Winds Laden with Dust: Way-Finding Through Creolized Religious Experiences

Many movements for establishing communities of belonging within the Africana diaspora have been motivated by various desires to lay claim to a particular set of ancestral memories and histories, as a means to reconcile the loss of those memories that occurred during slavery. For it is within this desire to recall and reclaim, that there lies a possibility for these fragmented histories to be situated in individual and communal notions of identity, that ultimately grant these individuals and communities a sense of belonging. Dionne Brand’s book A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging, frames this movement of desire as way-finding. Brand positions the specific desire to love and be loved as a catalyst to way-finding, which are the methods used “[t]o reclaim the Black body from that domesticated, captive, open space is the creative project always underway.” (Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging (Toronto, Canada: Vintage Canada, 2001) pp. 32. epub.) Because of the infinitely different yet shared experiences of enslavement that have compromised the diaspora’s capacity to recall and remember ancestral histories, the element of desire as way-finding provides an opportunity to examine traditions within diasporic communities born from the search for belonging by way of reconciling the loss of ancestral memories from a ruptured history. Though Brand does not focus on one specific path to way-finding, one of the many paths she points to are the variety of religious traditions within the Africana diaspora. These religious paths of way-finding establish methods for what I call “probing” the door of not return that symbolizes the infinite yet unknown connection to lost ancestral histories. Using Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust to illustrate Brand’s notion of way-finding, I argue for a return to these religious practices that have been fashioned out of a desire to love and be loved. In doing so, these religious practices can be used to demonstrate the way in which communities that stem from the desire to love and be loved contribute to shaping identity and belonging. 

First, by turning to Brands notion of way-finding, this essay seeks to demonstrate the relationship between desire and belonging within notions of identity that are deeply connected to the loss of ancestral knowledge during slavery. Next, By examining the practice of Hoodoo in Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, this essay argues that religious practices like Hoodoo, Vodou, Ifa, and even Christianity, deserve to be examined both individually and alongside one another in order to trace the ways in which ancestral knowledge has been both retained and renewed in the development of identity and belonging in the diaspora.  The films’ emphasis on the tension between Nana Peazant, the matriarch and elder of the Peazant family who represents the dusty/old knowledge of the past, and her family who represent the present and future possibility of knowledge serves as a complimentary tool for engaging with Brand’s notion of desire as a catalyst for historical, modern, and future practices of way-finding. And lastly, this essay concludes by examining the role of ritual in Dash’s film. Though the dust of past ancestral memories represented in Nana Peazant’s religious practices serves as a path to way-finding, the goal of recalling and remembering is not to produce static criterias for belonging and cultural identity. Rather, the goal is to use practices of recalling and remembering in religion, as a method for innovating notions of identity and belonging that are not limited to the emptiness felt from in the aftermath of slavery.