Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice. - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Deborah G. Plant

Ayana karanja, Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice. new york: lang, 1999. 176 pp. $29.95.

Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice is a laudatory appraisal of and critical inquiry into the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston. The book is a discursive and an impressionistic pastiche of poetry, photography, dream interpretation and representation, sociology, anthropology, dramatic monologue, and literary criticism. Ayana Karanja's methodology in this work emulates what she terms "Hurstonian stylistics," an ethnographic praxis characterized by a blending of fact and fiction, interdisciplinarity, and self-referentiality. Hurston's style, Karanja states in the text's "Prologue," anticipated that of contemporary postmodernist anthropologists, "those who challenge conventional forms of ethnographic writing and who demonstrate unconventional discursive practices." Karanja uses this unconventional mode of discourse to search out not only the literary and socio-political dimensions of Hurston's life, but also the etheric and astral dimensions of the author's life not typically researched.

Part I of The Breath of Her Voice is comprised of an essay, "A Sentimental Journey," three poems authored by Karanja, and photographs of Hurston's gravesite and of Eatonville establishments and residents. Reminiscent of Alice Walker's "Looking for Zora," the essay gives a journalistic detailing of Karanja's intellectual, geographical, and emotional twists and turns in researching Hurston. The poems, respectively, give expression to the author's perseverance in investigating the life of a yet enigmatic personality, the "real-life dream" which motivated the author's methodological and presentational approach to her work, and the integrity between the dream and the research. Part Two contains "four sets of two-part dialogues." In the first part of these sets, the ancestral voice of the author's dream addresses Hurston, explaining Hurston's actions and motives and recounting her accomplishments. In the second part, the author is a semi-omniscient medium of sorts, who, addressing the reader, discusses Hurston's te xts and her life, defending Hurston's choices and interpreting her will and her emotional states. In these four sets, Karanja revisits recurrent debates surrounding Hurston's literary career and her unconventional life choices, and she touches on topical issues of the Harlem Renaissance period. White and male privilege, the private person versus public persona, the sexism and elitism of the Black intelligentsia, white patronage, identity, community, racism, and color consciousness are among the topics engaged.

In the stream-of-consciousness flow of issues and ideas, Karanja emphasizes the significance of Hurston's role as a Black woman writer and the impact of this choice on the quality of her life. She asserts that Black women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston reinscribe Black women's traditions and (re)create cultural texts, which are inflected with a Black woman's perspective. These works, then, document Black women's experiences and provide correctives to scientific studies, which demonize the images of Black women and undermine the value of their lives. Karanja places a premium on Black women's writing: "Writers should write; non-writers should assist them in making that possible, or at least not stand in their path." She highlights the importance of the imagination, of dreams, as indicated in Dust Tracks on a Road, as "the creative force that later becomes a road map for the mature woman." She sees Black women's stories as instructive and redemptive and considers them primary sources of inspiration and self- awareness. They awaken in the reader a sense of her own agency. As Pheoby" 'growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin''" to Janie, so Black women find, embedded in the texts of Black women writers, recognition, approbation, encouragement, and regeneration. Karanja holds Zora Neale Hurston up as an exemplary Black woman writer and her character, Janie Mae Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as symbolic of "true Black womanhood." According to Karanja, Janie was "the multidimensional Black woman of [Hurston's] inner vision.... Think of Janie as a skeletal frame that we might build on Black womanflesh."

Though Karanja extols Hurston's work as "culture bearer" and literary foremother, and her legacy of resistance, resilience, and achievement, she underscores the pain of her purchase: marginality, invidious criticism and personal scrutiny, impoverishment, ill health, and social alienation. Hurston's determination and resiliency always allowed her to continue to write. But when "stressed to excess," and with no community to sustain her, concludes Karanja, Hurston succumbed to "old square toes." In the last of the four sets, "Full Moon: 'Things Suffered, Things Enjoyed, Things Done and Undone,'" Karanja explores the waning years of Hurston's life as a "mature woman"; that is, a woman "in, or approaching, menopause." She probes Hurston's interior life, speculating on her emotional and psychological states, and examines the effects of aging, as well as ill health and penury, on Hurston's productivity. Her probing yields poignant questions: What did it mean to a woman for whom "work was her life" not to be successf ul, anymore, at her work? What is there to learn in the irony of a writer whose work valued deep friendship, enduring relationships, and community but was without such support in her maturity. Must the cost of a Black woman's choice to write or otherwise to follow the dictates of her mind be dear? What circumstances are conducive to the generation of healthy Black womanhood? Is there legitimacy in the notion of a "true Black womanhood"? Is such a notion inherently conflictual?