50 pages • 1 hour read
Zora Neale HurstonTell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1938A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Rituals and Beliefs of Voodoo
A major focus of Tell My Horse is the study of rituals and beliefs in the Haitian Voodoo religion. The last and longest of the work’s three parts is dedicated to Voodoo, providing an overview of many of the religion’s key elements and its importance to the wider culture and society of Haiti.
Voodoo, usually written as “Vodou,” has much in common with other religions of the African diaspora, such as the previously-mentioned “Pocomania” folk religion of Jamaica. However, it is not to be conflated with the similar but distinct religion of Louisiana Voodoo in the Southern United States. Voodoo is highly syncretic: It has roots in the traditional religions of West Africa, which were brought to the New World by enslaved peoples and developed under the influence of European Catholicism. It is a religion with no centralized ecclesiastical order, although houngans and mambos must undergo rigorous training and a series of spiritual rituals to ascend to priesthood, regardless of whether their position is inherited or not.
Hurston’s description of the compound of Dieu Donnez in Chapter 12 shows the importance of hounforts as centers of community and culture, and the high social status which is afforded to Voodoo’s religious leaders. Hurston participates in several different ceremonies throughout Part 3 of Tell My Horse, describing their component elements and functions in depth. The worship of loa, through specific rituals, offerings, and sacrifices, is a key tenet of the Voodoo religion. Additionally, the possession or “riding” of practitioners by these loa, either spontaneously or ceremoniously, is a core element of the belief system. Hurston provides a broad overview of the loa, including the differences between the categories of Rada and Petra, as well the names, characteristics, and methods of worship of several key deities such as Damballah, Guedé, etc. She does note, however, just how unequal the scope of Tell My Horse is to an exhaustive account of the Voodoo religion in its full complexity (3, 10, 131).
Voodoo was a subject of great interest to the folklorist Charlotte Mason (1854-1946), who was Hurston’s patron. Mason funded Hurston’s fieldwork in exchange for significant sway over Hurston’s studies and final say on Hurston’s publications. Although Voodoo is undoubtedly an important element of Haitian culture, its proportional domination in Tell My Horse can likely be attributed to Mason’s influence.
Power Inequalities and Discrimination in Caribbean Societies
The legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean combined with globally-prevalent prejudices of the early 20th century meant that power inequality and discrimination were rife in the societies depicted in Tell My Horse. Hurston, writing as an African- American woman from a working-class background, was very conscious of the inequalities she observed, and portrayed them prominently in her work.
Hurston critiques the unequal power dynamics of Caribbean society both explicitly and implicitly over the course of Tell My Horse. In Chapter 7, Hurston characterizes Haiti as a nation divided in two by power structures that disenfranchise one-half of a dichotomous pair of demographics. She describes how the culture of domination and exploitation pioneered in its most brutal form by the enslaver/enslaved dynamic of the plantation slavery era persists in ongoing racial and economic hierarchies. Due to a legacy of enslavement, and as a reflection of worldwide discriminatory policies—such as the USA’s Jim Crow laws and South African Apartheid laws—idolization of whiteness and racial discrimination against Black people were accepted facts of Caribbean culture. Chapter 1 describes how proximity to whiteness in Jamaica equates with social status, a fact condemned by Hurston in her approbation of the younger generations for beginning to look more favorably upon African-American culture and their own Black identity.
Another axis of discrimination in Caribbean societies is gender. Hurston explores in detail the injustices faced by women due to cultural inequalities throughout Tell My Horse. Women are objectified as a matter of course, consigned to domestic duties and oppressed by expectations of purity. They have no recourse available to them when they are exploited or abused. The harmful effects of inequality between the sexes are highlighted most poignantly by Hurston’s accounts of two women who were abused and discarded by men in Chapter 5. The women’s lives were ruined or ended by their callous treatment at the hands of the men they had trusted, whereas the offending men were unpunished and uncensured, or even lauded for maintaining their own honor at the women’s expense.
Hurston also discusses more nuanced power inequalities in Haiti and Jamaica, for instance the exploitation and violence perpetrated by corrupt politicians as described throughout Part 2. There is also discrimination against the Voodoo religion, which is used as a scapegoat by Haiti’s social elite. However, Voodoo is also a means by which the powerless are able to reclaim their agency and strike back against their oppressors. High social status is achievable, regardless of race, through religious leadership roles, and both men and women are equal as mambo and hougan. Furthermore, traditional poisons, curses, and appeals to deities provide a reversal of traditional power dynamics. This is illustrated by the mambo Celestina Simon’s role in securing her father’s presidency, and the possessions of the loa Guedé, which allow the “horse” to speak unvarnished truth to power. In these ways, Hurston depicts the power imbalances in Caribbean society as both complex and shifting.
Blurred Lines Between Truth and Fiction
Hurston’s body of work includes both factual and fictional pieces, and she is well- versed in blurring the lines between these categorizations, such as through misrepresenting her date of birth (See: Background) and other autobiographical details in her own memoirs. Although Tell My Horse is a non-fiction work, it nonetheless incorporates elements of literary fiction, prominently exploring the theme of blurred lines between truth and fiction.
The nature of the book’s subject—culture, religion, and folklore—necessitates an exploration of the boundary between fact and myth. Hurston describes the beliefs of the communities she studies objectively, professionally disregarding her own religious convictions, and does not venture to comment on the authenticity or veracity of the espoused dogmas. She often speaks of matters of belief in absolute and affirmative tones, such as claiming “loa are” or “duppies can,” thereby presenting such beliefs as genuinely plausible to many. She also relates folks tales as they would be told, splicing them into her factual narrative as in Chapter 18 and Chapter 11 where the folk tale of La Gonave is introduced as a fact that “Everybody knows.” By necessity, the subject matter of Tell My Horse creates a work with a complex relationship with truth: Hurston herself admits uncertainty regarding some of the fantastical things she sees, such as the zombie, the corpse sitting up, and the calabash floating in the air.
A blurring of lies between fact and fiction is also a specifically Caribbean cultural phenomenon. Hurston describes how storytelling competitions are commonplace, and how every peasant considers himself akin to a trickster god when indulging in blatant or petty lies. Politicians habitually deny the truth and weave unabashed falsehoods into delusional narratives that are nonetheless accepted. The low levels of literacy among the population, the storytelling traditions of West Africa, and the neglect with which cultures and histories of African Americans are typically treated means that oral histories are of particular importance to Caribbean society. Even episodes of recent history, such as the death of Leconte, become akin to legends in the public consciousness due to the uncertainty or inaccuracy of official narratives.
Ethnography uses qualitative data methods—interviews and observations—to sketch a partial picture of the infinitely complex and nuanced topic of human culture. By the necessity of relying on an incomplete account from the impartial but fallible perspective of the researcher, potential inaccuracy or imprecision is an inescapable caveat to any absolute statements or conclusions. Furthermore, Hurston is writing under the constraints imposed upon her by a patron whose interest lay in folklore and Voodoo, potentially skewing the purview and focus of the work. The theme of blurred lines between truth and fiction is therefore not only explored explicitly in the body of Tell My Horse, but is also an integral facet of the work’s composition and perspective.
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By Zora Neale Hurston
