At the opening of Sheree Renée Thomas’s speculative short story “How Sukie Cross de Big Wata” (2003), the Earth’s waters tell about an encounter with a child named Stella, later called Sukie Diamond, on the banks of the Mississippi River.1 The narrator communicates with Stella through “muddy waters” that ask her if she knows the river (327). By issuing a “cold current swirling round her toes” and a “warm current to tickle the blackbottom of her feet,” the waters also question Stella about her history and her relationship with her mother (327). The literally fluid language of the story indicates that although Stella stands at the banks of the Mississippi as an escaped slave, she must be understood as linked to other places, times, and states of being: her history and subjectivity are liminal.
Liminality, or the state of existing on a threshold, describes not only Stella but also many other characters in contemporary women’s neo–slave narratives, including Sethe from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Dessa from Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Dana from Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), and Unborn Child from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). Despite being situated in an historical setting, these characters experience events and encounter beings from beyond the confines of logical space and time—especially when they are written into works of speculative historical fiction. Lauren J. Lacey asserts that authors of speculative fiction rely on characters, settings, or events unfamiliar in our “real” world in order to blur the boundaries between the possible and impossible. Lacey argues that contemporary speculative fiction texts “incorporate elements of the fantastic (such as time travel, the ability to fly, and even fairy tale figures) in ways that redefine the relationship between the past and present so that the past becomes a site of possibility rather than a closed story” (19). By confounding linear, rational notions of space and time, fantastic elements offer alternative trajectories for the dispersal of power, a proposition particularly promising for the oppressed.
In black women’s speculative historical fiction, fantastic elements do not simply disrupt rationality; instead, these elements indicate that we must dismiss reason as a—or, more importantly, the—hallmark of human identity. Both Thomas’s short story “How Sukie Cross de Big Wata” and Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust reject theories of rational subjectivity founded in the recognition of difference by featuring children who develop through their connections to others. Thomas’s Stella uses her own power to emerge from the womb after her pregnant mother’s death, but her bond with her mother affords her the ability to walk, talk, and spit fire immediately upon her entrance into the world. Dash’s protagonist, unnamed on screen but referred to as Unborn Child in the screenplay, similarly disrupts the notion that subjectivity develops from the separation of self and other by operating as a bridge figure throughout the film, aiding her family members in understanding the links between past, present, and future. Both texts establish black identity as founded in posthuman liminality and, in doing so, disturb hierarchies that would position black subjects as less-than-human.
Prioritizing liminal connections over rational dislocations requires a move away from white, Eurocentric theories of psychosexual development. A black posthumanist understanding of identity formation develops from Caribbean- and Afrocentric theories, including Martinican poet, novelist, and theorist Édouard Glissant’s notion of the submarine and Jamaican theorist and dramatist Sylvia Wynter’s expansion of Glissant’s work into a “New Discourse of the Antilles” (Wynter, “Beyond” 639).2 Investigating liminal, posthumanist space and time with the aid of Glissant and Wynter establishes not only the necessity of black posthumanist readings of neo–slave narratives but also the necessity of black posthumanist readings of existing theories—including posthuman theory itself. A black posthumanist approach to identity formation offers an alternative to deracialized and dehistoricized theories of psychosexual development and posthuman subjectivity. By positioning liminality as the hallmark of identity, oppressed peoples, including black subjects, become the “human” of “posthumanism.” Black posthuman theory thus enacts liminality, emerging from a future-based correction of an historical oversight by which white, liberal humanist notions of being became foundational to understandings of humanity and subjectivity.
In his theories of postcolonial Caribbean identity, place, and space, Glissant anticipates the emergence of the black posthuman subject. Like contemporary Afrofuturist theorist Kalí Tal—who points out that “African American critical theory provides very sophisticated tools for the analysis of cyberculture, since African American critics have been discussing the problem of multiple identities, fragmented personae, and liminality for over a hundred years”—Glissant turns to the historical experiences of the oppressed in order to provide an account of the origins of liminal identity. The similarity of both theorists’ views of identity shows that Glissant offers a preview of the black posthuman subject.
Glissant, like Tal, argues that black identity forms through the convergences of multiple spaces and times. Accordingly, he rejects colonial constructions of history, asserting instead that Caribbean temporalities exist “fixed in the void of an imposed nonhistory” that resulted when a group of people came into place—and came into being—due to the slave trade (64). The postcolonial “nonhistory” results in a Caribbean past located in the present and future:
The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future, without the help of those plateaus in time from which the West has benefited, without the help of that collective density that is the primary value of an ancestral cultural heartland. That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past. (Glissant 63–64)
Glissant’s “prophetic vision of the past” signals that the slave trade did not merely disrupt Caribbean history; instead, slavery created a liminal temporality for the Caribbean subject (64). While projecting oppressive histories into the future proves “painful,” Glissant argues that writers must chart alternative postcolonial chronologies in order to understand not only Caribbean time but also Caribbean identity (64–65).
