Part 1: "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

The writing style of Zora Neale Hurston is awesomely gifted. She has an extraordinary way of entertaining her readers with her selection of words. In part one of my review on Their Eyes Were Watching God, I discovered Zora’s beautiful dance with the reader by her usage of enticing literary talent. Zora’s characters come alive to reach out and touch us.

Zora tells her story though poetical expression. Each of her sentences is crafted so that you must re-read the passage for the sheer pleasure of tasting the words as though you would by savoring the taste of a juicy fruit.

I decided to make this a two-part review and a two-week live chat discussion for several reasons:

(1) To always give due praise to my ancestors for paving in order for me to succeed.

(2) To savor the magnificent talent and intellectual creativity of the artists.

(3) And why not! For that is the spiritual purpose of writers - to keep their readers feeling, guessing and loving to dissolve the writer's classic work of literature or art.

In part one of my review I will cover Chapter 1 to Chapter 9, where in the first chapter and paragraph, Zora sets the tone with exceptional ability of poetic literary writing:

“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.”

After this captivating and poetic paragraph the story continues in a town called Eatonville, Florida, when the main character, Janie, arrives back in town. The nosy neighbors watch her so intently but are able to not show how much they want to know where she has been. Janie’s good friend, Phoeby, makes it to her house to discreetly find out just where Janie has been living and doing all this time:

“Pheoby’s hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story. So she went on thinking back to her young years and explaining them to her friend in soft, easy phrases while all around the house, the nighttime put on flesh and blackness.”

The last phrase of the above section urges the reader to dance to the rhythm of Zora’s words: “the nighttime put on flesh and blackness.” Janie answers her friend by starting from the beginning, when she was a young girl and her Nanny was living and taking care of her on white folks' property.

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