Selection List:

Works Examined: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Sula by Toni Morrison Meridian by Alice Walker

Literary Conventions

Questions and Exercises

"Call and response" refers to the African and African American oral performance of chanted sermons enlisting the participation of both the celebrant and the community. The celebrant may be a spiritual leader or preacher. Within the African American community, call and response generates and sustains the cultural relationships of the preacher and congregation through the preacher's improvisational interpretation of the "Word" and the community's fixed refrain. This antiphonal performance is simultaneously both imaginative and spontaneous. In addition to its traditional religious context, call and response can be found in contemporary art forms such as the blues lyricism, speech, and as a literary convention in African American writing.

Assignment:

• In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie's narration is consciously directed toward a responsive and appreciative audience (Phoeby). Phoeby's willingness to hear the story reflects the call and response patterns of traditional African and African American oral communication. During the framing narrative Janie suggests this relationship between speaker and listener. How does Janie construct this relationship? How does Phoeby's response indicate a willingness to hear Janie's story? How will Phoeby's willingness to hear Janie's story, in turn, have an impact on the community? How will participating in Janie's story empower Phoeby's personal growth? Using concrete references from the text, support your discussion.

Consider: How is the notion of "call and response" constructed between Janie and nature? Analyze the following passage in terms of Janie's relationship with nature:

"She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in very blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid" (11).

 

 

How does this call and response structure Janie's subsequent notions of marriage? Using concrete examples from the literature describe how this notion is either realized or unrealized in Janie's three marriages.

• In Meridian both nature and the past affect a call and response relationship with Meridian Hill. How does Meridian's participation in these relationships inform her activities towards social justice and civil rights? Consider the following passages:
  "Meridian alone was holding on to something the others had let go. If not completely, then partially-by their words today, their deeds tomorrow. But what none of them seemed to understand was that she felt herself to be, not holding on to something from the past, but held by something in the past...When she was transformed in church it was always by the purity of the singers' souls, which she could actually hear....(15).

"When she stood in the center of the pit (Serpent's tail)...she felt as if she had stepped into another world, into a different kind of air...She knew she had fainted but she felt neither weakened or ill. She felt renewed, as from some strange spiritual intoxication...Later, Feather Mae renounced all religion that was not based on the experience of physical ecstasy...This was the story that was passed down to Meridian. " (48).

 

Identify and analyze two additional passages in the text that serve as illustrations of Meridian's increasing call and response relationship with nature and the past.

Program content by Violet Bryan, Ph.D. and Robin Vander