Booktv wants to know what youre reading this summer. Tweet us booktv or post it on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Welcome once again, to the next panel discussion. May we have you listening please . Thank you, so much. This panel, i love myself when im laughing a century or more, a century and more of Zora Neale Hurston. I had the pleasure of using the moderator todays discussion. Farah jasmine griffin. She is author of five books. The focus of her stud study of cultural history. D she is professor of english and comparative literature studies. She has a book, comparativehe history of black women. Ladies and gentlemen, far a jasmine griffin. [applause] thank you and good afternoon. I know youre here because you love hurston, not because this is one of the only cant hear . Is that better . No . I will keep talking until you can hear me. I will try to speak a little more loud did i. Is that Getting Better . Food. I know youre here because you love Zora Neale Hurston, not because this is one of the only airconditioned venues today. Wholly appropriate we have the panel on hurston here in harlem which is a place she called home, a place thain inspired much of her work. Place that a place that started and catalyzed her career. This were will mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. She continues to be a writer and figure that mesmerizes us. Were joined by a group of thinkers, scholars, writers who spent quite a bit of time thinking about hurston and her work. I will give brief introductions of them. F well have a discussion and open it up to you. Our first speaker is yvette christianse. She is beloved friend and colleague. Like hurston, yvette writes in multiple forms. It she is accomplished poet. She is author of a beautifule novel, the unconfessed, i recommend you read, even if you dont have time and also a scholar, a literary scholar having written one of the most important books on Tony Morrison. She teaches at barnard college. So yvette will be our first speaker. Cheryl wall is leading hurston scholar. I cant think of anyone whol knows more about Zora Neale Hurston and her ken testimony aries than cheryl wall who is significant and important critic and leader in our field. She is the author of, worrying the line, black women writers, lineage and tradition and women in the harlem renaissance. She is a beloved professor at Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick department of english. And our final speaker is rich blint. Many of you may know rich. He has quite the profile as sort of a curator of important cultural figure in our art scene. A writer, a scholar, and if cheryl is the leading scholar of hurston, rich is one of the leading scholars of James Baldwin. He is the coeditor of a special issue of africanamerican review which came out in winter 2013 but you can still get it as well as contributing editor of the James Baldwin review. Please join me welcoming these three extraordinary thinkers and writers. [applause] so there is never enough time to talk about Zora Neale Hurston. I thought i would open with a leading question that would allow our panelists to say, give Opening Statements about their thoughts on Zora Neale Hurston. If they would share their opening thoughts. If you are able to consider thi question in the context. I whatever you say i think will address this question, why should we still read Zora Neale Hurston 100 years after her birth . Start with yvette. Th . The. Well, i just want to say how wonderful it is to be on a panel. First i want to say how wonderful it is to be on this panel and particularly because this panel is sponsored by the feminist press, which is held a candle and kept it burning bright. Cant hear . I really am projecting. I think people in the front row will feel im shouting at you. I am just going to join the glorious shout that is zora kneel hurstons style. Hurston is so important to us. Two polls that existed in her life also says something about the way we read between her andt her writing. Most two polls were marked out by her parents. Her mother, who encouraged her to jump at the moon and her father who said, dont do that, dont get too uppity you will make white folks nervous and they wont like it. Those to me seem to be a fork in the road for hurston. One is i think about hurstons jumping and her jumping of all of her forms of writing which went from reporting the and indventing. The anthropologist, fiction writer, essayist and thinker. They were supposed to negotiate those very hour dells and rein the dislikes, those cautions, insistent on containment her father warned her about. I think when we read hurston now, particularly for those of us who were teachers, we often conflate hurston with her writings and i think it is absolutely an ethical issue to read hurston now more as the inventor, as the writer, able to read her writing. We may see some wonderful things as were doing that. And one of the earlier panels was about trying to get students to read, children to read. Reading is a form of listening, and hurston understood this so powerfully. If were nervous about president obama and he is nervousness about being too black in the eyes of the congress, we alsoin cant be nervous about whatso seems to be impossible, improbable, rude speech. I dont think president obama would ever yell as Zora Neale Hurston did when she won second prize for her play, color struck, she said, color struck. She wasnt demur. That was a different time. She found a way to negotiate the demands of respectability and attainment and behavior that hei father said she needed to observe and that jumping. I think the key for young people today, even for those of us who are in our 60s, it remains a critical issue and hurstons writings keep showing us again and again. That is my opening shot. My opening good afternoon. And im happy to be with all of you and i do believe with far a thank you for farah. The title the panel, i love myself, is something that i think is a wonderful startingtha point because we take