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BLACK WOMEN’S RENAISSANCE
From the late 1960s, African American women began to
enter the economic mainstream of America. No longer just
nurses, teachers, domestic worker, cooks, factory hands,
dancers and singers, some became doctors, lawyers,
professors, politicians and corporate workers. (Sandi
1990:7)
Educated worldly equipped with sass and strength they took new
directions. For the first time, some of these women had economics
choices. In literature, the ‘sister’ stereotype were being discarded, as
African American women writers uncovered the distinct yet common
thread of black women’s lives.
Yet some of these women found themselves caught in the
trap of welfare drugs, little or no education, under
nourishment, bad housing and teenage pregnancy. Left
within a system dedicated to keeping them down, they were
defiled and denied by society at large. But they were visible
to the concerned and compassionate ‘gaze’ of the black
woman writer. (Ibidem: 42)
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No matter how different these women’s circumstances might be, all had
to contend with the age-old duo-sexism and racism. From the
sophisticated city woman to the radical feminist from the lesbian to the
housewife, all were searching for a meaningful place in their
communities.
From authors as diverse as their subject matter comes a literature that
addresses all of these issues, and more. Using realisms as their basic
mode of expression, these women’s stories range over a wide
geographical expense.
In her autobiographical essay, ‘ From the Poets in the Kitchen’, Paule
Marshall pays tribute to those women, who, ignored or despised by the
literature handed on to a new generation of writers the culture of her
mother tongue:
“The group of women around the table long ago; they
taught me my first lessons in the narrative art. They trained
my ear. They set a standard of excellence. This is why the
best of my work must be attributed to them; it stands as a
testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so
freely passed on to me from the word shop of the kitchen” (
Marshall 1983 :11-12)
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Paule Marshall, born of Barbadian parents who immigrated to Brooklyn,
New York, has a creative and insightful voice. Through her writing, she
has brought into focus the culture of the Caribbean peoples, in America
or within their own islands communities. Paule Marshall found that the
way of doing this lay through language. Her first novel Brown Girl,
Brown Stones appeared in 1959 and African- American women’s
literacy tradition which by now had come to a cross road, took a giant
leap into the world of ontological transmutation of black women’s
existential conditions in America. The novel opened the creative
floodgates and black women’s words poured forth from the depths of
their souls in an undiminished stream. The creative outpouring indicated
the coming of age of black women’s literacy tradition. Selina Boyce, the
protagonist of Brown Girl, Brown Stones, articulated what Mary Helen
Washington calls “The hardiness and resiliency of black eyed Susan’s,
the hunger and yearning of the mysterious midnight bird”. The novel
demonstrated clearly black women’s determination to revise history, to
carve out a place, to establish a unique presence for themselves, to
announce to the whole world their existence as “a person and as a
presence; as someone autonomous and as someone responsible to a
community”, to interpret their realities from their own points of view, to
define their objectives and establish their own priorities, and also to
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resolve the contradictions between images and reality of their lives.
Selina became the prototype of the new black womanhood whose sole
concern was “the black woman herself- her aspirations, her conflicts,
her relationship to her men and her children”. (Sandi 1990:144) unlike
their predecessors, who spoke to others, Marshall’s women speak to
their own self and try to articulate that self with a greater force.
Femininity for them is but an idiom of expression, a sort of added
enriching adventure and discipline giving subtler overtones to life,
making it more beautiful and interesting seeking explorations into the
psychic universe and finding happy release of self consciousness is their
major pre-occupation.
Silla and Selina, the two women in Brown Girl choose to be
black women, not only in body, but in spirit as well. It is the
process of identifying their own self and the selves of other
black women too as inherently valuable to their existence in
White America. (Ibidem: 145)
Marshall’s first novel indicated that black women artists now felt
impelled to break the snare of Maud Martha’s silences and fill the void
of those silences with ‘meaningful’ words. “In this white man world, yuh
got to take mouth and make a gun” (Marshall 1959:70) says Silla Boyce
in Brown Girl. The strong yearning of these women is to express
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themselves, to be heard, to be seen in their own terms, and to illuminate
and elevate the conditions of their lives. Marshall made a beginning of
the literature, which, in the words of Calvin Hernton
“… Is a dialectical composite of what is known coming out
of the unknown. It is an upheaval in form, style and
landscape. It is the negation of the negative. And it proffers
a vision of unfettered human possibility.” (Hernton
1990:58)
Paule Marshall, thus, stands out as a pioneer of the black women’s
renaissance. Until her arrival on the literary scene, most writers
approached the major themes like history, colonialism, slavery, racism
from a male perspective. Paule Marshall is the first black woman writer
who treated these ideas from a black feminist point of view. Helene
Christol writes that Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brown Stones became:
Tracing out new grounds, beating out the first contours of a new era of
mind and thus exploring an uncharted territory of black female psyche,
Marshall forged a path for the black women writers who were to emerge
in the 1970s and 1980s. Juxtaposition of woman and collective history,
inter-structure of race and gender, relationship between black woman’s
artistic creativity and the creativity of her womb, portrayal of black
women as complex, developing persons, and active participants in the
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sociopolitical world were the major subjects which Paule Marshall
announced as early as 1959 and the same ideas were, a decade later in
corporate into the fictional canon of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,
Gloria Naylor and Ntozake Shange. Fellow Poet and play write Alexis
De Veaux writes:
“ Long before the woman’s movement, long before the
current numbers of long overdue books by and about Black
women, Paule Marshall was carving a respectful place for
us in literature”(Veaux 1979:68)
Marshall’s own words put this point across more succinctly:
“These are themes that really only came into their right in
the early 1970s, when there was a flowering of writing by
women. But way back then in’ 1950s, I was aware of the
constraints placed upon women, and in particular upon
women writers, and I felt so strongly about this that I began
writing about it then.” (Marshall 1984:90)
It is important to note that Marshall’s writings also share certain qualities
of earlier black women’s fiction. Her insistence on the relationship of
woman as self and as part of community, reminds readers of Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and her intense regard for the
interior and the personal takes us back to Gwendolyn Brooks Maud
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Martha. Paule Marshall integrates all such themes in the texture of her
first novel Brown Girl, Brown Stones. Helene Christol therefore, states
that this novel is:
“…built upon qualities that characterized earlier black
women’s fiction; it also anticipated key features of the black
women’s novel that would only burst fully into blossom and
mature in the 1970s and 1980s”( Christol 1990:141)
Paule Marshall is a vanguard breakthrough writer in many respects. She
is a feminist, she is womanliest; she is a deconstructionist, she is a
revisionist. Or, she is none of these things because she is all of them and
more. The way she grants space and centrality to women makes her a
feminist; the way she seeks syntheses of male-female voice makes her
womanliest , the way she demolishes racist/sexist images grants her a
position as a deconstructionist, and the way she acknowledges and
celebrates black culture and community makes one call her a reconstructionist . At times she transcends all these things by presenting a
wider context appealing to larger humanity Barbara Christian comments
that Marshall is the only black woman writer who engages United States
Society, the new world as well as the international context.
