Student Presentation #3: Taloria on the Reception of Their Eyes Were Watching God

The Controversy over Their Eyes Were Watching God

Richard Wright’s Condemnation of the Novel

Zora Neal Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God generated a lot of controversy upon its release. Several African American critics, such as Richard Wright, felt that Hurston had not been harsh enough in her critique of the white treatment of blacks in the South. They felt that she painted too rosy a picture of black life in the South, and betrayed blacks by not portraying the ill-treatment and demoralization that they had suffered. 

Wright published several controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, most notably Native Son, that took up racial themes and the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. 

In his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wright excoriates Hurston for her representation of African Americans:

 “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. […] The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race”.

Wright argued that the work was not radical enough in its condemnation of racism, while others felt that Hurston’s treatment of sexism weakened the novel. I would argue, however, the novel does fulfill its purpose. While the novel is not necessarily radical in its condemnation of racism, I feel that its treatment of sexism was radical because the roles of women and the perception they had during that time was properly depicted.

Alice Walker’s Celebration of the Novel

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She worked as a social worker, teacher and lecturer and took part in the 1960s civil rights movement in Mississippi. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, and she is also an acclaimed poet and essayist. 

In 1973, when Alice Walker discovered the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, she had it inscribed: "Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South”. Walker made an active choice to befriend the spirit of Hurston. Hurston was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance, but most of her work was out of print by the time she died in 1960. Due in large part to these protests, such as Wright’s discussed above, Their Eyes Were Watching God soon slid into a quiet obscurity, until Walker began advocating for minorities. Walker was very instrumental in bringing Their Eyes Were Watching God into the modern literary canon, thirty seven years after Richard Wright’s review of the novel.  Walker became Hurston's champion, advocating for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to rediscover one of the finest American social commentators of the early 20th century.

Student Presentation #2: Nikki Giovanni and The Spirituals

Ms. Yolande “Nikki” Giovanni is a black feminist and a prolific poet.  Recently, she published a book titled, On My Journey Now: Looking at African American History Through the Spirituals.  As suggested by its title, this book paints a picture of African American history by examining how music was a means by which to communicate a variety of sentiments.

Giovanni begins her discussion of the spirituals by suggesting that the reader think of the Africans transported on the Middle Passage.  The spirituals, she says, began on this voyage.  It was a situation not unlike when a mother attempts to sooth an upset child through humming or lullaby.  The men and women and children were chained together, terrified, and could not talk amongst themselves to try and calm each other because they spoke a variety of languages and came from many different nations.  But the most basic element of communication, of music, is universal: it is a hum.  Within the bellows of the ship, Giovanni imagines a woman beginning to hum, an action that was contagious and spread quickly through the confined space.  She has visited the docks in Africa where men and women were kept before departure, and she heard the echo of this hum from all those years ago.  She says it is like a moan.

Giovanni then traces the use of spirituals throughout the slave years.  In so doing, she helps the reader to understand the experience of being slave, especially of being a woman and a slave.  She interprets the spirituals very differently than joyful groups of contemporary worshippers.  For example, she explains that the popular song “This Little Light of Mine,” is not a happy tune, but rather a harsh statement intended to get a person through a particularly hard situation.  The correct way of singing it, she writes, is not joyfully, but rather as a fact, like: this little light IS mine and I WILL continue to let it shine, no matter the circumstance.

               

She really expands on the idea that the spirituals are a dynamic, evolving genre in the chapters that address the years following slavery.  She begins this discussion by recounting a dark period in the history of Fisk University, Giovanni’s alma mater.  Following emancipation, Fisk, at the time an institution focused mostly on the education of former slaves, was facing repeated attacks from the Ku Klux Klan.  Determined to maintain the integrity of their school, a group of students got together, left school, and toured the Northern states, singing spirituals to raise money for Fisk.  These were the Jubilee singers, and they continued their tour through Europe, singing for the German Kaiser and the Queen of England.

Largely due to the efforts of the Jubilee singers, the spirituals gained a larger audience.  Consequently, criticisms regarding the origination of the spirituals began to surface.  The American press asserted that they were learned by slaves who stood on the steps of Southern churches, listening to the worship of white plantation owners.  Giovanni’s entire book stands as stark evidence against this claim, but she addresses the criticism directly by writing that “Americans need to get over [the idea that the spirituals were first sung by whites].  They need to because these people [the African Americans] didn’t just write the songs; they lived them.”

In the final pages of her book, Giovanni examines the role of the modern spiritual, a genre that is more diverse than ever.  According to Giovanni, examples of today’s spirituals include the words of Tupac Shakur, protest songs from the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, the humming heard by NASA ground control on John Glenn’s turbulent descent to Earth, and in Arrested Development’s song “Raining Revolution.”  After all, the essence of the spiritual is a hum, a moan, and a means of creating a community in the darkness.