When Language Emulsifies Into a Story

a review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Congratulations to everyone who has written a book,” Heidi Montag tweeted once. And now, more than ever, I’m like: where is the lie? Zora Neale Hurston belongs to the coterie of authors who use language to create a meta-narrative around storytelling, race and gender. It’s not just about the stories we read, but how they’re told. Hurston’s story is satisfying and episodic like a perfect HBO mini series. Her use of language in Their Eyes Were Watching God is a twin pillar of the book’s greatness. 

Their Eyes Were Watching God is written both in dialect (AAVE) and Penguin Classics English that is formal, flowery, grammatically immaculate, traditionally revered. Growing up in London, I was fed Shakespeare like it was spinach and believed that to understand and appreciate El Bardo was pinnacle English class. That is white supremacy! I believe there’s intrinsic value in engaging with different iterations of language because it provides an opportunity to learn new words and exist outside your intellectual comfort zone. I felt this way reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, written in stream-of-consciousness Jamaican Patois, even though when I was on the bus and a leering gentleman asked me what the book was about I honestly answered “Bob Marley, I think.” But the moment when language emulsifies into a story is so satisfying that the mental whisking is worth it. 

Janie Crawford asks “Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated?” like an intersectional, relevant Carrie Bradshaw. And while her life is ordered by marriage and romantic relationships, her agency is steadfast. Every man who walks into her life with a hopeful luminescence is eventually dimmed, a lesson I’ll remember as I match with Account Managers and Moderates on Hinge. If Janie was living in another context, her story might not be so determined by dudes. But alas, Florida in the 1930s was as inequitable as it was humid. 

This is what hopeful luminescence looks like—fellas take note.

The great love of Janie’s life is Tea Cake (named because he is sweet). Tea Cake is a good dude but when I met him, I felt so protective of Janie I was like… don’t even try it, babe! Does Tea Cake even try it? You gotta read the book to find out, since this is a no spoilies zone. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is firmly in the canon of Black literature, but deserves a more central place in the greater American literature landscape. Basically, I wish I had read it in high school. I trade The Awakening for this. I mean actually, you can just have The Awakening because I thought that book was extremely bogus. Regardless, it’s too little too late for Hurston who was sidelined in her lifetime and brought back into focus by Alice Walker. Hurston did not just write a book, but created a permanent fountain for Black female writers, as well as the rest of us, to drink from. To push back on Ms. Montag, I think she deserves more than congratulations.