Week #10: Daughters of the Dust/Parting shots

[jscappettone]

Please prepare for Tuesday's session by posting brief remarks regarding Daughters of the Dust to this forum. How does this film's treatment of issues we've explored this quarter—of cultural violence, continuity, and discontinuity in diasporic contexts, linguistic retention and
metamorphosis, creolization, regional preservation and migration—resonate with or differ from that of the poetic texts we've explored this quarter? (Choosing one text may help you narrow your reflections for brevity's sake.)

[Michael Dango]

One of the things Daughters of the Dust foregrounds for me is a point that seems obvious now but which I realize I haven't been paying attention to in the other works.  This is the point that poetries of dislocation function through a conversion of space into time and vice versa in order to manage the ambivalence of intense belonging to a place that nonetheless feels distant with an official history other than personal history.  This is not quite the compression of space and time we saw at the beginning of the quarter with Harvey's attention to postmodernism.  I mean more basically the designation of a place as a point in time, thus something like "Africa" as the place of ancestry.  About twenty minutes through the movie, I was really struck by the scene in the developing graveyard which comes with the imperative to appreciate the old souls who from the beginning "guided our journey from one world to another." A graveyard is one way of turning an event (death) into a space (of mourning).  It is also a way of turning nomadism into settlement, rooting a community in a place that collects tradition and memory by being tethered to the placedness of death. 

In Zong!, the trauma was in part, without a landed graveyard, not being able to give death a place, thus the event is kept open and permeates a space that organizes the recurrence of violence.  The old souls continue to provide "guidance" in the hauntology of Daughters because they, unlike those graved in the new land, are in a place, like the deaths in Zong!, not accessible.  They cannot be placed, and this is both their continued strength and their participation in the continued trauma that displacement is.  I'm also interested in the line, more than once, about how "children are the most important, and the old souls."  This feeling out to both the future (children) and the past (old) is one way to continually reject the present, with your affective investments in other places named by times that are dislocated from your ontological circle.  What is the status of the present in our other poetics texts? I think only Zong! really has an investment in the present, and this is because the death drive of the text seems to be a compulsion to repeat historical violence in a such a way that the present is continually lived even as it denies to itself a space for itself to endure on either side (both the past and the future are hostile to the present, thus the present is a living death, or a deathly liminal life).  Paterson would be another exception in our class ouvre, if the documentary mode can be trusted as a presentism. Most of the other texts we've encountered are more interested in the future, I think.  This may be the avant gardism of some of them, which seems to invest in a time ahead of the present in which a work is realized, or else aims to precipitate that time through the demand of the work.  And perhaps the present is just too unbearable to live, if it means only the repeated and repulsive affective disorientation that the aftermath of the event that a violence historical or ontological is.   

I hope it isn't too melancholic to be thinking so much of death and the death drive for our ultimate class. I only mean to call attention to the status of the present, which perhaps we can only learn to live by converting all other times into places that no longer speak distance.

[Patrick Morrissey]

I’ve been puzzling over Eula’s unborn child and the emphasis Daughters of the Dust places on questions of parentage.  In the film’s “realistic” register, we’re led to believe the Eula carries the child of an unspecified white rapist; this is what Eli believes, and it seems also to be what Eula herself believes in her conversation with Yellow Mary (when Mary affirms Eula’s decision not to tell Eli who raped her) and when she criticizes the family’s judgment of Yellow Mary, referring to herself also as “ruined.”  But in the film’s “spiritual” or “magical” register, we’re led to believe that Eula’s child is Eli’s, since, according to Nana, any child who comes into the Peazant family comes at the behest of their ancestors; Nana calls upon the spirit of the unborn child to “convince” Eli that she belongs to him and to their Ibo heritage, thus keeping alive his dreams for the future and Nana’s wish that he keep the family together as they move north.  The reconciliation scene in which Eula recollects the Ibo arrival and magical departure as Eli walks across the water suggests that he has made contact with his ancestors—“who we is” and the “memories inside a we,” as Nana says—and comes to understand that Eula’s child is part of the Ibo inheritance.  One question is whether the child has been Eli’s all along or whether it somehow becomes his by force of Nana’s magic, say when the child’s spirit runs into and merges with Eula’s body.  The other possibility is that the child is or remains the child of the white rapist, in which case what it means for Eli to accept her as “his” is something quite different.  So I guess I’m wondering how the movie leads us to think about racial and filial inheritance.  Is value placed on the “pure” identification of one generation with the next—past, present, and future rooted in the specific terrain of Ibo Landing?  Or is there an opening for something more “mixed” and possibly mobile?  (A related question: how are we to understand the role of magic, which Nana makes more or less synonymous with ancestry, in the film?)

