Teaching <I>Daughters of the Dust</I> as a Womanist Film and the Black Arts Aesthetic of Filmmaker Julie Dash

Figures

Figure 1.1: Nana Pondering

Figure 1.2: Eli Pondering

Figure 1.3: Yellow Mary

Figure 1.4: Haagar

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Avery Research Center staff for making the 2011 conference, “We Carry These Memories Inside of We: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Daughters of the Dust and the Black Arts Aesthetic of Julie Dash,” the colossal success that it was! Thank you Daron Lee Calhoun II, Valentina Rebaciuc, Deborah Wright, Savannah Frierson, and David Rothsmund for helping me bring this project to fruition. Thank you to all of the contributors to the anthology, your patience and belief in me. Finally, thank you, Julie Dash, for your friendship, sisterhood, and for giving us all such a deep well of creativity and cultural and ancestral pride to draw from!

Introduction

PATRICIA WILLIAMS LESSANE

At the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Black feminist filmmaker Julie Dash announced she will direct the upcoming Lionsgate biopic of Black feminist freedom fighter, Angela Davis. Dash, whose seminal work is Daughters of the Dust, has directed other films since the 1991 debut of this feature film, including Funny Valentine and The Rosa Parks Story starring Angela Bassett, as well as recent episodes of Ava Duvernay’s OWN series Queen Sugar. However, her latest dramatic narrative, and current documentary project Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (about the life of Gullah Geechee writer, journalist, and chef Vertamae Grosvenor and for which she was recently awarded a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to produce), signal a new chapter in her life: a new beginning and a renewed recognition of her talent and creativity as writer and director. That she is directing a film about Davis, a Black woman whose revolutionary life and life’s work have had such a colossal impact on the way we as Black people see ourselves and envision liberation, is appropriate as Dash’s debut dramatic narrative film, The Rosa Parks Story, situates Black women squarely within the longue durée of Black struggles for freedom, agency, and self-determination—from slavery, through the turn of the 20th century, and then again during the turbulent civil rights era of the mid-20th century.

Dash and Davis occupy unique roles in African American history and Black feminist thinking, both as truth-tellers and high priestesses of Black consciousness. Davis, with intellectual brilliance and defiant spirit, became a rallying figure for Black youth and freedom fighters across the world when she was indicted and ←1 | 2→then acquitted by an all-white jury of charges that included conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping in connection to a courtroom shooting that left a federal judge and two prison inmates dead.

Daughters is too exquisite a film to not be seen. And African Americans should not depend solely on marketing executives to get the word out. Daughters will likely build its audience through Black America’s oldest marketing strategy—word-of-mouth. Imagine that: buppies discussing it in water-cooler conversations at their offices; Black nationalists analyzing it in fireside chats at bookstores; sisters in beauty shops paraphrasing some of the film’s sauciest lines. Historically significant and visually sublime, Daughters of the Dust is like a sacred secret whispered in your ear. Pass it on. (Boyd 1991)

A keen observer of developing technological trends and emerging cultural shifts, Dash embraced the margins of the cinematic frame, imagining and constructing a cinematic space in which her characters present and embody counter-narratives to those depicted in American media and the dominant culture. Then and now, Dash, like Nana Peazant, looks inward to the past and forward to the future for inspiration and vocational guidance in her developing narratives about Black people and Black spaces, and in her executing cinematic technique. Film scholar Manthia Diawara (2000) contends, “Black films use spatial narration as a way of revealing and linking Black spaces that have been separated and suppressed by White times, and as a means of validating Black culture” (245). The Peazant Family, their extended kin, Mr. Snead, and St. Julian Last Child are Dash’s people; Ibo’s Landing is Dash’s world. Both are, separate and apart from the dominant white gaze.