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“ we do indeed flow back and forth ( from America to the
Caribbean
to
Africa
and
back)
in
the
circular
dance…touching and being touched” (Hull 1986:2)
The rhythm, the cadence of human experience that Marshall captures in
her fictional tapestry constitutes a choral symphony in which not only
blacks, not only women but all the human ‘ souls clap hands and sing’.
However, Marshall is basically a black woman writer committed
primarily to black womanhood. It is this commitment that inspired her to
introduce a startlingly a new iconography to women’s literacy tradition.
She is the first black woman novelist who announced in a voice so
heroic, so articulate that the black woman in America was no more a “
de mule uh de world” (Hurston 1978:29) carrying the burden everybody
heaped on her back but a radiant female hero who would cast off from
her imprisoned psyche the self-loathing conditions and marched straight
into the world of Eros-a state of self assured paradise from where she
would proclaim to the world that they are now the creators of a new
world where “ we build our own temples for tomorrow, strong as we
know how and we stand on the top of mountain, free within ourselves”.
(Hughes 1926:112) Paule Marshall demolished what critic Edward Said
calls “Imperialism of representation”. She shattered the monolithic,
mechanistic empire erected both by white and black male writers. She
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cracked all the hegemonic, malignant, ever ridiculing stereotypical
misconceptions that the larger society held about black womanhood.
Marshall broke the seamless web of societal misrepresentation that
presented black women as complex and liberated persons.
She achieved such as iconographic feat especially when the literacy
scene in America was dominated by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and
many other black male writers whose female characters came painfully
close to the stereotypes that white America held about black women.
That was also the time when these stereotypes myths and images
abounded like weeds in the collective national psyche with nothing to
counteract them. Everyone other than the black woman herself, to
paraphrase the words of Mary Helen Washington tried to define who she
was, what she was supposed to look like, act like and sound like. Mae
King argues that such stereotypes “represented externally-defined,
controlling images of Afro- American womanhood and have been central
to the dehumanization of Black women.” (King 1973: 4) They made
slick generalizations about their lives and thrust them into a perpetual
state of invisibility. It is galling to note that the black women novelists
who preceded Paule Marshall, did not, for some curious reasons, make
any insistence on replacing these negative stereotypes with positive
ones, nor did they insist on self definition, self evaluation that was so
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very essential for valuing the consciousness of their own self defined
standpoints in the face of images that rendered them as the objectified
big ‘ other’, as the dehumanized creatures drifting through darkness
without any specifies centre of existence. An examination of the fictional
canon of Frances Harper, Jessie Fauscet , Nella Larsen and many others,
as seen earlier , reveals that the black women who populate their fiction
are either “ suspended or assimilated” (Washington 1982:43)
as
Washington calls them.
“Black women lived a numb existence, unfulfilled as wives
and mothers, racially and sexually oppressed. (They) have
no relief from their burdens and responsibilities and the
pain and violence that are often part of their lives. These
powerless women lead lives of blind existence which many
drive them to become destructive individuals either to
themselves or to others. Poor, over worked, and tired from
child bearing, suspended women lack an outlet for positive
self-expression, so they stumble blindly through their
lives…” (Ingram 1986:20)
If suspended women were the persons unable to move beyond their
trapped level of existence, the assailant black women were the near
white, bourgeois persons who were prepared to wash the black race
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whiter than snow and embrace the Euro-American value structures even
though it required total denial of their ethnicity, racial pride and cultural
identity they were no less than shadow images of whites, whose
aspirations were to be not themselves but replicas of their white
counterparts. None of these writers ever tried to examine black women’s
lives in relation to their culture, their community and finally, the
complexity of their experience in America. Exploration into the
psychological aspects of black women’s lives was something that eluded
their narrative scope and creative vision. They replaced images with
counter-images which did not really go very far in offering new
definitions of black womanhood.
