I Love Myself When I Am Laughing and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean & Impressive Quote

"Book Review: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive"

Reviewed by Joe Walters

A celebration of the life and work of a securely undervalued literary icon, the bang-up Zora Neale Hurston

I first read Zora Neale Hurston in college—a short story called "The Gilt Six $.25"—and I was kind of blown away by it. There's this 1 scene where a married man returns domicile after piece of work and tosses his hard-earned coins at the forepart door, followed by a express joy-filled chase around the firm. It's a gentle routine between husband and wife; information technology's a glimpse into the joy a marriage tin can hold.

The chat in my class the next day ended upwards being an as enjoyable time. We talked about Hurston's use of Blackness Southern dialect and the gut-wrenching twist in the latter end of the story, but one thing nosotros didn't talk virtually was that Zora Neale Hurston died without a penny in her proper noun. What nosotros didn't talk virtually was how, during her lengthy prime, she even so had to submit her books through an unsolicited slush pile, despite a novel that would soon go a classic (Their Optics Were Watching God) and stories or essays gracing the pages of The Saturday Evening Postal service and The American Mercury. Subsequently all, she was a Black woman writing between 1925 and 1960 well-nigh Black lives.

I didn't larn about these issues in class; I learned most them during my recent read of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…So Over again When I Am Mean and Impressive.

This book is labeled equally a "Zora Neale Hurston Reader," significant it is both a collection of Hurston's piece of work (both fiction and nonfiction) as well as outside essays and introductions from writers like Alice Walker and Mary Helen Washington. Information technology'south an opportunity both to get to know how others have perceived (and proceed to) perceive Hurston and to become to know Hurston through her own work.

Here are a few pieces y'all'll encounter in this volume:

1. An introduction by Mary Helen Washington called, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Adult female Half in Shadow"
2. An extract from Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on the Route
3. An excerpt from Hurston'south collection of Blackness Southern mythology, as told past existent people on stoops, Mules and Men
4. Lasting essays similar "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" and "Crazy for this Democracy"
5. The brusque story, "The Gilded 6 Bits," which I vicious in honey with all once more during my re-read
6. An excerpt from her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, which rewrites the Book of Exodus from an African American perspective.
7. An extract from Their Eyes Were Watching God that chronicles the story of the first Black man to begin a government in the all-Black boondocks of Eatonville, Florida in the early twenty^th century.
8. An afterword by Alice Walker, about visiting Hurston's battered grave site called, "Looking for Zora"

Throughout each of Hurston'south works in this reader, you'll see what makes her special. I know I did. Beyond a dialect that drops yous into each scene, she's also able to infuse near each extract, story, or essay with humor and zeal. There's a particular honesty well-nigh her work, perchance shining brightest in the excerpt from Mules and Men, where she roams the streets of her old town striking conversation with the townspeople, celebrating their humor through seemingly unfiltered dialogue and their morals through the stories they tell. We have the opportunity to sit on the porch with Zora, listen closely to the people who infuse their folk tales with genuineness and meaning. Not each folk tale comes with a neat bow-necktie catastrophe, making this reader glad that Zora told the stories every bit they were, honestly, as opposed to putting her own storytelling flair to it. This excerpt feels existent. It feels intimate. It feels like something I want more of. Luckily, Bookshop has me covered.

Another sure-fire favorite of mine from this reader is her essay "Crazy for This Democracy." It'due south four pages of passion grounded in the fact that "They tell me this democracy form of government is a wonderful affair. It has freedom, equality, justice, in short, everything!…I desire to encounter how it feels," and yet, Zora withal has to put what's in front of American leaders in the spotlight, namely The Jim Crow Laws in this essay. After offering that the Jim Crow laws must come to an end at present, "Not in another generation or and then. The Hurstons have already been waiting 80 years for that,"she goes on to equate racism to the disease it is:

"The patient has the smallpox. Segregation and things like that are the bumps and blisters on the peel, and not the disease, only testify and symptoms of the sickness. The doctors around the bedside of the patient are badly picking bumps. Some assume that the opening of i blister will cure the case. Some strangely assert that a change of climate is all that is needed to kill the virus in the blood!

"Merely why this sentimental over-simplification in diagnosis? Practice the doctors not know anything about the widespread occurrence of this disease?

" …So why the waste material of good fourth dimension and free energy, and farther filibuster the recovery of the patient by picking him over bump by bump and blister to blister? Why not the shot of serum that will kill the thing in the claret? The bumps are symptoms. The symptoms cannot disappear until the cause is cured" (162) .

I've always had a soft spot for Zora Neale Hurston, but the spot has gotten softer after I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…. If you haven't read all of Hurston (or whatever of her), this reader is a special opportunity to encounter firsthand non just how talented the undervalued Hurston was only also the impact that she's left on usa forever.

Publisher: Feminist Press

Paperback: 296

ISBN: 978-1936932733

---

Thank you lot for reading "Book Review: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…" by Joe Walters! If yous liked what yous read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

pittsanks1988.blogspot.com

Source: https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/07/i-love-myself-when-i-am-laughing/