Exiled at Home: Daughters of the Dust and the Many Post-Colonial Conditions

Abstract

Red-haired, light-skinned African American Trula emerges as a striking image of an exiled and marginalized lesbian woman in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust. This film tells the story of an African American family's migration from the Georgia Sea Islands to the US mainland in the early 1900s. Some members of the family already live on the mainland and return to the Sea Islands to celebrate the formal migration. Trula, a friend, accompanies family member Yellow Mary Peazant. Trula's abundant and flamboyant hair and her excessive whiteness place her exterior to the predominantly dark-skinned female community of Ibo Landing in the Georgia Sea Islands. Trula's position as outsider emanates not only from these markers of difference or excess, but astonishingly, also from the Ibo belief that [o]n the day of the friends go (qtd. in Pendit and McGuire 6). This belief forges and legitimates her ostracism. Thus at the moment of migration and leave-taking, the women of the Peazant family, the blood relatives, enact an unapologetic exile on Trula while simultaneously confronting varying degrees of self-exile. Trula's overt silence and her refulgent presence signify a gaping wound in the text of the film, a laceration deliberately inflicted by Dash to warn that no unified moment or place of safety exists for all post-colonial African American female figures. Trula, perpetually in exile, is not safe on the Sea Island; she is not welcome; she is not at home. And yet, we argue, so too are all the other women depicted in the film. Dash risks projecting black women as divisive, and in particular, as homophobic when she portrays the variety of womanhoods occupied by individual black women. Making