Background
This project was conceived as a means of encouraging patrons of Barnard’s Library to critically engage with the library’s collection in a way that channeled Zora’s ethos, which centered embodied knowledge, the oral tradition, and community engagement.
In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston recounts how her family's move from Eatonville, FL following her mother's death triggered what would become a series of travels throughout her life — her “wanderings", which she describes as, "Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit”. As Zora's wanderings brought her to D.C., New York, North Carolina, Honduras, Jamaica, Haiti, and back to Florida, she encountered several individuals from throughout the African Diaspora with countless stories to tell. These stories—of themselves, their ancestors, their people—were housed within their bodies, transmitted through tall tales, rituals, recipes, songs, dances, and recollected memories. Zora saw the inherent value of these lived experiences, and sought to document them through her ethnographic research and creative writing. In both her literary and anthropological pursuits, Zora rejected the urge towards respectability politics and refused the sanitization of lived experience. She always made sure to write dialogue spoken by her fellow Black Southerners as they sounded, relying on phonetic spellings that emphasized the importance of regional dialect in storytelling. She would do the same in her travels abroad to the West Indies, where she documented Afro-Caribbean folklore and religion. In a time where creole languages like Patois and AAVE (African American Vernacular English) were treated as broken English that needed to be fixed, Hurston sought to embrace them and incorporate them into her literature, even when it meant facing scorn from some of her Harlem Renaissance peers. To me, her work manifests as an act of true love for her community, their voices, and their stories. In doing this audio project, I wanted to highlight the embodied multivocality present in her work, encouraging patrons of the library to listen to the voices of their community as Zora did, and treat the stacks as a site of wandering.
Inspiration
This project takes primary inspiration from Kameelah Janan Rasheed's 2019 installation at Brooklyn Public Library, Scoring the Stacks. From the BPL website—"The project features a series of performance scores and visual art throughout Central branch as a means to experiment with different modes of learning and unlearning...To complement the individual performance of the scores are a set of public programs. These public programs invite participants into a collaborative environment to create music lyrics, compose dance choreography, and to write flash fiction using the collected score contributions of public participants".
Much like Rasheed's BPL exhibition, this project seeks to center wanderings as a part of library navigation, encouraging patrons to take a different approach to engaging with the stacks and focus on how one moves throughout the space rather than just the end goal of a search inquiry. This project pulls from Rasheed's use of interactive activity cards, whose prompts encourage patrons to explore the library in a manner akin to play. The open-endedness of each prompt allowing for each participant to have a new, unique experience that is informed by how they personally relate the materials in the stacks.
Execution
For this project, several activity cards were made, each with a unique prompt encouraging patrons to wander and openly explore Barnard library in a manner that feels unfamiliar, playful, and freeing. The top right corner lists one of five areas of study: Anthropology, Black Diaspora Studies, Film, Gender Studies, or Performance Studies. These five categories correspond to the areas of study listed under the Zora In... page, highlighting Hurston's often unsung contributions to each field. At the bottom of each page is a QR code, which, when scanned with a phone camera, opens up a file that plays an audio recitation of a Zora Neale Huston excerpt, which patrons can listen to with headphones as they wander through the stacks. The voices behind these recitations belong to Barnard and Columbia's Black student body, alongside volunteers who participated in Centennial programming. For each year of the Centennial, Barnard Library hopes to add 25 new audio excerpts to the collection, ultimately adding up to a total of 100 audio excerpt recordings, aligning with 100 years of Black students at Barnard. This page of the guide will act as a repository for all excerpts collected thus far, kept in alphabetical order by participant last name.
Anonymous
Anonymous
Brown, Tonnay
From Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston: Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With Kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma's house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made.
Dunlop, Enshalla
From Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually underprivileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by.
Francis, Kiwana
From Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston: Why God Made Adam Last—God wuz through makin' de Ian' an' de sea an' de birds an' de animals an' de fishes an' de trees befo' He made man. He wuz intendin' tuh make ‘im all along, but He put it off tuh de last cause if He had uh made Adam fust an’ let him see Him makin' all dese other things, when Eve wuz made Adam would of stood round braggin' tuh her. He would of said: “Eve, do you see dat ole stripe-ed tagger over dere? Ah made. See dat ole narrow geraffe over dere? Ah made ‘im too. See dat big ole tree over dere? Ah made dat jus’ so you could set under it.” God knowed all dat, so He jus' waited till everything wuz finished before he made man, cause He knows man will lie and brag on hisself tuh uh woman. Man ain’t found out yet how things wuz made—he ain’t meant tuh know.
Ellis, Aedin
From Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston: The Negro offers a featherbed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes up. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics? "The white man is always trying to know into somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho' can't read my mind. I'll put this play to in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song.”
Rowland, Michelle
From Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston: Are you so simple as to assume that the Big Surrender banished the concept of human slavery from the earth? What is the principle of slavery? Only the literal buying and selling of human flesh on the block? That was only an outside symbol. Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others. All of the outward signs come out of that.