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A work of mesmerizing lyrical power and profoundly human dimension, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust celebrates the bond of women, the richness of culture and tradition, and the mystery of nature with bracing, impressive authority. Unlike so many of our contemporary media products passed along the popular-culture conveyer belt, this is a film whose depiction of a faraway time (the turn of the century) and place (the Carolina Sea Islands off the Georgia/South Carolina coast) and hitherto unfamiliar world (the culture of the Gullah inhabitants) envelops, rather than alienates, an audience. Still, I suppose it is a sign of these malign times – the vice president’s spelling being another – that Daughters of the Dust has been taken to task, albeit gently, in laudatory critical columns around the country for the denseness, and alleged impenetrability, of the Gullah patois which is occasionally subtitled over the course of the film. Twenty years ago, when moviegoing (and critical) ears were more acclimated to linguistic diversity in cinema, I doubt there would have been much complaint.
This hybrid dialect is also known as Geechee, a variety of creole that mingles seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English with a number of West African languages. During that period and through these Sea Islands multitudes of ships passed and entered the New World, bearing slaves to labor on the rice and cotton plantations of the South – thus setting in motion the wheel of African-American tragedy that gingerly navigates the inner cities of the United States today. This is a point Dash, in her richly nonlinear manner, brilliantly makes clear: the black experience is a chronicle of nomadic displacement, of a people uprooted and compelled to walk through shadowlands, stripped of their ancestry. The film is set in August, 1902, but speaks to our time, 90 years later, with compassion and fervor.
Appropriately for a treatment of diminishing traditional values, Daughters of the Dust is a family saga. The protagonists are the Peazant clan, a group of Gullahs at a critical juncture: 88-year-old Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day), the spiritual leader of the family and a great-great grandmother, has chosen not to migrate to the mainland with the rest of her kin, who seek to immerse themselves in America’s middle class. Nana, who spouts homilies to her young relatives (“Respect your elders. Respect your family. Respect your ancestors”), is the closest link to the African continent, its culture, and especially its Yoruba rituals. The polytheistic old woman, a believer in magic and ghosts, has witnessed the virtual dissolution of African ways on the island. She gravely accepts her family’s departure.
The women propel this matriarchal story forward. Among others, they include Viola (Cherly Lynn Bruce), a devout Baptist Christian who believes the African traditions are “hoodoo”; Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), a prodigal daughter who returns briefly to the island from Cuba (where she was a prostitute), and now on her way to Canada with a female lover; and Nana’s granddaughter, Eula (Alva Rogers), who is pregnant and whose husband believes she is carrying a white man’s child. In an oddly becoming touch – which represents psycho-cultural continuity – the film is narrated by Eula’s unborn child.
The narrative structure adopted by Dash is boldly episodic. Relaxed in its pacing and sensual in its appreciation of incidental details, the film is almost two hours long, but even at the most unhurried points never becomes static. Dash, aided by the extraordinary camerawork of Arthur Jafa (who also co-produced Daughters), entices us with contemplative vistas of the island’s lush tropical splendor, misty beachfronts, and palm-strewn seascapes, along with languorous vignettes of daily life – the ritualized preparation of supper, the spontaneous giggle of women chattering under a tree. The women, wearing long Victorian white skirts and extended hats, are very romantically drawn – their Western elegance, when placed beside their unsettled economic circumstances, has an air of pathos that is, in context, very moving.
In conventional dramatic terms, these actresses don’t compare favorably with our finest black actors. But their uncertainty of performing style matches that of the characters – thus a weakness becomes a source of strength. Each of these women belong to different generations, and they’re imposingly charismatic and lovely. Dash wisely concentrates on their faces – ruminative, knowing, alternately laden with sorrow and joy. (In particular, Cora Lee Day’s countenance is a tome in itself.) Ultimately, this film seeks an elusive harmony, a spirit of delight that, as the poet Shelley observed, comes rarely, rarely. And it affirms, in a heartfelt dissemination of African-American cultural well-springs (what Greg Tate of the Village Voice called “Africentric”), a time-worn dictum from the dawn of the civil-rights movement: Black is beautiful.
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST
Written and directed by Julie Dash; with Cora Lee Day, Kaycee Moore, Alva Rogers, Adisa Anderson, Barbara-O, Cherly Lynn Bruce.
Unrated.
Opens Friday.