Director Julie Dash
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST A
USA Great
Britain (112 mi) 1991 d:
Julie Dash
We were the children
of those who chose to survive.
—Unborn narrator (Kai-Lynn Warren)
It is with mixed emotions that one revisits this film, always
utterly astonished at the striking beauty of the film, which remains embedded
in the subconsciousness of viewers literally for decades to come, like a gold
standard in comparison to other films, while also remaining befuddled and
disappointed at the lack of opportunities for women in the motion picture
business, as this director, the first black woman to release a feature film in
the United States, was surprisingly never given another opportunity to make
another film, instead working exclusively in television and as a college film
instructor. Despite screening at the
Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals, the film still had no distributor until
Dash ultimately discovered the New York outlet for Kino films, which almost
exclusively distributes foreign films.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kino marketed the film as “a foreign film made
in America.” Released just after
Christmas in 1991, not seen by most until the following year, this would be
sometime after Spike Lee released JUNGLE FEVER (1991), yet before MALCOLM X
(1992), a director who’s gone on to make twenty films since then, or it would
be after Terrence Malick made DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), but before the release of
his next film THE THIN RED LINE (1998), making half a dozen features since
then, while indie filmmaker Richard Linklater just released SLACKER (1991), and
has been given the opportunity to make more than fifteen films since then. So why not Julie Dash? The answer lies in the paucity of
opportunities offered to women and minorities in the motion picture industry, a
startling fact that reveals the backwardness of the male-dominated white
culture in Hollywood that instead seems content to release an unending supply
of blockbuster comic book super hero movies.
The startling originality of this film, however, has remained part of
the conversation for decades, lingering in the minds of cinephiles, often
discussed but rarely seen, as until recently few had seen it. Then a mega-million pop star sensation named
Beyoncé makes a tribute music video entitled BEYONCÉ: LEMONADE (2016) that
premieres on HBO that is seen by millions and becomes all the rage, with haunting
visual reminders interspersed throughout that literally duplicate the artistic
vision of director Julie Dash and her lone feature made more than twenty-five
years ago, spurring a 25th anniversary restoration and DVD release of the film,
actually re-screening again throughout the country, while viewers can also
watch it on Netflix. Bear in mind it is
Beyoncé raking in the millions, while Julie Dash is relegated to the dustbin of
history, very similar to black artists in the music industry in the 40’s and
50’s whose songs were then made into huge hits by white singers, who cashed the
ginormous paychecks and lived the Beverly Hills lifestyle at the expense of
otherwise forgotten black artists who penned the original songs and received
only a pittance in comparison. Well into
the second decade of the 21st century, it’s hard to believe we are
re-experiencing those same times all over again. As one of the characters (Eula) in the film
says, bearing a timeless poignancy, “We wear our scars like armor.”
Written, directed, and produced by Dash, the film premiered
at Sundance where Arthur Jafa won the Cinematography Award. Shot over a period of three weeks on St.
