harlem renaissance

There are 2 posts tagged harlem renaissance (this is page 1 of 1).

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

For weeks now, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to write about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” #462 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve started reading books on literary theory to get inspiration. Most books on the subject are awfully dry and filled with the sort of academic jargon English departments are notorious for. 10-dollar words like “philology” and “hermeneutics.”

The issue isn’t that the book is hard to understand. Sure, the dialogue is written in dialect, but it’s not difficult for the average reader to comprehend. And the issue isn’t that the subject matter is inherently depressing, even though you do feel somewhat drained as you flip through the pages. A lot of bad things happen, and it can be difficult to read such a novel when we live in a world with so many bad things happening. 

That isn’t the problem with my blogging about the book, though.

The problem is something usual, something that I experience with a lot of the books I read that are on this list: This book absolutely isn’t written for me. As a straight, white, American male, I am about as far from the “target audience” for “Their Eyes Were Watching God” as you can possibly get.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

I feel like I’m bogged down by thinking of this blog as a “book review” blog, which is not what I want it to be. 

I don’t want to give books five-star ratings. I don’t want to sell you on a story. I don’t even really want to give plot synopses, to be honest, although it’s hard to think of a way around it. What I want to do is have a chronicle of my journey (if you want to call it that) toward reading these 1,000 books. Something I can look back on in seven years’ time and think, “Oh, that was right around when the election happened and the whole world went to shit. My how time flies.“

The whole thing is steeped in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when blogs were popular, when the internet wasn’t an ad-riddled, subscription-based nightmare of trackers and trolls and propaganda. Nostalgia for when we didn’t refer to this sort of thing as “content.” Nostalgia for when the internet was populated by people and you had a sense of community.

It seems as if we’re intent on killing that version of the internet. More’s the pity.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

Anywho.

Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty after being nearly forgotten by the literary community. She had become popular during the Harlem Renaissance, but many people thought her work focused on the wrong topics — she tried to capture the everyday lives of black Americans rather than writing about social justice and the struggle for equality, which, naturally, were prominent topics in African American literature.

This is a simplification, of course, but sometimes books go against what are considered “modern trends” and fall out of public consciousness. This was the case for Hurston and many other “Harlem Renaissance” artists.

After Hurston died, scholars like Alice Walker “rediscovered” her writing and realized its uniqueness and importance. Suddenly, Hurston’s work was like a diamond that had been found in the garden, and Hurston has since become somewhat of an American staple — she is still taught in many U.S. classrooms, including my own.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

I often think about what it’d be like to be forgotten in that way. It isn’t quite the same, but recently I’ve been wishing I could experience it. I’m not saying I’d like to disappear, but I’ve been having this desire to…hibernate, if that makes any sense. I’d like to experience what it’s like to crawl into a cave, cover myself with leaves, and sleep for three to six months. 

In fact, I have been sleeping a lot more than I usually do. When I get home from school, the first thing I do is crawl under the covers for a quick nap. After dinner, I also go to bed relatively early, often sleeping for 9-10 hours.

Is it seasonal depression? Maybe. Nights are getting longer, and the weather has finally turned into the bitter cold that’ll be tapping at our windows around until March. Ultimately, though, I think I’m just craving the feeling of sanctuary you get when you crawl into a warm bed in winter. The coziness, the safety. Much like I imagine a hibernating bear feels when her nature tells her it’s time to go into her cave. No expectations, no responsibilities, just me and my earthen hovel and my leafy blanket.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

It’s interesting to consider the impact of a book upon someone who isn’t the book’s target demographic. I said earlier that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” wasn’t “for me,” but that thought is slightly more complicated than it seems on the surface. Whatever literary theory you subscribe to (which may be no theory at all, and God bless you), it’s difficult to read a book if you can’t put yourself into it. There have to be characters, themes, settings, plot points, whatever that resonate with you. Or, at least, that’s the way our modern education system has trained us to approach literature. Right or wrong, we read books and ask ourselves, “How does this make you feel?”

In the case of Zora Neale Hurston, I can recognize that there are elements in the novel that readers might identify with, but they just don’t hit me the way I think they’re supposed to. I don’t know any people who are like these characters, I’ve never had these sorts of marital issues, and I’ve never been to Florida.

I would probably say that it’s a “difficult” book for these reasons, but there are others. There’s a lot of dialect in Their Eyes. It’s enough that you often get the impression that you’re reading two separate books.

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

The prose itself is not written in this voice, but whenever we hear a character talk, that’s what it looks like. It made the novel an interesting and…er, novel experience, constantly switching between standard prose and prose in dialect, and there are many people in American society who use a variety of voices when they speak. Depending on the context, people can often have what you might call “dual personalities.”

