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Robert Farris Thompson Speaks: Daughters of the Dust

Mar 08, 2024
I think the first thing I loved about the movie and I loved watching it again through video is that she captured the whole concept of being neat, clean, and an African-American Englishman in black speech, meaning beautifully dressed, but, for Of course, there is that semantic ambiguity that makes it delicious because clean, of course, means well washed and in this case well starched and the women were starched in their skirts and blouses and the boys were starched from stem to stern and as a light motif along the Throughout the whole movie part of the beauty was that now everyone was starched and you can say, well, okay, so that's a cultural trend, black people tend to use more starch than white people, but that's not even close to that because when you start you are whitening your shirt and you are subliminally spiritually pulling by any means the idea of ​​the Yoruba world that to the extent that you are starched on white you are saying that look here I am I hope to be like that I hope to be transparently honest like that white shirt of starch like this white robe on the congo side white, of course, is the world, the color of wisdom, the color of the dead, the color of our ancestors as they pass through the kalunga line and emerge as these white, coastal spirits, not white racially but white in a sense of ultimate purity and the only way to simulate that and show that you care is to dress clean and then everyone is clean in the movie.
robert farris thompson speaks daughters of the dust
That's the first thing that caught my attention, the starch element, the second thing that caught my attention was the zora. neil hurston element of black aesthetics in his book where zora makes this incredible statement about african american aesthetics that no one else said or will ever say that the difference between our aesthetics and theirs, that is, europe, asia, is that we decorate the decoration , suddenly I have the new Orleans and they have these beautiful feathers for Mardi gradients that march, but it is not enough to have a feather, there are rhinestones that run along the line of the feather and in and on the

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there is a table that is raised and there is something. decorative on it, but there is a small starch mat that is decorating this decoration point, so from the gitmo she is into that they are decorating the decoration and to such an extent that she begins to decorate scenes with two types of black writing, the amazing scene where you have the newspaper, a newspaper wallpaper that everyone knows that the evil spirit has to read every word when he finishes reading every word on all the walls, four walls of the room, the dawn breaks and he breaks evaporates, that's powerful enough, but she has a quilt under a gauze, a gauze curtain that decorates the quilt with mystery and then the bright curtain opens and then this woman appears coming out of another text because recently, as you well know, this book came out about the secret and simple view or something like that some of the quilts were used as a sign towards freedom this way to Canada that way away from the plantation, so there was that element, but even apart of the underground rover's liberating secret elements on the quilt, these patterns were filled with all kinds of commandments to improve life, just having red makes you feel better and she used the color white and starch to begin with, but then the quilts played against the wall text and the third thing that caught my attention was simply the joy of seeing so much visual history of African Americans, the joy of seeing black people seen not as problems or as deficits and all that nonsense. about how black people love chitlins because it's an inferior food that was thrown at them and that's a lot of horse kashika because When I got to Africa, one of the first things I noticed was that they served me chitlin and I thought, this is a treat, not a deficit, and then they also told me that well, the slave cabins did not have windows for economic reasons, or maso.
robert farris thompson speaks daughters of the dust

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robert farris thompson speaks daughters of the dust...