At the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, Julie Dash was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and Arthur Jafa won for his cinematography, but it was not until 2016 that Dash was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for the 25th Anniversary Restoration of Daughters of the Dust, confirming the enduring impact and legacy of both the film and the filmmaker. In that same year, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter released Lemonade a Black feminist, multigenre visual album replete with images reminiscent of characters and scenes from Dash’s debut full-feature narrative. Like Dash, Knowles-Carter tackles issues germane to the 21st century Black woman’s experiences—rejection, subjugation, familial obligations and ancestral connections, colorism, abuse, motherhood, and the struggle for liberation and personhood. Accordingly, Davis (2017, 9) asserts “Daughters of the Dust and Lemonade, represent Black feminist approaches to filmmaking that lovingly elevate the particularity of the Black female experiences in the United States on both systematic and interpersonal levels, crossing sexual, class, and even skin color lines.” In this manner, both Dash and Knowles-Carter “break the mold” in which Black women have been traditionally portrayed (Bogle 2001, 349).

I first saw Daughters of the Dust on a sunny day in August 1992 in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. My cousin Shelley and friend Miles agreed to accompany me to see a film I had been raving about for weeks. I had not even seen a trailer for the film, but friends in Chicago and Washington, D.C., had told me about it and said it was one I just had to see. Shelley and Miles knew of my obsession with film, but also of my burgeoning identity as a Black feminist, or Womanist as I had begun to embrace. They also knew I was a veracious reader, having studied English Literature at Fisk University where I excelled in Negro Literature, Harlem Renaissance Literature, and inhaled any and everything written by Black women. Seeing Dash’s film was a cinematic convergence of African American literature, poetry, art, and history on the big screen, live and in technicolor. My friends assumed, and rightly so, that I would be moved beyond words when I saw the movie for the first time. What they did not know—nor did I—was that Daughters of the Dust would shape my writing and pedagogy in ways I could not have imagined as a young, twenty-two-year-old Black woman learning to see myself and my people with new eyes. I was awakening, and Julie Dash’s film further inspired my appreciation of Black film and literature, as well as my future approach to scholarship that had sparked in me while I was in college.

I had found bits and pieces of myself in the pages of books written by 19th and 20th century African Americans while at Fisk. Yet, it was in Daughters of the Dust that I first saw myself wholly, although I did not have the words for this feeling back then—unapologetically Black and beautiful. For me, Julie Dash had channeled the anthropologic spirits of Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, as well as the literary genius of every Black woman writer I had read up to that point. At the same time, I saw in her 19th century Black women the ←3 | 4→same 20th century struggles I was experiencing, along with just about every other Black woman I knew. And although the film follows the experiences of a cloistered Sea Island Gullah family contemplating migration, assimilation, and transitioning from their traditional agrarian way of life to the bustling modernity awaiting them on the mainland, their hopes, dreams, challenges, and wishes are ones my mother held for my siblings and me. The Peazant women wrested self-determination and agency with the hand they had been dealt and held tightly onto them so they might propel their family and them forward.

It has been over 25 years since I first viewed Daughters of the Dust. Over the years, I have watched the film countless times, using it in my courses Black Bodies in Television and Film, African American Society and Culture, and The Untold Story of the Great Migration. Most recently in 2016, I introduced the film to students studying North American Literature at University of Malàga in Malàga, Spain. Yet it was fifteen years after seeing Daughters of the Dust for the first time that I had the opportunity to actually speak with Julie Dash, inviting her to give a keynote address at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. To say I had a “fangirl” moment is an understatement. Meeting Dash and discussing what was on the horizon for American cinema, and Black film specifically, was life-changing. While I had conducted extensive research on Daughters of the Dust and had learned of the familial and cultural impetus for her undertaking the project, listening to ←4 | 5→Dash recount her research endeavors, the challenges to securing financing for the film, surviving the oppressive Lowcountry heat, and weathering temperamental storm systems and mercurial talent and crew, made the film that more meaningful for me. It seemed the ancestors old Nana Peazant speaks of—Julie’s ancestors—would not let her dream die. The film, then, is a testament not only to Dash’s creative vision and film aesthetic, but also to her connection to and reverence for her African past and rich Gullah Geechee roots.