Glissant extends temporal, spatial, and subjective liminality from the Caribbean to the Americas based on the similar colonial experiences of Caribbean and “New World” black subjects (160). In her translation of Glissant, Wynter explains that because Caribbean and American black societies “‘did not pre-exist the colonial act, but were literally the creation of that act,’ one cannot ‘speak of structures disturbed by colonialism, of traditions that have been uprooted’” (“Beyond” 643). While other colonized groups could attempt “a return, after independence, to the old ancestral bases of identity, on which to meet the challenge of coping with a contemporary reality,” the formerly enslaved in the Caribbean and Americas enjoyed no such local history divorced from oppression (Wynter, “Beyond” 643). Accordingly, Caribbean and American black subjects alike must embrace Glissant’s prophetic visions of the past if they wish to escape the colonial version of history imposed upon them.
Accepting a prophetic view of the past allows the colonized not only to escape colonial histories but also to integrate liminality into black identity and culture. Glissant contends that the temporally liminal histories of black Caribbean and American subjects “bring to light an unsuspected, because it is so obvious, dimension of human behavior: transversality” (66). Transversality, a term popular in geometry, describes the intersectional quality of lines or of networks of lines. Glissant’s transversal subjectivity, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structure of knowledge, releases the individual from “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course” (Glissant 66). Rather than being consumed by a colonial history, Caribbean and New World black subjects experience multiple, intersecting histories that interrupt the lasting power of a colonial past.
With his prophetic and transversal vision of the black experience, Glissant allows the historical black subject an intersectionality that prefigures contemporary posthuman liminality. Specifically, Glissant’s theory of submarine identity serves as a precursor to posthuman subjectivity. Borrowing from Caribbean poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, who asserts in his assessment of scholarship on Caribbean history, “The unity is submarine” (qtd. in Glissant 66), Glissant perceives in the black Caribbean subject “[s]ubmarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches” (67). Ian Baucom clarifies the relationship between self and space in Glissant’s notion of the submarine, asserting that Glissant imagines a “heterotopic self” situated in “an equally fluid environment” that “not only encompasses the subject but ‘passes through’ it” (par. 7). As Ruth Mayer and Yogita Goyal argue, Glissant’s submarine envelops liminal notions of not only space, as the discussion of unfixed positions suggests, but also time. Mayer states that when placed in contrast to “the chartered and mapped high seas, this world below emerges as a realm beneath existing lines of power and signification, an ambivalent space, […] a fantasy space which is always as much of the future as it is of the past” (561). Goyal similarly promotes the transversality of Glissant’s notion of the submarine by stating that the “subliminal roots” Glissant theorizes “are constantly being created rather than located in a single primordial moment” (238).
Glissant brings ideas of multiple locations and times together by commenting on the significance of contemporary understandings of black experiences during slavery. He writes that Brathwaite’s evocation of the “submarine” “can only evoke all those Africans weighed down with ball and chain and thrown overboard whenever a slave ship was pursued by enemy vessels and felt too weak to put up a fight. They sowed in the depths the seeds of an invisible presence. And so transversality, and not the universal transcendence of the sublime, has come to light. It took us a long time to learn this. We are the roots of a cross-cultural relationship” (66–67). According to Glissant’s theory, the enslaved subjects who “sowed in the depths the seeds of an invisible presence” remain extant despite their historical deaths. As Glissant, Baucom, Mayer, and Goyal argue, the submarine depths are about the present and future—that which grows from the seeds sown—as well as the past.
Transversality rather than transcendence characterizes black Caribbean and American subjects during and after slavery. Given that transversality encompasses colonial and anticolonial as well as racist and antiracist understandings of the past, present, and future, Glissant’s submarine theory applies to the contemporary posthuman subject as well. By crafting a theory of identity linked to historical and contemporary experiences of liminality, Glissant offers a posthumanist approach to posthuman theory. Accepting a fluid, transversal, and liminal posthuman identity demands that the historical subject be unmoored from a fixed past, which includes white humanist notions of humanity. Baucom asserts that Glissant’s submarine theory works toward this task, given that the author insists “that we free ourselves from those acts of forgetting upon which the constitution of fixed identities so regularly depend, but asks that in joining ourselves to the no-longer forgotten we refuse to fetishize an alternate past and instead cultivate a vulnerability to the mutating ebb-tides of submarine memory” (par. 6). Glissant, according to Baucom, pushes his readers to look to the past but also to recognize the influence of multiple temporalities on the memory. By rejecting concretized histories, memories, and identities, Glissant refuses to prioritize liberal humanism over alternative ways of being and theorizing. As such, his submarine theory stands as a posthumanist mechanism—and, in particular, a black posthumanist mechanism—for understanding the posthuman subject.
