Forgotten: The Things We Lost In Kanye's Gospel Year
We should not forget that Zora Neale Hurston was forgotten. By 1975, when Alice Walker wrote an essay honoring Hurston's life, all of her works had gone out of print.1 Walker had to go on a search for her, had to find her unmarked grave, had to excavate forgotten histories, testimonies, narratives, in order to find the woman who wrote about the characteristics of Negro expression, who wrote about the practice of dissidence found in black religiosity, who wrote about nighttime searches for God in the stars, who wrote and sang and played a full and dense life of black love and laughter.
An anthropologist, novelist, worker of black language and song: We forget that Hurston was forgotten. And if we forget she was forgotten, we forget her writings, too — we forget, through a kind of exponential loss of memory, the touchstones of thought and practice that she inhabited and elaborated. We will have forgotten, then, the essay she wrote titled "The Sanctified Church," from which emerged a class critique internal to black social life, attending to the modes, patterns, behaviors, of what we colloquially call the black church.
In this essay, Hurston states, "the Sanctified Church is a protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth."2 She urges outsiders to focus on the way folks sing and shout and praise at church —their noise, their choreographic and sonic method for meeting the divine.
What strikes me are the ways Hurston's words allow for us to consider performance as carrying the capacity for commentary, for critique: how performance is the place in which engagement and argument should happen. Hurston's words let me consider how the ways one sings, shouts, praises, the way one calls attention to the flesh, can be in the service of either engaging with or breaking from the habits, behaviors and political economy of the normative world.
If we use Zora Neale Hurston as our guide, we can understand that the black church has always been a
