Kirstine's Reviews > Their Eyes Were Watching God

I imagine most writers, and people who want to be writers, have lines that haunt them. Lines someone else wrote that just made you go "Oh... Shit. Fuck.", because you knew you hadn't written them and would perhaps never write lines to match them.

I'm not a writer of fiction, but if I ever become one, these are the lines that will haunt me:

“He looked like the love thoughts of women. [...] He was a glance from God.”

Those are the lines I would strive, in both small and big ways, to overcome, to surmount and to honor with every word that came out of me. Those words I'd chase down and reckon with.

When I finished reading this I took a long walk, and those lines were all I thought about. It was like they had imprinted themselves onto me, in some concrete way. I don't know exactly why. Except they struck something true within me.

I don't know how anyone wrote lines like that. I don't know how she managed to write a whole book of them.

I don't know much about the period or the people that inhabit this book. But something about it felt so extremely true in its depictions of Janie's both physical and emotional life. The way Janie felt things, they way she described her inner being's relation to the outside world, it always seemed almost bordering on the magical, without, of course, being so. But the way she feels things so intensely, like there was a whole world inside of her, waiting to burst out.

And the way she welcomes her emotions, lives by them and honors them. Her life is a quest for love, real love, because this is how the spring inside of her will blossom. And the tragedy is that love is very difficult to come by, and when you have it you might very well lose it.

Hers is a life of challenges, hurdles and men, who want to rule her. Through it all Janie is, without truly faltering, her own. She feels no shame for her choices, no regret for the life she's lived or might yet still come to live.

I think that, perhaps, Janie is a very good role model in many ways. Not in the way she manages to lock down her innerself and hide it, when her husband forces her to live a life she doesn't want, but in the way she lets that innerself free again. The way she lets herself find a greater, transcendent good in love and in loving truly, because that significant someone knows you.

The way she doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks.

It's also an incredibly nuanced book when it comes to the complexities of racial inequality, internalized racism and the aftermath of slavery, colonialism, and a community that is still very much segregated. In that it's very educational, and most of all very, very poignant.

I don't necessarily think all classics are masterpieces. But this one, I feel, very much is. In any case, the words of Zora Neale Hurston, in all their steady elegance and dedication towards nuance and honesty, are words that will haunt me.