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Cynique
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2003 - 03:23 pm: | 
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Just finished "Wrapped in Rainbows", Valerie Boyd's biography of Zora Neale Hurston, a book I found to be very well-crafted, and extremely interesting. In fact, I became so immersed in the narrative, so absorbed in the life and times of the talented, free-spirited Ms. Hurston, that I went from being Valerie's reader to becoming Zora's companion, taggin' along with her, sharing her adventures, witnessing the uniqueness that propelled her as she blazed a trail through the map of her world. For me, "Wrapped In Rainbows" was an enriching reading experience. |
Steve
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 02, 2003 - 11:07 pm: |
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I'm on p. 260 of Wrapped in Rainbows and I think it's an interesting biography and I'm enjoying it, however, I'm reading it critically to a certain extent. I'm more interested in Zora's restless intellect than her free spirit, although I like her free spirit too. Before starting it I had read Ishmael Reed's appreciation of Zora Hurston in Airing Dirty Laundry, which mentions her "conservatism." Apparently she praised the American occupation of Haiti, and admired the ruthless dictator Trujillo whose slaughter of many Haitians -- for political and personal reasons -- is the subject of Llohsa's The Feast of the Goat, which I may read at some point. She wouldn't have been the only American of her time admiring Trujillo, who was fiercely anti-Communist, although I don't know if that was her reason. I didn't see a reference to Trujillo in the index, but I did notice that the author mentions Zora's letter to the Orlando Sentinel condemning the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, and so I bought the book. I'm not sorry I did. However, I want to talk (or ask) about one area of her work which I've just come to: musicology. I'll start with the following paragraph, which quotes her application for a Guggenheim Fellowship:
Hurston applied for a fellowship in order to explore the African roots of hoodoo and other black American cultural practices. Specifically, she proposed to take up residence in Nigeria or somewhere else on the Gold Coast of West Africa -- the region most plundered by the slave trade -- to study indigenous religious practices, as well as African medicine and music. "I hope eventually to bring over a faculty from Africa and set up a school of Negro music in America," Hurston revealed in her application. "No Negro can remain a Negro composer long under white tutelege," she asserted. "The better he is taught, the less there is left of his nativity."
There's a little bit more to it than that, but I'm interested in the last two sentences, and specifically in trying to put them in context. I'm a white jazz musician, so you know I'm either really good, not working, or receiving some kind of informal affirmative action. But I interpret her statement in the narrow context of her concert production, From Sun to Sun, for which she always had to train new performers in the folk music and dance of the South. I could be wrong about that. I like her idea of a school to teach Nigerian music and culture, but the references to nativity and white tutelage sound a little like nostalgia, considering that it was 1934 and Duke Ellington was touring Europe where he was considered a serious composer, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Hershell Evans had just had their famous "tenor battle" in Kansas City, and Le Courbusier had said that black American jazz is a greater cultural achievement that the New York skyline. My point is simply that there have always been radically different interpretations of what black music is and should be -- Will Marion Cook's, James Weldon Johnson's, and W.E.B. Du Bois's, to name a few, and so I assume that Zora's ideas about music are limited to the sphere of folk culture. In New Orleans, white tutelage was a casualty of Plessy vs. Ferguson and parental musical instruction and instruction by the classically-trained Creoles of color became the norm. White tutelage survived Jim Crow in St. Louis though, where Scott Joplin studied with a German Jewish emigré named Weiss, who taught the classics. There's not much basis for Zora's belief that "white" musical instruction restrains or suppresses black creative expression in music -- Scott Joplin didn't study syncopation or ragtime, he just studied a course of normal musical instruction, and supplied the rest himself. I have a hard time whenever a writer who's an Ivy League grad -- whether it's Zora or Adam Mansbach -- makes a claim of musical inauthenticity based on "tutelege," especially when education doesn't seem to affect their creativity as writers.
This statement on page 261 is a little puzzling:
[Katherine] Dunham was preparing for fieldwork in the Caribbean by studying with [Melville] Herskovits, now a Northwestern University professor who'd published several works on African and Haitian culture -- and who was among the first scholars in the United States to recognize that black Americans were a people with a rich African past.
