Their Eyes Were Watching God

I want to think of positive things to say about Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Nothing’s springing to mind, though.  It’s a real shame as loads of authors who I admire love this book; it’s endorsed all over the shop by people like Zadie Smith and Alice Walker.  I feel like by not liking this book, I’m missing out on something.  It’s probably not even that it’s a bad book.  It’s just that I could not get into Zora Neale Hurston’s classic.  I really tried, but it just didn’t speak to me and so I felt a real frustration with both the book and myself when I read the thing.

The book tells the story of Janie Crawford, in her own words.  Janie, from a family already blighted by tragedy and tied up in a past of slavery, is married off at sixteen.  This is not so much to prevent teenage pregnancy, more to legitimise it.  Anyway, she marries much older Logan Killicks, who wants her as a partner on his farm.  She wants this less, so leaves him for Jody Starks.  This doesn’t last long either and she soon grows too old for Starks.  Once he dies, she hooks up with Tea Cake who is pretty wonderful.  That is until he gets rabies and tries to kill Janie.  She kills him instead, gets accused and acquitted of murder and is left alone.  All by the time she’s in her mid-forties.

The plot is fairly convoluted and this isn’t a long book.  But I think that my real issue was it was the language.  The speech, at least, is written phonetically in the dialect of the Deep South.  And I get that this is partly what is meant to make the book great.  That it is a poor black woman writing in her own voice and that that voice sounds like her.  But it makes the thing bloody hard to read at times.  Sometimes it felt like most of the battle of the book was understanding the barest bones of the words and so their message got lost.  It’s so annoying because I know why Hurston did it and it would probably be just a trashy and lurid tale had she not but it made my enjoyment of the book near impossible.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is such an important book.  And this is why I am annoyed I couldn’t enjoy it.  Hurston rejected the idea that African-Americans should better themselves by acting more like white Americans.  The Racial Uplift programme of the time essentially wanted black people to aspire to be more white.  Hurston instead celebrated rural African-American culture; a thing practically unheard of in 1937.  The book’s refusal to say what it should meant that it flopped at the time of publication.  It’s only in retrospect, in the 1970s and 80s, that this novel has been elevated to the status of classic that it holds now.  

There it is, then, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Probably a good book; just not for me.  Certainly a vitally important that went against the party line for what it should be to be black and American and poor in the 1930s.  More than that, it gives a woman’s voice to African-American poverty.  It’s a shame that do to this, all Hurston had to do was present reality.

I have now moved on to more Paul Auster and The Music of Chance.  I’m enjoying it more.