These questions are bringing me back to the moment in Cecil Giscombe’s essay when he finds himself dislocated by the possibility that that John Robert Giscombe was a “white English guy” and then runs down the tenuous and tangled lines of inheritance that might link Cecil back to the mixed coupling of James Clarke Giscombe and Jane Skinner (181-6).  I think we could think about this genealogy in relation also to the “Indianapolis, Indiana” section of Prairie Style, in which Giscombe meditates upon the mythical Ben-Ishmael clan, the racial identity of which—white, black, indigenous, mixed—is indeterminate, changing with the story and its teller.  For Giscombe, “color” and “location” seem at once specific and mobile, like the “style” I tried to describe in my last post. A line I keep remembering from his essay: “But destination—place—is nothing but another version of the question, there’s no answer.  Sites are specific, all right, we inhabit them and go on” (188).  I’m glad Michael brought up Paterson, which makes an interesting point of comparison: if Giscombe seems interested in a kind of horizontal mobility, a drift across specific point on a grid, Williams seems interested in kind of vertical or geological excavation to reveal the “elemental character of the place.”  These different imaginations of space might, per Michael’s post, imply different imaginations of time.  But both, it seems to me, are interested in “impurity.”  If it’s productive, how might we compare Dash’s film to Giscombe’s and Williams’s spatial-temporal-racial imaginaries?       

[Peter]

  I was re-watching the opening of Daughters of the Dust and the second time was overwhelmed by the presence of indigo. It appears in the film's credits, it is the ink used for handwriting, there is indigo light in several of the background scenes, and the dress clothes of both Nana and Viola are dyed with indigo blue. All these uses, and several others, point back to the labor of working on the indigo and to the memory of the past that stains Nana's hands. This seems to me one of the film's most powerful metaphors: the past as a stain. The stained hands call up images of guilt (bloodied hands), the bodily marks that labor leaves (being able to tell someone's work from their hands), skin-color as stain, and as a mark that reveal's one's identity or origin. I'm not sure why exactly, but the scene where the indigo bricks were produced was a striking combination of utility and whimsy - reminding me of Glissant's strange line : "The language barrier falls; in such a function, language is operative. I choose or I elect: I am bricking a poem" (46). In a sense indigo is doing something similar to the transposition of space and time that Michael described above - but here the past is exchanged for materiality. One of the interesting things about this transposition, and how it differs from the idea of past as scar, is that the materiality is heritable in alternate forms. The past scars Nana's hands, but even those who have never worked with indigo have clothes, household items, or letters that connect them to that past. In this sense the film's use of indigo as an aesthetic choice furthers the logic of a specific material inheritance, as if indigo haunts the unconscious and colors the camera lens. We might see an conjunction of both displacements (the spatial one Michael describes, and the material one) in the bottle tree, which presents a place for memorialization but which needs the colors and textures of specific bottles to connect to specific ancestors.

This idea of past as stain reminds me somewhat of Tan Lin's inheritance of television. We didn't really talk about the element of the aunt's labor in Insomnia and the Aunt, but her late hours and the monotonous act of waiting for customers makes the television an intimate companion of her work. Television acts as a psychic dye, and its technicolor and grainy world does seem to leech out into the world Tan Lin describes. But Lin does not inherit television as labor, but rather as a way of coping, thinking, and dreaming about the world. The idea that the past can be dislocated into an object is certainly not new - and we might look at the symbolism of the indigo pouch containing hair that Nana passes on, and which is significantly called a 'hand' - nevertheless there is something different about both Dash and Lin's figuration of inheritance. Rather than a conscious and symbolic marker, indigo and television work to cross generations through a kind of sinuous logic. The past in this view is neither infinitely heritable, its difference dispersed in a few generations, nor is it something that can be lost through a conscious rejection. 

[Mollie McFee]

One particular constraint transforms the atmosphere of Daughters of the Dust: it is shot using only natural light. Not only does this give a particular radiance to many of the faces shot in the film, it draws the viewer’s attention to the fact that much of the film is shot outside. The choice to shoot with natural light helps to preserve a sense of the moment; the sea islands, which are now almost entirely developed, provide the light and shadow that evoke the time in which the film is set. It also strikes me as a decision that bumps up against the film’s ethic. While many of the central characters ultimately stay behind to preserve a complicated sense of belonging and origin that is very much tied to place, the film also insists on the flexibility of family. While Iona and Eli insist family is governed by biological ties, Nana Pezant tells Eula that her child will belong to the family regardless of her father. Through the plot the film rejects the biological-natural, though nature is prioritized through filming practices.