Glissant must be counted among those theorists speaking on posthuman liminality in that he answers the call for a “(post) humanism that does not privilege European Man and its idiom” (Jackson 673). Wynter best explicates Glissant’s rejection of the liberal humanist European Man by arguing that his works fight against reason. She describes the “major themes of Glissant’s works as performative acts of countermeandering directed against the semantic character or behavior-regulating program, instituted by our present order of discourse and therefore by its related order of rationality or mode of ‘conventional’ or cultural ‘reason’” (“Beyond” 639). Wynter maintains that within our current order of discourse (i.e., our system of naming and categorizing), which defines the rational subject by means of its antithesis to the irrational Other, the black African or Caribbean individual comes to stand as “the Negative Signifier” of white, European Man (“On Disenchanting” 222–23, 237). She asserts that Glissant’s central themes, which include “history,” “psychic disorder and cultural malaise,” “consumerism,” and hierarchical ordering, participate in the destruction of the dominant discourses committed to binary linguistic and ontological structures (“Beyond” 639–40). If the rational self—the white, liberal humanist subject—cannot be understood as the subject of Glissant’s submarine being, then a new type of identity emerges: one as relational and fluid as the submarine itself. By joining Wynter in recognizing “differing modes of the human” (Wynter, “On Disenchanting” 241), Glissant predicts a new type of subject that overlaps or corresponds with the black posthuman subject and, in doing so, provides a prophetic black posthumanist vision of posthumanism.
As Wynter argues, Glissant’s theories of Caribbean liminality—including the need for a “prophetic vision of the past”—apply to the black American subject. In Thomas’s “How Sukie Cross de Big Wata,” free-floating views of temporality and subjectivity allow Stella/Sukie to exceed the history of enslavement into which Thomas situates her. Additionally, the story’s liminal views of the self confound white, liberal humanist notions of subjectivity, particularly traditional understandings of psychosexual development. Thomas’s story depicts a submarine transversality that extends beyond the depths of the ocean to the waters of the Mississippi. In the story, all bodies of water—even those seemingly rooted in place or to person, such as the amniotic fluid of the womb—exemplify the rootlessness of the submarine.
As described above, the line of questioning generated by the Earth’s waters in Thomas’s story draws attention to the transversality of both external and internal bodies of water. By first asking Stella if she knows the river and second inquiring about her relationship with her mother, the narrator links the Mississippi and the womb, indicating that both have enveloped Stella but also that both move her beyond the specific location in which she can be found. Moreover, the Earth’s waters position Stella and her enslaved ancestors within the transversal womb of time—and thus outside of linear, colonial history—given their existence as “the creation of [the colonial] act” (Wynter, “Beyond” 643). The narrator places Stella’s ancestors’ origin at “the door of no return” (the entrance of the slave ship) and their passage across the water to “the land they call mother” (their home in America). Given this modern, water-based birth story, Stella’s mother and ancestors, as well as Stella herself, must be understood as subjects with submarine roots, individuals “not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world” through their connectedness to external and internal fluidities (Glissant 67).
In some ways, reading connection as inherent to Stella’s subjectivity seems incongruous with the events that take place early in Thomas’s story. The narrator indicates that Stella’s power and personality reveal themselves only after her mother’s death, a parting that mimics the traditional Lacanian paradigm of psychosexual development, particularly the imperative that the child must separate from the mother in order to enter into the symbolic order. While the narrator mentions Stella in the opening of the tale—speaking, for instance, of her many names and ability to “steal away”—she does not emerge as a full-fledged character until her separation from her mother, a moment marked not by her birth but her mother’s death: “Folks say they could see her little arms and legs just a waving under the cold dead flesh of her mama. Say Stella birth herself in her own time, say she come on out kicking, and swinging too, and been swinging ever since” (Thomas 327–28). By contrasting Stella’s animated limbs with her mother’s “cold dead flesh” even when Stella resides within her mother’s womb, Thomas’s narrator emphasizes the protagonist’s physical dissimilarity from her mother. Such descriptions reveal that Stella’s difference from her mother—as opposed to her transversal links to the surrounding world—prompts her emergence as the protagonist of the narrator’s story.
Likewise, Stella’s entrance into language, the realm of symbols and signs, initially appears to be spurred by her separation from her mother and community. Thomas’s narrator reports that in the moments after leaving her mother’s womb, Stella expresses, first, her dissimilarity from her mother and, second, her desire to distance herself from those who surround her: “Stella leaned back, took in her world, saw her mama tree-stump dead—the spirit still fresh on her breath—and didn’t drop no tears. No, Stella didn’t cry. Stella leaned back, smacked the old granny that held her, and snatched back her navel string. Say she’d bury it her own damned self. Say she’d rather carry her destiny in her own hands than trust it to some strange bloodtree, cut down ’fore its roots can grow, like her mama and all her kin that come before” (Thomas 328). When read through Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, Stella’s violent reaction to the sight of her mother’s body—her smack of the woman who holds her—and her expressed desire to gain distance from those who witnessed her birth can be understood as part of her struggle to identify herself as separate from the (m)other (13). Although Stella links herself to her mother by taking possession of the umbilical cord, the context of her actions—readers learn repeatedly that she “leaned back,” distancing herself from those around her—appears antithetical to Glissant’s ideas of intersectionality.