It was Paule Marshall who engaged herself to the task of reconstructing
black womanhood. One of the reasons why the felt impelled to write
Brown Girl, Brown Stones was also to seek corrective measures against
the prevalent derogatory images about black women. In her interview
with Sabine Brock, Paule Marshall states:
“ one of the reasons I wanted to write the story of a Selina
Boyce was to give an answer to the prevailing image, to say
that she was not a tipsy, she was not any of the
characters…or any of the stereotypes…I wanted Selina to
be a departure from all that … (with) Selina you get away
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from this whole Nella Larsen theme, you get a type of Black
woman who truthfully reflects the reality of most black
women.” (Marshall 1984:206)
Marshall charges that such a ‘truthful reflection of Black women’s
realities’ was not chronicled both in American and Afro- American
literature. The portrayal of the black woman as a character was confined
to the stereotypes and fantasy figures which had little to do with the
black woman in reality. She writes:
“… The black woman as portrayed has suffered the same
unhappy fate as the black man. She has in a sense been
strung up on two poles, there is the nigger wench- a
sensual, primitive pleasure-seeking , immoral, the siren, the
sinner …At the other end of the pole, we find that larger
than life figure, the Negro matriarch, who dominates so
much fiction- strong, but humble, devoted, devoutly
religious, patient, wise beyond all wisdom, the saint”.
(Marshall 1974:33-34)
It is not necessarily criminal to write about matriarch, wenches, sinners,
saints, whores or emasculating persons, but what is really criminal in
Marshall’s view point is that the black woman has been lawfully
confined to these stereotypes as if that is the sole reality of their
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existence. Marshall adds: “the black woman is denied the complexities,
the contradictions, the ambiguities that make for a truly credible
character in fiction” (Ibidem: 34)
The underlying reasons why black and white male writers have chosen
to portray the black woman are many. Marshall argues that “the
purpose, the intent, was to deny the –Negro woman her humanity”
(Ibidem: 81) so that all the atrocities and inhuman abuses inflicted on her
could be justified. She reiterates the point in another essay:
“All in all, what emerged out of a whole body of literature
was a debased, on e dimensional figure that, in Ralph
Ellison’s words, had been drained of her humanity. The
reasons for this image are easy to come by. To treat a man
brutally, you first have to render him less of a man. Thus, if
the black woman could be shown to be less than human
…then all sorts of crimes could be committed against her
and go UN remarked…. And none of these crimes need
evoke the kind of moral outcry one could expect if the had
been committed against someone considered fully human”.
(Ibidem: 111)
Black sociologist Joyce Ladner’s assessment of the manner in which
black women were conceptualized in the minds of white America offers
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similar hypothesis. According to Ladner: The black woman was viewed,
as loose and immoral woman because she endured the harsh economical
and social conditions that ensured beyond bondage, she was perceived as
being stronger than other women and certainly stronger than the black
man whom she purportedly emasculated. This dualism of the immoral
nigger wench and the emasculating matriarch is
“… Characterized the way in which the black woman is
perceived by the dominant society (the towering pillar of
strength and an immoral person who cannot approximate
the white woman who has become the adorned symbol of
femininity).” (Ladner 1972:30-31)
Throughout the decades, this dual image of the black women so
pervaded the American psyche that, according to Paule Marshall, black
writers at one time succumbed to it. She charges that rather than
directing their concerns toward capturing such ness and complexities of
black life, and exploring the fullness of black character, black writers
reacted by creating counter stereotypes and one- dimensional caricature
– like characters. Marshall cites as an example of such counter
stereotypes, the reappearance of the tragic mulatto as genteel woman
who was as good as her white sister despite her few drops of black
blood. Marshall writes that in these Fauset and Larsen female characters:
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“The flight was on… The desire, the hope, was to gain
acceptance in the white world, or if not acceptance, the
acknowledgement at least that they were different from the
others, the darker others, and better. The mulatto heroine of
one of Jessie Fauset’s books sums up that hope when,
standing in front of her mirror. She cries out, ‘oh God, all I
want is a chance to show them how decent I am”. (Marshall
1974:36)
Marshall feels that it was through this intricate web of negative images,
myths and stereotypes that the black woman in America was brain
washed and made to deny her culture, her history, her roots and her
selfhood. She observes that the malignant images and symbols
perpetuated consciously by those who controlled them operated
proverbially and pre-rationally and found their way into the thought
system of black women and finally led them to self-oblivion.
Paule Marshall, there fore, believes that image-making is absolutely
necessary for a black writer if he or she wants to reconstruct history of
the last four hundred years, to un-brainwash the entire community and
finally, to bring about a cultural revolution because it is she who has
suffered the triple brunt of oppression, and it is she who knows America
better than America knows itself. Marshall’s writes:
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“ I see writers as image makers, and one of the ways that
we can begin offering images of our self which truly reflect
us, which begin to throw off the negative images that the
West has imposed on us is to begin having out literature
offer to the Black reader the image of himself that is
positive and creative. I don’t think a people can really
progress until they think positively of themselves. Cultural
revolution is about how you see yourself, what you think of
yourself, is part and parcel of other aspects of the
revolution, the political revolution”. (Marshall 1989:30-31)
Marshall thinks that one of the major concerns for black women writers
should be how she can, given the negative, distorted facts, create a
personality which would be positive and assist them to event a new
society, a new nation. She feels that nothing will really change until the
black people learn to see themselves in positive terms. She believes that
reclamation and re-construction of black psyche will not really be
possible until the dragon of self hatred, self denial and self doubt is
expelled from people’s psychic universe. She, therefore, writes:
"It is the writers’ great contribution to create new images
that will overcome the negative psychological images we
have because of our history. I don’t think the political thrust
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can be really effective until there is a new thinking on the
part of the black woman…” (Ibidem: 47)
For the first time in the tradition of black women’s novels, we have
someone in Paule Marshall, who is emphasizing the value of fusing the
personal, the cultural and the political into a whole, someone who is
thinking about cultural revolution in terms of psychological implications,
someone who is concerned with the meaning of the terrors imposed on
black women’s by the colonizing imperialism, and finally someone who
is stressing black artists commitment to the task of remaining faithful to
his/ her personal vision, and “building an internal strength within our
communities” (Marshall 1991:10-11) and freeing their minds from
psychological bondages through the most truthful portrayal of the black
self. Fellow novelist Toni Cade Bambara comes very close to Marshall’s
view when she critiques that:
“Revolution begins with the self, in the self. The individual,
the basic revolutionary unit must be purged of poison and
lies that assault the ego and … That hazard the next larger
unit- ( the community)… we make many false starts because
we have been programmed to depend on white models, or
white interpretations, much less begin to move in a correct
direction”. (Cade 1970:109)
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One of the basic ways of asking ‘ correct questions’ and ‘ moving in the
correct direction’ and finding an antidote to the oppressors’ tendency “
to chop away, to cut away at that sense of self”, ( Marshall 1991:411)
Marshall holds, is
“ to really depict ourselves, portray ourselves as we truly
are to offer not so much the world, but ourselves a more
truthful and in depth and complex sense of who we are in
all our diversity.” (Marshall 1991:17)
Paule Marshall feels that the responsibility of the Black woman writer in
this regard is still greater. She must engage herself to the task of refuting
all the stereotypes, myths and images including the ones accepted and
finally internalized by even the assailant group of black women.
