Tell My Horse Review

Rating: 2.8/5

Synopsis: Zora Neale Hurston's 1938 memoir Tell My Horse details her experience learning about cultural and spiritual traditions in Jamaica and voodoo (aka voudou, vodoun, or vodun) in Haiti.


My Thoughts: As a Haitian-American guy, I was interested in looking deeper into my heritage and what better way to do that than read about it from the queen of The Harlem Renaissance Ms. Hurston since I can't travel there due to COVID-19 and political turmoil. I went into the book expecting I would instantaneously devour it in less than a week worth of time. Sadly for me, it fell short on the excitement factor. To be clear,  I appreciate and respect Hurston's effort to deeply immerse herself in rituals that were derided at the time by middle to upper-class Haitian contemporaries as silly, pointless superstitions. However, I feel like the book dragged on for too long which made the reading process very slow. In fact, it took me nearly four weeks to finish this work of 274 pages for which I procrastinated a lot throughout. One of my main gripes was that it spent too many chapters on the history of Haiti's colonialization and socioeconomic/political divisions. While I understand a certain degree of context in these aspects are integral in fully grasping the contemporaneous state of voodoo, dedicated several chapters to these make much of the passages tangential to book's primary subject matter. Also, perhaps it's just me but the first part, which takes place in Jamaica, was pretty dull since it did not much of a tightly connected premise beyond the various local superstitions detailed, unlike the second portion in Haiti, which made obvious enough that voodoo was supposed to the focus even if it went all over the place with it and meandered too long. On a more positive note, I did enjoy the parts which did actually center around voodoo's rituals and mythology as well as The Secte Rouge, a cannibalistic secret society that can be considered partially responsible for some of the social stigma voodoo.

Final Thoughts: Hurston did try in Tell My Horse and did succeed in providing an accurate portrayal of Haitian voodoo culture. Unfortunately, the lethargic pacing dragged it down a couple of notches, making the book more of a chore to slog through. I hope her fictional works are better than this.