Books with title THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

Their Gods Were Watching Me is a memoir that journeys into the world of a Cameroonian child. It is a blend of personal stories depicting several aspects of family life: sibling rivalry, love, marriage, divorce, and death; intermingled with poorly understood traditions, including the cultural and superstitious beliefs rampant in this third world setting. Replete with emotion, the memoir portrays the challenges of foster parenting when guardians are busy, inexperienced, or too poor to effectively nurture. It also details my educational journey, undertaken in spite of the cultural argument against the education of girls and the subtle dangers of sex, rape or child abuse. Set against the backdrop of both tumultuous civil war and peace time, the stories within reveal the challenges of poverty, child marriages, and the fears and uncertainties of youth. The memoir reads like a novel and offers readers a host of experiences that provide insight into the African psyche, from traditional celebrations and superstitious beliefs to herbal medicines.

The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture and brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment. This reader's guide features: An Introduction/ Historical Context/ About the Author/ Other Works/Adaptations/ Discussion Questions/ Additional Resources. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) begins with our eyes fixed on a woman who returns from burying the dead. Written in only seven weeks while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston's novel chronicles the journey of Janie Mae Crawford from her grandmother's plantation shack to Logan Killicks' farm, to all-black Eatonville to the Everglades-until a tragedy brings her back to Eatonville. From this vantage point, Janie narrates her life story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson, satisfying the "oldest human longing-self-revelation." Although the novel is not an autobiography, Hurston once reflected that it is, at heart, a love story, inspired by "the real love affair of [her] life." She also fictionalized another important incident in her life in the novel: In 1929, Hurston survived a five-day hurricane in the Bahamas, getting herself and another family out of a house moments before it began to collapse. Hurston's conviction that black culture is valuable, unique, and worthy of preservation comes through in Their Eyes Were Watching God via its harmonious blend of folklore and black idiom. In Janie Mae Crawford, Hurston rejects nineteenth and early twentieth-century stereotypes for women and creates a protagonist who though silenced for most of her life ultimately finds her own voice.