Marshall’s
women,
therefore,
break,
considerably
from
their
predecessors because they are neither middle class, bourgeois, romantic,
near white pariahs alienated from their cultural cords, nor victims
hopelessly drawn into the “ quagmire of sexism” and the ‘ quicksand of
circumstantial forces, nor the exquisite butterflies trapped in evil honey,
nor the mute midnight birds prepared to be choked through insufferable
silence either. Selina, Silla, Reena, Merle Kinbona or Ursa Beatrice are
Marshall’s women, who are self-seekers and perennial rebels, who
demolish societal definitions with a great strength, and power and also
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place themselves on the pedestal of humanity thus far denied to black
women in America. They are not “creatures so abused by pain”
(Walker 1983:232) but Marshall’s and Moses’ who illuminate
themselves and the people around them through darkness and crises.
Silla Boyce in Brown Girl, Brown Stones, for instance, leads a life that
is a paradigm of the Barbadian. Americans Community, She is its
touchstone for she proclaims loudly the deep troubles and aspirations of
her people:
“She is not only the mainstay of the Boyce family, but she
is preeminent in the Bajan Community. She is the pioneer,
forging a path through unfamiliar territory, cutting bush for
those behind her, crushing whatever is in her way with her
powerful gift of words she expresses, in the accent and
idioms of the Bajan community, its fears and aspirations,
she is the avatar
of the community deepest value and
needs”. (Washington 1981:313)
Marshall’s women are highly complex beings with all the human
ambivalences seeking explorations
into the psychic
dilemmas,
oppressions, trials, triumph rejections and idiosyncrasies from the
insiders’ point of view. Marshall examines the innate humanity of her
characters who embody in them the qualities that make them neither the
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queens of the universe nor the helpless actors enacting their own
tragedy. Marshall thinks that the basic commitment of a black woman
writer is to portray black life in all its complexities. She prescribes ways
for the black woman writer to undertake this task:
“One is for the Negro woman writer when dealing with
Negro life and Negro characters, to write about that life
and to depict those characters in full, in all their complexity
and richness to insist in other words, on the common
humanity which joins us to all men everywhere.” (Marshall
1974:36)
She puts this more succinctly in her interview with Joyce Pettis:
“There is something that motivates and guides my work,
the sense that you can portray black women in a black
community as it truly is that you do a great service to that
community, because once you see yourself as you really are
and that doesn’t mean a glorification, but with our failings
and our strengths that you begin to have a sense of your
right to be in the world”. (Marshall 1991:18)
Silla, Selina, Merle Kinbona are the souls tortured and torturing, the
persons whose business is to talk, to reveal, to confess and to explore the
dualities of their lives. In them one finds people with their passions, their
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tumult, their astonishing medley of beauty and vileness. They are at the
same time flawed persons and saints, their acts are at once beautiful and
despicable. One loves and hates them at one and the same time. There is
none of that precise division between good and bad for them nothing is
purely beautiful or purely ugly. It is always “beautiful-ugly”, something
expressing “a fundamental dualism in life: the idea that a thing is at the
same time its opposite, and that these opposite contradictions make up
the whole”. (Marshall 1983:28)
It is this contradiction, this dualism that constitutes the fabric of
women’s lives in Marshall’s fictional world. In brown Girl, Brown
Stones, Silla Boyce complexity- her gentleness and hardness, her ability
to attract and repel, her fluctuations between love and wrath, combine to
make her a real person. She is neither pious, nor passive. She believes
god but also feels that “each man got to see god for him”. She drives her
husbands to the brink of madness and death, she drives her children
away. Marshall writes that Silla Boyce,
“… the mother, is complex, strong yes. Determined to make
her way and yet, at the same time quite capable of
destroying those she loves, reaching out to her children, yet
at the same time driving them away”. (Marshall 1974:37)
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Here is a mother who loves her children but cannot simply express it;
here is a woman who has a deep longing for love and caring arms of her
husband yet cannot forgive him for his romanticism. Here is a woman
who has an irresistible desire for white value ideals. But who spends her
weekends making black puddings and coconut bread which tie her to
her. Afro-centric back ground. In Silla’s temperamental contradictionsher capacity for love and revenge, for inflecting pain and enduring it ,
her self awareness and lack of control, her will to power – are
illuminated the complex historical relations between colonized and
colonizer and within the colonized group which are obtained in America.
“This strong, bitter, frustrated disappointed, loving,
vindictive woman, who keeps striving in the face of all
disappointments, is perhaps one of the most complex black
women characters in contemporary American literature.”
