Africa Has Her Mouth On Moses: Zora Neale Hurston Rewrites The Exodus Narrative

Résumé 0

Zora Neale Hurston’s “historical” novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, first published in 1939, rewrites the ur-narrative of slavery in the Judeo-Christian West, The Book of Exodus from the Hebrew Bible. What might have been at stake for her, on the eve of WW II, with anti-Semitism rampant in Europe, and racism rampant in America, in choosing to write this hybrid narrative, using diction from biblical rhetoric mixed with black dialect, but not in any schematic, formulaic way? What does she do with the paradigms of the biblical story? This paper will explore Hurston’s choices, interrogating her satirical and subversive prose in the light of the contemporary African-American literary and political scene, as well as her insights into the problems of (patriarchal) power, the complexities of leadership, the hesitancies of freedom. What structures does this novel share with more conventional 18th and 19th century slave narratives which are usually autobiographical, such as the drama of escape, and what is changed in the move from the individual to the collective? The function of poetic closure, so effectively utilized in the Exodus story, of Moses leading his people just up to the promised land before dying, is often lacking in traditional slave narratives because “others are still enslaved”. How does Hurston reinscribe poetic closure? What social and political critiques of her contemporaries might be embedded in Hurston’s revisiting this story of collective liberation and the doubts and rivalries produced in its aftermath?