I'm skeptical of that statement, even based on what little I know. In the chapter entitled, "The Faith of Our Fathers," in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois mentions Voodooism and Obi (or obeah) in connection with a rural religious service. Herskovits may have been the first white academic to receive recognition for the ideas, but long after the fact:
As incredible as it may seem from the vantage point of the 1990s, for more than three hundred years after the arrival of African slaves in America nearly all historians and sociologists insisted that African-Americans had no culture of their own. Early in the twentieth century, the renowned black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois apparently became the first scholar to suggest that the behavior of black Americans was significantly influenced by African culture. Subsequently Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Journal of Negro History, supported those claims. But it was not until Melville J. Herskovits's 1941 book The Myth of the Negro Past, in which he reaffirmed the idea of African cultural retentions advanced by Du Bois and Woodson, that the issue was seriously debated in academic circles.
-- Mel Watkins, On the Real Side
Here's something else which caught my attention:
Hurston focused at length on how this will to adorn manifested in black language -- and her conclusions stood in glaring opposition to those of folklorists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson, who'd complained in 1925 that black dialect was so difficult to record because "there is no regular usage for any word in the Negro's vocabulary." Newbell Niles Puckett, author of Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, viewed black speech even more condescendingly ... (p. 254)
Contrary to what these noted white folklorists seemed to believe, black vernacular speech was not just so much senseless gibberish, "full of 'ams' and 'Ises,'" as Hurston pointed out ... (p. 255)
The point I want to make is that Guy Johnson wasn't a "white folklorist" at all, he was a black sociologist from the University of Chicago who is fictionalized in, and whose reasearch is central to Colson Whitehead's novel, John Henry Days. I'll take her point, however, that there was some condescension on the part of the Northern folklorists. Zora had a working relationship with Alan Lomax, whom she called, "the best informed person today on Western Negro folk-lore." I have a lot of doubts about Alan Lomax too, the man who got into a brawl onstage at the Newport Folk festival with Bob Dylan's manager who took offense at Lomax's condescending remarks about electric guitars in blues music. |
Kola
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 12:49 am: |
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Hi Steve,
As a Sudanese-American, I must say that Zora is totally right.
Too much prolonged association with "Caucasoid Whites" (without contact with ones own bloodberry) definitely takes the flavor out of a Black person. They begin to think with a different mind, and so naturally, out comes a different art.
BLACK ART is passion-based, communal, improvisational, deeply sexual and deeply spiritual (the "art" of sensuality being a part of all African aesthetic religious society and the woman's bare breast being our Crucifix).
WHITE ART is intellect-based, introspective and focuses on the individual instead of the entire tribe.
White Art is plaintiff.
Black Art is festive.
White Art is political.
Black Art is life-affirming.
White Art is phallic in place of a phantom phallus.
Black Art is vaginal and is expected to continually re-produce the community by "teasing" the phallus.
White Art is for recital.
Black Art is for "everyday use". It can occur, without warning....ANYWHERE at any moment.
That is what Zora meant. Too much separation from ones own roots....eventually kills one.
A Black man can always make art. But maybe just not his own anymore.
Look around you...the Black Americans are becoming more and more like Whites every day. They are losing their unique flavor and becoming
less interesting. It's even getting to the point where Whites can suddenly compete with them artistically.
This is what Zora was keen about. And she was right.
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Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 02:19 am: |
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Steve,
I couldn't presume to speak for Zora and we have to consider that her story was being told by an author who obviously had great admiration for her subject. Suffice to say that Ms Hurston was a very quixotic character, full of contradictions. It seems to me, a lot of what she said was designed to shock and provoke or perhaps to silence critics of her own race who chided her for being too easy on white people. Zora was, after all, an anthropologist rather than a historian. With her hands-on approach she experienced rather than analysed. To me she was more shrewd than intellectual, more instinctive than scholastic, full of home spun wisdom. And although she was a researcher, she was not necessarily an interpreter. Whites as well as many blacks found her fascinating because she lived by her own rules. So I don't know that we can evaluate her except to say that she was ahead of her time.
