Drylongso: A Refuge of Their Own

Drylongso mixes tonalities of terror with elements of unpretentious beauty. Dappled with light and scattered with images of flowers, candles, and trinkets, it has the improvisatory ease of a student film, the tension of a thriller, the soothing hum of a hangout movie, and the shape of a coming-of-age narrative. In the way it plays with moods and genres, the film reflects Audre Lorde’s teaching that “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” In defiance of universalizing stereotypes, Smith’s reliance on multiple filmic registers expresses the complexity of what Pica experiences in the world with a degree of critical thoughtfulness that is still unusual in films that center Black women.

The layered emotional connection that develops between Pica and Tobi is foregrounded through Smith’s frequent use of intimate close-ups. Their bond rests on a shared experience of instability: Pica’s mother (Channel Schaffer) is unreliable, and Tobi’s is entirely absent. Though the film takes care to avoid the pathologized image of the “bad Black mother,” it pays tribute to the complicated and beautiful ways that Black women protect and parent themselves as well as one another. Drylongso is also a sensitive examination of a friendship forged across a clear class difference: Tobi receives seemingly limitless funds from her mother, while Pica pays rent to hers. Smith doesn’t romanticize or paper over that divide, and in several scenes, the characters’ divergent social backgrounds lead to moments of discomfort or mutual misunderstanding. But Pica and Tobi negotiate these disparities with grace and cocreate a refuge for each other, resisting their devaluation by the outside world.

The film’s ambivalent relationship to seeing and being seen—a self-reflexive critique Smith handles with subtlety—also comes up in Pica and Tobi’s second encounter, which begins with a misrecognition. Tobi has started to dress as a boy, partly to protect herself from commonplace harassment by men, and partly to make herself appear more noticeable and threatening to white people who would otherwise knock into her in the street as though she weren’t there. Tobi’s changing style gives her the ability to camouflage, but her need to do so exposes the potential dangers of visibility for Black women. In the present-day American cultural and political landscape, where the representation of marginalized identities is celebrated without being interrogated, Smith’s film reads as a subversive challenge to the assumption that visibility necessarily secures value or safety.

Throughout the film, Smith evokes the banality of violence and precarity in Black life. In one scene, Pica and Tobi sit on a dock and casually share the number of funerals they have attended that year: five and seven, respectively. The serial-killer subplot also creates a sense of atmospheric danger, often through news reports on the murders that Pica’s grandmother frequently watches on television. The formal counterpoint of these segments has the effect of illuminating Smith’s method; they are emblematic of the kind of media spectacle that the film deliberately and strategically rebukes in favor of an emphasis on ordinary life.

Memorialization and mourning are at the heart of Drylongso. Early in the film, a love interest is introduced in the form of Malik (Will Power), a sweet young man who rides around on his bike selling his own multicolored, creatively designed T-shirts and constantly asking Pica, “When you gonna take my picture, girl?” Their brief romance is brutally curtailed when he falls victim to the serial killer, a painful loss that catalyzes Pica’s reorientation of her practice from documentary to elegy. The skeleton of Malik’s bicycle is the first object in a series of vibrant shrine-sculptures that she dedicates to lost boys and men in the community. Made by the visual artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji, these handcrafted works beautifully recall the assemblages of other artists, such as Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar. Like Pica’s and Ogunji’s, Smith’s art-making is suffused with a spirit of generosity and textural sensitivity, and drawn to the socializing, relational capacity of objects. The film reminds us that mourning is a life practice, and that the ability to honor and hold those we have lost is the antidote to the deathly finality of forgetting.

Drylongso is one of the rare films that takes the self-determination, intelligence, and day-to-day existence of Black women and girls seriously. In 1984, Kathleen Collins—another Black woman filmmaker with one feature to her name—delivered a lecture at Howard University in which she stated plainly: “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.” With these words, Collins unraveled the mythologizing caricatures to which Black people are reduced in mainstream American culture. As she had done with her film Losing Ground (1982), Collins used her talk to offer an elegant, precise, and impassioned challenge to a system that could never account for her devoted attention to Black women’s interiorities and adamant valuation of everyday Black life. Smith would go on to share these cinematic priorities, and they are written into the film’s title, inherited from anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney’s 1980 book Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. The word drylongso, which means “ordinary” or “getting by with very little,” is rooted in the Gullah Geechee communities of the American South. These origins draw a valuable connection to Zora Neale Hurston, whose anthropological work documented, preserved, and was influenced by Gullah Geechee culture, and whose own filmmaking was attentive to the self-expression of Black people in the registers of the social and the quotidian. Smith’s kinship with Hurston and Collins is demonstrated by her film’s engagement with the Black sociality they nurtured.

Anchored in an expansive cosmology of Black feminist consciousness, Drylongso also belongs to a tradition of subversive cinema. Though it has a relatively conventional narrative, the film is evidently connected to the training Smith received in oppositional filmmaking at San Francisco State University, where she studied with Trinh T. Minh-ha, Larry Clark, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. One of Smith’s first films, the experimental short Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron (1992), shares Drylongso’s subtle destabilizations of gender, its careful attention to personal identity under construction, and its critique of mainstream-media narratives of Black people. Smith has also cited the influence of Third Cinema on her practice. That revolutionary, anti-
imperialist, and anticapitalist film movement, which emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, was shaped by a series of manifestos. One of the most significant of these writings is the Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema,” a fiery 1969 text that rejects the technical perfection and deceitful embellishments of Hollywood and European cinema, and proposes the experience of ordinary people as a baseline for an aesthetic that could reflect the material conditions of their lives and of cinematic production. Drylongso is “imperfect cinema” played in the key of Black feminism. Smith models a practice grounded in curiosity, hospitality, and sensuality, deftly engaging in the mundane scale of mythmaking that Black women artists have devised to give themselves the creative sanctuaries they have otherwise been denied.

This sense of deep-rootedness and interconnectedness blossoms in Drylongso’s final section. Pica’s art show, Evidence of Existence, pulls her more tightly to Tobi and her mother while also gathering the community at large. Battling a chronic cough, fearing the serial killer who lurks in the area where she performs her side job wheat-pasting posters, and racing to her end-of-semester deadline, Pica is able to put the show together only through an embrace of mutual care. Tobi ends up helping her finish her project—in one scene, we see them sitting on the floor, side by side, glue in hand and surrounded by multicolored pens and paper. Shortly after, Pica finally confides in her mother, telling her about the upcoming exhibition and asking for catering help. However fallible she may be, Pica’s mother rises to the occasion when she’s needed, easing the tension between them.

In the same way that Smith approached making Drylongso as a collaborative community practice rather than as a colonizing, invasive production, Pica does not document Black trauma for institutionalized consumption but instead creates art that serves as a conduit of memory for her people. She defies convention by presenting her shrine-sculptures at a cookout rather than a gallery. These works are a form of sharing and collectively holding grief. The notion of “giving back” is so often positioned across a differential of power, but here the offering is horizontal and reciprocal: Pica gives to the people who give to her. Similarly, Drylongso is a tribute to the richness of what can be made with little and shared without limit. The film finds both Pica and Smith cultivating artistic practices devoted to Black life, building bright, multiform worlds out of the same materials that get them through every ordinary day.