#barracoon
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tagged by @mariacallous to post 9 books I’d like to read in 2025! I’m already almost halfway through my previous list from the beginning of the year, so it’s time for an update.
Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. I love music books— books about music, books about musicians, books about what music means to people, and books that capture the feel of bygone eras through their music. This book seems to be all of the above.
Mondo Tokyo: Dispatches from a Secret Japan by Patrick Macias. Speaking of books that capture a cultural zeitgeist, this one is about the rise of “bleeding edge” modern Japanese culture— the kind of stuff that, in the early 21st century, became a global phenomenon.
Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this next installment of the Susan Ryeland mystery series?? I’ve been devouring his other series (Hawthorne & Horowitz) in the meantime but now I’m out of those too. It’s time.
The Language of Clothes by Alison Lurie. Part of my ongoing quest to read every book in the world about clothes, how we wear them, and how they shape us in return.
Bluebeard’s Castle by Anna Biller. A gothic fairytale by the writer/director of The Love Witch? Say less.
Olive Days by Jessica Elisheva Emerson. Literary fiction always makes me feel highbrow, and this steamy story about an Orthodox Jewish woman testing the boundaries of her marriage and her life seems like just the thing.
Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream by Marjorie Rosen. I've had this on my list for ages as a companion piece to From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies by Molly Haskell.
Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume by Mandy Aftel. Another book about scent from the perfumer extraordinaire Mandy Aftel. I'm curious to see if I'll like this one as much as I liked Fragrant!
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. I first heard of this book, published in 1967, as one of the OG erotic novels. Looking forward to seeing how it holds up to 21st century sensibilities.
Honorable mentions:
Savage Blooms by S.T. Gibson. It’s dark, it’s gothic, it’s intensely sexy, it takes place on the stormswept moors of Scotland, it’s going to make me crazy, and it’s coming out later this year.
The Lady Waiting by Magdalena Zyzak. One thing about me is that I will never not want to read about glamorous international art heists.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston. I’ve had this one on my bookshelf for literally almost a decade, and 2025 is going to be the year I finally read it.
tagging @mordredsheart, @bluestockingbaby, @forthegothicheroine, @owlsongsandgoblinlaughs, and @lucacangettathisass!
#books#book recommendations#tbr#i am literally running out of good fashion books please help send recs#if my library doesn’t get a copy of roland barthes’ the language of fashion SOON i am going to start living inside their walls
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Today We Honor Oluale Kossola, Renamed Cudjo Lewis
Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin in her book “Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”
A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast.
There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery, after the “Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves" took effect in 1808 slavery was abolished, and crammed onto the Clotilda, the “last” slave ship to reach the continental United States.
The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1808.
After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different owners.
“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother.”
“Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”
“We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.
He and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.
CARTER™️ Magazine
#carter magazine#carter#historyandhiphop365#wherehistoryandhiphopmeet#history#cartermagazine#today in history#staywoke#blackhistory#blackhistorymonth#Instagram
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“Happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going.”
~ Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo
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Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early 20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God. She wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
She used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. It is the site of the “Zora! Festival”, held each year in her honor.
She began her studies at Howard University. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. She conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community’s identity.
She wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the African American community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!. She wrote and published her literary anthropology on African American folklore, Mules and Men, and her first three novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; and Moses, Man of the Mountain. Published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.
Her works concerned both the African American experience and her struggles as an African American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. Her manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, was published posthumously in 2001 after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, about the life of Cudjoe Lewis, was published posthumously in 2018. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #zetaphibeta
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a study for barracoon (Helga Testore)
by A͓̽n͓̽d͓̽r͓̽e͓̽w͓̽ ͓̽W͓̽y͓̽e͓̽t͓̽h͓̽ (1976)
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📚#ArtIsAWeapon Remembering author, anthropologist, southern Black life storyteller, trailblazer #ZoraNealeHurston, who was born January 7, 1891.
#ZoraNealeHurstonDay
📷 photograph by #CarlVanVechten .

Caption and images reposted from @thefreeblackwomenslibrary It’s Zora Neale Hurston Day ⭐️🖤⭐️

Are you familiar with the life and writing of this legendary free thinking world traveling rule breaking culture defining Black woman icon?
Which one of her novels have you read and enjoyed?
Today we celebrate the birth of a chosen ancestor, spirit guide and muse of The Free Black Women’s Library, also a quintessential Capricorn and role model for Black girl scholars researchers historians anthropologists story tellers and mean muggers world wide!!