Despite her separation from her mother and community, Thomas’s protagonist departs from the traditional stages of psychosexual development and demonstrates, through her reliance on maternal, nonrepresentational speech, a liminal or transversal identity. The narrator positions Stella’s speech within the realm of the mother rather than the father by comparing her words to those her mother spoke during Stella’s last moments in the womb. Stella’s mother speaks in “spirit-tongue,” a language “part African, part Indian” that few understand because “ain’t nobody live long enough to know the meaning to” the words (Thomas 331, 327). Stella, like her mother, communicates using spirit language; after her birth, Stella “remembered what most forget, on the trip to this world from the next,” which allows her to speak “in spirit-tongue, as her mama before her death” (Thomas 329, 331). Thomas’s narrator asserts that Stella recalls from her time in the womb the language she heard her mother speak, and she uses this maternal language to keep her connection with her mother alive. Stella’s words not only blur subjective boundaries between Stella and her ancestors, but they also blur spatial and temporal boundaries, since only the dead—those not of this world—or the old and newly born understand the language.
Fluency in spirit-tongue distinguishes Stella from “rhetorical man” and his “historico-phenomenological space of being/discourse” predicated on difference (Wynter, “On Disenchanting” 214). Stella instead inhabits a transversal submarine state, where an acknowledgment of connection—between African and Indian, dead and living, past and present—precipitates communication. According to Glissant, nonrepresentational language—such as Stella’s spirit-tongue—links transversal identities, spaces, and times: “The word as uncertainty, the word as whisper, noise, a sonorous barrier to the silence imposed by darkness. The rhythm, continuously repeated because of a peculiar sense of time. Time, which needs to be undated. Opaqueness is a positive value to be opposed to any pseudo-humanist attempt to reduce us to the scale of some universal model. We welcome opaqueness, through which the other escapes me, obliging me to be vigilant whenever I approach. We would have to deconstruct French to make it serve us in all these ways. We will have to structure Creole in order to open it to these new possibilities” (187). While Glissant’s Martinican speech echoes Kristeva’s choric communication in that both emphasize “rhythm, tone, colour, with all that which does not simply serve for representation” (Gallop 124), Glissant works outside of white culture’s psychoanalytic theories of language. Rosi Braidotti argues that Glissant’s demand for a “hybridized poly-lingualism” fights against Eurocentric systems by offering “an affirmative answer to the coercive mono-culturalism imposed by the colonial and imperial powers” (133). In Thomas’s story, for instance, spirit language fights against “coercive mono-culturalism” in that it rejects differentiation in favor of association: rather than establishing linguistic parameters through the contradistinction of self and other, Stella’s language connects her to her mother and ancestors in the past as well as her community in the present.
In addition to offering a critique of white, Eurocentric views of language, the move from separation to association also suggests that psychoanalytic theories fail to capture the development of the black subject. Embracing alternative conceptions of the human—including the posthuman—requires new theories of the self. The problem with current trends lies in their assumption of a universal human identity based on the white, liberal humanist subject.3 Glissant deconstructs acultural notions of the human subject by offering multiple, local, and liminal views of human identity. In particular, Wynter argues, Glissant situates the black subject outside of the symbolic realm of reason: “Glissant’s Antillean human subject, coming to realize its cognitive autonomy not merely with respect to its knowledge of physical and organic nature but with respect to its knowledge of itself as a mode of life which exists outside the symbolic circuit of organic life, must therefore now accept the full responsibility of its position as a ‘free outcast’ who confronts ‘the rest of nature as a trial, task, issue and enigma, as an alien abode,’ and therefore as the causal source of our own Good, our own Evil” (“Beyond” 645–46). While Wynter asserts that Glissant’s transversal subjects must establish their own system of ethics—they must, as Donna Haraway implores of the cyborg, take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” and “responsibility in their construction” (150)—an Antillean ethics relieves transversal subjects from colonial modes of being.
By working against reason to offer alternative figurations of human identity, Glissant’s submarine transversality anticipates posthuman liminality. In lieu of viewing separation as necessary to the advent of subjectivity, the submarine subject, like the posthuman being, develops out of connections to or relations with others. Alexander G. Weheliye similarly asserts that according to Glissant’s theory, “Relation is not a waste product of established components; rather, it epitomizes the constitutive potentiality of a totality that is structured in dominance and composed of the particular processes of bringing-into-relation, which offer spheres of interconnected existences that are in constant motion” (Habeas 12–13). According to Glissant’s theory, the connections that grow out of colonial nonhistories produce transversal notions of being in time (64). Moreover, Glissant’s transversal temporality indicates that the idea of a “beginning” to subjectivity, as suggested in traditional psychoanalytic theories, is false: the “multiple converging paths” hidden in the depths of the submarine invalidate the idea of a single, linear temporality or rational subjectivity (66). By moving beyond bordered notions of space and time, Glissant positions liminality as inherent to the subject’s identity.
