In this paper, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is examined to demonstrate how storytelling and the blues, as aspects of diasporic survival, function in her fiction which depicts how African cultural heritage operates in the United States. She articulates the need for her black folks throughout diaspora to confront racism by employing their African cultural heritage as a vehicle for empowerment. Janie, Hurston’s protagonist, finds that when she embraces her African heritage not only does she gain great awareness of her selfhood better as African American, but she also discovers that her Africanity and her identity are intertwined.
Abstract :
Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is examined to demonstrate how storytelling and the blues, as aspects of diasporic survival, function in her fiction which depicts how African cultural heritage operates in the United States. She articulates the need for her black folks throughout diaspora to confront racism by employing their African cultural heritage as a vehicle for empowerment. Janie, Hurston’s protagonist, finds that when she embraces her African heritage not only does she gain great awareness of her selfhood better as African American, but she also discovers that her Africanity and her identity are intertwined.
Key words : African cultural heritage, diaspora, storytelling, the blues, and Afro-American vernacular.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891—1960) is one of the most accomplished Afro-American writers. She has established herself since the mid-1920s as a distinguished literary Afro-American figure, and is seen by many critics and fiction scholars as “one of the most prolific authors” in Afro-American literature (Bader 129). Hurston dedicates herself to speak for the black experience and is concerned mainly with the issues, challenges, and problems dominant within the black community. She insists upon the specific Africanness of her characters who are shown under pressures peculiar to their own position as blacks in a white society. Defining Hurston’s credo in this respect, Jill Terry refers to her as a voice “speaking of black experience,” in order to explain, in terms of Africanism, “the realities of the experience of captivity and enslavement” (525). Elaborating on Hurston’s Afro-American background, Bader maintains that all Hurston’s writing was “informed by her roots in the rural American South and by a love of African-American folk culture” (129). On 28 January 1960, Hurston passed away, after spending over three decades portraying the suffering of individuals entrapped in racism, isolation and hostile surroundings. During her lifetime, Hurston published, to name but a few, four novels— Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), two collections of folktales— Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), fifty short stories, many plays, two collections of poetry and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
In Hurston’s works, narrating one’s own story is a salient theme. Such a story carries the flavor of one’s personality, as well as cultural identity, which in turn embodies the true entity of the black folks; their cultural roots, their ancestors’ legacy, their dreams and even their relationship with each other. This story, to William L. Andrews, is “a metaphor of self,” as it acts as a person’s “self-discovery, self-watching and self-pleasuring” (110). It is this story that grants the black self-acceptance and cultural pride. This theme manifests itself in Hurston’s model identity novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which, as Valerie Boyd declares, there is a particular case; for the first time Hurston depicts the African identity by using a female storyteller called Janie, who seeks self-affirmation and selfhood in the eyes of the world (303). Through telling her own story, Janie manages to connect herself to her community and to understand who she is.
Their Eyes is set in Eatonville in the South during the 1900s, a period of racial discrimination that would not bring any positive changes for the blacks in America. Through the characterization of Janie, Hurston sketches the dire social condition of black females by stressing their homelessness and restlessness during that period in which they were disconnected from their heritage, dislocated from their roots and alienated from themselves and their community. Sharon L. Jones remarks, Janie is a symbol of the Afro-American woman “in early 20th-century America, a time and place in which the black female experience was marginalized,” Jones further holds that Their Eyes is a notable novel which puts “a black female on center stage; whereas elsewhere during her era black women were marginalized in fiction as well as in life, this text validates the black woman’s experience by focusing directly on Janie Crawford, her family, and her life” (173). Subsequently, Hurston portrays Janie as a wanderer searching for a real sense of identity that reflects her true self. Janie’s confusing longing for love and stability in a society, where estrangement sounds to be the black female’s destiny, reflects her alienation. She is separated from her community, and as the novel moves on, she tries to redeem her lost relationships by finding someone that gives meaning to her existence. Reflecting her protagonist’s sense of estrangement, Hurston employs a nontraditional plot structure which makes the novel seem to lack coherence because of its “nonlinear narrative that begins in the present, shifts to the past, and then returns to the present at the end” (Jones 173). Maria Tai Wolff agrees that “the narrator presents Janie’s story as a series of episodes and pictures” (32). However, Hurston’s selected novel is quite coherent, as it fictionalizes not only the life of a disoriented female who is still on her way to self-discovery, but also the spirit of the post-slavery era and the 1900s, which can be seen as the most unsettled periods in the black Americans’ history. Having these restless periods as its time setting, it makes sense that Their Eyes is made of some narrative clips that have been collected to form a novel.
Though Their Eyes begins with Janie coming back to her hometown Eatonville; she recalls memories that reach back to her childhood. The whole novel is a narration of Janie’s life to her friend Pheoby. Janie lives with her grandmother, Nanny who works as a maid for the white Washburns. One day, Janie finds a photo of some children, she “looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair,” Janie does not realize that she is black, “Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So ah ast, where is me? Ah don’t see me,” Janie’s portrait of herself as a white girl is fully smashed. It is a tragic experience to a young girl of Janie’s age to recognize that she is black in a white, racist society, “Aw! Aw! Ah’m colored!,” she says sourly. Actually, Janie is uprooted of any aspects of identity because she nearly does not have a certain name, “Dey all useter call me Alphabet cause so many people had done named me different names” Janie recounts ( Their Eyes 9).
