Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: A Re-Discovery that Helped Preserve African-American Culture

by Shana Thornton-Morris

Sometimes friendships just happen when we meet someone. An instant spark ignites a lifetime of favors, compassion, words, activities, and challenges. Often circumstances make us friends. Other times, we choose and actively pursue friendships. During grad school, I heard the story of Zora Neale Hurston’s rescue by a friend she had never known in life.

In 1973, when Alice Walker discovered the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston and read her stories, Walker made an active choice to befriend the spirit of Hurston. Hurston was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance, but most of her work was out of print by the time she died in 1960. She was a forgotten writer until Alice Walker reached through the mists of time, blew the dust away from the covers, and re-introduced Hurston’s work into American literature.

Walker recognized the shared experience of being an African-American female author. It wasn’t an easy road to travel…few predecessors had blazed the trails. Often, those women who bent their bodies over paper (most in secret) and labored their pens to reveal a truth rarely shared and spoken became forgotten like Hurston. Maybe that’s what Alice Walker felt when she faced the wordless grave site of Hurston, a woman intensely dedicated to the preservation of her culture. Maybe Walker felt a sudden pain for her new friend’s final circumstances in life and a desire to revitalize the work, life, and spirit of an author who shows us an intimate portrait of the oldest incorporated African-American town in the United States during its formation in the post-Reconstruction years. The University of Central Florida’s Department of English offers a Digital Archive of Hurston’s work that shows the scope of the creativity that Walker rescued; she was a novelist, folklorist, anthropologist, and singer.

Alice Walker’s re-discovery gave us the treasured story of Hurston’s character Janie Mae Crawford, a woman drifting like blossoms on the wind into a loveless marriage, then rolling in the tide with a controlling, ambitious, second husband, and swept away in love with Tea Cake until Janie finally discovers herself alone, rowing her own way home. Countless activities have stemmed from Alice Walker’s emphasis on Hurston’s work. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God has become part of many high school curricula. A Zora! festival is hosted every year in Florida. Scholarships and artistic endowments are offered in her name. A t.v. movie was created. Plays of her work are often performed. Her work has inspired a celebration of African-American culture and prompted African-American women to use their voices and challenge censorship from all sides.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the books featured in The Big Read, “an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts (that’s) designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.” The National Endowment for the Arts teamed with the Institute of Museum and Library Services as well as Arts Midwest to promote reading and discussions about literature in communities across the United States. On the evening of Wednesday, February 27, many cities are kicking off The Big Read campaign. From Chapel Hill, NC, and Lafayette, LA, to San Diego, CA, and Brooklyn, NY, groups will hold discussions about Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Brooklyn, special guest Lucy Ann Hurston will speak. She is the niece of Zora Neale Hurston. The calendar of events contains information about the above meetings, as well as events through 2009, in participating cities.

In The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Exhibition Portfolio titled, “Harlem 1900-1940: An African-American Community,” Zora Neale Hurston’s work is described as “play(ing) a large role in preserving the folk traditions and cultural heritage of African Americans.” Alice Walker thoughtfully retrieved Hurston’s “genius” from the grave and gave us a chance to hear her sing and tell stories.

Shana Thornton-Morris reads about, researches, and explores her curiosities. She also blogs frequently at http://storytimeout.blogspot.com/

Anne Bradstreet - Still Relevant Today

by Lee Conell

I’m not in the habit of thinking about Puritanism, except maybe around Thanksgiving, when we are inundated with images of turkeys and pilgrims. In the past, when I heard the word “Pilgrim” or “Puritan” I imagined a woman with her hair in a tight bun, wearing a stiff dress and a stern look. Then, I read some of the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, and began to see Puritan women as something other than a cardboard cutout you see on a store window (before the Christmas decorations go up, anyway).

Born Anne Dudley in England in 1612, as a child Bradstreet had many tutors, unusual for the time; girls were generally barely educated. Her family was well-off — her father was the steward of the Earl of Lincoln’s estate — and Bradstreet had access to an extensive library. Perhaps because of her access to education, she was able to grow up knowing that women were not witless beings: She herself was proof of that.

At 16, Bradstreet married her father’s assistant, Simon Bradstreet. Two years later, she undertook a voyage to the New World with her husband, her mother, and her father, who was one of the leaders of the venture. Bradstreet was more than a little reluctant to leave the comfortable England for the unknown New World. However, part of her Puritan upbringing meant obeying what the men around her said. Ultimately, Bradstreet accepted her situation. She joined the church in Boston and had eight children.

The men in her life were important people; both her father and her husband served as governors of Massachusetts. Still, Bradstreet clearly had some confidence in her own abilities, leading her to pick up the pen to write poetry. Women were not encouraged to write in Bradstreet’s society. It was assumed that a female writer must be neglecting her household duties if she had the time to compose poetry. But this did not stop Bradstreet from writing, or from viewing herself as anything less than a devout Christian woman.

The first poem I read by Bradstreet, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” certainly concerns her devotion to her religion. The poem is a dialogue between two “sisters,” the world-loving Flesh and the heaven-loving Spirit. Of course, Spirit’s argument about the weakness of Flesh wins out. Such abstractions, which appeared in the first edition of Bradstreet’s poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, are more imitative of other male poets than Bradstreet’s later work would be. As she continued to write, the subject of her poetry increasingly turned to her own life. She began to write love poems for her husband, who was often away in his work, or elegiac poems about the death of her children and grandchildren.

In her later poetry, Bradstreet continued to use the tension between worldliness and higher religious thoughts seen in “The Flesh and the Spirit” However this tension manifested through Bradstreet’s own life struggles, rather than abstract theological beings that might alienate a reader. In “Upon the Burning of Our House” for example, Bradstreet mourns the loss of her beloved material items in a fire — a loss a modern reader can sympathize with — and then quickly reprimands herself, asking “Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,/The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? /Raise up thy thoughts above the skye.”

