by bell hooks
One must write and one must have time to write. Having time to write, time to wait through silences, time to go to the pen and paper or typewriter when the breakthrough finally comes, affects the type of work that is written. When I read contemporary black women’s fiction I see much similarity in choices of subject matter, geographical location, use of language, character formation, and style. There could be many reasons for such similarities. On the one hand, there is the reality of the social status black women share, which has been shaped by the impact of sexism and racism on our lives and shared cultural and ethic experiences. On the other hand, there is the possibility that many of us pattern work after the fiction of those writers who have been published and are able to earn a living as writers. There is also the possibility that a certain type of writing (the linear narrative story) may be easier to write because it is more acceptable to the reading public than experimental works, especially those that would not focus on themes of black experience or tell a story in a more conventional way. These restrictions apply to many groups of writers in our society. It is important that there be diversity in the types of fiction black women produce and that varied types of writing by black women receive attention and be published. There should not be a stereotyped image of a black woman writer or a preconceived assumption about the type of fiction she will produce.
It must not be assumed that the successes of contemporary black women writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and others indicate that a new day has arrived for a majority or even a substantial minority of black women writers. Their individual successes and continued creative development are crucial components of what should be an overall artistic movement to encourage and support writing by black women. Such a movement could take many forms. On a very basic level it can begin with communities stressing the importance of young black children acquiring reading and writing skills and developing along with those skills a positive attitude toward writing. Many of us learned reading and writing but disliked or hated writing. Throughout my twenty years of teaching at a number of universities I have witnessed the terror and anguish many students feel about writing. Many acknowledge that their hatred and fear of writing surfaced in grade school and gathered momentum through high school, reaching a paralyzing peak in the college years.
An intense effort to create and sustain interest in writing must take place in schools and communities. Entering writing competitions should be encouraged by parents, teachers, and friends for young writers. Black women and other people who are interested in the future development of black writers should establish more writing competitions where prizes could be as low as twenty-five dollars to stimulate interest in writing. There should be grant programs for newly published but not yet successful black women writers so that we can have a summer or a year to concentrate solely on our work. Though programs exist that fund writers (like the National Endowment for the Humanities), only the occasional lucky black woman writer receives one of these grants. Often the same few writers receive a number of grants from different sources. While this is good for the individual, it does not increase the number of black women writers receiving aid. Money could be given to a number of universities to sponsor individual black women as part of creative-writing programs.
It seems easier for black women writers to receive monetary support of one kind or another, grants, teaching positions, and talks after they have struggled in isolation and achieved success. Yet only a few black women writers make it in this way. It took me seven years to finish the writing of Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism in part because I did extensive research before writing but also because every avenue I turned toward seeking monetary support failed. I would write after working my eight hours a day at the phone company or after other jobs. When the book was completed almost six years before it was published I sent it off to a number of publishers who rejected it. Without the support of my companion, who helped both financially and emotionally (affirming me as a writer), it would have been impossible to continue. I hear this same story from other black women who know firsthand, as I do, how devastating working in isolation can be. On several occasions I contacted established black women writers seeking acceptance, advice, and critiques but got little response. However, Alice Walker was one person who told me that she was very busy but would take time to read the manuscript if she could. I did not send it to her because I felt that I was imposing, perhaps taking her attention away from her work. Also I think the other black women writers I approached were constantly asked to respond, to give support and advice to younger writers and there is a point when one must say no if you are overextended.
Black women need not be the only group who give support and affirmation to aspiring black female writers. A teacher, friend, or colleague can provide the encouragement and affirmation that fosters and promotes work. When I first met Gloria Naylor, author of the novel The Women of Brewster Place, I asked her how she had found a publisher. Gloria was a student at Yale working on an M.A. focusing on creative writing. She found support and affirmation for her work in this academic environment. It was with the help of a friend that she was able to find an editor to read her novel and consider it for publication. Having people around who affirm one during the writing process is as vital to the aspiring writer as finding someone to publish one’s work.
When I was an undergraduate taking creative-writing courses, I remember a black male poet advising me not to worry about publication but to focus on writing, then when I had produced a body of work to worry about finding a publisher. This bit of advice has been very useful over the years, reminding me that the primary emphasis for the aspiring writer has to be initially on the production of work. I find in teaching creative-writing classes that aspiring writers are often so desperate for the affirmation that comes with publication that they are not interested in rewriting, or putting away a piece for a time and coming back to it. After Ain’t I a Woman was rejected I spent almost nine months away from the work before I took the box down from its hiding place in the closet and began massive rewriting. Like Gloria Naylor, I learned from a friend who had seen their ad in a Bay Area women’s newspaper that South End Press was seeking books on feminism and race. In retrospect, despite the pain I suffered when the manuscript was continually rejected, I can see now that it was not ready for publication at that time. I now consider it fortunate that no one accepted it then. I have completed many books that focus on feminist and cultural issues, one poetry manuscript, one dissertation, two novels in manuscript, and yet I still confront daily the difficulty of providing for myself economically while seeking to grow and develop as a writer.
