DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1: What did you notice?
2: What were your questions?
3: Did you want to change anything about your life, or the world?
4: If you are a descendant of people brought here in chains, what do you want the rest of us to know?
If you are not a descendant of people brought here in chains, what do you think is your responsibility to those people?
5: "I’m trying to learn you how to touch your own spirit. I need to know that I can hold on to what I’ve come from." - What do you want to hold onto?
It’s probably true that most of the films that most of us have seen are from a few square miles in Southern California. Hollywood cinema is the dominant form - though not the most prolific, as India and Nigeria compete for that title. And yes, some Hollywood cinema is of course extraordinary - SUNRISE, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, VERTIGO, SINGIN IN THE RAIN, PLANET OF THE APES, THE GODFATHER, CHINATOWN, DO THE RIGHT THING, ET THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL, CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, MAGNOLIA, THE THIN RED LINE, BARTON FINK, SELMA, THE HURT LOCKER - and a thousand more.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we should remember that there are 23 countries in North America - after the US, Mexico and Canada the most prominent; but El Salvador, Panama, Cuba too.
If we were watching more than one film a week, I would probably suggest that we take a look at STORIES WE TELL from Canada, ROMA from Mexico, and this week’s choice - and if you haven’t seen those two, I urge you to take the time at some point. But in choosing our film from North America, there was really only ever one option: DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, by Julie Dash.
TRAILER
GARETH’S INTRODUCTION
HOW TO WATCH DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST IS AVAILABLE ON THE FOLLOWING PLATFORMS:
Click here to watch on Amazon from $2.99, or paste this link into your browser: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.6eb7ff4a-ce65-ed69-e035-b888f92606b2/ref=dv_web_auth_no_re_sig/147-8298827-8815535?ie=UTF8&autoplay=1&
Click here to watch on YouTube from $3.99, or paste this link into your browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWYR7THgvBE
Click here to watch on iTunes from $3.99, or paste this link into your browser: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/daughters-of-the-dust/id1490337699
Daughters of the Dust is also available to watch for free on Kanopy, which some public library and college students can use for free. Click here for more information, or paste this link into your browser: https://www.kanopy.com/product/daughters-dust
REFLECTIVE ESSAY - GUEST CONTRIBUTOR JASMIN PITTMAN MORRELL
FROM GARETH: When watching a film like Daughters of the Dust, I’m aware more of my desire to listen than to speak. Before I can assess, I have a responsibility to be curious. It’s a blessing that I not only have this responsibility, but am continually invited to hear the stories of people who see themselves represented on screen less than I do. Even the assumption that I should assess may be a function of hierarchies, inequalities, discriminations. To state the obvious: Daughters of the Dust is about Gullah women, descendants of people brought in chains from the Central-Western region of Africa, readying to leave their transplanted home; it’s a film to be experienced and re-experienced, a circular narrative whose very voiceover comes from “the future”, but whose “story” goes further into the past than any of us can grasp. Every time I watch it, I feel less concerned to “understand” than to experience it. And my friend Jasmin Pittman Morrell, a brilliant writer, from Georgia, is gracious enough to share in conversation with me about it. Jasmin will join our call on Thursday evening, and her reflective essay on the film is below. I’ve appended the Wikipedia page for Daughters of the Dust first, as some further overview of the film is helpful.
Daughters of the Dust is set in 1902 among the members of the Peazant family, Gullah islanders who live at Ibo Landing on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast.[5] Their ancestors were brought there as enslaved people centuries ago, and the islanders developed a language—known as Gullah or Sea Island Creole English—and culture that was creolized from West Africans of Ibo, Yoruba, Kikongo, Mende, and Twi origin and the cultures and languages of the British Isles, with the common variety of English being the superstratum in this case[6] Developed in their relative isolation of large plantations on the islands, the enslaved peoples' unique culture and language have endured over time. Their dialogue is in Gullah creole.[5]
Narrated by the Unborn Child, the future daughter of Eli and Eula, whose voice is influenced by accounts of her ancestors, the film presents poetic visual images and circular narrative structures to represent the past, present and future for the Gullah, the majority of whom are about to embark for the mainland and a more modern way of life. The old ways are represented by community matriarch Nana Peazant, who practices African and Caribbean spiritual rituals and who says of the Unborn Child, "We are two people in one body. The last of the old and the first of the new."
Contrasting cousins, Viola, a devout Christian, and Yellow Mary, a free spirit who has brought her lover, Trula, from the city, arrive at the island by canoe from their homes on the mainland for a last dinner with their family. Yellow Mary plans to leave for Nova Scotia after her visit. Mr. Snead, a mainland photographer, accompanies Viola and takes portraits of the islanders before they leave their way of life forever. Intertwined with these narratives is the marital rift between Eli and his wife Eula, who is about to give birth after being raped by a white man on the mainland. Eli struggles with the fact that the unborn child may not be his.
Several other family members' stories unfold between these narratives. They include Haagar, a cousin who finds the old spiritual beliefs and provincialism of the island "backwards," and is impatient to leave for a more modern society with its educational and economic opportunities. Her daughter Iona longs to be with her secret lover St. Julien Lastchild, a Native American, who will not leave the island.