In “How Sukie Cross de Big Wata,” both language and subjectivity develop through connections to the mother and other members of the community, which places the black subject within the realm of the submarine rather than the symbolic. When Stella visits the belly hole she climbed out of at the moment of her birth, she hears or feels “somebody call her name”: “The call echoed from the pit of her own belly, sound like sweet spirits sangin’. Then Sukie felt a kiss—soft full lips on her temple, the place where the spirit rest—and she knew it was her mama come to visit” (Thomas 332). Language, specifically her mother’s call, originates from Stella’s “belly,” her womb. Thomas’s repeated mentions of the waist/belly/womb emphasize Stella’s connection to her mother throughout time: she carries near her womb—the site from which potential future generations might emerge—the umbilical cord that physically linked her to her mother in the past, and she feels the pull of her mother’s ongoing presence in her womb as well.
Additionally, multiple references to fluid in the story, from the amniotic fluid of the womb to drinking water and rain, indicate a persistent connection between Stella and her mother. On her path to freedom, Stella comes across the overseer who beat her mother. The overseer looks “her up and down like he thirsty and want a taste,” and Stella rejects his advances by reminding him of her mother’s resistant body. She asks the overseer, “[I]f you couldn’t handle my mama […] what make you think you can handle me?” (Thomas 328–29). Stella’s question prompts the overseer to ask, “Who yo’ mama, girl?”, an inquiry that Stella takes as an invitation to bring to life the violence the overseer committed against her mother. Stella sets her conjure powers upon him, “pressing her full lips on his rusty jaw. Burnt off half his face” (Thomas 329). Stella’s body and her mother’s spirit join together to defeat their wrongdoer by making him understand their pain. Their kiss—part of the “taste” the overseer thirsts for—brings the overseer into their realm of connection, and he expresses his relationship to the women by shouting the same spirit-word Stella’s mother yelled before her death: “Steela!” (Thomas 329). The overseer’s inability to imagine a world beyond the rational results in him drowning in his victims’ submarine depths.
After the overseer cries out using spirit language, rain begins to fall. The baptismal rain—another marker of the submarine—signals Stella’s rebirth or shift into a new life: a life outside of slavery, a life as a fully realized subject. From this moment forward in the story, the narrator transitions from calling the protagonist Stella to referring to her as Sukie, a name that has been associated with the lily, a flower symbolizing rebirth and resurrection. Although readers see a shift in Stella/Sukie’s identity, Thomas shows through the repeated image of baptismal rain that any move away from the mother and maternal body can only be understood as temporary and that the mother–child bond persists in the child’s future.
Sukie and her mother commune in the submarine waters of the rain after Sukie returns to the scene of her birth. Sukie carries her mother’s body with her on the journey out of Mississippi, but rain begins to dissolve the corpse: “Sukie […] moved with heavy feet, allowing the black dirt so full of cottonseed, blood, and bone to fall heavily to the earth through her stiff fingers. She moved with purpose, flinging more of the black mud with each step, until all that remained of her mama’s charred body were a few dark smudges on her fingertips and lips” (Thomas 333). While Sukie’s continual movement, paired with her mother’s disappearing body, suggest that she must distance and distinguish herself from her mother, Thomas once again rejects the mandate that subjectivity include separation from the mother by drawing a comparison between the bodies of the two women. The remains of her mother’s body on Sukie’s “fingertips and lips” suggest an act of communion: Sukie’s kiss or even consumption of her mother’s body and spirit.
The bodily communion of self and mother enables, as Sukie’s name indicates, a physical and spiritual rebirth to occur. Sukie’s body does not dissolve in the rain, but Sukie follows her mother in transforming her body in order to achieve freedom. “Some folk say when Sukie got to the river,” the narrator states, “she turned herself into a stone. You know the kind, smooth and polished and slick” (Thomas 333). Coming to the river’s edge, a patty-roller picks up the stone and skips it across the Mississippi in frustration because he cannot find Sukie. Once on the other side, Sukie emphasizes her physical power as well as her connection to her mother by materializing in her own human body and, again, singing the spirit-song her mother sang before her death (Thomas 333–34). Sukie’s submarine connection to her mother—which defies space and time—allows her to make her way to freedom.
By calling upon her mother and internalizing her mother’s language and body, Sukie develops as a subject. Her connection empowers her. Keeping her mother with her both physically and metaphorically allows Sukie to move from Mississippi, where she exists as an enslaved object, toward free land, where she can fully exercise her subjectivity. Thomas’s neo–slave narrative demonstrates via the depiction of transversal spatiality and temporality that the black subject develops through connections rather than separations.