When I told Chinosole, a black woman friend and fellow writer-scholar, about this essay, she commented that it is amazing how much writing we black women can produce even when we are worried sick about finances and job pressures. It is my hope that the current interest in works of a few black women writers will lead to the recognition of the need to encourage and promote such writing—not just the work of famous black women but the work of unknown, struggling, aspiring writers who need to know that their creative work is important, that it deserves their concentrated attention, and that it need not be abandoned.
zora neale hurston
a subversive reading
Although much is written about Zora Neale Hurston’s life, her flamboyant personality, there is little information about her engagement with books. What writers did she read and like? Whose work influenced her writing? Robert Hemenway’s biography mentions only that
Zora learned to read before school age, and her quickness set her apart. Of all the school’s students it was the fifth grader Zora Hurston who so impressed two visiting Yankee ladies that they were moved to send her a box of books. Suddenly her single-volume library, the family’s Bible, was augmented by Grimm’s fairy tales, Greek and Roman myths, Norse legends, Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Like Hurston, diverse books I
could call my own first came into my childhood as gifts—a retired black schoolteacher was cleaning out her house and throwing away shoeboxes filled with tiny books in leather. They were the “classics” of white Western literature. From among these writers I chose one whose work influenced me, Emily Dickinson.
At thirteen, I knew I wanted to write. Confident that this was my destiny, at sixteen I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and chose another guide. She was the sister-informant, sharing the secrets of what it would mean to be a woman and a writer, telling me what I would need. I never thought of Dickinson or Woolf as “white women.” They entered the segregated world of my growing up as writers, and most importantly as women writers. Later I would learn the distance separating their experience from my own, the politics of race, sex, and class—still their work spoke to me. However, it was the discovery of black writers in general, and black women writers in particular, that fully affirmed that I could indeed become a writer, that it was vital and necessary to draw upon the experience of black culture and black life for inspiration and imaginative direction. Zora Neale Hurston became the representative mentor for me. Her background was similar to my own (rural, southern, religious, lacking in material privilege) and I was profoundly impressed by her commitment to writing, to breaking through silences, and her willingness to experiment with form and content.
Like many readers I have often thought Their Eyes Were Watching God most fascinating because of the way it challenges conventional sexist notions of woman’s role in marriage and romantic love, insisting on the importance of female self-actualization. I, too, have celebrated Hurston’s fictional portrait of love between a black woman and man. Critical attention has necessarily focused on these aspects of the novel, so intensely however that readers are inclined to overlook Hurston’s concern with the construction of “female imagination” and the formation of a critical space where woman’s creativity can be nurtured and sustained. These concerns radically inform the structure of Their Eyes Were Watching God and its narrative direction. They can be fully addressed only if readers no longer centralize Janie’s relationships with men. Strategically, the focus on romance is a device Hurston uses to engage readers while subtly interjecting a subversive narrative.
Hurston’s passion for the folktale that captivates audiences by sharing a story cast in terms that appear familiar, coupled with her sense that stories were most interesting when lies masked truth, greatly influenced her writing style. Barbara Johnson comments on this strategy:
If, as Hurston often implies, the essence of telling “lies” is the art of conforming a narrative to existing structures of address while gaining the upper hand, then Hurston’s very ability to fool us into thinking we have been fooled—is itself the only effective way of conveying the rhetoric of the “lie.”
Much of Hurston’s magic and power as a writer centers on her incredible ability to manipulate multiple plots in a single narrative. Her insistence on playful subterfuge is often missed by readers of Their Eyes Were Watching God who see the novel as conventional linear narrative weakened by textual gaps.
