The Zombie in/as the text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Amy Fass Emery

In foregrounding the ambiguity about the provenance of utterances made by the "horse," Hurston points to the double-voiced nature of her own narrative strategy. Just as for the "horse," for Hurston there is both freedom and constraint in language, the possibility for self-expression coexists with the risk of vulnerability, of having one's voice taken over by more powerful others. The horse/loa dynamic may have suggested to Hurston as well her potential complicity in the parasitic ventriloquism that anthropologists perform with unwitting subjects, speaking through them and effectively rendering them voiceless. Hurston's sense of her own vulnerability is mirrored in that of the folk from whom she collected folktales; throughout her career, she searched for a style in which to convey the richness of black folklore as performance in writing without draining it of its dynamic, creative spirit, of its living voice.

Although some critics have felt that Hurston's position on voodoo is celebratory, its potential for malevolent activity seems to have impressed itself deeply on her consciousness. (5) Voodoo's menace lies in its ability to exploit the vulnerability of its victims through sorcery. Hurston's awareness of her vulnerability is everywhere expressed in her writing, as she often dramatizes putting the self at risk. Her autobiography has been read as evasive and incoherent, more concealing than revealing--a stance that suggests a need to protect the self from malicious readers. In Mules and Men she dramatizes her vulnerability by involving her character Zora in a knife fight in a seedy jook [that is, a bar] that she barely escapes unscathed. In the hoodoo section of Mules and Men she finds herself in New Orleans in the exceedingly vulnerable position of being stretched out naked on a mat for three days during her initiation into the mysteries. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novel's protagonist Janie is wounded in a fight to the death with her lover Tea Cake who, maddened by rabies, bites her arm and draws blood. This wound marks at once Janie's vulnerability and Hurston's sensitivity to the vulnerable position; as James Clifford notes, the etymology of the word "vulnerable" relates it to rending or wounding (Predicament 43). (6)

Robert Hemenway reports that Hurston became deathly ill in Haiti and, fearing that her illness was caused by voodoo poisons as a warning to end her quest to uncover voodoo mysteries, she in fact was frightened enough to keep her distance (248-49). The fear of physical harm that intervenes in Hurston's research causes an "epistemological failure" that can be sensed in the distance that she creates rhetorically in the text with respect to voodoo. (7) One way that Hurston distances herself from the voodoo material is through a liberal use of unattributed, generalized statements such as, "All over Haiti it is well established that Damballah is identified as Moses" (116); "The rod of Moses is said to have been a subtle serpent" (116); "They say that many witch doctors in Africa can so hypnotize a snake that it can be made rigid and seemingly lifeless and carried as a cane and brought to life again at the will of the witch doctor" (118); "The average houngan says that he is given the white cock and hen because he guards domestic happiness" (119); and "It is said that no girl will gain a husband if an altar to Erzulie is in the house" (122). (8)