The submarine depths of the ocean and the womb likewise come together in Dash’s critically acclaimed Daughters of the Dust, the first independent feature film with a theatrical release by an African American woman. Set in 1902 in Ibo Landing, a Gullah community located on an island inlet off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, and narrated by Eula and Eli Peazant’s unborn daughter, Dash’s Daughters of the Dust reveals that submarine transversality instead of rational dislocation facilitates the development of identity. The unfixed, “floating free” branches of Glissant’s submarine root system reveal themselves in Dash’s film through the Peazant family’s links across space and time (Glissant 67). Unborn Child and her great-great-grandmother Nana Peazant repair family relationships as several members get ready to move north, and they unite in this connection-focused project with Unborn Child’s mother, Eula Peazant, who strives to keep her immediate family together following her sexual assault. Dash reveals the timelessness of mother–child bonds as the key to each character’s quest. Unborn Child, Nana, and Eula rely on their maternal bonds as they acknowledge the family’s oppressive history and their potentially empowering future.
The transversality of the submarine presents immediately in the film’s cinematography, which creates an alternative temporality—one founded in fluidity—that frees Dash’s characters from a “linear, hierarchical vision of a single History” that forecasts their extinction (Glissant 66). By embracing a nonlinear style, playing with frame rates (Bambara xv), and communicating through musical expression and vocal “ululation” (Dash, “Making” 16; Dash, Daughters 65), Dash moves beyond “documentary and ethnographic approaches that tend to objectify the Black subject as object” (Foster 49).4 Gwendolyn Audrey Foster argues that the film’s celebration of African diasporic community and identity hinges on the idea of continuation: Dash honors “the persistence of African cultures despite all colonial efforts of suppression and oppression” (70). As Foster notes, Dash and Arthur Jafa, the film’s cinematographer, consciously promote the continuation of diasporic culture by relying on “Afrocentric aesthetics” in their narrative strategy (Dash and Baker 158). In telling the story as an African griot or “old relative would retell it, not linear but always coming back around” (Rule C17), Dash and Jafa create “an alternative universe of visual reference and cinematic procedures, one in which Black beauty has self-determining agency” (Tate and Jafa 90). The Gullah individual of Daughters of the Dust, like Glissant’s Antillean subject, emerges from colonial origins and takes power in “the specificity of its own Creole language, its own landscape and lived existential history” (Wynter, “Beyond” 643).
Paradoxically, the specificity of Caribbean and New World black subjects, including the Gullah men and women of Dash’s film, lies in transversality: identities develop through connections across space and time rather than through separations. Baucom argues that Glissant’s submarine theory posits “a self which manifests itself not as an essence but as a meandering” (par. 7). Because this “meandering” submarine subjectivity rejects rootedness in a single type of being or historical precedent for identity, submarine subjectivity prioritizes connectedness over separateness and, accordingly, liminality over rationality. Wynter asserts that a connection-driven view of the self, as theorized by Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and others, requires the destruction of the rational subject: “The new discourse of the Antilles therefore goes ‘beyond the Word of Man’ in that it is impelled to replace the latter’s postulate of ‘man as Man,’ of an ontogenic subject, with that of an everywhere culturally relative—because rhetoric-discursively cum neurophysiologically instituted—mode of the human subject and therefore of the relativity also of its necessarily negatively invested mode of the Abject, of Ontological Lack, of the ‘Negro’ as a ‘different kind of creature,’ as the only group (as Césaire pointed out) excluded from human status within the symbolic logic of the Word of Man and of its absolute model of the human” (“Beyond” 645). Wynter finds that acultural understandings of human identity position as the abject other not only the mother, as argued in the typical Lacanian paradigm, but all people of color. Accordingly, new understandings of community and culture as networked require new understandings of the development of the self.
The power Unborn Child derives from her connections to multiple people, places, and times becomes apparent in the graveyard scene. Unborn Child’s efforts to bring her parents together in the cemetery culminates in a climactic moment of spiritual implantation: Unborn Child runs into her mother’s open arms, joining her spirit and her mother’s body. While the moment of Unborn Child’s birth takes place off camera after the story concludes, she reveals her agency through her participation in this spiritual conception. Now within Eula’s body, the power of Unborn Child’s spirit inspires Eula to tell the story of the Peazant family, a story that encompasses their history as slaves, their freedom on the island, and their future off of it (Daughters 67). The story not only links mother and child, but it also allows the family’s Ibo ancestors to commune with Eula and Eli. Eli overhears the story his wife tells and, with the aid of the ancestors Unborn Child has evoked, reenacts the tale of the Ibo people who walked on water (Daughters 68). By bringing her family in touch with their history, a past filled with pain yet containing hopeful promise for the future, Unborn Child propels her parents forward in their relationship, uniting them once again.
