Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews from The Biblio File radio program pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile.
Zadie Smith has just come out with a new collection of ‘occasional’ essays entitled Changing My Mind. (Penguin, 2009). The first, ‘Their Eyes were Watching God: What does soulful mean?’ changed my mind about her.Very much for the better. Not so much because it represents an admission, but because first it’s an extremely well written, focused, powerfully felt piece of writing; and second, it proves she’s not as rabidly, or irrationally, anti-realist as I once supposed.
Here are some of the highlights:
"I had my own ideas of "good writing." It was a category that didn’t include aphoristic or overtly "lyrical" language, mythic imagery, accurately renedered "folk speech" or the love tribulations of women."
I lost many literary battles the day I read Their Eyes were Watching God….had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power…
"She saw a dust-nearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom"
I had to admit that mythic language is startling when it is good…my resistence to dialogue (encouraged by Nabokov, whom I idolized) struggled and then tumbled beofre Hurston’s ear for black colloquial speech.
Her conversations reveal individual personalities, accurately, swiftly, as if they had no author at all…
Above all I had to let go of my objection to the love tribulations of women…the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another…is in the end a choice between values, possibilities, futures, arguments…languages and lives.
Their Eyes were Watching God…is about the discovery of self in and through another. It suggests that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets your free.
At fourteen, I did Zora Neale Hurston a critical disservice. I feared my "extraliterary" feelings for her. I wanted to be an objective aesthete and not a senitmental fool. I disliked the idea of "identifying: with the fiction I read: I wanted to like Hurston because she reporesented "good writing" not because she represented me.
Zora Neale Hurston – capable of expressing human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentimental, romantic and yet rigorous and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex – is as exceptional among black women writers as Tolstoy is among white male writers.
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston’s own grain."
At fourteen I couldn’t find words (or words I liked) for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my hari, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of my speech.
…after I read this novel…the word soulful took on new weight…The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing…Another shade…to follow and fall in line with a feeling…Hurston…makes "culture" that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance – seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise…
…when I’m reading this book, I believe it with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally. Things like : She is my sister and I love her."
This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 PM and is filed under Literary Criticism.
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