Some of my students are prime examples. To hear them speak in the hallways is one thing, but the way they talk inside the classroom makes them come off as entirely different people. Are teenagers everywhere like this? Probably, to some extent. Teenagers all over the world act one way with their peers and another way around adults.

That, I suppose, is something we all can identify with. While all of us don’t have modes of speaking with such dramatic and noticeable differences, there are times when all of us feel like we are someone we’re not.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

In my case, I often feel like I’m pretending to be a “good teacher.” I’m not sure if I even want to be what I’d call a “good teacher.” I’m a competent teacher — don’t get me wrong — but the line between “competent” and “good” is one that, in my own mind, I’m not sure I can cross. “Competent” teachers have to do a lot, but “good” teachers take on extra. Often times, they take on more than is healthy. 

There are teachers at my school who are there 11 or 12 hours a day, teaching regular classes and then doing sports or activities after. They work on weekends, organize field trips, do fundraisers, and generally throw everything they’ve got into the teaching profession. I do care about my students, and I do everything I can to make my classes engaging and useful, but when that final bell rings, I want to go home and do other things. I want to have a life outside the building.

When I first became a teacher, things were different. I wanted a career I could throw myself into with every element of my being. I wanted to be like one of the characters on The West Wing, a kind-of Sam Seaborn who sleeps, eats, and breathes his work. The problem with shows like that is the fallacy that there are intelligent and moral people in charge of things. In reality, there are no whiz-kid doctors who’ll stay up all night to diagnose your medical condition, there are no tough-as-nails police detectives working overtime to catch the guy who broke into your house, and there certainly are no brilliant political officers who are trying to make the world a better place.

I know it’s putting awfully high expectations on myself when I say that I need to work 60-hour weeks in order to be “good” at my job. One thing that you learn if you study mindfulness or Eastern philosophies is that a person should be okay with being “okay.” You don’t need to be brilliant — it’s enough just to exist.

That’s just a tough pill to swallow when you live in a country filled with bozos who brag about how little sleep they’re getting or how much overtime they’re putting in. As if it’s some kind of badge of honor to work yourself to the bone for a system that couldn’t give less of a shit about you.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

Last night, a freezing rain fell that covered the whole city in a layer of ice. Sarah and I went out to get some drive-thru chicken and quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to get out of our neighborhood — there was no way to drive up even the slightest hill. We saw cars hopping curbs, cars that were stuck at intersections unable to move forward or backward, people who’d gone out for a walk and were slipping helplessly down the sidewalks.

Some nights you’re just stuck. Nature will always remind you of that fact.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

I try to emphasize in this blog (as well as in the classes I teach) that literature is a conversation that’s been going on since the invention of history. Authors respond to authors, books to books, and #21 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” It drives home one of the practical reasons why viewing literature this way is apt: For years and years in America, people were excluded from that conversation.

I just finished teaching a unit with my Juniors in which we had a chance to read and discuss people like Frederick Douglass, as well as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other authors from the Harlem Renaissance. “Hughes was one of the first black Americans who was able to make a living as an artist,” I tell my students. “That’s an astounding fact when you consider he’s the same age as my great-grandmother.”

Maya Angelou is one of the major African American voices to follow the likes of Hughes and Bontemps and has become essential reading for anyone who is interested in African American literature.

I read the book mostly while sitting at my desk in the teacher’s plan center, thinking about how I just don’t “get it.” Not that I dislike it or don’t understand, but that it wasn’t a book meant for me.

Race and issues of race were about as far from my experience growing up as they could have been. The town I’m from has about 1,500 people in it and is about as ethnically diverse as Sweden — very white, very middle-class; a town that existed as a place where highways met and where there was a John Deere dealership. I don’t consider that a good thing, necessarily (it was a safe place to grow up, certainly), but books like Caged Bird were one of my only windows into the experiences of black America.

Was it a good window or a window that provided an accurate depiction? Probably not. I can only try to understand what Angelou is talking about. I didn’t “get it.”

Crispity, Crunchity, Peanut Butter-y

One of my first memories of Angelou comes from Saturday Night Live, in a satirical sketch starring David Allen Grier. It’s a sketch I still randomly quote to this day:

The joke being, I suppose, that Maya Angelou would never stoop so low as to to advertise for anything, much less a candy bar. Such was her integrity that the very notion of her appearing in a commercial was comical. That was my impression of her — she was a serious woman who talked about serious issues and spoke the kind of poetry you were supposed to frown at and say, “Hmm, yes, I see,” in very sombre tones.

Which is, quite honestly, one of the things that has prevented me from ever really connecting with Angelou’s work — it’s the sort of thing that seems to preclude humor. The sort of thing that you daren’t laugh at or make light of.

