Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust is an intimate, surreal, one-day encounter with a turn-of-the-century Sea Island Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina. Dash explores the unique culture of a former Ibo slave population and its descendants, embodied by the Peazant family, and examines how their history affects their interior lives and life choices. As most of the Peazant family prepares to head North, the film demonstrates how scraps of memories provide them with a historical and spiritual connection, a source of identity and, therefore, a source of strength and validation.
With Daughters of the Dust (1992), Dash became the first black woman to have a nationally released feature-length film. This came after the movie won first prize for cinematography at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. Dash had previously made film shorts and directed music videos, including Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason."
Daughters of the Dust is also a milestone for its portrayal of African Americans and their history. In the nonlinear fashion of African oral tradition, the film eschews easy and traditional stereotypes, instead challenging the viewer with nuances of family, culture, history and spirituality. It bemoans the tragedy of slavery's resultant cultural amnesia and the legacy of shame felt by both women and men. The film offers them sources of strength, pride, connection and collective memory. It is a reminder and a request to hold onto those "scraps of memories" that represent a connection with the past.
Though men are shown with their own memories to pass on, Daughters of the Dust focuses on the complexity, individuality, resilience and beauty of African-American women in particular. It does so as much through its powerful and enchanting imagery as its dialogue and narrative. The various African hairstyles, the rich melange of complexions and the range of personal style and character all illustrate strong, attractive, complex ways of being a black woman. Even the film's lyrical style is emotional, spiritual and subtle rather than cerebral and direct. It plays at times like a dream.
The Peazant women are the central repositories and conduits for the sometimes tangible, sometimes psychic, sometimes sentient and sometimes unconscious memories. Nana Peazant is the matriarch of remembrance, with her tin box, ancestral bottle tree, stories of the past, supernatural connection to the "old souls" and the "Unborn Child" (who narrates the movie) and her appeals to "never forget who we are, and how far we done come." She stresses to those who are leaving for the North that though they are leaving the soil, their connection to family (past, present and future) can still be their source of strength, spirituality and identity.
The movie's concern with familial and spiritual connections across space and through time may call out most immediately to African-American women, but ultimately imparts to all viewers the importance of remembering and connecting. Julie Dash provides not merely a story but a "scrap of memory" for contemporary audiences. She gives an always timely warning about the prevalence of cultural amnesia. Most importantly, Daughters of the Dust is a reminder to pass on the memories, to retain a bond to the past, tradition, family and community. Dash's film is a challenging, inspiring and gorgeously nuanced masterpiece of remembrance.