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Tag: zora neale hurston
Black women’s book club leader Well-Read Black Girl announced Thursday its partnership with W.W. Norton & Co. imprint Liveright for a series focused on highlighting fiction written by female and nonbinary authors.
Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim made the announcement on Instagram about the WRBG x Liveright series that will debut in 2023 under the goal to publish two books a year. The series will acquire agented manuscript submissions for now from writers who identify as female and nonbinary, particularly focusing on writers of color and underrepresented voices, with the help of Liveright editor Gina Iaquinta.
“I am deeply aware of the deep structural changes occurring in the publishing industry and public education—and the tide of rising dissent that threatens to silence authors of color and queer, non-binary, trans and disabled writers—it is the perfect time to expand our collective work,” Glory writes in the post. “We need equity and diversity in these vital spaces!”
“The word is out! @LiverightPub is collaborating with the fabulous @guidetoglo!” Gina writes in a tweet. “It’s such an honor to be involved in @wellreadblkgirl‘s thrilling new chapter. One million cheers to @CordeliaCalvert @LiverightPub for making this possible.”
Glory’s social media post says more announcements will be coming down the pike soon. Currently, the series is looking for novels, short stories, and unconventional fiction.
Liveright published Glory’s second anthology On Girlhood last October. The book features works by Toni Cade Bambara, Edwidge Danticat, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves by Glory Edim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Well-Read Black Girl is an anthology by Black female writers who discuss how they became writers, but while some stories strike a chord, others lack depth.
Between the stories, the anthology has lists of written works by Black women to check out. It’s a valuable resource for a to-be-read list. The writers themselves usually mention a work that changed their life and directed them to writing. Jesmyn Ward discusses the unexpected Black girl magic within Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg. Dhonielle Clayton credits Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair with making her realize her sexuality. Zinzi Clemmons discovers how close she grew up next to the Brooklyn brownstones highlighted in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mahogany L. Browne compares the girls in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to the ones she grew up with in Northern California and how they all felt invisible as Black girls.
While some essays mostly focus on one experience and one book, others broaden their journey. Rebecca Walker talks about being Alice Walker’s daughter and how hanging out with Black female writing dynamos informed her future career. Gabourey Sidibe writes about her mother’s disappointment in having a daughter and how that motivated her to live her best life. Renee Watson tells the story of how she became a Rose Festival Princess in Portland despite being a big Black girl expected to lose and how Lucille Clifton’s poetry later moved her to accept her body.
The anthology gives insight to what inspires some of the top Black female writers, but it comes off as a collection meant for a younger audience. The theme of how you became a writer or what it means to be a Black writer also simplifies the essays with several mentioning well-known books as inspiration with similar reasoning. Marita Golden writes about Zora Neale Hurston’s impact on her career, particularly with Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora is an expected source of inspiration due to her popularity, and the essays that highlight other lesser-known Black writers resonate better and make you feel as the reader you’re learning about or being reminded of a writer’s legacy.
Overall, the anthology is entertaining, but some stories are better than others and what inspires authors can sometimes be interesting and sometimes not, depending on how they write their inspiration story.
View all my reviews
Perched on The New York Times Best Sellers list for the past four weeks with an HBO miniseries in the works, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is the anti-racism novel we need right now as the country grips with another tide of facing race relations.
The Vanishing Half, a novel in the 350-page range in the hardcover format, follows light-skinned Black twin sisters as they run away from their unique Louisiana town with only people of their complexions to New Orleans in the 1950s. As they adjust to their new lives, one twin disappears without a trace to pass as White to marry her White boss while the other one returns home after her abusive marriage to a dark-skinned Black man.
The colorism conversation when it comes to “passing”—when someone decides to disguise themselves in another race or ethnicity for a better quality of life—has been seen in previous books from decades prior when the act was practiced more often.
Passing was more common in the early 20th century amid the Great Migration and European immigration defining the big cities. Mostly when passing is mentioned, it’s in reference to Blacks with complexions light enough to pass as White, but European immigrants also practiced this with some considered to have darker skin like Italians passing for Jews, Jews passing for Gentiles, Poles passing for Germans, and Whites passing for Blacks, according to Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature by Werner Sollors.
