Importance of Food in Daughters of the Dust - Essay Example

Daughters of the Dust In Julie Dash’s Daughter of the Dust, food is given the most attention because it holds a central position in the life of the people and the society. Food is made the element of focus because it does appear in most important scenes in the film: When Yellow Mar. food holds the central theme in the film because of the cultural value it hold. At the 46:30 minutes, Yellow Mary is shown to have been missing the good Gumbo, which is inevitably found in her native homeland. Yellow Mary: a young energetic and a lovely woman from Gulla Island left her native home a while ago and she is now living in the mainland. She left home in the quest for employment to make ends meet. She is in the deepest quest for good life just as anybody else would life. She finds the food in her new home of abroad not in any way comparable to the food that she is traditionally accustomed to. She remarked that the American Gumbo is not as delicious as the Gulla island gumbo. The American gumbo lacks some ingredients that should be giving it the natural salivating taste. Food is dictated by culture and whenever there is change of food, it does mean that the culture has also changed. In respect to this, lack of Gulla gumbo would mean that they would miss their native culture and way of life and adopt a typically new culture and a completely new set of behavior while they are living in America. They would completely miss the Gulla culture and the peasantry family to adopt the western culture and get submerged into the western society. When Yellow Mary takes a note of the Gumbo, this reflects on the importance they attach to their ancestors who actually lived before them. She is not ready to lose her native food and bearing in mind that she would not get the natural gumbo in the western society, she opts to stay in Gulla Island to continue enjoying the gumbo. Yellow Mary notes; while she is in the west that it has taken quite a long time since she had well for: good food to her is the spiced gumbo of the Gulla island. Because of this, she feels as though she is losing an aspect of her identity. She does not have the food that depicts the very ease of her natural state. The nurturing components of the traditional food are intertwined to her psychological makeup. In saying that she has missed good food is just a metaphorical way of saying that she has missed her people, culture, and the traditional food, all things that is associated with her native land (Van, 45). Food ranks to be at the top of things that bring the nativity of her home at the comfort of her imagination that she is home (Houston, 56). The gumbo is an icon of comfort and a traditional way of nourishment. They also gathered under the tree where they shared various views on the traditional culture. They also got their identity by just sitting as a family around the tree. The tree was a depiction of family unity, it symbolized life, growth, progress, and it marked the depth of the family culture. The tree was a symbol of unity, knowledge, and life of the Gullanians. When Mary moved to the west, she was in deep quest for money to help her sustain a high standard of living in the west. She thus become a nanny to a while family: a place where is get maltreated. Mary seem to be in a desperate quest for money that she uses every possible way of getting money that even when she is treated as a mere object, she does not object this at all. Her focus is on getting money without taking a good reflection on the dignity of her life. The family in which she serves in the capacity of a nanny also uses her for sexual satisfaction. This is a thing that she does continuously until a time comes when she feels used, manipulated, misused. At this point, she then decides to leave this miserable lifestyle and she tries to pursue a decent life. in the same episode, she fixes her breast to stop milk from flowing to give her easy time to discharge her duties. While serving at the white family, she expresses discontentment with the way things are. She tries to adapt to her traditional way of life there is a constant attempt to assimilate her to the life that is greatly prevalent in the mainland. Food still acts as the born of contention that gives her and everybody in the film their identity. The white family has their own ways of preparing their food. Their delicacies are not in any way a reflection of Mary’s pride and she does not find any cultural fulfillment in the food that is currently exposed to. She is fed up and she just want to go home at least to have a taste of the gumbo. Mary was taken captive in the white home and she was completely enslaved that she could not leave. She had the desire of going back to her native land to enjoy with her people. The thought that she had of good and decent life were well negated. She did not even get the value of her money because she was not being paid in the right measure of things that she was doing. Most of the time she was used as a tool, sometimes as a machine and most of the time like an object of achieving some predetermined end. Her condition was growing worse by the passing sun. She made a resolution to rescuing herself but the method that she applied meant a lot of injury to herself. The first strategy that she uses to gain her liberty and independence from the wicked white family was to stop milk from flowing from her breast. Other than that, she knew that she was only valued in that family when she was productive but nobody could care for her even for a second if she was in an impoverished state. She therefore decided to cause physical harm and damage to herself to deprive the white family the value that they were seeing in her. This strategy worked. When the family deemed that they could not contain her and that she had lost her usefulness that she could not serve as a nanny, they had no option but just to send her parking. The moment Mary stepped in Gulla, she felt a natural sense of relief and free from the American oppression. This seen depicts a hilarious transition of Mary from being and object of consumption to being a consumer. Work Cited Houston, Lynn M. Food Culture in the Caribbean. Westport, Conn. [u.a.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Print. Van, Esterik P. Food Culture in Southeast Asia. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2008. Print. Read More