Cheers to the goat!!
🖤🖤🖤 🎂🎂🎂🐐🐐🐐🥂🥂🥂


BTW!!!
for those doing The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge feel free to read

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD for - a book where the characters speak Geechee, Gullah, Creole, patois or AAVE
BARRACOON - a book of history , historical fiction or slave narrative

HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK - collection of stories, poems, letters or prose

DUST TRACKS ON THE ROAD - a memoir
#zoranealehurston
#freeblackwoman
#TFBWL
#tfbwlreads
#tfbwlreadingchallenge
#thefreeblackwomenslibrary #TheirEyesWereWatchingGod #Barracoon #FreeBlackWomensLibrary #HarlemRenaissance #BlackWomenAuthors #BlackGenius
#ZoraNealeHurston#FreeBlackWomen#FreeBlackWomensLibrary#BlackWomenWriters#ArtIsAWeapon#ZoraNealeHurstonDay#BlackGenius
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Hey you can answer this tomorrow, but why women king was made…remember roots? I heard the og mc kunta kenta (Is that a real fucking African name?) didn’t understand what the Europeans was doing on the ports with slaves…even though he would have actually known-ooooh
But as you know that left a (bad) impact onto my community….but I keep realize one huge issue Africans have with my community is we try to keep the sanitize version of the slave trade we were taught even as middle age adults
Expect meee, god this pan Africa hurt us
Also people tried to compare women king to 300 and braveheart…haven’t seen braveheartt…but 300 was meant to be a glorified retelling of the battle of themployae
Women king have to twisted the entire course of history to write it
Roots managed to serve its purpose, at least the original one, suffered from extreme historical inaccuracies in places never saw the remake.
But as you know that left a (bad) impact onto my community….but I keep realize one huge issue Africans have with my community is we try to keep the sanitize version of the slave trade we were taught even as middle age adults
This is Oluale Kossola, his American name is Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis (he chose all but Lewis himself), he's the last known slave with distinct memories of life in Africa before being sold by the dahomey and put on a ship and smuggled into the US, human cargo was illegal by then but greedy and evil people on both sides of the Atlantic kept on doing it anyhow.
You can do some of your own reading if you like, but some highlights from his wiki page are.
In April or May 1860, his village was attacked and Lewis was taken prisoner by female warriors led by King Glele of Dahomey, during an annual dry-season raid for slaves. Along with other captives, he was taken to the slaving port of Ouidah and sold to Captain William Foster of the Clotilda, an American ship recently built in Mobile, Alabama, and owned by businessman Timothy Meaher. The importation of slaves into the United States had been illegal since 1808, but slaves were still routinely smuggled in from Spanish Cuba.
And this is from a article about a book about him
The pathos of the African American experience, told with such tenderness in Barracoon, is matched by its complexity. Hurston herself remarked that in writing Kossola’s harrowing account of how the king of Dahomey profited from raiding and selling members of neighbouring kingdoms, she was deeply affected by the question of African complicity in the slave trade. “The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw,” Hurston wrote, “was my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on – that white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”
One hell of a reality check right there
Also people tried to compare women king to 300 and braveheart…haven’t seen braveheartt…but 300 was meant to be a glorified retelling of the battle of themployae
ya if they wanted to do a Braveheart comparison they'd need to set it up so that the areas that the dahomey raided set up to fight againt the dahomey
Women king have to twisted the entire course of history to write it
Based on historical events, but we're not going to tell you that we did a 180 on who was doing what.
Could you imagine the fallout if someone made a accurate movie about that, painting all the perpetrators as what they were.
Wonder if finding out that if their ancestors hadn't been forced onto a boat there's a good chance they would have either been worked until they died or used as a human sacrifice might shift some viewpoints a little.
None of that is me expressing anything other than just curiosity, since this is tumblr and we piss on the poor who just want to read here I figure disclaimer is needed.
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In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship’s ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer’s journal—‘last night I laid with Dido on the ground’; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic ‘that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with’ in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler’s account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.
—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)
#saidiya hartman#say her name#radical black studies#black feminist theory#Venus#gender and slavery#cultural studies#israel#palestine#higher education#afterlives#in the wake
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Tagged by @bawnjourno thank u :3
last song:
As i type this i am actively listening to Ain't No Rest for the Wicked Cage the Elephant
favorite color:
Green :-)
currently watching:
Houusee MD 🦧 (that's wilson)
last movie:
STALKER 1979, showed my pal :3
currently reading:
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" - Zora Neale Hurston
sweet/spicy/savoury:
Savoury👍
relationship status:
Single and ready to settle 🤰🧑🍼😊🙌
current obsession:
Looking at every single individual moment in life from a cultural anth point of view and then exploding :(
last thing i googled:
"Can praying mantis hurt me" cause of this guy