While the women prepare a traditional meal for the feast, which includes okra, yams and shellfish prepared at the beach, the men gather nearby in groups to talk. The children and teenagers practice religious rites on the beach and have a Bible-study session with Viola. Bilal Muhammad leads a Muslim prayer. Nana evokes the spirits of the family's ancestors who worked on the island's indigo plantations. Eula and Eli reveal the history and folklore of the slave uprising and mass suicide at Igbo Landing. The Peazant family members make their final decisions to leave the island for a new beginning, or stay behind and maintain their way of life.
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST RECONSIDERED
- Jasmin Pittman Morrell
Julie Dash’s glorious film Daughters of the Dust is not for the faint of heart. Not because its violence is gruesome, nor because sexuality is on display as though the act of lovemaking were a spectator’s sport. But it is purely provocative filmmaking, a dreamlike foray into the sultry landscape of the Sea Islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this land was largely considered unsuitable for white settlers due to its climate, which served as a breeding ground for various tropical diseases and fevers. Gullah culture was born from the once enslaved West Africans who tended their white masters’ rice plantations in relative isolation, allowing for an unprecedented preservation of culture with little European influence. The film is set at the turn of the century in 1902, years after the Civil War had ended and Black folk wrestled with the dual identities of now being both African and American. Centering around the Peazant family, we are introduced to them in a moment of great transition. If they leave their island for the mainland, traveling North with its promise of greater opportunity and assimilation into American life, will they lose vital pieces of their culture and forget how to belong to themselves?
*
I first met Julie Dash, in college after a screening of her work. I must admit upon first viewing, I could barely follow the plot and hardly put into words how the movie had affected me. But it left its mark—whether that was through the images of beautiful women with darkly luminous skin dancing on the beach in ethereal, creamy Victorian style dresses, or the sense of connection I felt to the Peazant matriarch who charged her family to remember and respect their ancestors and traditions—I still can’t quite say, but it left me longing to know more about this rich heritage, that at the time, was lost to me. I had known myself largely to be American, certainly, but the African piece, my own blackness, was mostly unexplored territory. I was, most immediately, born into a Black family who had worked incredibly hard in attempts to overcome the limitations of racism, but in so doing did not emphasize where we’d come from, only where we might go.
Ms. Dash herself posed a striking figure, her grounded, powerful presence as a storyteller something I simultaneously felt intimidated by but deeply admired. She spoke of womanhood, describing it in part as the ability to create, hold, and birth new life, our wombs the great container for literal and figurative transformation. She invited us to consider what we carried woven into our very cells, from our ancestors tenacity to survive, down to the lovers we invited into the sacred temple of our bodies. She seemed to wink at me when she mentioned lovers, and I am sure I blushed. This was also unexplored terrain, the kind of delicious sinfulness I had yet to taste for fear of eating, and in so becoming, tainted fruit. The religion of my youth had effectively divorced me from experiencing my body as something to celebrate, its pleasures only allowable within the confines of a heterosexual, martial union (and even then…I was fairly certain I was not supposed to really enjoy my own body, let alone someone else’s).
What does it mean to be a daughter of the dust, equal parts soil and wind, matter and spirit? It implies something temporal yet lasting; the weight of history and the witnesses who have gone before us; the buoyancy of surrender to the energy of transmutation. There is no daughter without mother. No dust without earth. No history without the present moment. Daughters of the Dust invited me into these seeming dualities, each one intrinsically tied to the other to form a whole. The opening lines of the film feel full of this ancient wisdom:
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’t understand
I am the utterance of my name
Resisting linear storytelling forms and opting instead for a kind of visual lyricism, one could almost argue that the film in itself is a series of bridging shots between the rooted past and the winds of migration. For all of the seeming conflicts between magic and religion, sexual purity and shame, African and American, slave and free, ancestors and children; you might imagine heavy contrasting in lighting and use of shadow, symbolic changes of weather, or quick montages juxtaposed with long, steady shots, but this is not the case. Daughters of the Dust is set in the balmy, warm afternoon light of the coast, its pacing deliberately measured, its sense of continuity an invitation to all to sit with its poetry in meditation, in community, or perhaps, if you can, with family.
When I watch Daughters of the Dust, I feel part of the Peazant family, but I don’t think this experience is unique to me simply because I identify as African American. The themes of this film are universal, perhaps unique in specificity but not in applicability. We all benefit when we are familiar with our heritage, when we can look it in the face and see its laugh lines as well as its scars, accepting both, with all the sorrow and joy that may entail. When I belong to myself, when I truly love all that I see in the mirror, there is nothing that tarnishes or diminishes me, unless I allow it. And that is provocative, that is revolutionary. To love oneself in a culture that is propped up by our fears, insecurities, and isolation, to belong to communities that imagine different ways of being and foster interdependence, this is radical. This has the power to change the world.
FOR FURTHER VIEWING
Restricting ourselves to a maximum of ten films for each country, it’s a tall order indeed, but here we go:
UNITED STATES: Nashville, Make Way for Tomorrow, Do the Right Thing, Munich, The Tree of Life, Leave No Trace, Little Women, The Fisher King, Smoke Signals, McFarland USA
CUBA: I am Cuba
CANADA: Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, The Sweet Hereafter, My Winnipeg, The Red Violin, Stories We Tell, Last Night, Jesus of Montreal, Maudie, The Bear, The Dead Zone (Canadian director, made in Canada, but set in the US)
GUATEMALA: El Norte
MEXICO: Roma, Amores Perros, Cronos, Los Olvidados