Zora Neale Hurston and Talking Between Cultures

Canadian Review of American Studies 1992 Special Issue, Part I 141 Zora Neale Hurston and Talking Between Cultures Mary O'Connor The glamour of Barnard college was still upon me . . . . I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, 'Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?' The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. (Hurston [1942] 1991, 128) Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, learned soon after her first anthropological field trip to the American south in 1927that she would have to talk in other accents if she was ever to collect and document the rich treasuries of African-American culture.1 Her Bamardese and scientific notebooks would get her nowhere. She herself had been born in the allblack town of Eatonville, Florida, had lived in fact with people who told their tales and sang their songs in the very dialect she was now trying to document objectively, but she had been away for fifteen years learning the language of another class and another race. She studied literature at Howard University, in Washington, and then anthropology at Barnard and Columbia, in New York. Having published stories in the Howard literary magazine, Stylus, and some poetry in the Negro World, she arrived in New York in 1925 with, she claimed, $1.50 in her purse, ready to become an author (Hemenway 1977, 3).2 She made friends with both the AfricanAmerican artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their white patrons, and succeeded eventually in publishing four novels, two books of folklore, one 142 Canadian Review of American Studies autobiography, some plays and theatre revues, and numerous newspaper articles.3 She also continued her field work, long after she had abandoned academic anthropology, collecting examples of African-American and Caribbean culture in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Haiti, Jamaica, and Honduras. Zora's position between Barnard and Polk County, between the literati of Harlem and the oral culture of Florida, between the anthropologist's scientific method-"the spy-glassof objectivity," as she calls it (Mules, [1935] 1990, 1)-and the jook joint's "woofing," "lying," and "specifying," is emblematic of other problematic "positions" crucial to our times. Inside and out are not interchangeable positions. How was Zora Neale Hurston able to move from one culture to another? How successful was she at translating one for the other? Can her work stand as a model for what must be one of our own most pressing political and cultural needs: talking between cultures ? Not only do our multicultural debates in education demand strategies for dealing with the introduction of noncanonical works into the curriculum, but the shrinking of the world through media coverage, economic connections , and mass migration, not to mention "ethnic cleansing," demand that we develop successful ways of communicating between cultures. Here and throughout this paper I stress talking as opposed to more institutionalized forms of negotiation to emphasise the need for colloquial encounters. Talking implies agency, and the possibility of an unfinished process that allows for constant modulation and mutual change. It necessarily implies a reciprocal process of listening. Anthropology as a way of knowing the world has presented various models of the meeting of two cultures, some less palatable than others. The question of how we negotiate between our history and another's must in some way be resolved through what Talal Asad calls a "genuine dialogue" between the two (quoted in Mohanty 1989, 15).The risk of staying removed and "objective" is that one imposes one's own framework of analysis and interpretation on the other culture, thereby falsifying it. The risk of total immersion ("going native") is that one loses the ability to translate the other's culture into one's own. Any intervention of one culture into another must, as Satya Mohanty has argued, include "the possibility that the interpreter and her analytic apparatus might be fundamentally challenged and Mary O'Connor I 143 changed by the material she (and it) are attempting to 'assess"' (1989, 10-11). The relation between the two must be a "true hermeneutic moment...