Helena Island in South Carolina with an $800,000 budget ($650,000 from American
Playhouse and $150,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, receiving
the rights to broadcast the film on PBS after its theatrical release), starring
a predominately black cast, set in 1902 on a remote island accessible only by
boat where slavery existed until the Civil War, working on indigo, cotton, and
rice plantations, where the Sea Islands were historically unique, as slaves far
outnumbered whites living on the island, yet Africans continued to be
transported there half a century after the slave trade was officially
prohibited. Furthermore, because of the
presence of malaria, due to the swampy land filled with bugs and mosquitoes,
whites stayed out of the rice plantations as much as possible, leaving the
segregated slave communities relatively undisturbed. The first slaves emancipated in the United
States were on the Sea Islands at the start of the Civil War in 1861 when
federal troops seized the territory. Vastly
outnumbered, plantation owners immediately fled to the mainland, abandoning
their antebellum homes, where the land they left behind was considered
worthless. As a result, in this film it
is whites who are marginalized, existing only on the fringe (in flashback
sequences), instead of minorities. There
were no bridges to the coastal shore in those days, and this sense of extreme
isolation contributed to the preservation of the Gullah language, African
culture and traditions, along with a daily way of life, with Gullah families
working the same farms, growing much of their own food, making their own
baskets, as they continue to live in the one-room houses of their
ancestors. The last generation of
descendants of African slaves whose elders could actually recall the harsh
reality of slavery times, with flashbacks of a prolific indigo-growing past, the
film examines the link between three generations of Gullah women of the
extended Peazant family living on Ibo Landing as they attempt to bridge the
past, present, and future. Surrounded by
giant oak trees littered with hanging Spanish moss, living in a place time
seems to have forgot, Gullah comes from a west African language that means “a
people blessed by God.” While intrigued
by the languid pace and positively incandescent imagery, where almost the
entire film takes place outdoors, yet viewers will have a hard time with the
un-subtitled Gullah dialect spoken throughout, which is a masterstroke of
invention, which Dash took great pains to reproduce faithfully, something few
have ever heard before, spending “10 years researching the Gullah tradition,
poring over papers and books in New York City’s Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture, university libraries and the Smithsonian in Washington,”
which absolutely places viewers in another time and place, one of the virtues
of cinema, becoming something of an historical time capsule. The family is planning a farewell picnic on
the beach, fully dressed in their Sunday finest of bonnets and long white
dresses as they prepare a celebratory feast, with half the family planning to make
a break from their traditions and leave the islands, heading north to the mainland
in search of a better life, filled of hopes and dreams and the possibilities of
living in freedom. Only the oldest, Nana
Peazant (Cora Lee Day), the eccentric 88-year old matriarch, intends to stay
behind with her tin box filled with “scraps of memories.” She is the one who constantly emphasizes the
importance of retaining spiritual ties with the ancestors, who she views as guardians
of tradition and protectors of the family, making her the keeper of griot oral
traditions, passing down the family history through myths and stories told to
each new generation of children. Arriving
by boat for the occasion is her college-educated niece from Philadelphia, Viola
Peazant (Cheryl Lynn Bruce), a fundamentalist Christian who sees herself as a
Renaissance woman, thinking she has found the proper pathway to the future
through the teachings of Christ.
Confident that her education would prevail, thinking she could convince
everyone to join her to make the crossing, she is surprised at the resistance,
as some remain firmly attached to the simpler times of “the old ways,” such as
her cousin, known as Yellow Mary (Barbarao), having experienced first-hand the
prejudices and racist brutality of the people on the shore, having worked as a
wet nurse and prostitute in Cuba, who could only leave subjugation by damaging
herself in the process, returning with a beautiful female lover, Trula (Trula
Hoosier), an almost make-believe character who rarely speaks. Shunned by most in the family, known to have
had a white father, Yellow Mary dreams of faraway Nova Scotia as she embraces
Nana’s mysticism, much to the ire of Viola.
