Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash is a delicately crafted, intimate look at Gullah Geechee culture and the Black experience, through the lens of a Black woman.

Photo Credit: Sebastian Voortman, Pexels

Daughters of the Dust is a 1991 film loving crafted by Julie Dash in pursuit of healing and nurturing the Black community, particularly for the bearers of tradition and culture – Black women. Unlike most films, this film does not posit a strongly positioned argument, though it does tackle the issue or portraying Black existence through a culturally rich and relevant depiction. Dash offers us gentle depictions rather than championing particular arguments or impositions. In contrast, Spike Lee’s 1986 She’s Gotta Have It aggressively imposes the male gaze on the audience. Cinematically, and in our navigation of this world, Black women have developed an oppositional gaze – a protective defense mechanism, naturally resulting from constantly being under assault. Instead, Dash offers culturally refreshing, empowering, and admiring gazes towards African cultural products borne from the breasts of Black women.      

Dash respects the interpretive process of all Black people, recognizing our variant positions by virtue of her complexly oriented characters, and would rather we forge our own meanings and personal understandings for our personal and communal ability to thrive. Black filmmakers have had their own interpretations of our means to freedom, but many have been set in opposition, or in exclusion to, Black women. So, for example, Dash does not overtly challenge Viola’s Christianity, but uses her reality to initiate a critical engagement of those practice and spaces, and if it is helpful to our collective wellbeing and ability to thrive. None of the characters are depicted in villainous or strawman-esque ways. In contrast, Micheaux’s depiction of the Black preacher Old Ned, while making a salient point about the functions of early Christianity, was done with an air of scrutiny and shame. And in Spencer Williams’ critiquing portrayal, urban dwellers were characterized as swimming in the liquids of their own debauchery. Dash refrains from passing value laden judgements and gives her characters the space to exist as complex beings.

Further, it is most fitting that Dash’s film fall into the Black independent film category of “community meeting.” The argumentative style is exhausting, particularly when narratives have been shaped to insist that we defend our right to live, breathe, exist authentically; especially when those arguments fundamentally deny our humanity. Dash’s pursuit is one of Black actualization and communal determination without recreating the oppressive tactics that we have languished under. Argument is a conversant style used to pit enemy against enemy, not a method for a community with mutual goals. Reflection and critique of our practices is necessary, but when delivered in opposition to individuals rather that systemic structures, when laden with antagonism and conflicting interests as in Hollywood’s form, it is not conducive to our wellbeing, growth, or communal interest. Julie Dash is interested in our collective survival. 

Throughout Daughters of the Dust, illustrations and mysticism are more important than the material realities. Since being brought to the United States, Black material realities have been stark. Dash offers that we create our own frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing our pasts and futures. It is through these poetic myths, songs, rituals, and re-rememberings that Black women are able to liberate themselves from oppressive and harmful forces, without pressure to perform, and with patience for the healing process. Dash calls for imaginative catharsis and inserting our own interpretations to heal from trauma; rather than dwelling on harms and drowning in them, Dash, through the character Nana, offers that we can become empowered by stories of the ancestors who chose to stand atop of the water, and did not drown, but walked back home. By reaching toward these embodied knowledges, and away from white and European notions of “empirical” knowledge, Dash offers empowering reframing of choice, collective action, and ways of being.

European arts are politically constructed in appropriative and exclusive ways, deployed in marginalizing ways to justify Black exploitation and degradation.^[1] The white American film project has been one to ease the conscious of whites, either by reaffirming the superior status or offering meager adjustments to the status quo. Daughters of the Dust has a symbolic meaning that does not invite or pander to the white gaze or understanding. Dash’s aesthetic speaks directly to Black women, in whatever time and place they are in, and calls on a reconnection to our pasts, to our roots for strength, and uses a Black expressive tradition in an attempt to make sense of those experiences.

The exchange between Nana and Eli enunciates the tension between the younger and older generations and emphasizes the disjuncture between the last of the originals and the first of the new era. This rift has emerged throughout the history of Black America, as various strategies, like racial uplift, respectability, and militancy are offered as tools and solutions to struggle. This tension highlighted between the born free and born unfree, however, is a sort of “ground zero” both as it pertains to questions of integration, resistance, and accommodation strategies of Blacks in America.