(Harris 1983:56-57)
All Marshall’s women are ambivalent personalities torn between love
and hate, acceptance and rejection, desire and denial of desire, and
aspiration and defeat. Merle Kinbona, Ursa Beatrice is such female
characters that cannot come to terms with themselves. They are the
voices of voiceless people, but remain tongue-tied when it comes to
expressing their own passions and problems. Marshall’s novels are:
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“Filled richly with human beings they all have the capacity to love, to
make mistakes, to cling to some ideal of life. There is a great deal of
ecstatic, and some painful love making. The mothers… are strong and
tend to devour; most of them have fervent realism which miscarries”.
(Buck master 1959:14)
Paule Marshall’s women, like Merle Kinbona and Reena, celebrate racial
victory and women’s triumphs but they also acknowledge defeat, not for
the purpose of reinforcing a sense of victimization but to insure that they
all recognize their vulnerabilities. This recognition originates in
acknowledging the source of their pain and reconciling themselves to
bearing, in some measure, responsibility for it. Hence, there is no turning
away from pain, error but seeing these things as part of their living and
learning a lesson from them.
Paule Marshall is the first black woman novelist to actualize this sense in
her narrative scope. Commenting on the novels of contemporary black
women led by Paule Marshall, Nellie McKay argues that
“There is a little effort to conceal the pain and just as little
to create the ideal but a great deal to reveal how black
women incorporate the negative and positive aspects of self
and external reality into an identity that enables them to
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meet the challenges of the world in which they must live”.
(McKay 1987:186)
Marshall examines the innate humanity of the characters she portrayscharacters who embody qualities that make them neither flawless
heroines, nor immoral individuals or helpless victims. Silla, Merle
Kinbona, Cassie are tragic and exploited women in Marshall’s fictional
canon but they are not victims. Fellow novelist Kristin Hunter holds that
“victims are flat, one dimensional characters someone rolled over by a
steam roller. So you have a cardboard person.” (Hunter 1984:86)
Marshall’s women are far more resilient and more rounded. It is here
that Marshall’s portrayal of female characters differs from that of her
predecessors and contemporaries. No woman in Marshall’s fiction is
sexually brutalized or victimized by her own father or stepfather, or her
husband: Paule Marshall explains:
“The women in my novels really represent a departure from
the kind of women that you see in so much of contemporary
Black women writing. They are not victims on one hand,
they are oppressed women… they are insulted and
humiliated and so forth, but their whole way of reacting to
that , their whole ability to find means of giving vent to their
anger and frustration, their ability to exercise a kind of
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control of lives… suggests that they are not victims”.
(Marshall 1984:196)
Marshall adds further:
“I am not going to portray Black women as eternal victims.
I am not going to give the impression that the whole thing
that one reads in so much of the literature of rape, of incest
and so on is a pattern in the black community… I’m saying
that they do exist but that it’s not the total story of our
community”. (Ibidem: 201-201)
No Marshall’s women suggest that black life is in such disarray, that
black community is so disintegrated, that they do not constitute any kind
of positive force in America. Marshall’s women, therefore, are the
genuine human beings with weaknesses, vulnerabilities and strengths.
They always “feel human instead of like some old mule”. (Marshall
1981:14)
Silla Boyce has not ‘outlet for her Blues’. She turns her pain inward
instead of releasing it outward. Merle Kinbona is a person with a
fractured psyche and struggling hard to fuse the fragmented pieces of her
personality into one whole. Ursa Beatrice in the Novel “Daughters” lies
crouching and in the fold of darkness that, her father has imposed on her
existence. She is not able to cut away the subtle reduction and
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domination that has long characterized her relationship with her father,
Primes Mackenzie. Avey Johnson is a person who suffers emotional
constipation and is hopelessly in search of some meaning in her
culturally lost life. Each one of these Marshall women is spinning out
their destinies from their own beings. They are tragic because “They
don’t know what they are and since they don’t know why behave as they
do.
They
make
for
themselves
as
infinity
of
misery
and
misunderstanding”. (Lask 1969:31) Paule Marshall’s women are
mysterious tragic and more often than not take us into the dark recesses
of their souls. Yet they are strong in many ways. They lose the ground
temporarily but recover it finally.
“Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction
loss. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or
jobs, they always find themselves … Marshall insists that
the woman with enough nerve can win even when the deck
is stacked and the other players are hostile. Nerve, here
means making radical choice … and making up one’s mind
to heed an inner voice. ” (Pinckney1983:26)
Silla Boyce, for instance, is the woman who has staked out a claim to
power in white America in spite of all the odds that everyone including
her husband has stacked against her face. She feels that,
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“People got to make their own way. And nearly always to
make your way in this Christ world you got to be hard and
sometimes misuse others, even you own.” (Marshall
1981:224)
Silla calls upon that black woman in racist/sexist America “best be
swift, if not somebody come and trample you quick enough.” (Ibidem:
25) She tells them to “keep yours head up and not have these white
people push you ‘bout like yours’ cattle”. (Ibidem: 172) Silla, therefore,
thinks that it is for black women to carve them a place in the hostile
country. She meticulously plans for months to sell her husband’s land in
order to get the down payment for the brownstone tenement. She does
everything short of murder to attain her ends, to find a safe ‘place’ in
America. She is determined to crush whatever is in her way, even her
own husband “Be-Jesus Christ.” I gon do that for him then. Even it I got
to see my soul fall howling into hell I gon do it.” (Ibidem: 47) Her life is
a paradigm that informs black women in America that such a search for
autonomous survival assigns them the power of conscious choice: they
are not victims.