Dash, a New Yorker who grew up in the Queensbridge Projects
in Long Island City, but every summer she would visit her father’s family in
Charleston, who were of Gullah descent, where one of her goals in the film is
undoubtedly invested in the project of reclaiming Gullah’s African heritage. She persistently draws connections between
Gullah and African traditions in the film, particularly in terms of spiritual
beliefs. While the film is remarkably
lyrical and densely abstract, perhaps the single biggest surprise is a narrator
from an unborn child (Kai-Lynn Warren), unseen to the naked eye, yet viewers
can watch her magically flit about like an apparition, adding a bit of
mysticism throughout, where one of the novel choices (that defied white critics
at the time of its release) is telling a non-linear story much like an African
Gullah would tell the story, moving backwards and forwards in time, sharing many
of the director’s own personal experiences of her youth, like preparing gumbo,
eating meals with her family, even gluing okra to her forehead while listening
to her grandparents spin stories and myths into her family history. This is one of the first films to emphasize
and appreciate the beauty of dark-skinned women, while not concealing the
age-old prejudices held against lighter tones, even among her own family, which
is one of the many problems this family must face. While there are many young girls between late
adolescence and early adulthood, the one that stands out is Eula Peazant (Alva
Rogers), who married into the family, yet she has a major impact in uniting
many of the conflicting emotions of the film, addressing the rancor of the back-stabbing
comments, many directed at her, believing she was raped by one of the white
landowners, leaving her currently pregnant, yet she never utters a word about
it, leaving her husband Eli Peazant (Adisa Anderson), already torn between
leaving and staying, in a perpetual state of confusion. Amusingly, the unborn child believes it is
her mission to convince him that he’s her father. But visually, what we see are young girls at
play, retelling stories, learning dances, playing games, and sharing their
customs, with the island including a healthy mix of African, Muslim, and Indian,
where one of the girls, Iona Peazant (Bahni Turpin) constantly fantasizes over
the last Cherokee Indian on the island (M. Cochise Anderson), almost always
seen riding on a horse, using a change of speed to slow-motion, interjecting a
dream state. Dash prefers to film family
members in groups, either entering or exiting the frame, even shooting woman
lying on tree branches, as people move in and out of the frame, perhaps seen
riding bikes on the beach, or speaking to a family elder, where the
choreography of characters within the frame rarely leaves anyone alone,
creating a visual expression of family and spiritual camaraderie. Perhaps accentuating this framing device is
the presence of a professional photographer, Mr. Snead (Tommie Hicks), a man
hired and brought along by Viola to commemorate this occasion, where the feast
on the beach resembles The Last Supper.
In something of a playful manner, the unborn child is initially seen
through the photographer’s lens, making an appearance only in the imagination,
as when he takes a peek away from the camera, she has disappeared. The interconnection of the family is
continually evolving, much deeper than we initially imagine, as painful
personal experiences and deeply-felt family tensions allow multiple
perspectives to develop, which is how the story unravels, allowing one
character to respond to another, going back and forth, with all sides given
equal weight, where there is no right or wrong, as the collective information grasped
by the viewer reshapes what we know about the profound differences within the family,
with each harboring a distinctly unique point of view. Interspersed throughout are themes of
acceptance and tolerance, where doubts remain even within the family, continually
exploring the impact of their connections going back to Africa, where a
conflict exists on how to proceed into the future, linked perhaps by the spirit
of an unborn child who wields influence in mystifying and indescribable ways. Examining the connections between various
African cultures and American slaves, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
interestingly writes, (page 42), The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, “The
most fundamental absolute of the Yoruba is that there exist, simultaneously,
three stages of existence: the past, the present, and the unborn.” Add to this the ghostly spirit awareness
expressed in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved,
where the line of demarcation between the living and the dead seems rooted in
this same Yoruba philosophy. It’s hard
not to be impressed by the poetry of the language, where Nana’s opening remarks
(though spoken in Gullah) reveal an awesome underlying power, with knowledge
suppressed through hundreds of years of slavery, where education was not only
prohibited, but brutally punished, yet whose intact survival and conscious
existence may defy traditional Western thinking, like something mythological
coming out of Altman’s 3 Women
(1977), as all women somehow become one,
“I am the first and the last. I
am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the barren one and many are my daughters.
I am the silence that you can not
understand. I am the utterance of my
name.”