ELI: We believed they would protect us. And we believed in with all our love. I’m ain’t scared o’ nothing. Or no one. Cause I knew I knew my great grandmother have it all in her pocket.

NANA: Eli. Eli. There’s a thought. A recollection. Something somebody remembers. We carry these memories inside of we. Do you believe that those hundreds and hundreds of Africas brought here on this other side we forget everything we once knew? We don’t know where the recollection come from. Sometimes we dream em. But we carry these memories inside of we…  Eli. I’m trying to learn ya how to touch your own spirit. I’m fighting for my life. And I’m fighting for yore’n. Look in my face. I’m trying to give you something to take north with you. Along with all your great big dreams!

Eli is expressing his discontent and disillusionment with his past, and the pasts of his loved ones. He believes that taking a new wife, abandoning Eula, and denying his Unborn Child might relieve him of the burden he experiences. Nana is under no pretense that the land awaiting them is any more inviting than the one they currently inhabit. There is something particularly familiar about Eli’s doubt towards the Nana’s insistence on retaining and maintaining Gullah ancestral ties. Nana’s pleas for a return to cultural memories backgrounds the tension in Daughters of the Dust.

Cinematically, Dash’s scene transitions are carefree, easy going, and musical, depicting the every day of the Gullah people – their sleep and relaxation, their morning routine, including expressions of love and sexual desire. She gently nods at Gullah humanity, beauty, and easily wallows in those moments. Dash spends just as much time with these wandering tributes and acknowledgements to the daily cultural practice of the Gullah as she does with the “main” storyline, because in these transitions are where the symbolic linking and signification take place.

It’s important to note that throughout the scene between Eli and Nana, Dash uses images of a cultural practice (in this case, collective dancing), to visually build the connection between ritual gathering, dancing, and celebration, to a recollection and reconnection to the past. When the scene of dancing women is first introduced, it appears that it is for its own sake, enjoyment, and appreciation, but as the conversation between Nana and Eli progresses, it becomes more evident that these two practices, the tension and the release through dancing, are linked. Understanding and identifying with communal practices is an integral part of healing and transformation.

For these reasons, Dash approaches bodily harm in a way that is sensitive to the pain of violation. We are able to approach the subject of physical trauma and contend with its impacts without being forced to re-open wounds. As the bearers of culture and secrets, it is so important for women to experience camaraderie, support, and release. Sharing the burden amongst each other has often been a method to endure the impacts of trauma. Eula and Yellow Mary fend off accusations of strangeness, foreignness, scariness, and embrace and share their pasts in ways that are beneficial to each other’s uplift. At one point, Eula addresses the shunning of Yellow Mary, wailing:

EULA: If you love yourselves then love Yellow Mary. Cause she a part of you. Just like we a part of our mothers. A lot of us are going through things you feel you can’t handle all alone. They’re gonna be all kind of road for takin life. Not be afraid to take em. We deserve em. Cause we all good woman… Our past own us. We wear our scars like armor. For protection. Take hold of me scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let’s live our lives without livin in (inaudible) old wounds.

Yearwood describes the practice of the Black expressive tradition as “intuitive and sensory based as opposed to those that are empirical, logical, analytical.”^[2] In keeping with these notions, Dash offers us the chance to explore the expansion of the possibilities, through the medium of oral storytelling and poetic call and response, where expression is more important than “knowing.” Since the aim is to reach a psychological and physical release through symbolic construction of the Black experience through a medium that leaves space for community building, communication, resistance, and survival.^{[3] [4] [5]} From bell hook’s point of view, “[southern Black displaced Africans] believed that beauty should be integrated into everyday activities, thereby having community survival and development, and they defined their aesthetics as having a political function, for in their art forms, they bore witness and challenged the racist ideology that claimed that Blacks were not fully human and were uncivilized.”^[6] Dash’s Daughters of the Dust does exact this, and does so in a way that is gentle, caring, and cathartic for the Black community and Black women in particular. The representations of Gullah experience is done in such a way that primes the audience for reflection, healing, connection, and revitalization.

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^[1] Yearwood, Gladstone. “Theorizing Black Film,” 70.

^[2] Yearwood, 71.

^[3] Yearwood, 74.

^[4] Yearwood, 80

^[5] Yearwood 81.

^[6] Yearwood, 104.