currently working on:
My got-damn site reporrrtt 😭😭😭😭
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I love the brunt of zora neale hurston’s work but she so wrong for lying about the dahomey & lying on cudjoe lewis like dat .
and idk how much of it is hurston& moreso the presumption ppl have made about barracoon being some sort of history… bc it was published at the time in new ebony mag as fictional. and theres this remark on her work (which definitely maps onto barracoon’s prose.. passages about heathens and all)

#‘Yoruba’ HES SPEAKING EFIK. AN ETHNICITY WHO AT THE TIME LIVED THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY FROM THE DAHOMEY?#she derived much of her conjectures on dahomey str8 from a pro slavery white author & claimed it was cudjoe’s words#yn.#history#africa#blackness#pseudohistory
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16, 23, 25!
16. What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?
Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red did not land for me. Based on the tumblr-dot-com-based hype I was led to expect that it would be an incredibly emotionally resonant experience, and I'm sure for some people it is, but for me it ended up reading like pages and pages of artisan gibberish.
23. What’s the fastest time it took you to read a book?
I can get through an Agatha Christie mystery in a matter of hours. Outside of that, I devoured Simon Doonan's Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed in a single day because I just physically couldn't put it down.
25. What reading goals do you have for next year?
To read more of the books that are actually sitting on my shelf (whoops). I've been meaning to get to Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston for ages, as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and maybe even a reread of James Joyce's Dubliners if I'm feeling seasonal.
#it may be time to accept that i am just not an anne carson girl#i tried! oh i tried! but alas.#mordredsheart#ask game#bookblr#questions queries quandaries
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six sentence sunday-30 march 2025
after taking my sick ass antibiotics, both my tooth infections are gone and i've had more energy and been writing (quiet yay)
also my mouth is healing pretty well i think-idk how to evaluate the bone grafts but they don't hurt so i assume that means they're successfully grafting with the bones already there lol also i was drinking hot liquids the day after my surgery bc i forgot about that one but it was homemade bone broth and i needed the protein
i've been flying thru the nonfiction as well, which is great; i read "king leopold's ghost" about how the congo got colonized and i didn't realize that one greedy jackass started the scramble for africa by himself-rest in piss (really liked it but i was expecting more of the aftereffects, ie the titular ghost of colonization, but that's partially on me-highly recommend)
and then i read "chernobyl" bc apparently every time i have a dental emergency i'm in the middle of a fucking book where they describe radiation poisoning and i freak out for two seconds thinking i have it somehow before my rational brain comes back (it was also really good, highly recommend)
then the library had "the lumumba plot" which was perfect timing to continue the history of the drc (v interesting both for national and international history, highly recommend)
then i read "educated" which has been on like everyone's book club lists for three years, but me being only three years late is actually very timely for me (super interesting, highly recommend)
and then i read "barracoon" which was so interesting hearing authentic african experiences and lives right before the scramble happened, as well as the experience of freedom in the south (quick read and important history, highly recommend)
now i'm reading "good economics for bad times" bc i thought it was a personal finance book, which that's on me for going in blind like i always do, but it's actually very interesting in a dry and boring way-idk i can't explain it, i'd recommend it tho if ur interested in learning about economics and theories and shit which i kind of am but i prefer to learn about that thru other things so it's a weird experience to just hear about economics without like the whole history of fabric and pigments and paint and trendy earrings or whatever like i normally read lol
my next nonfiction is another memoir (this is way more memoirs than my usual ratio lol) "a long way gone" about a boy soldier in sierra leone-it's so weird how sometimes things seem connected even tho it's random like i finally got king leopold's ghost from the library and then i saw a nonfic recommendation post that had the lumumba plot literally right after i finished it and was disappointed it didn't go into the after lol and just recently i saw this memoir in a recommendations video (plus barracoon) so it looks like i'm doing some sort of africa history deep dive but it's actually not on purpose-it's just when the library app gives me books/has them available for me, not that i don't like reading these books in succession it's actually really great but i never really coordinate more than two or three books in a row on purpose and this is just a fun, lucky accident
