Zora Neale Hurston

Dzieła

• 1935Mules and Men (Muły i ludzie)

  Baśnie ludowe, pieśni, kazania i praktyki hoodoo, które Hurston zbierała od 1927 roku w Eatonville, w obozie tartacznym w hrabstwie Polk i w Nowym Orleanie; mowę narratorów, czarną angielszczyznę Południa, oddaje tak, jak brzmi, i ujmuje ją we własną relację z badań terenowych; przedmowa Franza Boasa.

• 1937Their Eyes Were Watching God (Ich oczy oglądały Boga)

  Powieść napisana podczas jej badań terenowych na Haiti: Janie Crawford opowiada Pheoby o trzech małżeństwach i o poszukiwaniu miłości oraz własnego życia, od Eatonville po Everglades; dialog zachowuje czarną mowę Południa, a narracja przechodzi między nią a standardową angielszczyzną.

Stanowisko

Hurston is on the map as an anthropologist and writer whose work joins two fields. Trained by Boas, she studied the folklore of her own community from within: “Mules and Men” (1935), with a preface by Boas, records tales, songs and hoodoo practices from Florida and Louisiana, and “Tell My Horse” (1938) describes Vodou in Haiti and Jamaica. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) she described drama, the “will to adorn” and asymmetry as features of Black vernacular culture, and in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) she wrote that she did not belong to “the sobbing school of Negrohood”. Her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937) follows Janie Crawford’s search for a life of her own in a narrative voice that moves between standard English and the speech of its characters. Alain Locke published her in “The New Negro” (1925) but in 1938 asked when Black novelists would turn to “motive fiction and social document fiction”; Richard Wright accused the novel of minstrelsy. After long neglect, Alice Walker’s essay of 1975 began her rediscovery, and Black feminist thinkers such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks and Angela Davis drew on her work. Her place in the African and Africana school refers to the Harlem Renaissance and to Black folklore studies; she belongs equally to the history of literature. Her political positions, among them her opposition to the school desegregation ruling of 1954, are set out under “Context & critique”.

Życie i kontekst

Zora Neale Hurston was born on 7 January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States. After her mother’s death in 1904 she worked in various jobs and finished high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore in 1918. At Howard University (associate degree 1920) she joined Stylus, the literary club led by Alain Locke. In 1925 she moved to New York, took part in the Harlem Renaissance and studied anthropology with Franz Boas at Barnard College (BA 1928). Supported by the patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, she collected folklore in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana from 1927 to 1932; Guggenheim fellowships took her to Jamaica and Haiti in 1936–37. She worked for the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida and published four novels, an autobiography (1942) and many essays, but earned little in her later years. She died in Fort Pierce, Florida, on 28 January 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
• Tell My Horse (1938)
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
• Barracoon (written 1931, publ. 2018)