Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  Daughters of the Dust capsulizes the stage of independent Black filmmaking ushered in by the LA rebellion in other ways as well. Spiritual and religious continuum, a particular theme of Ben Caldwell’s, is central to the DD drama. Folklore too is key. Two further decisions Dash made highlight her strategy for grounding DD in the discourse of committed Black cinema. She drew her cast from films by her UCLA colleagues: Barbara O (as Yellow Mary) was in Gerima’s Child of Resistance and Bush Mama, and in Dash’s Diary of an African Nun; Adisa Anderson (as Eli) was in Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image; Cora Lee Day (as Nana) was in Gerima’s Bush Mama; Kaycee Moore (as Haagar) was in Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Woodbury’s Bless Their Little Hearts.

  She also cast from films by other independents: Trula Hoosier (as Yellow Mary’s woman friend) was in Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories; Geraldine Dunston (one of Nana’s daughters) was in Iverson White’s Black Exodus; Tommy Hicks (as Snead the photographer) was in Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It; and Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor (as one of Nana’s daughters) was in Bill Gunn’s video soap Personal Problems. She also drew from industry-backed films by Black filmmakers and from industry White-directed, Black-cast films: Alva Rodgers (as Eula) was in Spike Lee’s School Daze, Tony King (as Eli’s cousin) was in Sparkle. Note too that the presence of Barbara O links DD to other works by filmmakers, for she appears in Saundra Sharp’s Back Inside Herself and Zeinabu Davis’s in-progress A Powerful Thang.

  The effects of intertextual echoes resulting from Dash’s casting strategem are best discussed in screen demonstration, rather than in on-the-page discussions, but one example can perhaps illustrate the point. The presence of Dunston from Iverson White’s lynching-migration film deepens the antilynching campaign theme in DD and underscores the difference between the White lynch mob’s picnic (the dead man’s sons find orange peels and other debris near the hanging tree) and the Black family reunion picnic. The existence of DD makes it easier than ever for someone to produce an anthology film on Black U.S. history on the order of Kwati Ni Owoo and Kwesi Owusu’s anthology film on African cinema, Ouaga, which combines film clips, interviews, and footage from FESPACO, the Pan-African film festival in Burkina Faso, and uses ideogrammed panels of cloth (event turned to story turned to punch line turned to proverb turned to ideograms woven in kente cloth) to segment the film’s “chapters.”

  Dash’s Daughters of the Dust is a historical marker. It not only promotes a back glance, it demands an appraisal of ground covered in the past twenty years, and in doing so helps clarify what we mean by “independent Black cinema.” In its formal practices and thematics, DD is the maturation of the LA rebellion agenda. By centralizing the voice, experience, and culture of women, most particularly, it fulfills the promise of Afrafemcentrists who choose film as their instrument for self-expression. DD inaugurates a new stage.

  I’m trying to teach you how to track your own spirit. I’m trying to give you something to take north besides big dreams

  NANA

  We meet the Peazants in a defining moment—a family council. Democratic decision-making, a right ripped from them by slavery and regained through emancipation, hallmarks the moment. The Peazants and guests gather on the island at Ibo Landing for a picnic at a critical juncture in history—they are one generation away from the Garvey and the New Negro movements, a decade short of the Ni-agara/NAACP merger. They are in the midst of rapid changes; Black people are on the move North, West, and back to Africa (the Oklahoma project, for instance). Setting the story amid oak groves, salt marshes, and a glorious beach is not for the purpose of presenting a nostalgic community in a pastoral setting. They are an imperiled group. The high tide of bloodletting has ebbed for a time, thanks to the activism of Ida B. Wells, but there were racist riots in 1902; in New Orleans, for example, Black schools were the paramount target for torchings, maimings, and murder. Unknown hazards await the Peazants up North. The years ahead will require political, economic, social, and cultural lucidity. Nommo, from an older and more comprehensive belief system than meanings produced by the European traditions of rationalism and empiricism, may prove their salvation.

