Review of Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston

*Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica* by Zora Neale Hurston (1938). Published by HarperCollins.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on my blog as of late, you probably have noticed that I’ve read some other Zora Neale Hurston lately. If not and this is your first time around—welcome! I’m Ashley. I am a graduate student and this semester I’ve been taking a class called The Traveler, which is about travel narratives through the lens of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the concept of forced migration that came along with it. Quite a few of the books I’ve been reviewing on the blog as of late have been coming from the courses I have been taking. This class in particular has had some fascinating reads.

Anyways, my Zora Neale Hurston arose from reading Tell My Horse. I’m working on an academic paper that I hope to publish in a journal soon on the book, but we had to read this book and discuss the concept of ethnography through the lens of travel writing. This is my area of expertise in a way, so I had quite a bit of fun with this book and digging into the academic literature on it.

Let’s get into the review before I ramble too long!

Zora Neale Hurston’s observations in Jamaica and Haiti as an anthropologist.

Before we get into the nitty gritty of the book, let’s go into the details of why this happened. Zora Neale Hurston, who had dropped out of Barnard’s PhD program studying anthropology, was awarded a Guggennheim Fellowship in order to conduct the research for this book. She had pitched an idea saying that she wanted to find a way to bridge writing for academic circles with mainstream writing (so for general audiences), and that she could not find a ton of resources on voodoo in the United States. She was going to change that with Tell My Horse. After receiving the funds, she headed off to Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurston splits the book into two sections, each of them about the two countries she visited. We begin with Jamaica, where each chapter focuses on different interactions she had with the local voodoo culture and people. Interestingly, because she is a Black American woman, entering the culture under the context of research, she makes smaller comments about how she is one of the only woman who has been allowed to spectate what’s going on.

The Haiti chapters are what Hurston really was roasted for. She engages in a discussion that on a superficial level seems like she thinks Haiti should be considered as backwards considered to the United States, and she was very much criticized for this. She uses this language in the Jamaica chapter as well, using words like “savage” and making comments that can be upsetting for the modern mind. Despite all of this, the Haiti sections of this book are where she really digs deeper into voodoo, hearing rumors of a zombie and giving us straightforward information about the culture.

All of this is written in an unconventional style—it’s not a traditional ethnography, it’s part memoir and essay writing, and it’s also part travel narratives. This makes Tell My Horse a such fascinating text to pick up if you’re interested in the hybrid spaces created by this, and my paper argues that this is an early attempt at critical autoethnography.

I think I should give some more overarching historical context to wrap this up as well. Zora’s book was not well received at all. In the literature I have been reading, Zora was often blasted by her male Black intellectual contemporaries because she was seen as backwards—instead of wanting to pitch into the idea of a new Black identity, she looked to preserve the past. They saw this as a threat, and because she was a Black woman, they sought to undermine her.

She was rushed in publishing Tell My Horse by the publisher, according to the work I’ve been reading, and thus was not able to make the book she wanted. Her publisher also relied on racist tropes and stereotypes to market the book, and it was criticized by most literary/book critics of the time and was unable to gain any traction commercially. Zora’s career ended after the thirties after she was blasted by her male contemporaries and accused of molesting a boy, which has not been verified.

Overall Thoughts

I think this isn’t the book for everyone, but instead read it if you’re interested in Zora Neale Hurston, hybridity, how travel narratives can look like through blending genres and fields, and/or the Caribbean during this time. There are some valid critiques of the book, especially if you’re not looking at it through the academic lens, but I think it was such an interesting book to pick up even for class. I typically struggle with books I have to read for class, but I enjoyed this one a lot! Enough to even write a major academic paper on the subject and continue the research beyond this semester.

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