Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mine Were Reading Perfection (Negro Spiritual)

Aged five and bedridden I was given my favourite present ever.

No, it was not a new fabulous train set for Christmas. I am Cuban, we did not celebate Christmas in those days (1976). It was not a bicycle either. That came afterwards. It was definitely not a 'King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table' set with plastic figures; a toy I so much coveted after seeing one in my mate's house.

No, the best gift anyone has ever bequeathed me was to teach me how to read and write, especially the former. True, it was in a hospital, I had just fallen ill with the condition that was to accompany me for most of my childhood and part of my teenage years, chronic gastritis, but the seriousness of the disease was offset by the enjoyment of learning how to read my first words. And it was my mother whom I owe this pleasure.

So, when now at the ripe age of thirty-six I read a book like 'Their Eyes Were Watching God', I say to myself: Thanks, Mum, thank you very much indeed.

Because Zola Neale Hurston's famous novel is a joy to read. Please, reader, understand that this pleasure does not derive from any literary sadism or voyeurism exercised by yours truly. Other people's suffering is as much a pain for me to behold as my own one. It is Zola's writing style that brings these people's calvary so close to home and it is her mix of the literate narrator's voice with the highly idomatic black one that captivates me. You, reader, could be forgiven for thinking that I was under a spell whilst reading 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'. And you would be right.

The book centres on four characters, although, it is only two who take up more than two thirds of the story. Janie Mae Crawford, a black woman with straight, Caucasian-like hair who defies gender stereotypes by insisting on her own independence and wearing men's dungarees. Tea Cake, Janie's third husband and real love, who is twelve years her junior and who, from the first moment they meet, impresses her with his wit and energy. A third character, Jody Starks, forays into the novel early on and takes up about fifty pages of the book, during which time he marries Janie, takes over nearby town Eatonville, thus, becoming its mayor and satisfies his political ambition. Crawford's first husband, Logan Killicks, is the fourth character. He offers her the financial security Janie's Nanny seeks to secure for her granddaughter. Other characters pop in and out of the narrative throughout the 193-page literary journey, enriching the story as they interact with the four personages or with each other.

To me the main strength 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' (TEWWG) has is the use of an autonomous imagination, where the narrative of the novel shifts from third to a blend of first and third person. This points at a total identification with the main character, Janie Mae Crawford, on the author's part. And it is in the voicing of this woman's innermost feelings and emotions where Hurston is more successful. Whereas usually African-American fiction arrives shrouded in a large political discourse, TEWWG comes with no baggage other than the tale of a woman fighting for her own independence but without naming the process she's involved in. It could be said and it has already been mentioned, not least by academic and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr, that TEWWG is a feminist novel and Janie an 'accidental feminist'. In her understanding of the reasons why black folks gossip about her when she returns to the town she left a few years before with Tea Cake, Janie shows a maturity that belies her second-class citizen status. It's the same status, her second husband, Jody Starks, exploits to the maximum in his treatement of Janie as an object rather than as a person. And lest we forget, let us just recall that Janie is not just up against her husbands (especially the first two), but also against her own ethnic group's mentality, against white people and against society as a whole. In his thought-provoking book 'Sex and Racism', Calvin C. Hernton comes up with a hierarchy in US society where white men occupy the top position, whilst the lower echelons are taken up by white women, black men and black women in that order. TEWWG is a good example of this.

The other strength of the novel lies in the use of language. As I attested at the beginning of this review, reading is a pleasure to me. More so when I come across books that make feel as if I have discovered language for the first time. TEWWG is one of those books. Hurston's poetic prose is unbridled and unadulturated. Throughout the novel I felt that here was an author who was not afraid to write because she was not afraid to live and it was that zest for life that most endeared to me. Sentences like 'Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun' are written with such literary bravado that one can't help but consume them slowly, letting each word slide down one's throat.

The issues of race and racism have a more natural and fluid feel in this novel than in many others by African-American authors where the approach is more black and white (no pun intended, although on second thoughts...). Through the interaction of the numerous characters in the book (both leading and supporting), we become acquainted with the lives of these folks, their dreams, their shortcomings (Tea Cake, Janie's true love, beats her once, thus showing his own weakness and fallibility), their disappointments and their achievements (Jody Starks, Janie's second husband, rallies the residents of Eatonville to improve the town's conditions, with excellent results). Above all, black people are presented as human beings and not as socio-political victims. The few times when politics rears its ugly head (for instance, the discussion between Janie and Mrs Turner about Booker T Washington does not amount to more than a few lines), Hurston keeps it in check and the issue is an addendum rather than the kernel of the chapter.

Despite the success of 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' when it first came out, its author was largely ignored in the 50s, 60s and early 70s until the African-American writer Alice Walker published her ground-breaking essay 'In Search of Zola Neale Hurston' in 1975. This could explain as to why more people have read Zola's works since that year onwards than in the period between 1934 (when she was first published) and 1975 and could go some way to illustrate Hurston's influence on other African-American writers, mainly female, such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Alice Walker.

