Daughters of the Dust
Julie Dash (1991)
Born in New York City in 1952, Julie Dash has Gullah ancestors on her father’s side. The Gullah (according to Wikipedia) ‘are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the US states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina, in both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. They have developed a creole language, also called Gullah, and a culture with significant African influence’. Daughters of the Dust, set half a century before the year of its writer-director’s birth, describes a Gullah family gathering immediately before most of its members set out from the Sea Islands of South Carolina for the American mainland. The film’s place in cinema history is assured: it was the first feature directed by an African-American woman to receive a general theatrical release in the US.
This cachet could earn Daughters of the Dust a place in Sight & Sound’s upcoming decennial greatest films poll – a selection that, as recent issues of the magazine have made clear, is under pressure to be a lot more diverse than hitherto[1]. S&S has already devoted too many column inches to this year’s list-fest: I’ve had enough of the poll even before it happens. One reference to it on the letters page in the latest S&S (June 2022) is germane to Dash’s film, though. Kelly May writes that ‘I for one would be pleased see voters using their hearts over their heads. Cinema should be about visceral, emotional reactions …’ I’ve never understood why the don’t-think-it-feel-it argument should apply to a film any more than to a play or a poem or a painting – why not think and feel? But Daughters of the Dust, which I’d never seen before, often left me wishing I could change the habits of a lifetime.
A few members of the Peazant family have made the journey to the mainland before, and the cultural transition it entails. They’re returning to their native island for the leave-taking before heading back north for good, with others. Viola Peazant (Cheryl Lynn Bruce), who now resides in Philadelphia, is a devout Christian. She’s accompanied by Mr Snead (Tommy Hicks), a photographer who’ll take pictures of the farewell ceremonies, including a family last supper. The controversial Yellow Mary (Barbara-O) comes back with her younger same-sex lover (Trula Hoosier). Those preparing to leave for the first time include Haagar Peazant (Kaycee Moore), who seems to have appointed herself leader of the migrating party; Eli Peazant (Adisa Anderson), conflicted as to whether to stay or go; his wife Eula (Alva Rogers), who is pregnant with the child of a white man who raped her; and Bilal Muhammad (Umar Abdurrahman), a Muslim and pillar of the island community. Those who’ll remain on the island include Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day), the elderly family matriarch and chief embodiment of its African ancestry and traditions.
The cinematography is by Arthur Jafa (Julie Dash’s ex-husband). As a succession of images, Daughters in the Dust, shot on location on St Helena Island and Hunting Island off the South Carolina coast, is beguiling – the various single and groups of figures in the seascape, a large, battered parasol washed up on the beach. When the film talks, however, it’s usually exasperating. The last entry in the opening credits cast list (which caused me some apprehension) is ‘Kay-Lynn Warren as the Unborn Child’. The spirit of Eula’s unborn child, this character both narrates the film and, supernaturally, appears as a young girl. She does both intermittently and, in the case of the narration, incomprehensibly. This is a family failing. You know where you are when Viola and Snead talk, and, in a manner of speaking – which Cora Lee Day certainly has, along with a camera-magnetising face – when Nana delivers pronouncements like:
‘I am the first and the last. I am the honoured 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 cannot understand. I am the utterance of my name.’
It’s hard to know if this kind of language is typical of the film – I couldn’t make out what most of the others were saying.
I recognised only one member of the cast, Tommy Redmond Hicks, from Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986). I thought I recognised Adisa Anderson but his very brief list of credits on IMDb suggests I was confusing him with someone else. The film boasts some impressive physical acting, from Anderson especially, but this rarely adds up to coherent characterisation. The most conventionally accomplished performance comes from Cheryl Lynn Bruce. Writing about Daughters of the Dust in Sight & Sound in 2017 (when the restored film was re-released), Lizzie Francke described it as ‘balletic, operatic cinema’. That’s right enough and the film (therefore) left me wondering why the people on the screen seemed to keep repeating their movements and the attitudes they presented. Daughters of the Dust is a culturally important piece of cinema. Unless you can stop yourself wondering what exactly the dramatis personae are doing and why they’re doing it, and trying to work out most of the relationships, the film is also hard work.
20 May 2022
[1] Afternote: Daughters of the Dust duly made into the hallowed top hundred announced on 1 December 2022 – joint 60th, alongside La dolce vita and Moonlight …