Zora Neale Hurston's Essays: On Art and Such
On January 13, 1938, Zora Neale Hurston finished the essay she was
writing for "The Negro in Florida," a volume that was prepared for the
Federal Writers Project. The essay, "Art and Such," would not be
published for more than four decades, but it provides rare and useful
insights into Hurston's understanding of African American literary and
artistic traditions and of herself as an
artist.[1] Hurston judges
African Americans' contribution to the arts harshly: "creation is in its
stumbling infancy." She is not concerned here with the legacy of
folklore and music, which confirm the existence of "many undreamed-of
geniuses."[2] She
concentrates instead on those who would call themselves
artists and who, only three generations removed from slavery, continue
to wrestle with its legacy of enforced silence. Crippling too are the
ideological constraints under which they labor. Compelled to write as
race leaders, they are unable to think as individuals or to draw a
character as anything other than "a tragic unit of the
Race."[3] The
tradition that gives pride of place to unimaginative "Race Men" silences
artists, clearly including Hurston herself, who do not adhere to its
dictates. Hurston does not name these men, but when she refers to the
misnaming of the spirituals as "Sorrow Songs," she identifies W. E. B.
DuBois as one of her targets.[4]
As she highlights the handful of black artists born in Florida,
Hurston identifies Brooks Thompson, a woodcarver whose work is a thing
"of wondrous beauty." Asked how he achieved it, Thompson states, "The
feeling just come and I did it."[5] Hurston
wants to create a free space
for writers who can do in words what this unheralded artist has done in
his medium. When describing the interior of the house Thompson decorated
with his carvings, Hurston notes that "without ever having known
anything about African Art, he has achieved something very close to
African concepts." Not surprisingly, Hurston posits a racial art that
owes more to culture than to politics. Although she offers no
explanation for the transmission of this artistic tradition, she had
previously identified African survivals in the folklore and music she
documented in a decade of fieldwork. The storytellers and singers whose
words and music she transcribed knew no more of African traditions than
Thompson.
In "Art and Such," Hurston insists that the pressure on blacks to
conform to political dictates stymied creativity. The paucity of artists
is proof. She cites one painter, one sculptor (Augusta Savage, whose
subjects are racial, but whose work is free of propaganda), one
musician, and two writers—James Weldon Johnson and Hurston
herself. Hurston's argument with the tradition she inherits is that it
has no room for an artist like her. Her critical intervention
anticipates pronouncements by black women artists such as Ntozake Shange
and Alice Walker, who similarly faced the need to create, revise, and
extend a tradition in which to locate their art. Writing in the third
person about her own work, Hurston cites as defining qualities its
"objective point of view" and its language, which give "verisimilitude
to the narrative by stewing the subject in
its own juice."[6] "Objective"
is Hurston's way of expressing her commitment to artistic freedom. It
marks her refusal to advance the race leader's political agenda and
asserts that her refusal has made her a better writer. The theme recurs
in Hurston's essays, as do the reflections on language that are at the
core of her aesthetic. Indeed, I will argue that to understand that
aesthetic, we need to pay much closer attention to Hurston's essays than
we have done.[7]
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