i've only written about 3k this week but i only have a few more chapters and then the first draft of my first book is officially finished!! very excited about it
“Let’s head down,” I said finally. My words pushed their way into the dusty wind.
“We can’t sleep next to water,” said Lukas. He came to a stop. I turned to face him.
“Did I say we should camp out for the night? We need more water. And then we keep going.”
“Ugh. You guys are so stupid. Let’s just go!” Tommy said. He marched past us.
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It was in many ways a substitute for 'Commonwealth literature' (referring to the loose political entity created after the British empire ended), though it basically maintained the same shape. Most of the literature that was included was written in English. Though critics have contested it, there are strong thematic and formal similarities between Anglophone African, British Caribbean, and South Asian literatures from the 1950s-1980s. This may offer a clue vto the answer to the question regarding Singh. The question is It is never clear what Singh intends by writing his book,his purpose keeps changing untill the act of writing it becomes his existance, a mimicry of life, V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity and Hindu ancestry from Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Naipaul lives now in Wiltshire, England.Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. Sir Vidia is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. Generally considered the leading novelist of the English-speaking Caribbean, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 2001. . V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity and Hindu ancestry from Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Naipaul lives now in Wiltshire, England.Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. Sir Vidia is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. Generally considered the leading novelist of the English-speaking Caribbean, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 2001. Naipaul's writings dealt with the cultural confusion of the Third World and the problem of an outsider, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in England, and a nomadic intellectual in a postcolonial world. Naipaul has also arisen much controversy because of his politically incorrect views of the "half-made societies. " He has constantly refused to avoid unwelcome topics, characterizing his role as a writer "to look and to look again, to re-look and rethink." The facts about Columbus have always been known. In his own writings and in all his actions his egoism is like an exposed deformity; he condemns himself. But the heroic gloss, which is not even his own, has come down through the centuries." (from 'Columbus and Crusoe', in The Overcrowded Barracoon, 1972)His themes, like Syal and Sing In deal with the feelings of the tines. Read the full article
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Many writers have wondered, when embarking on a new project, what might happen should Fate intervene and prevent them from finishing. This isn’t the most pleasant thought, however, and for this reason some of us have yet to make provisions for what should be done with our work after we die. Perhaps this is because we the living tend to assume there will always be more time.
The Life of Herod the Great will be published by Amistad in January. (Credit: Barbara Hurston Lewis, Faye Hurston, and Lois Gaston)
The writer, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was likely no different. Hurston spent nearly fifteen years conducting research for The Life of Herod the Great, which will be published by Amistad in January. In one letter to an editor, Hurston called the novel her “great obsession” and described the work she was undertaking to translate conflicting historical accounts into a fictional narrative “the most formative period of [her] whole life.” If not for her failing health, surely she intended to continue the painstaking process many writers know well: writing and revising, then submitting and revising anew if the book failed to find a home. She had queried editors (and unfortunately, received their rejections) up until a year before her death in 1960. Versions of the manuscript were found among her belongings, eventually making their way into the University of Florida archives and the hands of Deborah G. Plant, the editor of The Life of Herod the Great as well as Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (Amistad, 2018).
What might Hurston have thought about readers receiving this new novel in its current form? And, more important, what does The Life of Herod the Great tell us about the writer who authored it and her vision for her life’s work?
The novel, which will be published on Hurston’s 134th birthday, is a fictionalized biography of Herod, a Rome-appointed ruler of Judea during the first century BCE. In a preface that will be published with the book, Hurston writes that she chose his story because “the West, whose every nation professes Christianity, should be better acquainted with the real, the historical Herod, instead of the deliberately folklore Herod.”
