Their Eyes Were Watching God

"I think Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my favorite novels of all time. And I think Tea Cake is so hot."

"The black body exists within a wider black culture — one Hurston portrayed."

"Hurston was an anthropologist and an ethnographer who did lots of field work, but here she turns to the novel as a form to explore black indigenous culture. Black English is often disparaged as the vernacular of the uneducated; Hurston elevates black language to a level of poetry. She shows the worldview that one gets from language, which is a very spiritual one. “Hurston gives us one of the first true love stories in African American writing” Hurston gives us one of the first true love stories in African American writing. It’s a beautifully lyrical novel about a woman who married several times before falling in love with the person who helps her come into her own. Toni Morrison said, “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.” There is a burden of being politically representational. Many African American writers write whatever they want, but audiences tend to want and expect a certain kind of realism and a certain kind of political stance on the part of the black writer. The work that get the most attention, that gets most widely-read, has tended to be work that can be read as a statement on blackness in America."

"What does it tell us? It tells us that Black women were right at the bottom of the pecking order. It’s very much about the Darwinian nature of the Deep South and the complicity of Black men within this system, where as long as they had a woman as their ‘property,’ they could be more accepting of their lack of power and agency within a system that was defined by either slavery or Jim Crow. It’s the story of Janie Crawford, who returns to her hometown in Florida in her forties. She looks back at her life and marriages. In many ways, the book recounts a conventional female journey of discovery and empowerment. There’s the bad first marriage, the marriage that seemed better but soon turned bad as well, and the third, better marriage which then ends tragically. It travels around a well-trodden circuit, but because it’s about a Black woman, the stakes are that bit higher and the book is fraught with structural racism and difficult compromises. It was widely criticised when it came out. The Black male critics of the Harlem Renaissance, notably Richard Wright, really took against it, I think because they had a notion of what Black literature should be doing at that point and what its targets should be. Zora Neale Hurston didn’t subscribe to that at all. She worked outside, on her own. So she was therefore seen as a traitor to the cause—and as having indulged in a kind of minstrelsy by using too much Black vernacular. The dialogue is certainly gamey and ripe, sometimes almost a bit too much. Perhaps it was radical and necessary, but it was seen by the Black critics as over-affected, a cliché. She was also problematic in terms of the politics of the time, in that she was kind of right wing. Fiercely anti-communist. Against the desegregation of schools. Possibly even saw segregation as a good and necessary thing. So she put a lot of people’s backs up. The progressive left wasn’t minded to like her writing. She died in total poverty, and it was only in the 1970s that the book was rediscovered. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple , visited her grave and cleared away the weeds. She had died ten years or so previously in a welfare hotel. It’s a fiery book that completely sweeps you along. It gives you a sense of the role and opportunities and limitations and hopes and dreams of Black women at that time. There’s nothing that compares to it. Well, there’s the retro-fitted work that came later—by Walker and Toni Morrison , writers like that. But for the aliveness and the relatively contemporary nature of it, this is unparalleled. Yes. Maybe this is a weaselly argument, but can I make the case that the South is all history? Everything in the South drags the past in with it. Any novel set in the South is a historical novel, because it wrestles with and grapples with all those ghosts. That’s the argument, although I realise in the case of Demon Copperhead it might become even more thin and clunky."

"“Their Eyes Were Watching God,” by Zora Neale Hurston, has maybe the best depiction of a wrathful hurricane in literature."

""Their Eyes Were Watching God," which I read for the first time only five years ago, and which made me fall in love with Zora Neale Hurston. I was knocked out by her eye for detail."

"I might pick up Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" or "Moby-Dick" and read a random paragraph and feel satisfied."

"I'd have to say my heroine is Janie Mae Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," because she showed me what courage and confidence looked like as a black woman when I was young."

"It was, and is, a pivotal work of Black environmental writing."