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.  In this respect Cocoa is more like Haagar Peazant, who tends to bump heads with Nana because of the disdain she feels for Nana’s traditional ways.  Unlike Haagar, though, Cocoa does not openly reject Mama Day’s herbalist practices; and while she places her faith in some and not others, she is never as obviously opposed to Mama Day’s behavior as Haagar is to Nana’s.  Finally, while Haagar seems eager to sever her ties to Nana and the traditional folk-ways of Ibo Landing, Cocoa returns to Willow Springs every year to visit with her family.  She is therefore more like Eula in this respect: she embraces her connection to her ancestral past, knowing that this connection is an innate and inalienable part of her identity.

Returning to the comparison between Cocoa and Yellow Mary Peazant, Mary’s partner Trula bears a weak likeness to Cocoa’s George: an outsider, she observes as an unknown world unfolds around her in Ibo Landing.  However, George is met with much more friendliness and acceptance than is Trula, who is never seen speaking with anyone but Mary and, briefly, Eula.  The strongest tie George and Trula share is their mutual alienation from their partners in the end; George is separated from Cocoa by death, and Trula from Mary by the latter’s choice not to leave Ibo Landing. 

The plots of the novel and of the film are similar insofar as they deal with migration, although they deal with motion in two entirely different directions.  “Daughters of the Dust” sees most of the Peazants leaving the island, most likely never to return; Mama Day sees Cocoa in a constant pattern of returning to Willow Springs.  No matter how many times she leaves it, her return is as certain as the last weeks of summer.  However, on a larger scale both works can be said to share the theme of maintaining connections: the Peazants have learned the importance of memory by the end of the film, while Cocoa seems to already know - and practice - it at the beginning of her story.  The continuum of past to present and present to future is also visible in both works, with Mary and Eula Peazant’s futures inextricably invested in Nana’s past, and Cocoa’s similarly melded with Nana’s.

One final difference between these two stories only serves to make their juxtaposition seem strange: while “Daughters of the Dust” is an original screenplay, Mama Day’s strong ties to Shakespeare cannot be overlooked.  The novel’s plot is vividly reminiscent of “The Tempest,” and Cocoa’s given name, Ophelia, could hardly be any more Shakespearean.  But to approach this issue from the perspective of Mama Day and Nana Peazant is to discover that perhaps there are no original stories; each is simply a revision or retelling of an earlier one as the past pervades the present in its march towards the future.  Taking this angle on both texts reveals the subtle interconnectedness of things: of the young to the old, of those on the mainland to those on the island, of those from Ibo Landing to those in Willow Springs.