 I want to follow Peter in drawing a comparison between Daughters of the Dust and Insomnia and the Aunt. The light of the television in the middle of the night is the visual opposite of Daughters of the Dust’s natural light, though this light is more ambient and thus more natural to Lin. Insomnia also embraces the images on TV that don’t pretend to be natural. Despite this striking opposition, I think there’s a deeper way in which the two speak to each other. Both texts share an interest in the importance of non-biological family, and the ways in which such families form as a result of migration. Lin suggests that the aunt is not a biological family member, though the detail has slipped through his memory. Similarly in Daughters of the Dust family morphs from the rigid belonging insisted on by Iona to a more fluid entity comprised of people committed to preserving the memory and tradition of life on the island. Lin himself demonstrates an ambivalence towards things that are “canned.” While Lin and his Aunt hate live TV, Lin expresses a deep attachment to pieces of his family history which can never be recreated, like the unique circumstances that have produced his Aunt’s accent in English. I think ultimately both texts relate ambivalently to both the natural and the fake. While Lin expresses the comforting qualities of false TV light, and Dash pursues natural light of an outdoor setting, both artists feel the necessity of the opposite quality. 

[Suzannah Spaar]

Like many of the texts we’ve read, Daughters of the Dust deals self-reflectively in trying to figure out the best way to preserve memory. In this case, the preservation of family goes hand in hand with the quest--I’m not sure it’s clear whether, by the end of the film, family can be preserved in the same way that memory can be. Memory does, however, seem to be dependent on the family.  Yet it is nonlinear. The unborn child narrating the story places herself in cinematographic moments in the present (running to her mother) and the past (dying indigo). She is a to-be descendent, but she is also giving the agency of an ancestor.  Her memories are not her own. By the end of the film, the family ends up splitting into different directions, as some go north and others remain on the Island. So much of the movie is spent with the anxiety of the family leaving, of change seeping in, that it very much tries to cover up the scar that the whole historical family has already been uprooted and dispersed--from Africa as well as during slavery.  So the family isn’t linear, their shared memory isn’t linear. What makes having a family (the immediate and abstract, branching ancestors) so important? At one point, Yellow Mary talks about a case she wanted to buy once so that she could put all of her bad memories in it.  She said she wanted to keep the memories, to look at if she wanted to, but stresses “I didn’t want them inside of me.” On the other hand, there is Nana’s case full of African relics.  In Nana’s case (no pun intended) she is keeping seemingly good memories rather than bad (or at least familial ones..)--however, the similarity here is that, much like Yellow Mary’s desire to keep her negative thoughts outside her own self, the African relics cannot be carried alone. Nana cannot just keep them in her. And so the pain of the past must be explored, but no singular person can bare that history by oneself. So the family functions as a sort of case. Perhaps some generations are most closed than others--it doesn’t really matter as long as the relics that need to be shared are kept and passed on until they can be fully digested.

On Saturday, June 1, 2013 7:50:03 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Dani Fox]

Peter talked about Indigo in his post and a few other people have also mentioned this film's use of the natural light as it falls on the faces of the actors as well as gives direction to the long panning shots of the waves on the beach or the more interior landscape of the island.  I didn't notice the indigo but this is very interesting to me as I was really focused on the color white as it appeared so often in this movie--not just as the dress for the women and young girls but also as a transitionary mode that gave shape to the film's narrative.  I was struck by the use of the all-white screen to change setting, focus, or time especially in the way that it reminded me of what would happen if you were to point the camera directly into the sun and zoom in.  The sudden brightness of these transition screens never made smooth transitions but I think the white really plays in to bringing the viewers attention to the lightness or brightness or even just whiteness of this island in the heat of August.  

White also seems to signal innocence and freedom and memory too--all things I was thinking about during this film.  This struck me especially during the shots that did not become full white erasures of the previous scene but signaled a change by a wandering white figure (a horse, a child in white) against the green background of the trees and foliage.  I had a few lag problems while watching this movie but I think there were a few of these shots that occurred in slow motion and I think it was this effect that makes me think of that type of haunting innocence of the young or perhaps the new in general.  At the end, I'm left wondering about the various instances of Memory--remembering, recalling, recollecting--that all could be synonymous and yet don't appear to be so.  It's interesting in this movie as the past seems as troubled and as unknown to the younger generation of parents (those who are trying to forget the old ways in favor of Christianity and adaptation) as the future in the new land is.  The present--covered in sand, filled with family lingering in the edges and background of so many shots--is just white.  

