Daughters of the Dust and Mama Day

Daughters of the Dust and Mama Day

Although their plots are divergent, Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day possess strikingly similar elements: their setting in the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, their cantankerous-but-lovable matriarchs who are both traditional healers, and stories of migration, whether it be to the mainland or back home again. The themes of the film and the book are different but at the same time not dissimilar: Dash’s film emphasizes the importance of retaining connections to the ancestral past, while Naylor’s novel focuses more on love, loss, and reconciliation with the past that is part of the present and will continue into the future.

Were Dash’s audience to return to the South Sea islands eighty years after “Daughters of the Dust” they might find the Gullah people and their lives similar to those of the Willow Springs of Naylor’s novel. Although nearly a century spans between them, these two people nevertheless share many traits. Many of the residents of Willow Springs answer to a nickname given them as a child; similarly, Viola Peazant reminisces about the nicknames given to children in Ibo Landing. Members of both communities, generations from Africa and steeped in “modernity,” still come to the traditional herbalist for help in matters of the body and spirit: Eula uses Nana’s medicine to contact the soul of her deceased mother; Bernice and Ambush come to Mama Day to heal Bernice when she becomes ill, and later for help in conceiving a child. Both Nana Peazant and Mama Day draw their knowledge from a life lived on their respective islands and their strength from their ancestors, whom they visit and tend at the village graveyards. And like Nana Peazant, Mama Day struggles to maintain a tie with her family members who have left the island and immersed themselves in the mainstream culture.

Cocoa, however, is difficult to reconcile with just one character in “Daughters of the Dust.” Perhaps she is mostly like Yellow Mary, who has left Ibo Landing but returns in the “now” of the film. It is unclear, though, why Yellow Mary returns; unlike Cocoa, she is not in the habit of paying visits to her family, and she is hardly welcomed with the same enthusiasm as is Cocoa. Also, it seems that although both Mary and Cocoa share a closeness to their elder female relatives, Cocoa clashes more with Mama Day than Mary does with Nana.