Myth and History in 'Daughters of the Dust'

In her 1991 film, 'Daughters of the Dust,' director Julie Dash seeks to derive both a narrative structure and a cinematic style from the West and Central African religious traditions that inform the cultural sensibilities of the Gullah people who form the center of her story. In taking the approach, Dash requires that viewers enter Gullah culture fully from the outset, and she provides little context for her American audience to translate the characters or the story into the more familiar classical Hollywood style. translation, the film insists, damages the integrity of the unique cultural and social experience of the Gullah people, and, as viewers, we are called upon to take the difficult road of letting go of ingrained expectations for what a film about the consequences of slavery should look like, how characters in such a story should behave, and what the function of religion in the community should be. Dash is so keen on disrupting what American audiences had been conditioned to anticipate concerning how African Americans - and black women in particular -  should appear on film that she sought to set the atmosphere of a 'foreign' film from the start, beginning with the voice of one of the narrators speaking in Gullah without providing subtitles.

Gullah culture developed among the enslaved Africans who worked to produced cotton, indigo, and rice on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Isolated by virtue of their location on islands and allowed more cultural freedom because white slaveholders were often absent from these plantations, Gullah people developed distinctive religious and social practices grounded in West African traditions. The term 'Geechee' refers to African American slaves on the Georgia coast who are culturally similar to Gullah people. The word 'Gullah' is generally thought to be derived from the name 'Angola,' but in A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York University Press, 1988) Margaret Washington Creel suggests that it may have originally referred to the Gola people of Liberia and that 'Geechee' may derive from the neighboring Gizzi people. This would mean that Upper Guinea is the primary source for Gullah and Geechee cultures rather than the widely accepted Kongo-Angola origin.

In this film, which is so much about opening oneself to West and Central African ways of apprehending the world, Dash requires that we engage these possibilities along with the characters in the film, even as we might find the task of doing so confounding or discomfiting. From the opening shots on the beach of Ibo Landing - the images of Bilal Muhammad (Umar Abdurrahman) praying near the water at sunrise, and the first glimpse of the family's matriarch Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day) fully clothed and washing herself in the ocean like a 'salt water Negro' - we are asked to take a religious journey entirely in the terms of this extended Gullah family, especially from the perspective of the women.

The first feature-length film by an African American woman to gain theatrical release in the Unites States, 'Daughters of the Dust' became a flashpoint for discussions of the meaning of diaspora for black women, the quality and concerns of African American film in the 1990s, black aesthetics, and the burden of representing African American history. Dash was unable to get the support of a major studio during the fundraising period and relied, instead, on other funding sources, including the nonprofit American Playhouse series, the National Endowment for the Arts, and various southern arts foundations, prompting her to comment that, 'One of the ongoing struggles of African American filmmakers is the fight against being pushed, through financial and social pressures, into telling only one kind of story. African Americans have stories as varied as any other people in American society... Our lives, our history, our present reality is no more limited to "ghetto" stories, than Italian American are to the Mafia, or Jewish Americans are to the Holocaust. We have so many, many stories to tell.' Without a distributor, Dash took 'Daughters' to festivals in 1991, including the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the award for cinematography. Eventually, Kino International, a distributor specializing in foreign-language films, agreed to take on 'Daughters' and arranged for it to open at the Film Forum in New York City in January of 1992, where it sold out for every show with African American women expressing particular interest. See Julie Dash Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film (The New Press, 1992, pp. 7-26) for a discussion of the production and distribution process.

Examining the West and Central African and 'New World' religious groundings of the film's narrative and thematic concerns, this essay explores Dash's engagement of both myth and history in order to make sense of the varied and heated responses to this religious film that positions black women at the center of its vision.

The two modes that help to structure 'Daughters of the Dust' - attention to historical detail with a focus on the specificity of Gullah culture and a cyclical structure that relies heavily on a central myth of origin and on archetypal characters - do not coexist without tension, but, for Dash, the tension derives from the very constitution of the African diaspora. The dislocation that produces diaspora and the struggle to make a home and construct individual and collective identity in the 'New World' has necessitated that people of African descent rely on a complicated and ever-involving combination of various African ways of being and sensibilities encountered and transformed in the diaspora. The Gullah people provide a particularly rich case for Dash's investigation, but her concerns move beyond this particular community and are aimed at exploring the ways in which the cultures of people of African descent in the diaspora are fundamentally of the diaspora. Cultural critic Greg Tate writes,

'Praised for its photographic sculpturing, Daughters is a powerful piece of African American psychological modeling and portraiture... It is, finally, slavery that transformed African people into American products, enforcing a cultural amnesia that scraped away details without obliterating the core. We remain in a middle passage, living out an identity that is neither African nor American, though we crave for both shores to claim us. It is Daughter's achievement to represent this double alienation as an issue for the community as a whole, and as personal and interpersonal issues for the film's principle characters.'

