Lardeau)