[Ingrid Becker]

Somewhat like Michael, I found my mind turning to transitions over and displacements within time as I watched Daughter’s of the Dust. Perhaps this is because of the foregrounding of generational gaps in belief systems and an understanding of the way that time progresses or is held still—in particular the way that memory acts to provide continuity over time.  There are a variety of modes of memory here—as Suzannah has remarked—that toe the line between dwelling with the past in the present and ossifying the past, relegating it to the sphere of, for instance, the photograph.

 

Nana’s mode of memory involves direct communication with the ancestors, remaining close to the dead, feeling their presence in real time.  This sort of memory, and the folk traditions/intangible heritage through which it is practiced, reacts to a displacement in geography (a trip over the middle passage) by establishing a close continuity with the lives, practices, and knowledge of the dead and the yet unborn.  Nana says of her ancestral memory, “We don’t know where this recollections come from” but that the old souls can be trusted to “touch you with the hand of time.” The “origin” of a memory is not as crucial as the contact itself and the way it opens up to include or touch the entire family and its coming generations.

 

The photograph is a clear contrasting method of memory. I was especially fascinated with the final family photo scene, in which the photographer shouts “Look up, and remember Ibo Landing—Hold!” This a very different sort of “holding” than Nana is performing in regards to the memories she partakes in with the ancestors. The ossification of a living family and heritage is particularly palpable in the poses taken up by the family members and how different these poses are, often straight backed in a chair or upright, from the way they naturally stand or move in the film, dresses blowing, running on the beach, crouching over work, by the water, or splayed out on the ground, in trees. The photograph seems to detach memory from folk practice and presence.

 

Many of the characters fall somewhere along a spectrum of methods to relate to the past, perhaps with the photograph at one end and Nana’s communing with the ancestors on the other. The lone French-speaking man is an interesting middle ground—rather than answering the questions posed in French to him by the photographer, he says “What I remember, I tell you in the language that I speak here.” He is grappling with his memory of a past via the tool box of his present, post-displaced, state.

 

Brathwaite’s story of Namsetoura and the cover of Born to Slow Horses crosses the boundary between living ancestral tradition and the photograph; here, it is the camera lens that enables him to make contact with an ancestor in the first place.  The encounter with Namsetoura posits the camera as tool for creating art as well as a gateway to “past mid/-nights,” raising questions about the potential for aesthetic media to breach the gaps of dislocation across time. Brathwaite’s use of sycorax video style, mixing the grammars and rhythms of nation language with the slangs, abbreviations, and typefaces of the digital reinforces the idea that modernizing traditional practices does not preclude their successful construction of continuity with the past. I have been trying to think of how Daughters of the Dust makes contact with ancestral memory through the medium of film, and I keep coming back to the slow motion scenes, which happen again and again, technology dilating the present and forcing an elongated duration, a space where memory slows down too.

[David Gutherz]

I was struck by Dash’s decision to open the film with excerpts from The Thunder Perfect Mind, “I am the first and the last, I am the honored one and the scorned one, I am the white and the virgin, I am the barren one, and many are my daughters…” As most of you probably know, these are some of the first lines from an epic poem (in the style of Eliot’s 4 Quartets) discovered among the cache of Gnostic texts now called as the  “Nag  Hammadi Library.” So far as I can tell, the reigning scholarly hypothesis is that The Thunder was probably written sometime during the first centuries after Christ in or around Alexandria, Egypt by a woman. The poem bears witness to a syncretic sensibility, happy to combine the various philosophies that swirled around the Ancient Middle East, including various Jewish sects and the cult of Isis….which is probably why it was suppressed by the early Church fathers.  Carrying on the pattern developed in those early lines, the Thunders proceeds through a series of paradoxical oppositions that are meant to convey both the tremendous mystery associated with the divine narrator and her radical immanence, even in the most unexpected places. To choose two examples that seem relevant for this course, “For I shall be silent among those who are silent, and I shall appear and speak, Why then have you hated me, you Greeks? Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians? For I am the wisdom of the Greeks and the knowledge of the barbarians.” And, “I am the name of the sound 
and the sound of the name. I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division,” which Toni Morrison used as an epigraph to Jazz.

