Reflections of Dust
By Ansel Arnold
In the closing shot of the film, Daughters of the Dust, the camera’s gaze is fixed on the ocean and horizon line with the beach taking up most of the image’s foreground. It is not quite sunrise, but the sun is low enough that it creates a blinding glare as it reflects off the water’s surface. We watch as three women slowly walk across the beach from left to right. As soon as the women begin to disappear out of the frame, a child emerges from the left and runs across the beach following in the footsteps of the older women.
[Julie Dash, “Closing Scene: Unborn Child running on a beach - Daughters of the Dust,” 1990]
The entire scene is shot at a high frame rate and slowed down so that each figure floats across the screen in smooth dreamlike movements. Each figure seems to leave behind faint impressions, visual artifacts of the past, as they move across the frame. The glare from the sun hovering above the ocean, just out of frame, creates an overexposed patch of light that looks like a bridge connecting the past and future. The conclusion of this film is then not a complete ending but rather marks the beginning of a new journey and the memory of an older one.
This image and closing scene further work as a metaphor for the discussion I’d like to open through Julie Dash’s film and novel, both titled, Daughters of the Dust. The high-speed, slow-motion playback that we see in this scene suggests a different temporality, or an alternative flow of time, that exceeds the standard twenty-four frames per second cinematic playback. This temporal structure makes visible a different way of seeing the past. The young girl we see in the closing scene is an Unborn Child of the family who narrates the film alongside the eldest family member. As viewers, we then witness this overlapping temporality when we see an Unborn Child alive within the diegetic world. This suggests that Daughters creates a visuality or a way of seeing that connects disparate worlds and temporalities and brings them to coexist on the screen.
Daughters of the Dust was released in 1990 after Julie Dash spent nearly ten years doing archival and ethnographic research for the film. [1] Set in 1902 on the South Carolina Islands, we meet the Peazant family as they are preparing to leave their agrarian home to migrate to the industrialized North. The Peazants are among the Gullah Geechee, a community whose ancestors were kidnapped and trafficked to the South Carolina Islands long after the importation of enslaved Africans had been made illegal in the United States. Following the film’s opening credits, we are told that “as a result of their isolation, the Gullah created and maintained a distinct, imaginative and original African American culture. Gullah communities recalled, remembered, and recollected much of what their ancestors brought with them from Africa…” (0:01:53).
Several years after the film’s release Dash was commissioned by a publisher to write a sequel, which came out in 1997. It is notable that the novel carries the same title as the film, Daughters of the Dust: A Novel, as if they are each different retellings of a story passed on and shared for generations. But the novel also departs significantly from the film. The story is set primarily in 1926 and follows one of the Peazant daughters, Amelia, as she travels back down to South Carolina from her home in Harlem, New York to complete fieldwork for her thesis in anthropology. Amelia’s thesis, titled “The Colored People of the Carolina Coast,” focuses on the Gullah people of the fictional Dawtuh Island and seeks to understand what makes the Gullah community so different than African American communities on the mainland.
Born in the north with little contact or memories of her Gullah relatives on the island, Amelia experiences the loss of her family’s “old ways” which is only heightened by her grandmother’s hostility and aversion to the beliefs and practices, or what she terms “hoodoo mess,” at the heart of the Gullah community. Amelia’s grandmother, who is known as Auntie Haagar, was born on the mainland and married into the family. In the film, she is eager to leave the island and its old ways behind insofar as she regards the past as backwards and such traditions as out of place in the present and future. Haagar’s conservative attitude is further reflected in the names of her daughters, Myown (“my own”), and Iona (“I own her”). Despite this upbringing, Amelia’s mother Myown resists this attitude and encourages Amelia to pursue her research and uncover the histories that she feels the loss of.
Before Amelia departs to Dawtuh Island her advising professor encourages her to take still and moving-image cameras, claiming that photographic images will add “weight” to her research. Similarly, in the film, one of the relatives, Viola Peazant, brings a photographer from the north where she lives to document her family’s move to the mainland. In an early scene, we are struck by a colorful kaleidoscopic image projected on the screen as one of the characters, Yellow Mary, peers through the optical toy belonging to the photographer, Mr. Snead. As the character holds the kaleidoscope up to her right eye, Snead explains the tool’s Greek etymology before commenting that it is “beauty, simplicity, and science all rolled into one small tube” (0:09:45).