  The Peazants, as the name suggests, are peasants. Their characterizations, however, are not built on a deficit model. It is the ethos of cultural resistance, not the ethos of rehabilitation, that informs their portraiture. They are not victims. Objectively, they are bound to the land as sharecroppers. Subjectively, they are bound to the land because it is an ancestral home. They tend the graves of relatives. Family memorabilia are the treasure they carry in their pockets and store in tins, not coins. They are accountable to the orishas, the ancestors, and each other, not to employers. DD is not, then, an economically determined drama in conventional terms, wherein spectators are encouraged to identify with feudal positions—the privileged overlord or the exploited victim, and then close the mind as though no alternative social modes exist or are possible. The Peazants are self-defining people. Unlike the static portraits of reactionary cinema—a Black woman is a maid and remains a maid even after becoming a “liberated woman” through the influence of a White feminist, and even after making a fortune with a pancake recipe (Imitation of Life), and a Black woman is a prostitute and remains a prostitute in the teeth of other options (Mona Lisa)—the Peazants have a belief in their own ability to change and in their ability to transform the social relations of status quo.

  While DD adheres to the unities of time, place, and action—the reunion takes place in one day in one locale scripted on an arrival-departure grid—the narrative is not “classical” in the Western-specific sense. It is classic in the African sense. There are digressions and meanderings—as we may be familiar with from African, Persian, Indian, and other cinemas that employ features of the oral tradition. DD employs a folktale in content and schema.

  Instead of a “pidgin” effect, what the eye and ear have been conditioned to expect from the unlettered, the Ibo Landing characters use an imaginative and varied language—poetic, signifying, rhetorical, personal—in keeping with the productive artistry we’re accustomed to outside Eurocentral institutions. In addition to affirming the culture, DD advances the idea that African culture can subvert the imposed one. Nana, the family elder, binds up the Bible with her mojo in a reverse order of syncretism. Continuum is the theme. The first voice we hear on the sound track is chanting in Ibo; the one discernible word is “remember.”

  A striking image greets us in the opening—a pair of hands, as in the laying on of hands, as in handed down. They’re a working woman’s hands. Grandma’s hands. They seem to be working up soil, as in cultivation, or maybe it’s sand, certainly apropos for any presentation of an African worldview. And there’s water, as in rivers. Then two voice-overs introduce the story. One belongs to Nana, the elder of the family, we will discover later: first, we see and hear her in sync during the film’s present; later we see her in a flashback memory of bondage days, her hands sculling the dark steamy water of the dye vats, then, together with other enslaved African women, wringing out yards of indigo-dyed cloth. The second voice is that of the Unborn Child; we will see her later on screen, too, as a visitor from that realm that supports the perceived world. The dual narration pulls together the past, present, and future—a fitting device for a film paying homage to African retention, to cultural continuum. The duet also prepares us for the film’s multiple perspectives. Communalism is the major mode of the production. There’s something else to notice about the dual voice-over narration. The storytelling mode is indabe my children and crik-crak, the African-derived communal, purposeful handing down of group lore and group values in a call-and-response circle.

  The story opens with the arrival of two relatives, Yellow Mary and Viola, accompanied by Yellow Mary’s woman friend from Nova Scotia and a photographer hired by Viola to document the reunion of the Geechee family, whose homestead is in Gullah country. The family already onshore is introduced by the thud-pound of mortar and pestie, as in the pounding of yam�
��an echo of the opening of Sembène’s Ceddo, also a drama about cultural conversion and cultural resistance; in Ceddo, which portrays forced conversion, the daily routine of the village, as represented by the pounding of yam, will be disrupted, as signaled by the next shot, a cross mounted atop one of the buildings. The pounding and the drums in DD also evoke a Dash antecedent about imposed religious-cultural conflict. In Diary of an African Nun a convert to Christianity hears sounds from the village and can’t see she cannot continue to teach her people to smother the drums, stifle the joy, and pray (she realizes) to an empty sky. Shrouded in white, she chants, “I am the wife of Christ—barren and … I am the wife of Christ,” as snow melts on the mountain revealing the rich, black, ancient earth.