it for granted for in this era of children being raised to have selfesteem, that children necessarily had selfesteem. Hurston came up in a time when nobody liked black people. Most black people did not love black people and the fact that she and loved black people without hesitation is that fact sets her apart. I do believe that the is first lesson that we can learn from Zora Neale Hurston and one of the reasons we should continue to read her. I imagine that most of you have read, their eyes are watching god, and one of the reasons i love reading their eyes are watching god, is the pleasure of their eyes are watching god. I laugh out loud every time i read it, even though i have read it two dozen times. There is still lines that i hear and i do try to read their eyes are watching god out loud at least a few passages and every time i teach the novel, the first class, a couple of students will raise hands and say, i cant understand this dialect. I cant read this. And i tell them, go home, read it aloud just as it is written. And if you do that, you willd hear the beauty and the humor in that language. That didnt just happen. To follow up on the comments. Zora Neale Hurston listens as we listened to the way ordinary black people spoke. She wasnt ashamed of how wespe. Speak. She loves how we speak. She loves the line, on the first page, the people on the porch,en they pass nations through their mouths. There was nothing black people couldnt talk about and have an opinion about and hurston took black people seriously at a time when that was not the norm. And sometimes even today, weree good to laugh at, were good to play, watch, play sports, but she took our opinions seriously. And i do believe thatss something that we can, and should continue to emulate. So two things, read Zora Neale Hurston because it gives us pleasure, it brings us joy. We should Zora Neale Hurston because she has much to teach us about loving ourselves. [applause] i think thats a really important question why Zora Neale Hurston is relevant now 125 years after her birth and, for me, Zora Neale Hurston came into my life when i was 6 00 teen. I had just been in the country for like four years, right . I was reading into these honors classes the iliad. Chaucer, really european things she became at a moment in my life which someone scared my mother. Why are you building a library . I went to the library i excaned excan excavated things that were nourishing to me. And i whole bunch, i Read Everything in the early part, in my late teens. With what i found was this example, because she was incredibly productive, her output but she was like contradictory, right . In a profound way. She was a republican but you know, she was fighting with Langston Hughes. She was doing all these things. She said in 1943 to collins, she is going to go the way of her own mind. So she is fiercely independent, a sovereign self. And why she is relevant now, which is also important, what was stunning to me reading everything together so much is the kind earlier assimulation, literary process but something to get me through a different kind of education. Was that she said like the dead human cold rocks like the says, commonplace [inaudible] where she has been, what she has done and we have to Pay Attention to that. So for me she serves as a model now of, beside her death in that way which is kind of tragic but she, is someone who said there o is no mourning bench for me,t right . She was for social justice s seriously, and at same timeme anachronistic around, you couldnt pin her down. Right. So that model of fierce independent spirit is why she is important today. She is also one of the most Brilliant Minds and hilarious figures of the early and mid 20th century. She just that. And, again because of where she died she reminds me a little bit that black women remained in my mind, farah, you were at last which is kind of stunning, i heard about it, i couldnt makes it because i was doing something elsewhere Kimberly Crenshaw asked people to stand up for the name of the black men who were killed and everyone stood up, from what i heard. When names of black women were killed, everyone took their seat because no one knew the names quite the same way. So i think zoras death, but her voice around feminist impulse in literature, there is certain kind of ugly correspondence there that youth should Pay Attention to, timely and contemporaneous and remind us of the work yet to do. So that is my opening salvo. O. Those are wonderful. So many ways we can go with what each of you said. Two things im hearing i would like to follow up on, especially yvette and cheryl, but also rich, if you could talk about hurstons use of language. When she does with the language so unique and rare. And also we can think about something rich said, we can follow that up with, rich talked about hurstons contradictions. Her contradictions are so fascinating, you know i think also sustained our inquiry as well. So lets start with her language and maybe talk about her contribution shuns. Contradictions. I had to Pay Attention and actually write something, so could i take a few minutes i would something you wrote. Im, i was thinking you know, in this wonderful new book that feminist press put out, i love myself and im laughing, the introductory essay is about alice walker and alice walker opens that with an account that says you know, hurston still makes many of us nervous and uncomfortable and she talksto about this friend who says, i dont think i would have liked her. I talked with someone else and neither of us would have, and the reason they wouldnt have liked her because of her behavior at private event when she had received that second prize for color color struck. I dont know why. I keep want to call it color counts but color struck. And hurston walked into thatt prize event and yelled the name of the prize, and for walkersat friends, this was just really a sign they wouldnt like her. But i think that yell is the thing that is important. She does not demure. And she just