Selina Boyce is another Marshall woman who is equally assertive. She is
psychologically strong and independent articulate and an intelligent
young girl, who is not afraid of making radical choices in her life or
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being different from the established norms. Her experiences with men,
with her community have helped her to develop a greater sense of self
and she is psychologically equipped to reject or accept values of life in
order to determine what type of life the wants for her. Although Selina
appreciates the strength of her American – Barbadian people, she still
cannot accept their way of life, their inhuman code of ethics that
demands self – centeredness and strict conformity. At the end of the
novel, Selina removes one of her bangles and hurls them back into the
face of her community before she leaves for Barbados to find a larger
identity for herself. Her act is a testimony that she is a dauntless woman
who is now prepared to step out of centuries of molding and redirect her
own destiny.
“Selina develops and survives as the first really liberated
young Black woman in American fiction because she learns
to appreciate the permanent values as well the limitations
of the various human beings she encounters – despite
handicaps and short comings has suffered as the result of a
blind oppressive white society determined to keep them in
their place.” (Banner 1981:10)
Where the black heroines of the 1940’s escape to various places and start
life over merely to survive, Selina steps out not for personal survival but
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for the uplifting of her less fortunate black sisters and oppressed ones. It
is Selina who initiates the archetypal Journey back, a “kind of reverse
Middle Passage” (Washington 1981:313) a journey that effects not only
a reversal of the Middle Passage but the entire history of black women in
America.
Like Silla and Selina, Reena is one of the Marshall’s women who is
equally strong and assertive, liven when she was an adolescent girl, she
looked:
“…unique, superior, and therefore, dangerous. She seemed
defined, even then, all of a piece, the raw edges of her
adolescence smoothed over, indeed, she seemed to have
escaped adolescence all together and made one dazzling
leap from childhood into the very arena of adult life”.
(Marshall 1983:43)
Her behavior during her college years indicates her non-conformity and
individualism. Her involvement with a white leftist organization leaves
her feeling tormented because she realizes that the radical group is full
of rhetoric and theorizing without any real substance or action. Reena
has the nerves to seek divorce from her husband in order to emerge as a
political figure. She is a woman intensely committed to her black
experience and therefore intends to work for various political social
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cases to bring about change and black awareness. She feels a necessity
for black men and women to fully understand their cultures and history
if they are not to be the displaced people in America. Reena is conscious
about the political, economic and social ramifications of black women’s
racial/sexual oppression. She feels that she has a political vision and can
make positive changes in her life and the lives of her people as well.
“Like Alice Walker’s Meridian, “Reena” shows and thus
helps to define the American black woman in her political
role … Like Meridian, Reena Continues to serve here
political vision carrying her perspective of the need for
political and economic adjustment in the society into the
present time.” (Hawthorne 1986:3-4)
Commenting on Marshall’s two women Selina and Reena, Elwanda D.
Ingram writes:
“Paule Marshall’s two women characters Selina and
Reena, fit these characteristics (of assertiveness), Reena
demands a name change, becomes politically involved, and
divorces
her husband, Selina frees herself from the
restrictions of her Barbadian cultural background, becomes
a dancer, and decides to leave home. They are just two
examples of a type of woman character who learns that she
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must establish her own identity in order to be herself, in
order to be her own assertive persons.” (Ingram 1986:27)
Another female character that stands out distinctly in the fictional
landscape of Paule Marshall is Merle Kinbona, the protagonist of “The
Chosen Place”, The Tuneless people. “Merle remains the most alive of
my characters”, (Marshall 1983:109) says Marshall. To read the novel is
primarily to meet Merle Kinbona. From her very first appearance on the
first page to her last words, she is real, she is alive, a complex, rounded
character. She talks endlessly (her way of fighting against loneliness and
despair), she cries, screams, smiles, drinks carries, away, drags everyone
and everything along with her in her headlong race forward. But what is
really nearest her heart is Bourne hills and its people. “She is the queen,
the primeval Goddess of the island, a life-force, an-earth mother who is
the island-its past, present, and future”. (Talmor 1987:80) To Saul
Amaron, the WASP leader and the American anthropologist,
“It seemed that her dark face … mirrored not only the faces
of the children and those of the men and women in Delbert's
yard as well. She appeared to contain them all. So that for a
moment … he didn't see her simply as Merle … but some
larger figure in whose person was summed up both Bourne
hills and its people”. (Marshall 1969:260)
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"She somehow is Bourne hills", remarks Allan Fuso, one of the
characters in the novel. She is a symbol, or even more, an archetype.
When it stains the islands roads are impassable, and when the local law
firm conspires to sell Bourne hills to property developers, hell-bent on
jettisoning the island into the modern swing of things, Merle acquires the
measure of the multinationals. She blasts against exploitation. She poses
a major threat to the White American Colonists and their power
structure. She is intensely committed to Bourne hills. Her loyalties are to
"the little Fella", the ingenious poor, and she encourages them to rise up
against the conditions of their lives, primarily to resist the courtesies of
the dollar by ensuring economics autonomy. Merle Kinbona is catalyst
of change for herself and her black community and for the oppressed
people but an agent of destruction for the colonizers and the oppressor.
She cannibalizes the island life, brings resurrection for herself and Saul,
the Jewish scientist but drives Harriet Amaron-the brain behind the
WASP organization to death through suicide. Robert Bone, therefore,
praises Merle as
"Part saint, part revolutionary, part obeah woman … she
commands the loyalty of the villagers by virtue of the
obeisance they accord her suffering. Her devastated life
emerges with ravaged landscape and economy of Bourne
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hills; her toughness and resiliency contains intimations of
the new beginning. She is the challenge and testing ground
for the white characters; an agent of destruction or catalyst
of growth". (Bone 1969:54)
The revolutionary initiative that Merle exhibit is central also to the quest
of Alice Walker's Meridian which appeared some seven years later and
of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters published in 1980. Both
Meridian and Velma Henry are complex, political actors and seem to
draw the innate political and revolutionary strength from Merle Kinbona.