At the end of The Vanishing Half, Brit says she was inspired by Imitation of Life, more the 1959 film rather than the 1933 novel it was based on by White Jewish author Fannie Hurst, who came under fire at the time for stereotypical presentations of the Black mother character as a Mammy figure and her light-skinned daughter as a tragic mulatta passing as White. Culturally, it’s become a cinematic classic with Black mothers using the film as a cautionary tale for their Black daughters to not neglect their matriarchs under any circumstances, especially for White privilege.
During the Harlem Renaissance, Fannie also was a secretary for now-celebrated author Zora Neale Hurston while famed poet Langston Hughes created a satire play of Imitation of Life that reversed the roles with a Black family and a White maid. For insight on the tumultuous friendship of Zora and Langston mainly due to their relationships with others in the movement and their disagreements about their plays, check out Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal by Yuval Taylor.
The practice of passing has left holes in Black families since the end of slavery, and it’s a topic that’s still relevant today as people may or may not defend their ethnicities based on their looks. Nella Larsen, a biracial author from the Harlem Renaissance wrote a 1929 novel called Passing, a tale about two Black childhood friends in 1920s New York who are both light-skinned enough to pass as White. One woman does pass while the other stays in the Black community, similar to The Vanishing Half. Starring actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, Passing will be a film set for release this year, according to IMDb.
Nella, a daughter of a Danish woman and a Danish West Indian man, was considered a rising star in the Harlem Renaissance with Passing and her only other novel Quicksand. After becoming the first Black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship that she used for an artistic journey through Europe, she returned to New York and her nursing career, shedding her novelist life. With growing up in an all-White family after her father died and her mother remarried, her novels are considered semi-autobiographical.
The Passing film’s directors, Deborah Riley Draper and Jennifer Galvin, are also developing a TV series on the book described as “Downton Abbey meets Get Out.” And with The Vanishing Half also being turned into a miniseries for TV, stories on the history of racial passing, particularly for Black women, may gain more attention.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Barracoon” by Zora Neale Hurston is an interesting nonfiction piece from a voice that’s rare in our literature.
Cudjoe Lewis aka Kazoola at the time was considered the sole survivor of the slave ship Clotilda, which brought 150 people in 1860 from around Benin in Africa after the ban on ships from going to the continent. Because of the secretive act, the slaves worked on the Alabama coastline. Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjoe while a graduate student of anthropology in the late 1920s. She would go to his home and discuss his life, where he vividly recalls his life in Africa.
The book is mostly his folktale-sounding true stories from his native land involving how the king interacted with the people and how his father worked for the king. He talks about how he was brought to the king with the others and corralled onto the ship. He shudders at the horrendous journey to America, a strange place where he said it took him and the others from his homeland awhile to learn how to tend to the land, especially the sugarcane. He’s a slave for five years until the Union soldiers arrive in town and tell him he’s free. He asks where does he go now, and the soldiers don’t know. The community settles in what they call Africatown, modern-day Plateau, Alabama, where most of the descendants are African-born from the Clotilda. Cudjoe talks about the family he started and how they were gone by the time he’s speaking with Zora, even mentioning how one of his sons was shot dead by a police officer and how he had to look at his son’s disfigurement to understand what had happened.
It’s a quick read that made me research more on Cudjoe – there’s not enough of his story there, yet it’s there. It’s an interesting journey from living a regular life in Africa to adjusting to a new life in America he did not ask for or want. He expresses his longing to return home, especially with the family he started in America passing before him. The way he loses his son to a gun is the way many black families still lose their sons. He talks about being criticized by other African Americans because he was African and remembered Africa and preferred his African name, a sentiment still felt for African immigrants in America. The book opens the reader to a part of history from a personal account we rarely hear from, similar to “12 Years A Slave” by Solomon Northrup though that’s a first-person account.