does what someone else had done earlier in american letters and for which he received and elevated to the highest status and prize. Im speaking of course of walt whitman. T so it sounded, he is selfproclaimed loud barbaric yelp across the rooftops of the world. He cleared the air and was lauded for it. I think hurston always all her life was clearing the air, but the way she did it was different. It wasnt with a certain kind of masculine bravado. I think she did it in the way that, in, the eyes of watching god, her grandmother teaches her in beautiful language, i dont want you to be raised to be a spit cup. Oh, damn, right . I want to read this. This is a moment where you see her achieving her craft. She achieved so many but this is just one and she is moving between the poles. There are other poles that still parallel those that her parents laid out for her. And that was, over what was proper for a college educatededd ethnographer the syntax is all there. I can do it. The spontaneity and legitimacy of other way she carries in reality. Also what i would like to say are instances instances when shr own in other ways and theyrenci important. So that is the right lift. Hurston writes, my search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places an adventures this is a straightforward sentence. It is a establishing, foreshadowing and a tense that is past tense. A tense can sustain, stablize and secure, correct . She said my life was in danger several times and it continues to rattle ordinary progress. In the way of story telling and there is a, and then, there is shift from the personal to the general. And we glimpsed the language that she learned from an throwo. Apology. The fact that anthropology had to unlearn those terms. She writes, primitive minds are quick to sunshine and quick to anger. Al throw anthropology, her right write something quick to sunshine and quick to anger. Security of the past tense is on notice she is destablized. She writes some little word or look, gesture to either love or stick a knife between your ribs. Someone is certainly close by and looking and is right there and you feel her ribs as you perhaps move toward her too. The past is now. It is here, it is a killer singing, im going to make me a graveyard of my own. It is present and it is also staking out the future. Im, i am, and i am going to make. Hurston who is dared to go in search of knowledge is in polk county with water that tasted like cherry wine where they sell great trees of axe and muscle. Here you see the past, time and space are beginning to lose their proper boundaries. The tenses shift and were in one of those big saw mill turn turn turpentine places where the law is lax. And she sets song where it should be, narrow margins and sucks the margins from the language margins of prose and left margin of obedience and right margin of adventure. She makes language visible and audible. She puts exclamation marks in, polk county and ah. The exclamation mark is a brisk and ah is word saying Something Holding the place for the word that is yet to come. I would like to think that is where you see hurston the writer inventing, making another place. Now we may breathe with her. We may feel the breath. We may assume that it is hurston tinge singing that sock and it may not be. If it is hurston, may not be the hurston we want to be stable but not sure she is one we want to be stable. Want to bring that language to us. To there you have a master reader who brings all of everything she has to bear to reading hurston. So thank you for sharing your reading with us. Cheryl . To bounce off of that, a couple things back out. Hurston in polk county, florida. A woman traveling by herself. A woman who is student at barnard. A black woman who is a student at barnard in 1926. Then she is at a Migrant Worker camp in polk county where she just doesnt show up and say, im here to teach you. She doesnt show up to say, im here for an hour, an afternoon, stays overnight and overnight and for days, she goes with this group of people working, with them as they work. She joins the community. And im always humbled by her sense of example as a scholar, whereas scholars in the academy, we, we think and we do work hard, and we do take our work seriously. But this level of commitment, is just beyond anything of us can ask. She is talking about how she has the language, the language of her education and the language which she grew up and the language of the people that she is working with. I once interviewed one of her classmates from howard university. This woman lived inro jacksonville, florida where one of hurstons brothers had run a Grocery Store for many years and this woman remembers zora, but she did want me to know that after howard zora really went backwards, was her phrase. And i knew what she meant was that hurston had started or rather resumed speaking in the way that she had spoken before she got to howard. For for this woman it was a sign much her going backwards. For hurston it was a sign of her coming more fully into herself. She refused this idea that black people spoke the way they did, by that i mean to be specific, rural southern black people spoke the way they did because they didnt know any better. They hadnt had enough education. Hurston, no, she said they spoke the way they did because they thought that way in their words and their words were beautiful. This idea, how do i get that on the page, that wasnt an easy thing. I love the way that yvette has taken that passage to say that a hurston uses that word hop, and does it multiple places in her writing, sometimes to help us hear a preacher and his rythym in the sermon. Sometimes to help us here the rythym of the folk singers because it is not easy to render the oral culture literate. That takes a lot of skill as any of us know if we try to transcribe the conversation we had with our friend on the phone last night, it will be a challenging thing to write that in a way that somebody else can read it and understand it. But hurston had that com