#placeless

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"Given that the Black dream of settlement is a dream deferred, I want to consider what resting in the space of placelessness, rootlessness or 'no place' can offer us in terms of a radical subjectivity. In [Julie] Dash’s novel [Daughters of the Dust], Lucy makes the decision that she cannot go back and settle the plot of land: 'Lucy turned from the window and flatly stated, ‘I caint go back on dat land!..I know dat Miz Emma Julia say it all right, dat de evil been cleared from dat place, but it hurt me just to think about it !’ She blurted out. ‘I caint go back.’ The trauma of both settler colonialism and slavery haunt the land for Lucy. The horror of slavery for Lucy is structured by the processes of settling the land. Slavery and settler colonialism co-constitute one another. Lucy must turn away from not only settling the land, but also must relinquish her former relationship as a property owner. It was the owning of Black bodies as property on land that was considered property, that was lethal.

While, my own reading of Lucy’s arc in the novel does not necessarily represent Dash’s authorial intentions, the epistemic and ontological weight of this scene exceeds the narrative structure and intent of Dash’s novel. This scene allows us to focus on the dehumanizing and traumatizing aspects of settler colonial relations of settlement and property that might make Black people reconsider their relationship to land, property, citizenship and belonging in settler colonial states. In the novel, the plot of land ends up blooming with flowers after a proper burial is given to the felled slave. This could be a foretelling of Lucy’s return to this land. However, Lucy and her fiancé Charlie do not answer the question as to whether they will go back and cultivate the plot of land. The issue is left unresolved and we are left wondering. What role will this plot of land play in Lucy and her family’s future?

As the Peazant family tries to self actualize, the 'slave estate' keeps resurfacing or springing up from the ground. The Peazants exist in the forever space of slavery. Frank Wilderson argues that filmmakers who were a part of the LA Rebellion in the 1070s, like Dash, were among a cadre of artists who could make the slaves grammar of violence appear on the screen. Wilderson muses, Witness Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. What prevents this film from having the life sucked out of it by some grandiose pabulum proclaiming its 'universal' message (e.g., the 'universal' message of immigration and all its trials and tribulation) is that Daughters of the Dust makes the spectator painfully aware that what is essential about the journey being contemplated and argued over by various members of the family is the impossibility of reducing it to an analogy. Certainly all immigrants all over the world leave one country (or one place) for another. But only Black folks migrate from one place to the next while remaining on the same plantation.

I argue that slavery and settler colonial power are terminal and ongoing in the US. I also argue that slavery and settler colonialism as ongoing forms of death-making power make the Black and Native alliances in Julie Dash’s novel and film possible. Dash creates a world where Black and Native people articulate and embody 'grammar[s] of suffering' that can be in dialogue with one another.