Interpreting Janie’s loss of a certain name within the context of the slave narrative, it can be said that naming is very important for black Americans because it gives them some extent of identity. Historically, in American diaspora the slaves lost their African real names because they were identified by their white master’s name. Consequently, the slave, who already suffered a sense of dehumanization, suffered more because of losing identity. Sigrid King holds that naming is a crucial issue for man because it is related to man’s racial and personal identity as the name enables man to answer the question ‘who?’ (57). In short, Janie, who “receives her sense of definition from others,” fails “to recognize herself,” except as black ‘Alphabet,’ thus, she begins her journey of self-assertion and “her story without name or color” (Meese 45).
At the age of sixteen, Janie enters a stage of self-realization as a female. She watches “a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom,” this scene of blossoming pear-tree awakes her sexual consciousness as it stirs within her, what the narrator calls, “confirmation of the voice and vision;” therefore, she tells herself, “So this was a marriage!” ( Their Eyes 11). At this time, a black young man called, Johnny Taylor happens to pass by. Considering him her bee-man, Janie lets Taylor kiss her. Nanny, who watches them, takes this incident as a sign of imminent danger which she has to face at once. She decides to find a husband for Janie because aged Nanny believes, “de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his women folks” (14).
Nanny’s life is not fully portrayed; only scattered episodes of her confused life are exposed. As the novel moves on, the readers know that Nanny is a former slave who narrates her own story. Nanny has a key role in Their Eyes because she acts as an oral historian, who reserves and recounts her family history-- a role that relates Nanny to her African ancestors. She tells Janie, “Ah’d save de text for you” (16). Since African culture is primarily rooted in the oral tradition, early African history was not kept in written documents, but through the oral historians or the African ‘griots’ who Thomas A. Hale regards as “The human link between past and present” (20). Those griots, whose verbal art “makes the term ‘wordsmith’ fit as a partial synonym,” serve remarkable roles in their black community because they “function not only in a retrospective sense, linking past to present, but also…in a prospective sense, because of the impact of their words on the future activities of those listening” (114—15).
In Their Eyes, Nanny is presented as a modern African griot that guarantees the true transmission of history from generation to generation. Through employing this African tradition in her novel, Hurston gives her disenfranchised, black characters a chance to be oral historians as an attempt to define themselves according to their own terms instead of being captivated by the negative definition which the white mainstream culture tries to impose on them as an irrefutable fact. Laura Dubek argues that in Hurston’s slave narrative the history functions as a call “to remember the history of an enslaved people” whose roots have been ignored (qtd. in Davis and Mitchell 53). In other words, Hurston’s characters interpret history according to their personal experience which to them is more authoritative because it is “an act of self-authentication” (Konzett 88).
Nanny’s own story, as she tells Janie, goes back to slavery time when Nanny was a slave, she was raped by her white master whose wife cruelly threatened to kill Nanny and her newly born Leafy, so hapless Nanny escaped to the forest with her baby daughter and hid there for years until emancipation. Leafy joined school but she was victimized by a school teacher who raped her. After giving birth to Janie, Leafy escaped, “she was only seventeenShe ain’t dead, ’cause Ah’d know it by mah feelings, but sometimes Ah wish she was at rest” Nanny tells wistfully ( Their Eyes 19).
Nanny, then, is a woman dragging behind her painful memories. Together with the collective slavery past which she shares with all black females, her personal past has been a continuous cycle of grief. First, as a young girl, she lost her virginity and lived with an everlasting shame, then she lost her daughter who escaped after being raped, and now Nanny has to struggle alone as a poor black woman who works as a maid to bring up her motherless granddaughter, “Freedom found me wid a baby girl in my arms,” she recalls sourly (16).
In the light of her painful past and her hapless present, Nanny’s negative image of the black female sounds reasonable. She sees no hope for Janie for a better future except in marriage that is why she forces her granddaughter to accept the marriage proposal of aged Logan Killicks whom Nanny believes will offer Janie a comparatively secure life. To Nanny, Janie could spare herself the trouble of working as a maid by marrying Kellicks; she does not have to endure Nanny’s daily strife if she marries a rich man, “Ah can’t be always guidin’ yo’ feet from harm and danger. Ah wants to see you married right away” she warns Janie ( Their Eyes 12). Nanny seems to be a firm believer in the double standards of society concerning men and women as she is with the patriarchal social belief that no woman can be complete without a man, a belief which defines women only related to man. Nanny who was “a work-ox and a brood-sow,” (16) tells Janie, “Ah wouldn’t marry nobody, though Ah could have uh heap uh times, cause Ah didn’t want nobody mistreating mah baby” (19).
While on the surface Nanny’s words seem to portray her as a faithful feminist, her refusal to marry is not a matter of feminist independence or rebellion against man’s dominance as it is a fear of experiencing the pain of separation again with her siblings.
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- Citar trabajo
- Hamada AbdElfattah Yousef (Autor), 2012, Diasporic Survival in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God". African cultural heritage in the United States, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1247789
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