Dusting Desires: Rupture, Way-Finding, and Reconciliation Through Creolized Religious Experiences

Using Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust, this paper illustrates how Nana Peazant’s practice of Hoodoo functions as an example of way-finding through creolized religious practices. According to Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, there is a common experience within the diaspora of suffering from a fragmented and ruptured ancestral memory, which she names as the door of no return. I articulate the process of fragmentation that shapes the door of no return as creolization, using Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. I suggest that creolized religious rituals can serve as a method of way-finding that are capable of transforming the possibility of one’s survival, by way of reclaiming connections to one’s ancestral community in the past, present, and future.  Though the door of no return, which was shaped by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, is fragmented; the significance of creolized religious practices as transformative and liberatory frameworks of survival, like Nana Peazant’s use of Hoodoo, must be seriously engaged.