"Both Merle and Meridian are new literacy characters in
Afro-American Women's novels who are presented as
complex women struggling to understand themselves as
black and female. In seeking their own identity they find
they must pursue substantive social transformation. They
are female literacy characters of a social and political
depth seldom seen in either Afro or European-American
literature. In developing a character such as Merle
Kinbona within a graphic analysis of her particular society,
Marshall has announced the major theme of AfricanAmerican women's fiction of the 1970's in which black
women are finally being presented both as complex,
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developing persons and active participants in the socioworld.” (Christian 1984:168)
Paule Marshall's women are not only the social and political actors and
revolutionists but even extenders of Afro centric myths and transmitters
of black culture. Avey Johnson, the sixty four year old protagonist of
Praise song for the Widow for instance, is such a black woman who,
even at this age, capable of translating personal history into culture
metaphor through myths, rituals and dances. By using historical,
personal and cultural metaphors, Avey Johnson implies that AfricanAmerican need to connect those aspects of black heritage which are
psychologically empowering. For her, personal history and culture
contexts are paradigms of African-American history. She, therefore,
takes up an Odysseus, spiritual middle passage journey from Tatem in
South Carolina to Carriacou, the cultural source. Rejuvenated through
"ritualistic process", Avey, then, throws of the psychological bondage of
many years loyalty to false ideals imposed by the American society,
renames herself, finds her nation, reinvents the life and legacy
bequeathed to her at Ibo landing, determines to rebuild Great aunt
Cuney's Tatem house and invite the younger generations to make a
conscious assumption of the shared life inherited from her Ibo ancestry.
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Avey resolves to sing a praise song of history. Constantly radiating
outward ever - widening circles of new possibilities.
The above discourse evidences that Paule Marshall is the first black
woman novelist in black women's novelist tradition to go beyond the
established shorelines and offer realistic representations of different
models of black woman hood. She attempts to seriously capture the
network of sentiments, motivations and misfortunes that are a part of
human behavior. By presenting black woman as social, political and
cultural actors, Marshall captures the diversities and complexities of
their experiences and informs that her women are not victims. Sabine
Brock pays tribute to Marshall when she comments that "it was a very
avant-garde way in the fifties to portray a woman seeking after power
and admitting it freely, that would have been avant-garde even for white
woman". (Brock 1984:198)
Paul Marshall is an avant-garde black women novelist also because it is
she who has sculpted these new modes of female characters in relation to
culture and community they live in. Marshall insists on the reality of
black culture not only as an antidote to white racism but primarily as an
inevitable property of a people who, many thought, had no history, or
culture of their own she feels that
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“There is a whole culture, a whole field of manners about
Black American life that has to be first of all acknowledged
and celebrated. That's we are not, as too many of our
detractors would like to insist, a people without a culture.
That out of the painful experience slavery and the aftermath
we have been able to would a culture which is unique to us.
That culture has to be made available to black readers and
it has to be celebrated". (Marshall 1989:28-29)
Marshall assets what it is the black community which is the agent and
arch bearer of this culture and it is this specific culture that provides
strength nourishment and sustenance back to that community making
each one of them inseparable from each other.
Marshall, therefore, stresses the importance of culture and community as
context for understanding society's definitions of black man and woman
as a prerequisite for comprehending those distinct contours of the black
self. It is in this frame work of culture and community that Paule
Marshall portrays her characters. Barbara Christian comments that it is
“Marshall's concerns both to sculpt her characters in all their
uniqueness and to probe the space of their culture dimensions"
(Christian1985:83)
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In her interview with Sabina Brock, Marshall informs that the black
woman should be “defined not by racism solely but by her community
and by the people who make her up …" (Brock 1984:199) She is the first
black woman novelist who sculpts black female characters in relation to
their culture and community.
“She (Marshall) veers sharply away from mush of the
preceding literature, which emphasized advancement for
black women in terms of white American values. She
portrays the Barbadian - American Community both as a
rock her characters can stand up on, and the obstacle
against which they must struggle in order to understand
and develop their own individuality.” (Christian1985:239240)
Silla, Selina, Merle Kinbona and Avery Johnson are the female
characters in Marshall's fictional canon who carve out their self-identity
within a specific black community rather than in relation to a hostile
white society. They are psychologically connected to it and they
celebrate it so as to give the meaning of their lives back to community.
In Marshall's fiction community and characters remain inextricable wed
to each other to the extent sometimes community in itself becomes
another character and character the embodiment of the whole
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community. In Marshall's second novel, The Chosen Place. The
Timeless People, for instance, we have Merle Kinbona, who, as Marshall
Puts it, “some larger figure in whole person was summed up both
Bourne hills and its people." (Marshall 1969:118) Helen Washington
writes
“Silla’s life is a paradigm of the Barbadian (Barbados)
community. She is the touchstone, for she proclaims loud
the chaotic trouble deep in the core of the community. Her
endurance, her rage, her devotion to the dollar and
property, her determination to survive in "this man country"
is theirs. Her light and shadows are theirs. Her tragedy is
theirs" (Washington1981:315)
Silla Boyce, Merle Kinbona and other major female characters in Paule
Marshall's fiction represent not only the personal self but also the self
that is collective. Marshall feels that the black artist could move beyond
the personal self so as to ensure that the bigger, collective self continues.
“It’s not only my experience when I take about 'my' or 'I'. I’m really
talking about the collective 'I', ". clarifies (Marshall 1991:411) The self
that Marshall actualizes in her canon is not the self that is reduced to an
overtly slogan, propagandist, politically motivated purposes as one often
finds in black male literature, but a composite, multifaceted, revisionist
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rejections and endurances which so many black men and women in
American commonly share.