Events from the past and predictions for the future overlap in the figure of Unborn Child. From the moment her voice can be heard in the film, Dash’s audience recognizes the ties that bind her to historical and contemporary maternal figures in her family. Unborn Child recalls in an off-screen voiceover that her story begins before her birth, in the days when Nana prays to the ancestors for help in keeping the family together (Daughters 7, 25). Unborn child states that “the old souls” heed Nana’s prayers by “guid[ing] [Unborn Child] into the New World” (Daughters 6). While Unborn Child’s link to her great-great-grandmother calls her to Ibo Landing before her birth, once there, she makes her presence known. Invisible to her family members, she appears to viewers in the form of “a five-year-old” girl “wearing an INDIGO-colored BOW in her hair” (Daughters 25). By having child actress Kai-Lynn Warren play Unborn Child, Dash positions the character as one who is connected to others on two levels. First, the audience associates her (a young child) as dependent upon adults, particularly maternal figures, for care. However, this manifestation of youth belies the mature work Unborn Child does in bringing her family together, which adds a second layer to her connectedness. She invisibly integrates herself into the Peazant family, first making Nana aware of her arrival (Daughters 25), then seeking similar recognition from her Aunt Haagar (Daughters 28), and finally leading her parents to the family graveyard where they reconnect with each other by remembering their shared past and conveying their mutual dreams for the future (Daughters 64–68).
Unborn Child’s transversality—her image of youth but wisdom of age, her connection to the past as well as the future—allows her to shape her parents’ lives, and it also joins her with another mother in Dash’s film: Nana, the oldest living mother of the Peazant family and Unborn Child’s “symbolic double” (Rody 63). Both Nana and Unborn Child operate as bridge figures in the film. Nana notes that for the Peazants, she is “the bridge that they crossed over on”: “I was the tie between then and now. Between the past and the story that was to come” (Daughters 33). This complex, liminal position, addressed during the second half of the twentieth century by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and other feminists of color, has roots in African Ibo culture. In notes written on the screenplay for Daughters of the Dust, Dash equates Unborn Child to the Ibo deity Elegba, whom she calls “the one we appeal to overcome indecision” (Daughters 25). In addition to his role as messenger, Elegba is the deity of crossroads and thresholds, the bridge between humans and gods (Willis 274; Pelton 127–33). In Dash’s film, both Unborn Child and Nana fill this liminal position, helping their family members (living and dead) understand one another and join together to move back into the past or forward into the future, as need be.
However, as Moraga asserts in her preface to This Bridge Called My Back, being a liminal or bridge figure is not easy. “‘A bridge gets walked over,’” she quotes Barbara Smith as saying, before adding her own refrain: “Yes, over and over and over again” (xv). The difficult and unending bridge work undertaken in Daughters of the Dust evokes the “painful” foresight of Glissant’s “prophetic vision of the past” (Glissant 64). Unborn Child and Nana, as figures who embody Glissant’s transversal temporality, help their family members understand that their colonial history carries forward into the future; this history, as Glissant notes, “comes to life with a stunning unexpectedness” (63). Unborn Child states in a voiceover that her story takes place during “an age of beginnings, a time of promises” (Daughters 32), but viewers also understand Daughters of the Dust as set in a time of conflict and change that requires constant negotiation. For Nana, the events taking place in the present remind her of her early life as a slave and the turmoil she felt then. She mourns her mother’s physical absence in the present, as she also did in the past, and she fears that her family’s future move north will lead to their emotional and spiritual abandonment of Peazant family values, particularly the value of togetherness. While Unborn Child and Nana understand the transversal quality of time, they still experience the trauma of temporal overlaps, given that black, postcolonial histories materialize “at the edge” of what Caribbean and New World black subjects “can tolerate” (Glissant 63).
For the New World black subjects of Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, connections—particularly connections to the mother—make possible the difficult work of navigating times of transition. In her assessment of the “motherline,” the tradition of nurturance that bonds mothers and children, Anglo-American theorist Naomi Ruth Lowinsky argues that the intergenerational bonds that make up the motherline defy rational, linear constructions of time: “The Motherline is not a straight line, for it is not about abstract genealogical diagrams; it is about bodies being born out of bodies. Envision the word line as a cord, a thread, as the yarn emerging from the fingers of a woman at the spinning wheel. Imagine cords of connection tied over generations. Like weaving or knitting, each thread is tied to others to create a complex, richly textured cloth connecting the past to the future” (12). Rather than simply shifting vertical lines of kinship and inheritance from a paternal to a maternal paradigm, the motherline focuses on the multidirectional threads of connection that link the child to many “mothers,” including female and male blood relatives, family friends, and other caretakers. In Dash’s film, the threads of the motherline connect characters to past, present, and future sources of maternal strength. For instance, as Eli struggles with his feelings about his wife’s rape, he turns to Nana, his great-grandmother, for support. The two talk about his transition from a child who believed in the old ways and dreamt of a better life to an adult who is skeptical about tradition and fears what is to come. Nana tells him, “The ancestors and the womb… they’re one, they’re the same” (Daughters 20), a message about the connectedness of past and future that Unborn Child joins Nana in communicating to Eli.