I'm not a professional musician so I can't speak with authority on the subject of tutelege versus "free-style". But I would think that any good musician should know his craft, and build on his creativity from that starting point. Dave Brubeck is a student of jazz, as is Wynton Marsalis. I love them both but I also liked be-bop which from, what I can tell, was just wailin. But it was exciting! So, is your point that being a trained white musician is not a hindrance to performing black music? I don't have a strong opinions on this subject, but I do know that while reading your post,I was struck by how very structured and orderly and erudite your writing is; very clinical, almost sterile. This is not meant as an insult, because you are obviously very smart. But what also came through to me was that there are no pauses and spaces, no impact of the implicit in your prose. Of course, you are discussing a serious subject, so maybe I'm off base in making this observation. Yet, somehow, I'd expect a different style of writing from a jazz musician, because, hopefully, your personality manifests itself in your music. Well, I'm just rambling. Take care. I always find your posts enlightening. |
lurkerette
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 08:10 am: |
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Steve, what you write is always interesting, but some of your references are too scholarly for me and go right over my head. (Plessy vs. Ferguson? Probably a famous case, but I don't know anything about it.) Your comments always seem to be ready to go straight to a textbook, do you teach American literature?
Sorry, I want to bring the conversation down a bit now to a more gossipy level. Can anyone give me some advice, I am going to go to Orlando on vacation in a couple weeks and I was planning on going to the Hurston museum in Eatonville, but looking it up on the web, I can't find very much reference to it and looks more like an art museum from the little that I did find. Isn't it a museum dedicated to Zora? And on another note, does anyone know any good AA bookstores or second hand bookstores in the Orlando area (I'm also planning on going to the Eastern beaches, so anywhere in that area would be fine also.) Thanks very much in advance for any suggestions. |
Thumper
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 10:26 pm: |
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Hello Steve,
Thanks for your post. I have never been that deep off into the anthropolgy side of things, so I can't comment to much on that. I have to agree with Cynique on this one; I can't say, or securely guess, what Hurston meant on her Guggenheim application. I think the lines in question was thrown in to make her objectives more grand, sweetening the pot, sort to speak. It really makes Zora look very hypocritical. She studied anthropology, black folklores and song, for white anthropologists that couldn't go as deep, nor gain the trust of black folk to get the songs and stories that Zora could and did. Zora was a big ball of contradictions. I thoroughly disagree with the comment about white tuteluge though. Right is right, no matter who teaches it or who's learning it. A is still the first letter in the English alphabet, and so on. Your examples are very good. Allow me to use one of my own. Now, what would Zora think of Aretha Franklin. Yeah, Aretha is the Queen, but her pitch, and diction is near perfect, yet she still has her "nativity" (is that really a word?). But, with Zora...who knows?
I am disappointed that Boyd did not or was not able to reprint some of Hurston's conservative essays. I would love to have read them. It may would have more sharply defined Zora's character, provide a small amount of insight into her true nature.
BTW: I love your "scholarly" references. *big smile* |
Cyberscribe
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 12:15 am: |
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I'm reading Wrapped In Rainbows now and am totally drawn in. Valerie Boyd clearly is smitten by Zora. I loved how she focused on her life. Zora comes to life as a human being, not her critics descriptions or her contradictions and that is refreshing. I have a better understanding of where she drew her inspiration from to create her masterpieces. Her self doubts at times, her conflict with focusing on one particular area of her art (anthropology or creativity), and her dedication to doing what she loved and the necessary choices (humbling herself to her "Godmother" patron despite the sometimes racial slurs she hurrled at her) she made to make sure she stayed true to that dream.
Her ideas about love and marriage WERE foreward thinking and the refusal to limit her art to the plight of the "Negro" launched a new generation of writers creating complex characters based soley on being human. Not to mention she was one of the major contributors for recording black folklore. Her use of the "native" language of the south was beautifully crafted and rings of her love of being Black. If you think reading some of that dialogue is tough, try Conjure Woman by Charles Chestnut (which was written before Hurstons). I can barely get through 2 pages it's soo thick. |
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