That struggle between material items and something larger (whether that larger thing is God or, in a secular society, personal morality) is one that is still relevant today. What’s more, by writing about her own daily life and thoughts, Bradstreet’s poems are a precursor to confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, and to a more personal poetic voice overall. We can look at Bradstreet today and see not just a Puritan, but a struggling human being. After reading her, suddenly, those stiff Pilgrims on the store windows seem more like caricatures than ever. Bradstreet brings a strong female voice to a seemingly distant cultural past.

Remembering Grace Paley

by Lee Conell

We all know about the myth of the writer: He (it’s usually a he in the myth) is a recluse, sitting in his cabin in the woods, contemplating this and that, avoiding other human beings even as he seeks to emulate their problems in prose.

Then there’s Grace Paley.

When the New York writer and activist died on August 24 at the age of 84, the obituaries didn’t just appear in major mainstream publications – The New York Times, The Washington Post – but on websites devoted to feminism, to anarchism, to nonviolent activism. The legacy Paley leaves is not just found between the pages of her books, but in her commitment to being actively involved in major issues in the world today.

Sometimes this involvement showed its face in small, local ways: Every Saturday for years during the ’60s, Paley stood on a street corner near her home in New York City, handing out protest fliers to the passerby.

But Paley’s activism took her out of her neighborhood too. It brought her to Hanoi on a peace mission, and to Moscow for a world peace conference. It took her to Washington D.C., where she was among the “White House Eleven” arrested in 1978 for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

The strong female voice in her short stories parallels Paley’s own actions and role as a feminist. In 1972 she signed a petition in Ms. Magazine for women who had abortions in a pre-Roe v. Wade world. She added her name to a similar petition in 2006, the year before she died, as a woman’s right to a safe abortion again came under fire in South Dakota.

Paley did not publish frequently, but the stories she wrote forged her reputation as one of the leading American short story writers of the 20th century. The stories, like Paley herself, often engaged the world and questioned it, too. In the story “An Interest in Life,” the main character Virginia, whose husband has disappeared and left her with four children, decides to go on the gameshow “Strike it Rich.” When her neighbor’s son John finds out about her plan, he is scornful. The people who go on that show, he says, truly “suffer” in ways Virginia can’t understand. Paley revealed that the difficulties women faced were frequently and patronizingly dismissed as nothing more than “little disturbances” in life. Just as Paley handed out fliers to inform, she used her writing to shine a light on these difficulties.

When asked during a 1998 interview with Salon.com if writers have a moral obligation, Paley replied that all human beings do. “So if all human beings have it,” she added, “then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it’s as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it.”

Through her words, which remain alive and active, Paley will continue to contribute justice to the world. Her unique voice illuminates the lives of women working to maintain their own voices under duress. It is this illumination, as well as Paley’s fearlessness in engaging the world, that guarantees her importance both as a feminist and as a writer.

Lee Connell spends her time drinking coffee, scribbling, and studying literature at SUNY New Paltz.

Life, Passionately: Reflections on a Japanese Love Nun

by Suzanne Kamata

A few weeks ago, I gave my Japanese university students the assignment of writing about someone they would like to meet. As an example, I told them that my dream was to meet the writer/Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi who was born in Tokushima, where I now live, as Harumi Setouchi in 1922. Most of my students, whether local-born or not, are familiar with this figure. Setouchi, with her shaved head and nun’s robes, appears regularly in TV, in print, and at various venues around the country where she gives speeches and sermons. Although celibate since becoming a nun at the age of 50, in her sermons, Setouchi often urges people to be passionate in their love affairs. In an interview with Harumi Ozawa, published in The Japan Times, Setouchi said, “The meaning of life is to love someone – or not just that – to get besotted with someone. You come into life alone and die alone anyway.” This is a rather radical idea in a country where until, recently arranged, marriages were the norm.

Setouchi herself loved passionately. She abandoned her husband and three-year-old child after falling in love with a younger man, an experience that she wrote about in her autobiograhical novel Basho (Places). Natsu no Owari (The End of Summer), one of only two of her many novels to be translated into English is based on her eight-year affair with a married man. (Her other novel translated into English is Beauty in Disarray which was based on the life of the early feminist writer Noe Ito.) Male critics vilified her for writing about sex and passion. One wrote that she must have been masturbating while writing her novel Kashin (Center of a Flower) and she was shunned by publishers for five years thereafter.

Setouchi entered the clergy not because she was repentant for her wild ways, but because even with men and work in her life, she felt that something was missing. “I wanted to pursue something else,” she told Ozawa.

She recently translated the world’s first novel, Genji Monogatari, into modern Japanese, and she continues to write novels and court controversy. She has protested the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan in 2001 and Japan’s involvement in the war in Iraq, and has traveled to that country to bring medical kits to children. She currently corresponds with inmates on death row, and opposes the death penalty.

Setouchi is clearly a courageous and passionate woman, and it is for these reasons that I wanted to meet her.

I’d heard that she was in town for the annual national culture festival, which was held in Tokushima this year. Although I was eager to hear her speak, I was unable to get a ticket to an event at which she was making an appearance. The day of the event, I was having lunch at an Indian restaurant with a friend. While we were enjoying curry and naan, an elderly woman with a shaved head and nun’s attire came into the restaurant.

After eating, I politely approached her. “Are you Jakucho Setouchi?”

“Yes, I am,” she replied in Japanese.

“I live in Tokushima,” I told her. “I am a writer, too. And I am a great admirer of your work.”

I asked if I could interview her at a later date, and she complied. I returned home, feeling somehow blessed, with the memory of her warm hand in mine.

Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.