Connections, particularly mother–child connections, as emphasized by the repeated references to the transversal space of the womb in the film, also aid Eula, who similarly turns to her mother for help with the problems facing her family. Eula tells her cousin, “I needed to see my Ma. I needed to talk to her. So I wrote her a letter, put it beneath the bed with a glass of water, and I waited. I waited, and my Ma came to me. She came to me right away” (Daughters 45). While Eula never reveals the content of her conversation with her deceased mother, viewers note that Eula has an appreciation for traditional ways of knowing, which contrasts sharply with her cousin’s view that the “only way for things to happen or for people to change is to keep moving” (Daughters 47). For Eli and Eula, the mother teaches that forward movement requires an acknowledgment of what came before. Past, present, and future intertwine in Daughters of the Dust, and Dash communicates this liminality through the mother’s unbroken connection to her children.
I find that Dash’s vision of a networked submarine subjectivity comes through most clearly in the character of Nana Peazant. Shortly before her descendants’ journey north, Nana leads the family in a religious ceremony designed to keep the family united despite the distance that might separate them. She creates a charm bag or “Hand” that contains a lock of her mother’s hair as well as a lock of her own. Together, these bodily tokens symbolize the connectedness of the Peazant people. “There must be a bond,” Nana states, “a connection, between those that go up North, and those who across the sea. A connection!” (Daughters 77). Nana asks her family members to kiss the Hand and commit to preserving this connection, an action that several of her family members reject because of their distaste for “primitive” traditions and adoption of Christian beliefs (Daughters 64). Although these family members position Nana’s ceremony—and their Ibo ancestors—as remnants of a past that should be overcome, Nana’s invocation of the ancestors serves to move the family forward. In the narrative exposition of the screenplay, Dash writes, “And like those old Ibos, Nana Peazant calls upon the womb of time to help shatter the temporal restrictions of her own existence—to become a being who is beyond death, beyond aging, beyond time” (86). “The womb of time”—the fluid or, to use Glissant’s term, “submarine” space that creates an unceasing connection between mother and child, ancestor and descendant—allows Nana to live on in body in Ibo Landing but in spirit with her children in the North (Daughters 89). Like Stella, who in “How Sukie Cross de Big Wata” calls her mother forth from her womb, Nana’s descendants will carry her spirit within them, providing Nana with new life and themselves with the “strength” that, according to Nana, accompanies her spirit’s presence (Daughters 86).
Through her creation of characters that emphasize the ongoing bond between mother and child, Dash shows subjectivity as developing through connections to others—particularly mothers—across space and time. Caroline Rody argues that unlike other popular black women’s narratives, Daughters of the Dust” demonstrates little anxiety about losing or recovering mothers. Contact with ancestors here, in contrast with Beloved, seems utterly assured, and daughterly desire for reunion completely fulfilled” (63). More than simply making reunion possible, Dash’s film, like Thomas’s short story, reveals that separation need not occur.
While the bonds between self and other do break in Thomas’s and Dash’s texts when slavery and colonialism physically divide families, reading the works through Glissant’s submarine theory reveals that transversal connections remain across space and time. As Nana Peazant tells her descendants in Daughters of the Dust, “Take me wherever you go. I’m your strength” (86). Finding power in the presence of others, the children in these texts work before their births and well into adulthood to build better lives for themselves and their families.
Transversal submarine networks made physical by rivers, oceans, and wombs link the child protagonists to multiple temporalities. Thomas’s and Dash’s texts demonstrate that the child protagonists learn strategies for facing and embracing changes via their connections to others and, in particular, their mothers. However, locating power within the bonds that exist between mothers and children in diasporic cultures can be a dangerous project. As many theorists and critics point out, patriarchal and racist forces have historically worked to control women’s bodies and subjectivities by mandating maternity and associating female identity with motherhood, particularly a self-effacing maternal ideal.5 While contemporary analyses of the mother–child bond must acknowledge these historical constructions, they need not perpetuate them.
Black women’s contemporary works of historical fiction offer a view of the future we need. These texts demonstrate an appreciation for maternal bonds as well as other forms of connection, including systems of communal care and solidarity. Black women’s historical narratives—whether found in visual art, fiction, music, film, or other genres—demonstrate that links made across space and time empower black subjects, whether by offering them historical strategies for healing or new opportunities for resistance. In these works, black women in particular exceed the boundaries that would seek to contain them. As Dash states, “In my world, black women can do anything. They ride horses and fly from trapezes; they are in the future as well as in the past” (Rule C17). The theory of posthuman blackness helps us understand this temporal and subjective liminality as a source of both individual agency and collective authority.