            So, what is The Thunder Perfect Mind doing in Daughters of the Dust, and why did Dash choose the lines that she did? There is an eerie fit between the content of (especially the quoted section) of the holy whore’s monologue and the concerns of the Peazant family. Although during the opening credits the words are recited by Nana’s disembodied voice, at different times during the film they seem fit to pass into Yellow Mary’s mouth or the Unborn Child’s. On a more general level, is it just the echo of speaking thunder that makes me hear strange resonances between the Gullah ancestral beliefs, Gnostic theology, and Eliot’s mysticism? But whereas Eliot was above all interested in the relation between individual genius and The Great Tradition, by putting the words of an anonymous, non-canonical Egyptian mystic in Nana’s mouth, Dash is sounding out sympathetic vibrations between subterranean currents. This is further dramatized by the subplot that brings the mainland gospel of Jesus Christ into conflict with the power of the ancestral mother. In their adherence to, and creative reinterpretation of, “barbarian” rituals the Gullah women are shown to be closer to the rich, messy origins of early Christianity than the civilized mainlanders, T.S. Eliot included.

On Saturday, June 1, 2013 7:50:03 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Tala Radejko]

I just realized that this didn't send last night and was sitting in my drafts box. I'm very sorry for the delay.

One of the major motifs in Daughters of the Dust was that of connectedness, particularly the connectedness of the past, present, and the future/the unborn. The film can be said to directly connect the past of enslavement with both the film’s ‘present’ of the Gullah in 1902 and the unborn descendants of those who moved up North, of which Julie Dash is one. The narrative also makes repeated reference to the notion of connectedness through Nana and Eula’s unborn child, both of whom also demonstrate that any notion of connectedness is intrinsically tied to Gullah understandings of life, death, and birth. As Nana says to Eli in the graveyard, “it is up to the living to stay in touch with the dead… The ancestor and the womb, they one, and they with us.” Also, the use of Eula’s unborn child as a narrator serves in part to reinforce Nana’s repeatedly referenced sense of connection to their ancestors, which also translates into the Gullah’s emphasis on preserving their African heritage. This is highlighted in the scene where Nana adds her lock of hair to that of her mother’s, declaring that “there must be a connection between those who go north and those who stay here. Between we, and those across the sea. We came in chains. We must survive”.

The floating figure and the story of the Ibo Landing also highlight the Gullah’s connection to their African ancestry, though the discrepancy between Eula and Bilal’s version underlines tensions between memory and lived experience, and also points to questions relating to time, space, and the questions of discontinuity/continuity within collective memory. According to Eula, the Ibo slaves walked on the water and past the ship that had carried them in a refusal to remain in slavery, while Bilal’s version has them walk into the water, and ‘never come back up again’. His details may be more realistic, yet in both the important elements are preserved, and Eula’s more story-like retelling reflects an African-American tradition of recounting history by reassembling fragmented experiences into a narrative (Henry Louis Gates Jr.). The relation between the two stories can maybe be said to reflect the play between various historical narratives that belong to different groups in the diaspora. The two stories also illustrate to an extent the tension between time and memory, as well as between inherited and personal memory.

The forced displacement of their ancestors and the memory of further forced separation and dislocation as slaves, combined with the fear of future displacement drive Nana’s insistence on keeping the family together and ensuring the old ways continue. It also reminded me of Brathwaite’s Middle Passage, where its memory and remnants serve as a driving force in Born to Slow Horses, in which oral histories and traditions derive part of their importance by being vestiges of the slaves’ African heritage to survive the journey. The emphasis on retaining connections to the past, or at least a connection to sort of personal/collective history is a common theme in any sort of work that deals with dislocation, particularly when there is a cultural, spacial, and temporal disjoint between everyday experiences and felt associations of identity.  

The character that interested me the most however was Bilal, both as the heathen French speaker and as the character who was on the Wanderer along with the Ibo that ‘walked on the water’. He is a marginalized man in an already marginalized community, and his presence complicates what could have been a simple Gullah – mainland relation where the perception of the center and margins is merely reversed. Like them he has retained his own heritage and language, though in the one instance he speaks in conversation he favors English over French, saying that he will speak with the tools he has learnt here. Part of it may been out of practicality, in order to make himself better understood given Mr. Snead’s level of French, though I also thought it was interesting because it can also be said to echo Caribbean writers’ decision to write in English rather than nation language – changing the mode of expression in order to fit the linguistic patterns of the majority/the cultural center (especially given Dash’s emphasis on placing the Gullahs at the cultural center with the Christianized mainland at the margins).