Oh, there’re funny bits in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — or, at least, bits that are supposed to be funny — but it’s the sort of humor that you feel obliged to laugh at. Like when your drunk uncle tells the same joke for the 10th time that Christmas and you better laugh or you’re going to get it — that’s the sort of energy Angelou brings to telling a story about how she laughed so hard one time in church that she peed her pants.

A Book Club Member’s Book of the Month Club Book

The particular edition of Caged Bird that I have features a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, who uses her introduction to express her disbelief at finally reading a book that spoke to her, a book that seemed to capture an experience both she and Angelou shared — namely, the experience of growing up as an awkward black girl.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt the same way about a book. Sure, there have been books that I liked — I would even say there are a few books that I have absolutely loved — but I’ve never felt as if an author were reaching across some unfathomable gulf to tap directly into my brain, saying, “We’re alike, you and I.”

Mostly, I admire books by thinking, “Jesus Christ that author is talented.”

Even if it were possible that I could connect with an author like that, and it very well may be, I’m not sure I’d want to read that book. I barely like myself on the best of days and don’t particularly want to spend any more time in my own head than absolutely necessary. (Hello, darkness!) And if a person were able to capture what it was like where I was born and raised — really capture rural Nebraska — I probably wouldn’t care. It’d be like accurately capturing the essence of a random pigeon. Small towns are mostly boring and there’s a reason why Nebraska is called “fly-over country.”

(I have a theory that books and movies are only set in Nebraska if the authors/producers want a setting that is a metaphor for depression. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that’s fair.)

Still, I suppose I do take for granted that there are a plethora of books and movies that are about little white kids who go off on adventures. I never had to deal with the dissonance of wanting to play with a doll that didn’t share my skin color because I thought the other one was “normal.” That’s part of what Angelou is responding to — there’s an inherent question of why can’t we normalize books about the black experience?

Which is a fair question that a lot of people have asked and now it seems like we’re making progress in that direction. Or, at least, there are more published black authors today than at any point in America’s history. That doesn’t make up for anything, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Even if Maya Angelou is awfully dry.

What’s That Tractor For, Though

I’ve known several people who were that way — the kind of people that you’d just better laugh at or there’s going to be trouble. One of them was Grandpa Don, who was the sort of person who, when he retired, moved from a regular house in Iowa to a full-on farm where he had a tractor and a barn even though he wasn’t a goddamned farmer. He was just a guy who listened to Rush Limbaugh and thought farming was just peachy.

At Grandpa Don’s funeral, one of my cousins stood up at the pulpit and told a story about how Don one time pulled him, my cousin, and my other cousin around on a trailer behind his tractor. The boys were eating apples for some reason — that’s what they did for fun, I guess, was drive around on a tractor trailer and eat apples all afternoon. Anywho, Don cut a massive fart, presumably loud enough to be heard over the sound of a tractor, and turned around to say, “How do you like them apples?”

Everyone in the church laughed when my cousin told that story, even though nobody thought it was funny. Even my cousin didn’t really think it was funny — he’d only gotten up to tell the story because his mom had made him. It was a funeral, goddamn it, and you were supposed to tell stories. And you’d better laugh at those stories because we’re a family and that’s what family’s do.

I didn’t cry when we buried Grandpa Don, even though I very explicitly tried to. I stood right next to the casket and looked at the hole in the ground and thought, “Alright, better start the waterworks.” I got sidetracked though when everyone said the Lord’s prayer and I thought, “When in the hell did everyone memorize this nonsense?”

Seriously, were we supposed to know that? Just, like, at the drop of a hat?

We’re Dying to Know

Maya Angelou died in 2014 when I was in South Korea teaching kids how to write essays very quickly.

I said to the children, “Maya Angelou died today. Do any of you know who that is? Er, was?”

They all unsurprisingly said that they didn’t. South Korea is just as homogenous as the town I grew up in — almost everyone who lives in Korea is Korean. And, while Koreans are mostly….ambivalent towards the Japanese, there isn’t a whole lot of racism going around, and thus there has never been a struggle to overcome it. They’ve got a whole different set of cultural issues; sexism, ageism, a tremendous teen suicide rate; they’re just as messed up as Americans are, but for entirely different reasons.

I thought about how best to explain who Maya Angelou had been, but struggled to do so without bringing up how goddamned racist America was. In the end, I just said, “She was a very talented author.”

Which is, quite honestly, what I think about her. Maya Angelou speaks to experiences that are beyond my reckoning. I recognize that she’s very good at writing and I can get lost in her prose just as much as the next guy, but she’s never been an author that spoke to me.

I’m sad about that. Should I be? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just that I want to feel like I “get it” when I really don’t, when I’m just some kid standing by a hole in the ground wondering why he can’t cry, mouthing along with some alien litany. “Our father who art in heaven…”