Crabby post-colonial cribsheet and reading list: Zora Neale Hurston edition

When I say “postcolonial,” I’m talking about the internal state of mind and being after you’ve started decolonizing yourself.

After you’ve started dismantling the inherited ambient ideologies and started kicking out some of the stuff that’s not yours, and embracing that stuff that’s yours to embrace.

It is political, yes. But at the level of the personal, rather than national or global.

I’m not a postcolonial theorist or academician. I know that the term has import that I’m not addressing here. These are one idiosyncratic brown female human’s findings in the course of making sense of her world.

It’s not intended just for women, or people of color, or those who trace their history to some colonized nation. If you grew up in today’s world, you probably got indoctrinated too (no matter how you identify) into believing yourself to be smaller than you really are, and you are welcome to this discussion.

This is Part 2 of an irregular series about books, places, media, and bad-asses who taught me something I sorely needed. Things that helped heal and integrate some excluded part of me.

You can see Part 1 here.

Today I want to talk about my friend Zora.

She was a folklorist and a writer extraordinaire.

(Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is tender and powerful and describes the black town and people she came from in a way that had never been done before in this country and maybe hasn’t been done since. if you haven’t read it, I declare there to be a gap in your education as a human being that should be remedied immediately.)

Alice Walker tells how when Zora’s play Color Struck! won second prize in a contest,

Hurston walked into a room full of her competitors, flung her scarf dramatically over her shoulder, and yelled “COLOR..R.R STRUCK..K.K!” at the top of her voice…apparently it isn’t easy to like a person who is not humbled by second place.

She was a force of nature, and the word is she went her own way in all things.

But in her lifetime, she struggled to make a living collecting folklore and writing, and made many painful compromises in order to do her work (like working under the patronage of a woman she called Godmother, who funded her for a time and also required obsequious letters, and that Zora own no more than one pair of shoes at a time).

Partly for her personality, partly for her unpopular politics, and partly because she was a black woman writer being her whole self out loud, she got on people’s nerves. The critics were cruel, and many of her contemporaries contributed to the diminution of her reputation during her lifetime.

When she died at the county welfare home, she was penniless and her books were out of print. Her grave was forgotten and unlamented.

I wish Zora could have known before she died how valuable her work would be, and to how many people.

I wish I could zip back in time and whisper it in old-Zora’s ear: that we could love and appreciate and bless her and her work across the span of decades.

I can’t go back then and ease her impoverished last years with the comfort of knowing the impact her work would have.

What I can do is bless her now. And tell myself. And you.

So hear this (courtesy of Zora): be a force of nature. Be as you as you can stand to be. Because your impact will reach down and out through time and hearts in ways that you cannot predict or imagine.

Be comforted by this knowledge. Imagine yourself as old-You, looking back down your years, and know that There Are Effects.

Please don’t wait until you’re doing your final accounting. Take that flame of reassurance and fore-knowledge, and warm yourself by it now, and be heartened.

Comment Fu

This space is like a Quaker meeting that is happening in my living room. Honored guests, please speak as you are moved to. And let’s be awesome to each other, because graciousness among friends is why we hang out together.

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