[Julie Dash, “Kaleidoscope: Interior - Daughters of the Dust,” 1990]
The camera is seen here as a simple instrument that can accurately measure the world as well as represent it. Photographic images thus act as an authorizing witness to the written word, and a tool that can perhaps mediate a transition into modernity. Soon after she arrives on the island, Amelia begins to subvert these power dynamics. Her younger cousin, Ben, is immediately struck by her photographic devices. Amelia then teaches Ben how to use the cameras and invites him to use them whenever he’d like, which he is eager to oblige. She notices that Ben handles the cameras far better than she does, and he even has a good eye for composing beautiful images out of the ordinary. Ben will later be acknowledged as a major contributor of visual images to Amelia’s thesis. Importantly, Amelia’s position as an anthropologist (and we might add Julie Dash’s position as a filmmaker) reflects the camera’s authority. [2]
One evening, as Amelia and Ben are walking on the beach, she spots something in the water that she thinks would make an interesting picture and suggests that Ben take a photograph. But Ben refuses. We soon learn that what Amelia sees is Ibo Landing, a sacred place on the island that’s significance is tied to the violence of slavery and the agency of captive ancestors. Ben will go on to tell her “The Story of Ibo Landing.” However, when he begins, there is a visual break in the page where his telling receives its own space and title (“as told by Ben Peazant”). Each of the stories that is told to Amelia during her fieldwork receives this formatting that centers the agency of the storyteller and what they choose to disclose. In this way, Amelia centers her family’s Gullah worldview and values in her research.
[Julie Dash, “The Story of Ibo Landing - Daughters of the Dust: A Novel,” 1999]
This scene on the beach alludes to another significant moment in the film. As the family lounges around the beach prior to their feast, Mr. Snead gathers the men in the family for a group portrait. Snead first composes the men and then takes his place behind the camera. The next shot shows the men from the camera’s perspective, with its compositional markings overlaying the image. But through the viewfinder we notice something else going on. In addition to the men, we now see a young girl with a striking blue ribbon in her hair standing with them and smiling for the camera. Snead is startled by this and jumps up as if to verify the girl’s presence, but outside of the camera, he sees nothing there.
[Julie Dash, “Peazant Family Portrait - Daughters of the Dust,” 1990]
The young girl that he sees is the Unborn Child who narrates the film alongside the great-grandmother of the Peazant family. While the viewer is able to see the child throughout the film, she is not visible to other characters except through the camera’s mechanical eye. This moment of converging temporalities in the scene further connects to the novel. When Ben and Amelia are on the beach, just before they reach Ibo Landing, Ben trains his camera on a pair of lone footprints along the shore that, he remarks, seem to “belong to a ‘lil woman’” (94). This literary image of little footprints on the beach echoes the presence of the Unborn Child and the temporalities converging through Snead’s camera.
For Daughters, cinema then provides a new way of looking enabled by the camera’s vision. Through its apparatus, overlapping relations between the past, present, and future are made visible. Similarly anthropology provides Amelia with a “spy-glass” through which she can better understand herself and her past. [3] In the hands of Amelia and Julie Dash, anthropology and the camera become tools not only for recollecting the Gullah traditions, but also for enabling new ways of seeing.
Notes
[1] See Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film. New York: The New Press, 1992. In this work, Dash writes about the making of the film and is interviewed by bell hooks.
[2] In her research for making the film, Julie Dash occupied the role of an ethnographer by interviewing various members of her family about their stories and memories of Gullah traditions and history. In her writing on making the film, she notes how she had to learn how to navigate her own position in an ethical way, as family members would not always want to talk, might get annoyed and shut down conversations, or would avoid certain topics. Dash’s own process of creating Daughters is then reflected in Amelia who subverts her authority as a researcher and expert in order to center and account for her subject’s agency.
[3] This is referring to Zora Neale Hurston’s well-known statement in Mules and Men that anthropology was, for her, a spy-glass: “It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that” (1). See Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
References
Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust: A Novel. New York: Plume, 1999.
Daughters of the Dust. Dir. Julie Dash. Cohen Film Collection, 1991.
Cover Photo Credit: Julie Dash, “Opening Credit - Daughters of the Dust,” 1990.
Ansel Arnold is a film and literary scholar, transdisciplinary artist, and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research draws on visual cultural studies, film studies, Caribbean literary theory, and decolonial theory to examine how vision, memory, and subjectivity are constructed in Black diasporic and Indigenous film and literature. Building on his eclectic art practice, which frequently integrates writing, images, sound, and movement, he is particularly interested in exploring the relationship between word and image, as well as intermedial approaches to aesthetics that focus on the production of meaning through the relations between different media and embodied senses.