Also on the island, seen praying and studying in Arabic, is Bilal
Muhammad (Umar Abdurrahman), one of the island elders speaking to an inquiring
Mr. Snead, recalling the days when slave ships were anchored off the coast, illegally,
revealing a horrific story of what happens when a group of slaves are connected
by chains, giving them no chance when they hit the water, as they don’t ever
come back up. On that site rests a
mysterious floating icon, a visual reminder of their heritage, a large, black,
carved figure of an African man floating in the swamps of Ibo Landing. Bilal Muhammed is a crucial figure, who never
stopped practicing his faith, where his unique background represents a link to
a different part of Africa, perhaps Sudan, as throughout the film he is seen
praying in Arabic, speaking in French, or French Creole, in addition to
speaking the Gullah language. This
cultural complexity contrasts sharply with the innocence of the unborn child, “My
story begins on the eve of my family’s migration North. My story
begins before I was born. My great, great grandmother, Nana Peazant,
saw her family coming apart. Her flowers to bloom in a distant
frontier.” The different histories and
experiences of Dash’s characters resists an overly homogenous depiction of
Gullah, or blackness, as each individual must decide for themselves whether or
not to make this journey, where the film is about saving tradition while
confronting the future. The unborn child
comes from a place that might best be described as the future, suggesting the
possibility of a future that might be innocent of the past while not ignorant
of it, offering a kind of utopian vision of reconciliation, one that seeks to
find a way beyond the problems that history has been unable to resolve. Ever mindful of the past, indigo-dyed hands
become a symbol for slavery, a reminder of the work they were once forced to
do, where there is an accompanying attachment of shame that comes with it,
where Yellow Mary has been “ruint” and Eula has been raped, as sexual abuse is
part of the unspoken legacy of slavery. The
uniqueness of the film is that these women embody the scars of slavery, where
this is the traumatic past that must be overcome, where the heated exchanges
near the end of the film reach impassioned heights, with Eula’s extended monologue
serving as the grand climax of the film, embracing her connection to Yellow
Mary, as both share a legacy of shame. “If
you’re so ashamed of Yellow Mary ‘cause she got ruint, well, what do you say
about me? Am I ruined, too?”
But she goes further, “Deep inside, we believed that they ruined our
mothers, and their mothers before them. And we live our lives always
expecting the worst because we feel we don’t deserve any
better. Deep inside we believe that even God can’t heal the wounds
of our past or protect us from the world that puts shackles on our feet.” This recalls conditions during the Holocaust,
with concentration camp prisoners feeling a similar silence or absence of God while
confronting the utter futility of their position, surrounded by the stench of
death, as there was simply no hope left against such relentless barbarian viciousness. Yet, where God and religion have failed, Dash
strives for a transcendent aesthetic, one led by the innocence of an unborn spirit
who delivers the optimism of hope, imagining possibilities in the future that
have not yet been seen, perhaps best described as: “It was an age of beginnings, a time of
promises.” As part of a collective of black
UCLA film students in the 70’s known as the L.A. Rebellion, Dash was motivated
to create a unique cinematic landscape, an expression of pride and dignity, yet
one that showed a special sensitivity to children and their place in black history,
offering a transformative vision of a better society. While the language alone makes this a
difficult film to encounter, with history intertwined into the fabric of a
densely layered subject matter, where viewers often feel disoriented somewhere
along the way, as nothing is explained, yet one of the startling attributes of
Dash’s film is finding a new way of seeing, transforming her ideas into a colorful
kaleidoscope of impressionistic images, a multicolored quilt that waves in the
breeze, clothes hanging on the line, a broken down umbrella found on the beach,
and a variety of cotton dresses that the women wear. With each shot meticulously and purposely
crafted, including an ethnically inspired score by John Barnes, certainly Julie
Dash’s film was lightyears ahead of its time, disparaged and misunderstood when
it was released, yet both the seriousness and sensuousness of the film are
unmistakable, using a provocative style that only heightens the vulnerability
of such exposed lives, where it’s not enough to bear the burdens of the past,
but there must be a means to transform it.
In 2004, the film was determined to be “culturally, historically or
aesthetically” significant, as it was selected to the National Film Registry, "Films Added to
National Film Registry for 2004".
Just a side note, English subtitles were used in the film’s theatrical
release at PBS’s American Playhouse,
but they have been dropped from the recent restoration.