TEWWG was harshly criticised when it first saw the light in 1937 by none other than Richard Wright (read my review of 'Native Son' here and here). Yet, Zola's mythic realism, dense with lyrical black idiom has endured the battering of the years and found a much welcoming home in the eyes of new readers. And I am lucky to be one of those. Once again, thanks, Mum.

Copyright 2008

Native Son by Richard Wright (2) (contains spoilers)

Read the first part of this review here

‘… If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice that lasts for long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. (…) Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in the its place with its own rights, needs and aspirations. What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this form of life that has grown up here in our midst that puzzles us, that expresses itself, like a weed growing from under a stone, in terms we call crime. Unless we grasp this problem in the light of this new reality, we cannot do more than salve our feelings of guilt and rage with more murder when a man, living under such condition, commits and act with we call a crime…’

With these words, defence lawyer Boris A Max puts the entire American society in the dock in the closing pages of Native Son. In order to understand the flaws of the American War of Independence and its subsequent Civil War, we needn’t look further than Bigger Thomas, here characterising the uneducated black man, coming from the lowest rung on the American social and economic ladder. As his options comprise no more than menial jobs, Bigger’s life becomes a trap, which feeds him nothing but resentment and hate. He fears the whites, who determine his existence and this fear makes him see the white race as a collective that tells him where to live, where to work and what to do.

The setting of the novel, black and white colours with shades of grey thrown in and cloudy skies, eases the reader into the desperate plight the main character, Bigger Thomas, has. He is the focus of the novel and the embodiment of racism in the psyche of its black victims. Bigger and his compadres suffer from a popular assumption that whites are sophisticated whereas blacks are either subservient or savage. All throughout the novel and up until the dénouement Bigger’s thoughts change from shame (of his family’s abject poverty) to fear (of the whites who control his life)

Native Son is one of those novels that, although they focus on social and political issues, draw heavily from the work of other writers whose oeuvre might not be directly related to the issues raised in the novel in question. In this case it's that other great American writer, Edgar Allan Poe whose short-stories are the leverage that produce the effect in the novel . In Native Son, I saw clearly ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. The feeling of paranoia caused by the ‘vulture eye’ in ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ is on a par with Bigger’s mix of hate and fear towards Mary Dalton. The criminal modus operandi is the same. Both perpetrators smother their victims. They both stay in the same room where their dead victim is, as the police or investigator search the premises. They both panic in a moment of self-consciousness. Poe’s narrator begins to hear a faint noise that grows louder and louder. Bigger avoids replenishing the furnace. The atmosphere is the same, repressed, silent, grim and cold.

There’s an important lesson in Native Son and it’s mainly aimed at the liberal, white, middle class person. Mary Dalton, the victim and turning point in Bigger’s life, professes a benign type of racism, one whose own naïveté escapes its owner. Richard Wright, very deftly, criticises Mary’s attitude towards blacks, and specifically towards Bigger. Her youth and immaturity do not allow her to see beyond those rose-tinted spectacles she wears and therefore she fails to recognise Bigger’s signs of confusion and surprise when she approaches him in a such an open and friendly manner. Her assumption that Bigger will accept her friendship proves to be one of many fatal errors she and Jan, her boyfriend, make.

This is not to excuse Bigger. I wrote in the first part of my analysis of Native Son that as a father and husband, Bigger’s deeds tested my liberal credentials. They still do. But I feel now in a much better position to judge, and not too harshly, this human being who, rather than acting, was re-acting to the society that put him in that condition in the first place.


Copyright 2007

Native Son by Richard Wright (1)

It’s been a long time since a book has scarred me as much as Native Son. Last time this happened it was James Baldwin’s Another Country the culprit. With its myriad characters and black and white setting, literally, NS has created a dichotomy in my brain. On the one hand I can understand the main character’s psyche. I can even sympathise with him most of the time. Bigger is a product of white American society and its flaws. Bigger is what the US could have prevented from happening when the Civil War wrapped up. But then, race has always been a powerful tool in the hands of the ruling elite and nowhere is this more obvious than in the opening passages of NS. Sometimes I even find parallels between Bigger’s ordeal and that of the main character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, another major work of literature that I’ve gone back to over and over. The problem is that Bigger is the flipside of Ralph Ellison’s coin and it’s not due just to his sheer size, but also to his overwhelming presence through the first 100 pages of the novel.

On the other hand, I’m a father and I happen to have a daughter. And spoilers aside, it’s difficult to sympathise with Bigger once he commits his heinous crime. Because heinous it is, albeit accidental. It’s this dichotomy that places my liberal heart on the line of fire. I’m forced to feel for a criminal whom the society surrounding him has left no other way for him to express his frustration.

The book is written in the third person singular, however, I keep feeling like I am in the first person singular. And this is the first time this has happened, which attests to the good writing Richard Wright shows.

To sum up, I’m bruised and battered by the novel, and yet, I’ll soldier on, like the occasional literary masochist I can be, hoping that in the remaining 100-odd pages I can find the manna that Bigger deserves. Even if at heart I disagree with his deeds completely.

Read the second part of this review here.

Copyright 2007