Hurston is right: Herod’s legacy in the modern world is fraught, dominated by claims in the Gospel of Matthew that he personally ordered the deaths of Bethlehemite male children ages two years and younger around the time of the birth of Jesus. However, her research and that of later scholars suggest that Herod’s paranoia about being overthrown by an infant Messiah was unlikely, and among his subjects he was a popular and progressive king (albeit sufficiently brutal for his time and the mores of Roman rule). Yet instead of focusing on Herod’s anti-Christian infamy, Hurston turns to his shrewd manipulation of family, friends, subjects, and foes. She is meticulous in her re-creation of his inner life, describing everything from his private musings about love to the bejeweled embellishments of his tunics. In this melding of fact, fiction, and fable, we see Hurston in her finest form: a well-versed cultural historian who has done her research and grapples with archival inconsistencies, reconstructing a narrative that approaches the truth in a fascinating new way.
And, still, what we have received is not as complete as Hurston might have intended. As an editor’s note explains at the front of the book, the triple asterisks that become increasingly more frequent in later chapters denote missing sections and pages, some of which were likely lost in a fire set by workers clearing Hurston’s belongings from the welfare home where she was living at the time of her death. Other sections might have simply not yet been written. For instance, the final full chapter of the novel reads more like a summary than anything, and the book itself ends with snippets from Hurston’s letters, in which she outlines her intentions for writing Herod’s peaceful death, a marked contrast to historical accounts of his suffering from phthiriasis, a putrefying illness caused by lice. This detail is interesting because, unlike the discrepancies surrounding Herod’s rule and its potential overlap with the life of Jesus, nearly all historical accounts agree that he died a painful death. Hurston’s decision to write Herod’s death this way raises some interesting questions. Is it, in part, due to her lifelong commitment to bucking the status quo and disrupting preconceptions of what it means to be an artist—and a Black one at that? Should we think of the book as “unfinished,” or consider its truncated state emblematic of Hurston’s ever-evolving and still-unfolding legacy?
By all accounts Hurston was a mythic iconoclast. At my alma mater, Fisk University, a small, historically Black college founded in part with help from the American Missionary Association, stories abound about her time on campus in the 1930s. According to lore she raised eyebrows by wearing pants and smoking cigarettes on school grounds, and according to her own letters she once told Fisk’s then-president Thomas Jones that he “ran his school like a Georgia plantation” filled with “good n⸺ s.” She consistently thwarted expectations and ruffled a few feathers in the process. The Life of Herod the Great stands squarely in the ethos of Hurston’s life and work, from her depiction of Their Eyes Were Watching God’s Janie Crawford, who walks away from one marriage and is relieved when the next husband dies of old age (allowing her to meet her true love, Tea Cake Woods), to what is considered the prequel to The Life of Herod the Great, a retelling of the Book of Exodus titled Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), in which Hurston suggests the titular character was Egyptian—in essence, an African. In these and her other books, Hurston challenges readers to set aside what they have been told to believe—that women must settle for their lovers and their lives, or that our culture’s greatest heroes are white—and asks us to reconsider our received truths. In the case of Herod the Great, she raises questions that were undoubtedly on her mind during the decades she worked on this book, which spanned the wake of the Harlem Renaissance to the cusp of the civil rights movement, one of the most violent eras in American social history. Those questions persist today: Who gets to tell the story of who we were, how we lived, and what we did? And who will be brave enough to refute it if the full story isn’t told the first time? The answers to these questions are as complex as the central figure in Hurston’s new novel and are, in some ways, as incomplete as the text we have now received. But that reality is not a shortcoming. It’s an exhortation to continue this asymptotic work of trying to perfect the art we make about an imperfect world, imperfect people, and our imperfect selves. And to keep at it, whether we are destined to finish the task or not.
Destiny O. Birdsong is the author of the poetry collection Negotiations (Tin House, 2020) and the triptych novel Nobody’s Magic (Grand Central, 2022). She is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
#article#history#books#book review#new books#book#zora neale hurston#ancient history#mythology#myth#novel
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Hey if you are needing a really big baddy, try this guy out!
NOW INTRODUCING...
Barracoon the Piper, yes the one from Ultima Online. Try him out, let me know what you think.
#ultima#rpg#ttrpg#design#geek#illustration#dungeon and dragons#card game#art#comics#ultima online#d20
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