Cheryl A. Wall, "Zora Neale Hurston's Essays: On Art and Such" (page 2 of
6)
One finds in Hurston's essays some of the same characteristics, both
formal and thematic, for which we admire her fiction and ethnography.
These essays, published in general-interest magazines such as
American Mercury and The World Tomorrow as well as in
Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology, and those submitted to The
Florida Negro, reflect the wealth of metaphor and simile, the
angularity, asymmetry, and originality that Hurston defined as
"Characteristics of Negro Expression." No less than her fiction, they
are "stewed in the juice" of their subjects. We observe in them the
discursive juxtapositions that create in prose the jagged harmonies
Hurston heard in the spirituals, as well as the polyphonic effect.
Through the consideration of the essay, we come at the question of
Hurston's literary legacy "slant," as Emily Dickinson might say, as
we consider Hurston's conceptions of beauty and art—her definition
of a black aesthetic, if you will—which lie at the core of that
legacy.
A rich, if critically neglected, tradition of African American essays
reaches back to the early nineteenth century. Many of the most
influential works in African American literary tradition are books of
essays; I think immediately of W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black
Folk, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son and The Fire
Next Time, and, of course, Alice Walker's In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens. Many other writers, including Frederick Douglass,
Ralph Ellison, Jessie Fauset, June Jordan, James Weldon Johnson, and
Richard Wright have written essays that are intrinsic to our sense of
the tradition. As members of a group that has frequently defined itself
politically as being "in crisis," black writers are attracted to the
essay for its brevity and portablity. They respond to political
exigency, whether during the antislavery struggle, the rise of
segregation after Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, or
contemporary attacks on affirmative action. Timeliness is a necessity,
as is the desire to communicate with as large an audience as possible.
The dialogic form of the essay which strives to produce the effect of
the spontaneous, the tentative, and the open-ended lends itself to
exploring complex and contentious issues. The ability of black writers
to invite black and white readers to understand their presuppositions
and to share in their epiphanies enables them to affirm those who agree
with them and sometimes persuade those who do not. The tentativeness of
the form offers the assurance that both the reader and the writer might
try again. Gerald Early, the editor of one of the few collections
devoted to the African American essay, attributes the form's appeal to
the fact that "the essay is the most exploitable mode of the confession
and the polemic," the two variants of the essay that he asserts black
writers have used the most.[8]
The turn to autobiography is intimately
tied to the genre's political purposes. To a significant degree, writers
in the nineteenth century presented their lives as evidence for the
cause. Increasingly, over the course of the twentieth century, authors
risked sharing personal information that was not representative of the
group; they wrote for the purpose of self-revelation as well as social
progress. Hurston was one of the first black writers to employ the essay
for this purpose. Moreover, since the late nineteenth century, with
essays by Victoria Earle Mathews and Anna Julia Cooper, the essay has
also been the vehicle for writers to reflect on their own artistic
practice, the traditions out of which they write, and their relationship
to their audience. Few have done this to greater effect than Hurston.
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