Page 1: Their Eyes Were Watching God

I remember going to the local library with my mum and my sister when I was little. We would sit in the children’s section on these small red and yellow plastic chairs that circled a few low-down tables, and there you’d see mums and dads, or older siblings, or guardians and tutors, reading to children. It might be their first book, or they’re just learning how to make out the sound of a string of letters placed back-to-back and round out a word in the mouth. And I look back and feel quite warm about it at all, the idea that this was perhaps for many the earliest times of reading, of discovering new worlds; of travelling far and wide even if they’d only actually spent that afternoon in the local library with mum, as I had. And when I look back I wonder how many of a person’s earliest wishes and dreams were planted by a book, whether that be a character or a place, or a sense of adventure.

As I got older, I stopped going to that library and only found myself needing to go in a handful of times, but every time I return I can still see the same red and yellow chairs in the children’s section and there are always, and will always be, children learning their first words and being told their first stories in libraries. Presumably I’ll have children of my own someday, and I’ll take them to a local library too, or maybe back to the same one, where stories of adventure and wishes and dreams first found me.

*

Page 1 of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston:

‘Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.’

So, the beauty of this opening is in the smoothness of the set-up that starts rather zoomed out and then zooms in a little closer. It makes me think of a bird, an eagle perhaps, soaring over the ships and coming in with the tide, and how much they can see in a moment. We often use the term ‘bird’s eye view’, meaning a general view from above, and that could easily be used to describe the figurative language and imagery of ships on a horizon and the view of a tide coming in, but birds of prey like eagles and hawks and falcons, for example, have the unique ability to zoom in on objects, and I think we feel that subtle shift in focus here, once we move from the lives of men to the lives of women.

The narrator is perhaps trying to establish a fundamental difference between men and women in this way, and in doing so, state their major theme for the novel; gender, and all that that might come with, in terms of inequality, love, and relationships, and opportunities for self-discovery.

Alongside this reckoning with the sexes, we have the images of the natural world, which are a significant symbol in the novel itself. We have the tide and the horizon, which I always feel is an expansive image full of hope and possibility but in this sense, it’s rather a symbol of yearning and unrealised hopes. Later in the novel, there’s the destructive force of a hurricane, that brings with it the dark, haunting reality of the dangers of nature. That often reminds me of my grandmother, who I’d confidently say is scared of no man, but she is frightened of the wind.

We also know we’re talking about men and women here, not girls and boys, so there’s an established line between childhood and adulthood marked, and that that fork in the road is where boys and girls go off in their different directions, their different ways of seeing the world—once a sense of self is established perhaps, and we start to consider what we might want for ourselves. There seems to be a question coming up for me about what this ‘dream’ is for women, and what that ‘wish’ might be for the men, a wish that seems contained, outside of themselves, on board a ship. It reminds me of the Langston Hughes poem, A Dream Deferred, written in 1951:

What happens to a dream deferred

Does it dry up 

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

*

In the poem, Hughes is speaking about a dream deferred by an individual, not by circumstance or tragedy, but by some lack of action and in a sense, a procrastination, a putting off of one’s dream, ‘deferring’ them to a later date that never comes and the consequences of that action on the dream itself. Now, this resemblance in feeling isn’t surprising to me since both of these writers were popular at the same time. They were both part of the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, for a good period of time, Hurston and Hughes were best friends, until their collaboration on a play The Mule-Bone, which never reached the page nor the stage, led to a well-known literary feud, and the two supposedly never spoke again.

But for me, Hughes’s poem relates back to the opening of Hurston’s novel, in the way the men seem to cast their wishes off onto the ships on the horizon. They cast their direction in life, their trajectory, to something outside of themselves and in this way, they seem to have no control. They ‘turn away in resignation’ at the sight of their ‘deferred’ dreams, while time watches, mocking them. On the other hand, for Hurston, a woman’s dream is contained within her and we see this in the chiastic sentence (chiasmus being a literary device that involves repeating a concept in reverse order but using different words to express it), ‘women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget’, the repetition of ‘forget’ and ‘remember’ brings this sense of circularity, which makes things feel smooth, complete, tidy almost. It adds a rhythm to the line, a steady right foot, left foot, right foot, left, and it makes me feel the purposefulness of women in this passage. It reminds me of my mum, or my grandmother, or my sister, and the steadfast determination I’ve always come across in the women in my life.

Where structurally the sentences about men feel loose, searching, grasping; two simple sentences climaxing into one longer, complex sentence that talks about the Watcher and Time respectively, there’s a suggested, delicate longing to the wishes of men that is perhaps suggesting their wishes are too fragile, always there, but too intangible, ‘never out of sight, never landing’. At the same time, the narrator seems to have no time to dwell on that. ‘That is the life of men’, is the decisive, declarative sentence to end this thought. There’s an assertion of inevitability there too, for the lives of men, and later women, and the suggestion that this is a universal truth of some sort.

There’s something interesting too, in the way for men we have the word ‘wish’ and for women the word ‘dream’. To me, a dream is a much deeper, transcendental feeling. Where a wish is a verb, something you do, something you cast or make when you blow out the candle on your birthday cake; a dream is a noun, and it’s a thing that swells inside of you, and is often quite closely related to the story we’d like to one day tell of ourselves, or are already telling of ourselves. And if our dreams are within us and not outside of us, then, as the women in Hurston’s opening, and the women that I myself know, we must ‘act and do things accordingly’.

*

It’s the end of January now, so I imagine many of us, myself included, have cast our wishes for the year, and are acting on our dreams for the future. January is a month that, for some reason, we trust with all our hopes and, often put immense pressure on to set the tone for the year ahead, the adventures we want to take, and I wonder then, whether all of us are the men and women in this opening—we are the Watchers and the doers, and while time may be mocking us all, perhaps our dreams will outlive it.

*

This passage comes from the opening of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1937 by J.B. Lippincott, an imprint since acquired by Harper Collins. The novel was initially poorly received, but thankfully experienced a revival in the late 70s and 80s and has since been recognised as one of the most influential novels of our time. Hurston was an anthropologist, folklorist, documentary filmmaker, and writer. She died in 1960 on January 28th.