  Nana Peazant has called a family council because values are shifting. There’s talk of migration. The ancestral home is being rejected on the grounds of limited educational and job opportunities. Haagar, one of Nana’s daughters-in-law, is particularly fed up with the old-timey, backward values of the “salt-water Negroes” of the island. Her daughter, on the other hand, longs to stay; Ione’s lover, a Native American in the area, has sent her a love letter in the hopes that she’ll remain. Viola, the Christianized granddaughter, views her family in much the way Haagar does; Viola avers that it is her Christian duty to take the young heathen children in hand, which she does the minute she steps ashore. Nana struggles to keep intact that African-derived institution that has been relentlessly under attack through kidnap, enslavement, Christianization, peonage, forced labor gangs, smear campaigns, and mob murder—the family.

  Nana and one of the male relatives of this multigenerational community do persuade several to stay, but realizing that breakup is imminent, that the lure of new places is great, Nana offers a combination of things for folks to take with them as protection on their journey, so that relocation away from the ancestral place will not spell cultural dispossession. As relatives wash the elder’s feet, she assembles an amulet made up of bits and scraps. “My mother cut this from her hair before they sold her away from me,” she says, winding the charm and binding twine around a Bible. Each member has a character-informed reaction to her request to kiss the amulet, the gesture a vow to struggle against amnesia, to resist the lures and bribes up North that may cause them to betray their individual and collective integrity. The double ritual performed, some Peazants depart and others remain.

  Like many independent works of the African diaspora that conceptualize critical remembrance—Med Hondo’s West Indies, the Sankofa Collective’s Passion of Remembrance, Rachel Gerber and Beatriz de Nasciamento’s Ori— DD’s drama hinges on rituals of loss and recovery. The film, in fact, invites the spectator to undergo a triple process of recollecting the dismembered past, recognizing and reappraising cultural icons and codes, and recentering and revalidating the self. One of the values of its complexity and its recognition of Black complexity is to prompt us, anew, to consider our positions and our power in the USA.

  While presenting the who o’ we to ourselves, Dash also critiques basic tenets of both domination ideology and liberation ideology. An exchange illustrating the former occurs in a scene between Nana, the elder, and Eli, a young man fraught with doubt that his pregnant wife, Eula, may be carrying some White man’s child. Their lines of dialogue don’t mesh at first because each is caught up in her and his own distress—Nana is anxious lest Eli not be up to holding the family together in the North; Eli is too obsessed with doubt about the unborn child to be reasoned with. But then their speeches mesh.

  “Call on the ancestors, Eli. We need to be strong again.”

  “It happened to my wife.”

  “‘My wife.’ Eli, you don’t own Eula. She married you.”

  Yellow Mary relates two stories that illustrate the latter point. Strolling along the beach with her friend and Eula, Yellow Mary recalls a box she once saw on the mainland, a music box. It was a bad time for her then, and she wanted that box to lock up her sorrow in the song. In the briefest of anecdotes, the process from sensation to perception to self-understanding to decision is mapped. Self-possession is a trait in Yellow Mary’s unfolding of character; cultural autonomy is a motif in the entire DD enterprise. The allusion to both the sorrow-song and blues traditions in Yellow Mary’s art-of-living anecdote sets the stage for a mini-essay on desire. Yellow Mary’s walk, posture, and demeanor are in stark contrast to that of the Christianized cousin Viola. The careers of women blues singers in the twenties and thirties showed that Black women need not repress sexuality to be acceptable to the community. Unlike Yellow Mary, who must continually claim her sexuality, Viola has buried hers in Christian duty—that is, until perhaps Snead the photographer, thrilled to be part of the family circle, in a moment of exuberance kisses her.

