Daughters of the Dust
Feb. 14th, 2019 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJulie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust was the first movie by an African-American woman to get a theatrical release in the United States - in 1991. It’s a beautiful movie, both in terms of its sheer physical presence - the set dressing, the costumes, the natural beauty of the setting - and in terms of storytelling.
The story is set in 1902 on one of the Sea Islands of North Carolina (farther south than the barrier islands famous for wild ponies in Misty of Chincoteague, but also possessed of wild horses - of whom there is one beautiful, mystical shot). These islands are the home of the Gullah people, who (quoth Wikipedia) “developed a creole language, the Gullah language, and a culture rich in African influences that makes them distinctive among African-Americans.”
Dash, filming in those pre-Wikipedia days, clearly expects that many viewers will be unfamiliar with the Gullah, and part of her project is to create a rich, layered depiction of their world. I particularly liked the way that certain objects kept showing back up, like the corncob bubble pipe that we see both children and adults blow, or the big umbrella they find in the sand. Its canopy is ripped, but it’s beautiful nonetheless, and the characters sit beneath it to watch the wave - framed by the radiating golden ribs and fabric like the flat golden halo on an icon.
Some of these objects suggest a deeper meaning which the movie never elaborates: the murals inside the houses, the quilts with their many-pointed stars (in one lovely scene, we see the family holding back the quilts as the wind tries to blow them away), the fluttering white dresses the girls wear as they play games on the beach.
And sometimes the meaning of certain objects begins mysterious and becomes explicit. For instance, some of the younger Peazants scoff at the bottle tree as an old superstition, driving a frustrated Nana - keeper of the family traditions and magical beliefs - to exclaim, “I never said the spirits lived in the glass jars!” The bottles are an aide-memoire: the shape of the bottle is meant to help you remember the dead.
The dead are a powerful presence among the Peazant family. “It’s up to the living to keep up with the dead,” Nana says, and part of her frustration and fear at the family’s impending departure arises not only from the fact that they’ll be leaving her - for she refuses to go - but because they’ll be leaving their dead, as well. How can they build a future without a past? And despite the depredations of slavery, despite the fact that slave ships sailed to these remote islands right up until the Civil War - they call middle-aged Bilal, for instance, a “saltwater Negro,” because he was brought across the ocean as a child; he opens the movie by singing at the sunrise like a muezzin, and later we see him with what seems to be a Qu’ran.
Despite this legacy of suffering, the Peazants have built a past here. Their ancestors rest in the graveyard; the bottle trees recall their names. Nana has built up a web of magical observances, superstitions some of her children call them, which are meant to connect the family to their African past and protect them.
Yet such protection has come to seem inadequate to the younger generation. “Deep down, we believe that God can’t heal the wounds of our past or protect us from the world that put shackles on our feet,” cries Eula, Nana’s great-grandaughter-in-law - who, sometime before the movie began, was raped (it’s implied by a white man, although she won’t say who for fear that her husband might try to take revenge, and get lynched).
But Eula is not voicing despair: she is trying to bring this fear out into the open, to show how it is poisoning their relationships with each other, and particularly with cousin Yellow Mary who has returned from the mainland a “ruined woman.” “If you call her ruined, then what do you say about me?” Eula demands - and then insists, “If you love yourselves, then love Yellow Mary… We are all good women.”
The story is set in 1902 on one of the Sea Islands of North Carolina (farther south than the barrier islands famous for wild ponies in Misty of Chincoteague, but also possessed of wild horses - of whom there is one beautiful, mystical shot). These islands are the home of the Gullah people, who (quoth Wikipedia) “developed a creole language, the Gullah language, and a culture rich in African influences that makes them distinctive among African-Americans.”
Dash, filming in those pre-Wikipedia days, clearly expects that many viewers will be unfamiliar with the Gullah, and part of her project is to create a rich, layered depiction of their world. I particularly liked the way that certain objects kept showing back up, like the corncob bubble pipe that we see both children and adults blow, or the big umbrella they find in the sand. Its canopy is ripped, but it’s beautiful nonetheless, and the characters sit beneath it to watch the wave - framed by the radiating golden ribs and fabric like the flat golden halo on an icon.
Some of these objects suggest a deeper meaning which the movie never elaborates: the murals inside the houses, the quilts with their many-pointed stars (in one lovely scene, we see the family holding back the quilts as the wind tries to blow them away), the fluttering white dresses the girls wear as they play games on the beach.
And sometimes the meaning of certain objects begins mysterious and becomes explicit. For instance, some of the younger Peazants scoff at the bottle tree as an old superstition, driving a frustrated Nana - keeper of the family traditions and magical beliefs - to exclaim, “I never said the spirits lived in the glass jars!” The bottles are an aide-memoire: the shape of the bottle is meant to help you remember the dead.
The dead are a powerful presence among the Peazant family. “It’s up to the living to keep up with the dead,” Nana says, and part of her frustration and fear at the family’s impending departure arises not only from the fact that they’ll be leaving her - for she refuses to go - but because they’ll be leaving their dead, as well. How can they build a future without a past? And despite the depredations of slavery, despite the fact that slave ships sailed to these remote islands right up until the Civil War - they call middle-aged Bilal, for instance, a “saltwater Negro,” because he was brought across the ocean as a child; he opens the movie by singing at the sunrise like a muezzin, and later we see him with what seems to be a Qu’ran.
Despite this legacy of suffering, the Peazants have built a past here. Their ancestors rest in the graveyard; the bottle trees recall their names. Nana has built up a web of magical observances, superstitions some of her children call them, which are meant to connect the family to their African past and protect them.
Yet such protection has come to seem inadequate to the younger generation. “Deep down, we believe that God can’t heal the wounds of our past or protect us from the world that put shackles on our feet,” cries Eula, Nana’s great-grandaughter-in-law - who, sometime before the movie began, was raped (it’s implied by a white man, although she won’t say who for fear that her husband might try to take revenge, and get lynched).
But Eula is not voicing despair: she is trying to bring this fear out into the open, to show how it is poisoning their relationships with each other, and particularly with cousin Yellow Mary who has returned from the mainland a “ruined woman.” “If you call her ruined, then what do you say about me?” Eula demands - and then insists, “If you love yourselves, then love Yellow Mary… We are all good women.”
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Date: 2019-02-14 02:26 pm (UTC)On the topic of women directors, are you at all familiar with the work of Yelizaveta Svilova? I learned about her because she did the innovative film editing on the classic slice-of-life montage documentary Man With A Movie Camera, but she then went on to direct her own films, including documentaries about WWII.
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Date: 2019-02-15 12:48 am (UTC)Maybe I should do that this May.
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