Discussing the work of nineteenth-century white women writers, Eva Figes reminds readers in her chapter on “The Suppressed Self” that it was “not remotely possible for women to express themselves through fiction in terms of full individuation, because they were not free.” She emphasizes that internal and external constraints ensured that woman’s subjective voice would be “expressed with a certain degree of disguise and subterfuge.” These comments hold true for black women’s writing in the early twentieth century. Structural ambiguity is not a failing in Hurston’s work, it is a tactic, leading the unsuspecting reader astray. Within traditional African-American folk culture, telling a story to a listener who perpetually misses the point was seen as an indication that they were not meant to “hear” the message. They could enjoy the story without understanding it. One constructs a tale so that it appears to address everyone even though it speaks in its deepest structure to a select few. Without a doubt, Hurston intended Their Eyes Were Watching God to be an appealing story, one that would sell to a wide audience. To enhance the likelihood of such appeal she exploits many conventional aspects of romantic fiction. Yet she was not writing a romance. There are many plots and much social commentary in Their Eyes Were Watching God. One very moving story is the romance of Janie and Tea Cake. Just as everyone comes to the courtroom to hear Janie tell her story (the narrator comments, “Who was it didn’t know about the love between Tea Cake and Janie”), it is this story more so than any other told in the novel that continues to have appeal—it speaks to everyone.
Critics talk about the love between Janie and Tea Cake as the catalyst for her self-actualization, using the metaphor of her “coming to voice”—becoming a storyteller—as a sign of female empowerment. Consistently read as a novel that celebrates Janie’s finding a voice, readers are nevertheless disturbed by the concrete fictive circumstance that frames Janie’s autonomous identity as the novel closes. Hortense Spillers’ critique implies that Hurston’s ending betrays the characterization of Janie as self-actualized. Reading the ending as a “eulogy for the living,” she suggests that “Janie has been ‘buried’ along with Tea Cake.” In an even more suspicious reading, one that goes against the grain, Mary Helen Washington asserts that the novel “represents women’s exclusion from power, particularly from the power of oral speech.” Approaching the novel primarily through a comparative lens where Janie’s status is viewed in contrast to that of men or contemporary feminist standards, these readings simplify Hurston’s vision. Spillers focuses on the persistence of Tea Cake’s presence, even after his death, and Washington calls attention to the few times Janie actually “speaks.”
They read gaps in the novel as lacks, representing Hurston’s failed or distorted insight. These gaps can be viewed as narrative clues underscoring the extent to which Hurston’s critical project was not simply to create a female hero who resists sexist oppression, asserting autonomy, selfhood. When she stops speaking through the text to a mass audience engaged in empathic identification with Janie’s effort to resolve her quest for love and selfhood, Hurston speaks to her select few. Then the novel is more a fictive manifesto on the subject of gender roles as they influence and affect the construction of the female imagination. It echoes and extends the commentary Woolf begins in A Room of One’s Own, centralizing the plight of underclass black women who might wish to develop their creative talent.
Janie’s quest for selfhood ends in her return to a space where she can be solitary, critically reflective, where she can “tell her story.” Significantly, she returns economically self-sufficient—the material conditions that Woolf charges are necessary for any woman desiring to write. Just as Woolf delivers her important comments on female creativity to an audience of women, Janie tells her story to a black woman, Pheoby, inviting her to share the tale with others. Expressing confidence in Pheoby’s ability to convey the truth of her experience, Janie offers a provocative metaphor for sisterhood, declaring, “Mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf.” Much of the language describing their friendship is romantic—intimate and familiar. As storyteller and listener they complement each other. A similar complementarity exists between Janie and the third-person narrator who intervenes and shares the telling of Janie’s story.
Unlike the conventional third-person narrator who assumes a privileged distance from the story, Hurston’s narrator is engaged, familiar, and intimate. The tone the narrator uses is akin to Janie’s even though it is a more sophisticated voice. Some critics see Hurston’s use of third-person narration as a gesture that undermines the development of Janie’s voice. Mary Helen Washington assumes that “Hurston was indeed ambivalent about giving a powerful voice to a woman like Janie who is already in rebellion against male authority and against the role prescribed for women in a male-dominated setting.” Had the story been told in Janie’s fictive patois there would have been little or no space for the inclusio
n of a wide range of folklore and folk wisdom (much of which surfaces in dialogues between characters Janie would not have been in a position to hear). Hurston’s skillful repression of Janie’s voice never jeopardizes its significance. Even though readers do not hear her voice in the courtroom scene, we learn that she moved her audience, that she achieved the desired effect. Third-person narration does not deflect attention away from that achievement, or Hurston’s didactic insistence that women must come to voice to be fully self-empowered. If Hurston was ambivalent, her concern may have been that the novel not be viewed as a fictive sociology of black folklife. Though she wanted to celebrate folk experience in her writing, she wanted readers to recognize that her novel was a carefully constructed imaginative work. Third-person narration calls attention to Hurston’s authorial voice, highlighting the importance of writing.