  Yellow Mary’s second story is about a time worse than bad, the death of her baby. Her arms were empty but her breasts were full. The White family she worked for used her to wet-nurse their children. “I wanted to come home, but they wouldn’t let me. I tied up my breasts. They let me go.” The allusion here is to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. While Paul D is remembering the scourgings and humiliations of manhood, Sethe is caught up in the memory of gang rape in which the young White men of the plantation suckled her. “They took my milk,” Sethe repeats throughout Paul D’s cataloguing of atrocities. The yoking of Black women’s sexuality and fertility to the capitalist system of exploitation was a theme in Dash’s work prior to Morrison’s Beloved, however. Four Women, based on the Simone text, relates the tragedy of three women in history—Saphronia, enslaved; Aunt Sarah, mammified; and Sweet Thing, lecherized. The fourth woman is Peaches, politicized: “I’m very bitter these days because my people were slaves—What do they call me? They call me Peee-Chezzz!”

  The struggle for autonomy (or, how many forces do we have to combat to reclaim our body/mind/spirits and get our perspective and agenda respected?) is the concern of numerous Black women filmmakers—Camille Billops, Zeinabu Davis, Cheryl Chisholm, Ayoka Chenzira, Michelle Parker-son, Barbara McCullough, numerous others, and of course, Dash. What the Yellow Mary stories point to is the limitations of radical discourse that dichotomizes culture and politics, that engenders oppression and resistance as male, and that defines resistance as a numbered, organized, leader-led (male) action that is sweeping in process and effect. In tying up her breasts, Yellow Mary is a factory worker on strike.

  Any ordinary day offers an opportunity to practice freedom, to create revolution internally, to rehearse for governance, the film promotes. A deepening of the message is achieved by having both Barbara O and Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor, author of Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off, on-screen. O’s personal act of resistance in Bush Mama carries over to DD through the actress playing Yellow Mary, a domestic and a prostitute. The perspective of domestics, who are in a better position than most workers to demystify White supremacy, as Smart-Grosvenor’s book indicates, is a still-untapped resource for Black political theorists (including Afrafemcentrists). Likewise the prostitute’s.

  The thesis of daily resistance spreads from scene to scene. Eula’s silence about the White rapist, for example, is a weapon; it shields Eli from highly probable violence. However, as a metaphor for cultural rape, silence must be overcome; the film DD is the voice. Speaking Gullah is also resistance; it combats assimilationist designs. Gullah is an Afrish first created by Mandinkas, Yorubas, Ibos, and others to facilitate intercontinental trade long before the African Holocaust. The bridge language on this side of the waters was recreolized with English. The authenticity of languages spoken by the Peazants, by Bilal, a Muslim on the island, by the indigo dyers and the Wallahs (met in flashbacks to slavery times) is one of the ways the film compels belief. The film’s respectful attention to language, codes of conduct, food preparation, crafts, chair caning, hair sculptures, quilt making, and mural painting constitutes a praise song to the will and imagination of a diasporized and besieged people to forge a culture that can be sustained.


  In the anticolonial wars and since, language has been the subject of hot debate in both diplomatic and cultural arenas. It is key to the issue of cultural-political autonomy, as in, for example, the development of national literatures and national cinemas. Which language shall a newly independent country adopt—that of the largest ethnic group within its colonialist-created borders, that in which the oldest literature is written, that in which the most compelling oral literature is transmitted, that which has been taught in the schools, namely the colonialists’? Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembéne and Palestinian writer and theorist Ghassan Kanafani are a few stalwarts who have kept vibrant the arguments of Fanon, Cabral, and others concerning the imperatives of national culture. During the resistance struggles of the sixties in the U.S., writers in the various communities of color took up the vernacular-vs.-vehicular debate and also opted in favor of languages in which their constituencies experience daily life; hence, literature written in Yori-can, Black English, and Spanglais, for example, rather than “standard” or “literary” English. Ousmane Sembene’s use of Wolof in Ceddo, Euzhan Palcy’s use of Martinican creóle in Sugar Cane Alley, Trevor Rhone’s use of Jamaican creole in Smile Orange, and Felix de Roy’s use of Papiamento, the creole in the Antilles, in Eva and Gabriella are examples of noncapitulation to strategies of containment by official and monied types who argue that vernacular is neither a dignified vehicle for presenting the culture nor a shrewd way to effect a crossover to cosmopolitan audiences who may enjoy your cuisine and appropriate your music but prefer that you speak in standard Europese.