I didn't allow them to have windows, so I arrived in Africa and realized that the traditional Yoruba house didn't have windows. The idea was that it was just for storage and sleeping. Love making with all the actual interaction was on the porch outside. of course, African Americans gave us the porch, there are no porches in London, Glasgow or Edinburgh, along with the mint julep, which my private theory was an herbal potion intended to soften the spirit of masara, the mint julep, the porch, the game room, where all that comes from. Africa, so if you go back to the movie, the action takes place with all this starched beauty and you are light years removed from the deficit model of black people and you see everything they do as a conscious creative choice. his film shows that he did all the mortar, the working movements that you know when you work in the African way, deep and up is the bending and the posture and above all the spirit possession and the dreams, why do we believe that Africans were separated from their people? when they're in the new world, this idea that all the poor slaves are forever separated from their homeland, you know, it makes them helpless, it makes them victims, what happened to dreams, baby, you know, like you were saying before, the phone and there is a book that will be out soon.
robert farris thompson speaks daughters of the dust
The difference between white dreams and black dreams is going to make your hair stand on end because in black dreams you often tend to dream of turning into a bird and flying to glory. Before Harriet Tubman was freed from her, her ancestors communicated with her. showed her how to do it and she became a bird in a dream and saw herself flying over the north on her way to freedom then the dream of her gave her the map and the intelligence and the black dreams as a communication thing that kept the currents. flowed and the other was spiritual possession because if you walk through the streets of deetabiki, for example, the brown capital of the zookas in Suriname, and I was there in '78 and also in '81.
robert farris thompson speaks daughters of the dust
What surprised me is that I walked through the streets at night hanging out and I was listening to this, yeah, yeah, I hear this deep, gravelly voice of Louis Armstrong, someone possessed by a spirit from Africa and I thought, oh my God, they're getting the news, you know, the CNN of the cosmos, the possession spiritual, etc. When they go back to Julie and the film of her, I love the way she went into strobe mode to accentuate the specialness of the possession right in the middle of that game and I love the fact that she filmed the game, the dance, and the beach . along with the spirit because at that moment I was no longer on the beach in the islands of the sea, I was in Rio de Janeiro, where the couple of black guys were playing a game of volleyball and, scream, Nehemiah falls directly into a body at the edge! from the volleyball court and everyone was fine, you know, they continued playing volleyball but they saw out of the corner of their eyes that there was a goddess, you know, but they weren't afraid of her, they loved her, they knew her and that idea of ​​spiritual possession.
It should not be seen as something that can only be worshiped and experienced in a deep dark temple with lit candles that happened in the light of the midday sun I am sure in Congo Square and it certainly happened and happens all over Copacabana Beach and ipanema and all the famous basanova beaches and what hit her hard because of the resonance is that she saw that play and high spiritual exaltation are not mutually exclusive, any more than blues should be separated from gospel; there was a sequence that in effect brought the saint the bible itself is a syncretism because you are syncretizing the original Hebrew together with the original Greek Judaism together with the rise of the Christian church, the torah and cruelized together with the gospel, so it is not It is no wonder that black people love the Bible so much because it is a created bilingual text.
They are very familiar with the way they live and the way they organize their experiences, but the images that are in the Bible can become masks to hang your African, for example, there are many books of revelations, whether you are rasta or in the old times, religion in the black south of America, both in Jamaica and in the south, or the revelations, it is a book that is quoted and quoted without quotation marks, but the revelations are full of images and sacred enthronements and wheels on wheels and the entire religion of the Congo is art of the soul on wheels. rotate if you are a soul person then you want to move like the soul does what is the shape of the soul?
I'm going to ask that to the entire middle class from here to Helsinki and vice versa and I bet you that most of them form of the soul I don't know or palero this is the form of the soul it is a circle it is a miniature sun and it moves in a circle like If everything was spinning the planet is spinning the universe is spinning the galaxy is spinning it's spinning inside circle inside circle and guess to the core of that, in any case, you take the Bible and mix it with an aqui, of In fact you are doing what is loosely called syncretism, but syncretism if you define it simply as a mixture of one religion with another is not ingenious.
For me it's not black enough because you don't just pick something and put it together, you look for codes, you look for wordplay and in Haiti it can be very clever, like they have a medieval type chromolithograph. armor now, what the heck could medieval European armor have to do with African religion? Answer all baby if you recode because the visor, the bottom part of the knight's visor, looks like the white cloth you tie around a person's lower jaw. who just died so bam night vertiginous jaw so you have not already recoded it with respect to an element or saint ulrich has a fish in his hand boom aguer lord of the sea or shango of course is connected with lightning and saint barbara was martyred and god was very angry with the people who killed her to vaporize them with lightning so forever santa barbara is connected with lightning and shangoa and santa barbara are one but they threatened them along with these puns and one of the first surrealists a guy who loves spiritual blackness michelle, who wrote this classic anti-colonial text although it was not his intention, but he sees himself called le frick fontom phantom africa and is surprised by the way the guys are doing the field work, blackmailing the bosses and all that. he is surprised and writes that he has died, that he was quite socially conscious, but I think that because of his openness and his complete sympathy with black culture, he is one of the few who, as far as I know, has written, damn it, his definitive study on the kind of mentality behind placing a medicine derived from a congo or mande or igbo against the holy bible, so that little sequence may have been brief, but it's like the hoe, mortar and gourd on the trowel , you know, part for the whole, I guess. what I'm trying to say to sum up why I love the movie is that it's a metanemic child of yes, a metanemic child of a little bit, you just take a part of it and it's like a hologram, you know or it's like one of those computers where you enter you just put a little square around it whenever you want it comes back and it has that effect on me

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