Tate's assessment links Dash's work to W.E.B. Dubois's notion of 'double-consciousness,' which Dash uses in a way that resists a rigid separation between African and American and seeks a fluid and dynamic combination of potential African diaspora identities.

'Daughters of the Dust' is steeped in detail. Dash and her crew lovingly and painstakingly constructed sets and settings using ethnographic photographs from the early 1900s, adorned the characters in a variety of African hairstyles, and filled the frame with objects that speak of the African sources of Gullah culture in order to locate the characters in a rich and vibrant historical setting. In this regard, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, produced by the Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writer's Project under the Works Progress Administration and first published in 1940, was clearly an important source for Dash's work in setting the historical context. In oral history interviews and photographs, the contributors attempted to document the unique culture of the Sea Islands and to demonstrate connections to African languages and cultural practices. Dash was also influenced by the photography of James Van Der Zee.

Historical accuracy is an important element of Dash's goals for the film as she feels deeply the responsibility of representing attentively the history, culture, and lives of the Gullah people from whom she descends. At the same time, she does not understand her film project to be an ethnographic one - that is, she does not want the film to provide only empirical documentation of historical data. Myth, symbol and archetype are equally important structures for conveying the information she wishes her audience to have. Dash noted when responding to a question about the film's relationship to history, 'I think I felt I had to bring a basic integrity of the historical events and issues, but I had to be free to be able to create some drama, to create some symbolism...' (Houston Baker, 'Not Without My Daughters,' Transition 57 (1992), p. 164). It is not symbolism invented for the world of the film on which she draws, however, but on symbols with roots deep in the varied cultural streams that contribute to the cultures of the African diaspora. The film treats us to some of the visual symbolism of West and Central African religious traditions and to visual and oral accounts of a New World African myth of community origins, and presents us with characters constructed around archetypes from Yoruba religion.

While there is considerable variety among West and Central African peoples with regard to religious beliefs and practices, it is possible to identify a number of general characteristics held in common across ethnic groups,some f which will be addressed in the course of this essay. For a broad discussion of these general characteristics as they relate to African diaspora cultures, see Mechal Sobel, Trabelin' On: The Slave's Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Greenwood Press, 1979) and Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (Random House, 1983).

In many interviews and in commentaries on the film, Dash explained that the film's narrative structure was inspired by the African griot tradition in which a family or community history is recounted in vignettes rather than through a linear narrative of causality. So while the film's events are deeply rooted in the year 1902, the story sometimes flashes forward or backward in time in ways that are not clearly marked in typical Hollywood fashion. Indeed, in the audio commentary to the Kino International DVD, Dash argued that the entire film could be read as a flash forward from the period of slavery. Many viewers and reviewers of the film identified what they understood to be a conflict between the film's deep commitment to historical accuracy (read as ethnography) on the one hand, and the nonlinear approach to narrative, the use of myth, and the presentation of characters as archetypes on the other (read as confusing at best and as historically irresponsible at worst).

In an otherwise favorable review in the Denver Post, for example, Howie Movshovitz wrote, 'I can't think of a movie where the story matters less. It's not that the story is inconsequential, although it has something on an uncritical Sunday-schoolish attitude toward the past. What gets you in this film are the images of the island, the almost constant sound of breakers rolling onto shore and the rhythms of island life' (Denver Post, 20 March 1992). Writing in the Houston Chronicle, film critic Jeff Milar posed a series of questions and mocking answers to his readers in his largely unfavorable review, asking, 'Do you feel that any 10 minutes of it could be exchanged with any other 10 minutes of it? Well, obviously, you have arrived with preconceptions of linearity, and "Daughters of the Dust" is not linear... Do you think that the film is composed of arbitrary images, arbitrarily sequenced, which never quite settles down to practical textual work? Well,  you just don't "get" it. I didn't get it' (Houston Chronicle, 13 March 1992). USA Today's reviewer for 'Movies in Brief' dubbed the film a 'structural shambles' (USA Today, 1 April 1992).

Some reviewers felt challenged to locate 'the story' in the midst of of the details and had difficulty ascribing meaning to the symbolic images upon which the camera lingers, as indication of the perceived conflict between Dash;'s use of myth and history in the film. In Dash' version of the Gullah world, however, historical detail, symbol, elements of character and place, etc., appear in relation to one another and in an order that creates a composite over the course of the film, requiring viewers to engage mythic time that brings together pas, present, and future and historically located events at the same moment.

[This essay was extracted and slightly edited from Judith Weisenfeld's book chapter, 'My Story Begins Before I Was Born: Myth, History and Power in Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust",' which was originally published in Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making, edited by S. Brent Plate (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 43-66). Some of the original endnotes have been integrated into the text.]