Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000, ISBN 9780060838676)
Reviewed by lizw
Novel about a black woman trying to pursue her ideals of love and freedom (often represented in the book by the notion of travelling to the horizon) in the American South of the late 19th century. A good part of the story is set in Eatonville, which was Hurston’s home town and one of the first black-run towns to be formed in the US.
I found this hard to get into at first, largely because the viewpoint character is infuriatingly passive for the first several chapters – but that turns out to be part of the point. I also found Hurston’s rendition of her characters’ vernacular less convincing than, say, Selvon’s – something about the particular choices she makes about rendering sounds into phonetic spelling, I think. It’s possible that someone more familiar with Southern African-American accents would get on with it better, though. Anyway, I’m glad I persevered, because overall the character development is quite absorbing once it gets going, and the story of the viewpoint character’s third and happiest marriage in particular is quite touching. I loved the very strong metaphors Hurston uses to describe her inner life. Here’s the example that first struck me: She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. She also portrays quite vividly what it can feel like to dissociate to avoid dealing with an unpleasant situation: Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes… It was like a drug.
This edition comes with a foreword by Edwige Danticat, which is mostly about the personal significance the book has for her because it was written in Haiti, and an afterword by Henry J. Gates, who makes some interesting points about the intersections between gender and race in African-American literary circles during Hurston’s career.
