It's around election time, and once again I'm hit by how uninformed I am. My peers sit around debating the debates while I'm left clueless and confused. Honestly, though, I'm not complaining. Although I know I should be, and I'm sure I'll get there someday, I'm just not interested enough to follow the latest politics and develop solid opinions. It's not that I don't care how the country's run; rather, it's more that I care enough to not insert my blind, parroted opinion into the middle of the madness. But at the same time, I have yet to work up the motivation to educate myself. Perhaps this is perceived as bad, or lazy, or unpatriotic, but really. Right now, all I can see politics doing for me is causing stress and arguments.
I'm not just this way with politics. I'm always one of the last to hear the latest gossip. Lunchtime conversations often leave me puzzled and irritated. But once again, I don't have a whole lot of desire to hear this gossip or engage in these discussions. To me, it seems to be an unnecessarily wordy (not to mention potentially hurtful) waste of time. This is probably what threw me off most about Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Zora Neale Hurston made her novel especially focused around this society filled with rumors. The stage is set with Janie strutting into town in her overalls while people are talking behind her back. "They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty." Mass cruelty? What kind of a place is this, that it's glorified and identified by its cruelty from the very first chapter? Sure, it seems like a happy pleasant place while skimming through it, but mass cruelty? Really? This is worse than physical violence, because, as we saw in Invisible Man, words have a deep power. Words stick. They hurt and the hurt takes quite some time to heal.
Could it be, though, that the gossip war was meant to show Janie's strength? "Nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit until after her gate slammed behind her." It takes a lot of effort to hold your head up high while walking through a group where you know people were just talking about you. This image is very different from that of the young girl daydreaming under a pear tree.
What's even stranger is how Hurston manages to change the reader's perspective on the gossip. Earlier in the timeline of Janie's life, she admires the ritual of the people on the porch of the store chatting. The Mule Talk, based on the number of times it's mentioned, seems to be pretty prominent in the functioning of the community of Eatonville. Janie longs to participate in these gossip circles, but is always forbidden. It's a completely different perspective than I'm used to. But I think I can see why it's fantasized so much. Everything seems better until you get to the center of it.
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