Your Zora, My Zora, Our Zora
Re-introducing a local star
Two months ago I turned our living room upside down, dragged a crew of people out into the blazing Florida sun, and convinced my amazing cameraman (Jesse Adrian) to stand in mud and dead oysters to get a certain shot.
“Nobody ever does Zora,” said my actress, as we prepped. For several hours, we listened again and again as she, Kalina Karadavis, channeled her, Zora Neale Hurston.
Most of us have at least heard of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s literary brilliance shaped and deeply influenced writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. This particular novel is required reading in English classes at both high school and graduate levels, and her other work continues to provoke and complicate discussions of racial identity and consciousness nationally. It can take an embarrassingly long time however for us Floridians to connect her to ourselves and our history. As a brilliant writer, anthropologist, and filmmaker, Zora was deeply grounded in her surroundings. She knew this state. In this impressive rundown of Zora's life and impact, we are reminded of what the most influential Black woman writer of the early 20th century left us.
In a fantastic collection of essays called A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women, Siri Hustvedt writes about her interactions with the artist Louise Bourgeois’s work. In one essay, she explains how there is the art as it stands, the artist herself, and then the art as we the individuals experience it.
“Perception requires memory,” Siri writes. We bring a collection of memories and experiences within us that change how we perceive the work before us, the novels handed to us, and the poetry of someone else’s life.
"Nobody ever does Zora” is a simplification, but as a Floridian Zora defied easy categorization and left a legacy of controversial and subversive takes on politics, religion, and memory-making. Her own memory cannot be easily manipulated for political mascot-teering, oversimplification, martyrdom, or Black sainthood. She wrote often about how she was perceived, and insisted on injecting her own memories and perceptions of herself and other Black Floridians, into the social narrative.
By reading Hurston, watching her films, and looking over her careful preservation of narratives that White Supremacy needs you to forget, we can add to our own collective memory and change our perception of what is possible and what we- a state- hold from the past. We might see our glorious oak trees and look again, remembering they hold secrets of KKK strongholds and held the bodies of lynched Floridians. We might look closer at a Florida custom, and put down a judgment of an aspect of another religion we call “uncivilized” and link it together with pain or concern we never once considered. Zora invites us in her journalistic writing and novels to consider the limits of liberalism in terms of liberation and can serve as a caution in terms of how individualistic thinking can disconnect you from a pressing political reality.
As we wrap up edits of our film piece and head into the Fall and Winter seasons, I will be delivering dispatches twice a month and one of those will be the short film starring Kalina Karadavis, in a reimagining of Hurston’s famous essay “HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLOURED ME”. This will be followed by an introduction to a Hollywood-level mystery and murder that hit all the sore spots of Florida’s dark underbelly that Hurston investigated right here in Florida. Like Ira Glass says, stay with us. There are stories hidden in the mangroves and trees, and I’m grateful for all the ways women like Zora paid attention to them.