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Review 3: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God
There’s little I love more in the world than a really great sentence. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is stuffed with them, a literary scone crammed full of word raisins. Here are a few examples just from opening the book at random:

All day and night she worried time like a bone.
Daisy is walking a drum tune.
He stands in his high house that overlooks the world.

I could fill this review with them. The imagery and the rhythm and ingenuity of Hurston's writing weave powerfully through the book. I realise that this isn’t the main reason that this book or Hurston's writing is most significant in the literary canon, but as a reader it’s a deep pleasure to savour, up there with a long walk on the beach or a YouTube playlist of celebrity cat videos.

The novel itself is essentially about black women and their lot in the US South post-slavery. The exact time period isn’t given, but it’s roughly when sharecropping replaced slavery as the white means of exploiting black labour. The central theme is the difficulty for a black woman of that time to really know who she was, and what she wanted, in a world where black people were technically free but whose lives and ambitions were still shaped by white people, either directly or through their recent absence. When white male plantation owners and white male town-leaders are the primary icons of success they’ve been exposed to, how should they define their own success after emancipation?

Hurston does this elegantly by delving the reader into what she considered to be the heart of African-American life at the time – their oral traditions. Writing in dialect, she makes the centre of Eatonville (one of the first exclusively black towns in the South) the porch of the lead character’s store, where people would congregate to gossip, joke, sing and debate.

I won’t spoil the actual plot, but the lead character Janie finds herself struggling against her dual identities – that of a black person, and that of a woman – and their different societal constraints. This theme is a motif across the whole book, with Janie finding different men and wrestling with the gap between what they say before marriage, and their expectations of her afterwards. Hurston's pointed truths about the treatment of black women by pretty much everyone else, including other black women, are unfortunately still relevant in many ways today. In some ways, that’s the saddest part of the story.

The writing is superb, and it’s hard to believe that she disappeared into obscurity not so long after this came out in 1937. As far as I can tell, it was for three reasons: African-American writing wasn’t considered part of the literary canon by white people; women are desperately under-represented in that same canon; and her representation of dialect was considered problematic for that point in the Civil Rights movement by some who felt it encouraged whites to stereotype them. It’s one hundred percent not my place to comment on that last point, but I am very pleased that Alice Walker saw fit to resurrect Hurston's work from obscurity and pull it into the light. It certainly shines in it.

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