“The self is conceived as member of an oppressed social
group, with ties and responsibilities to the other members
… The self belongs to the people, and the people find a
voice in the self. (Butterfield 1974:3)
Barker reiterates Butterfield's point when he says that "black American
culture was never characterized by the individualization ethos of white
American culture … (it) is characterized by a collective ethos."(Baker
1990:16) Marshall is a woman writer. Therefore, she does not negate the
personal self, the basic unit, the private values and experiences, "the
individual ethos" but grants that self that ethos a multi faceted, multidimensional, composite tone so that it is accepted as an authentic and
representative expression of the entire community. This is the reason
why, writes Marshall, “She (Silla) became the collective voice of all
Bajan women, the vehicle through which their former suffering found
utterance” (Marshall 1981:45) It is this fusion of the private and the
public, the personal and the collective, the character and community, the
sculpture and the space that provides a viable context through which
Marshall's characters carve out their articulate and energized identities.
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The community, "this collective ethos" weaves a tapestry of rituals,
myths, religious beliefs and practices and presents its people a specific
cultural ethos through which they try to express their deep troubles, and
aspirations. It is through this ethos that they try to reconcile and resolve
the chaotic situations in their lives and finally, find unity and wholeness
of their being. In Brown Girl, Brown Stones for instance, the women
perform rituals around Silla's kitchen table. Their cultural idiom, The
Gatha steed's wedding. The meetings of the Barbadian- American
Association embody these rituals which Selina initially refutes but
subsequently accepts them for forging her self-identity. In the chosen
Place, The Timeless People, the circles of history, myth and rituals
constitute the cultural force through which the submerged consciousness
of Merle Kinbona and other Bourne hills people is brought into full play.
The carnival reenactment of Cuffee Ned, the conscious regression into
the historical past brings these people a renewed energy and power. In
Praise Song for the Widow, the folkloric trickster figure of West Africa,
and the ritualistic "Beg Pardon" dance become the agents through which
Avey Johnson, the jaded protagonist, rejuvenates herself into Avatara,
the incarnation of wholeness and human vitality.
Thus, Marshall Novels are praise songs also for the reason that the
relentlessly analyses all her major and minor characters in relation to
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their community and culture. Creation of complex and ambivalent
characters within the context of black community and culture was an
unheralded chronicle, and Paule Marshall is the first novelist to actualize
that chronicle into the canon of Black American literature.
Marshall occupies a pioneering position not only as a sculptor of
complex characters and a transmitter of Afro centric culture, but also as
a creator of feminine aesthetic which consists of ideas produced by
women that clarify a stand point of and for women. It is an aesthetic
which assumes that women possess a unique stand point on, or
perspective of, their experience and that there will be certain
commonalties of perception shared by women as group. This aesthetic
also demands that women embrace the ideology of self-definition and
self-valuation which stresses on replacing externally derived images
with authentic female images. Inherent in this aesthetic, then, is the idea
that women be the center of the entire discourse, the hub of all activities.
A practitioner of such an aesthetic must be confronted with a task that is
two fold; she breaks the Patriarchal pattern of representation and also
tries to make room for women with and within their script.
Paule Marshall is the first black women novelist to blend in her narrative
scope all these elements into one unified whole. Her texts document
lives of black women who insist on, what Toni Morrison calls, “speaking
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the unspeakable” or what Michel Foucault calls "thinking the unthoughtof". (Foucault 1973:33) Marshall is a woman writer and celebrates
"female culture" which, to paraphrase Elaine Showalter, means a
conscious acceptance of the relationships between women, as mothers,
'daughters' sisters and friends their sexuality, marriage, motherhood their
ideas about female body etc as the positive ingredients of woman's
existence. Marshall's fictions are foremost among those which challenge
the institutions that are indifferent to difference and intent on preserving
a myth of a homogeneous tradition for its own sake and for its political
ramifications. Canon-building has been accomplished by the scholars
both white and black who universalized texts by ignoring the
specificities of experience and who insisted on totalizing concept of
gender, race and subjectivity. Marshall subverts this concept of
canonicity and emphasizes through this celebration of "female culture"
that black woman writers write in difference, as the French call it. The
way she grants centrality to black women, the way she examines the
bonds of black sisterhood, the way the establishes authenticity of the
black female self and the way she juxtaposes feminism and racism
stands in clear testimony that Marshall is a writer who writes in
difference.
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However, for Marshall this difference does not mean that gender is
separate or separable for racial identity. While her arguments are for
liberation from racial and gender oppression, both race and gender
themselves are seen as liberation points from which to construct a
language for or to create a literature that is political in form as well as in
subject matter.
Any woman writer, who celebrates "female culture" who willfully
resorts to the act of writing in difference who insists that speak not as
women but like women, must begin by making women the primary
figures and central actors of the entire discourse.
“…Infact, any author who chooses a woman as the central
characters in the story understands at some level that
women are primary beings, and that they are not ultimately
defined according to patriarchal assumptions in relation to
fathers,
husband,
or
male
gods."(Pearson
and
Katherine1981:12)
With Paule Marshall ended the era of patriarchal imperialism and the era
of conscious foregrounding of black women really began. She
challenged the masculine economy of representation and hegemonic
dominance by introducing black women, the triply invisible persons, as
the central actors in her fictional drama. Marshall says:
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"From the time I started writing, women have been central
to my stories. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is
that women were central to my world growing up… The
other reason that women are central to my work is that they
were seldom the principal characters in the books … and
they were almost never black so that without being terribly
conscious of it, I determined to make women especially
Black women important characters in my stories when I
started writing. To make up for the neglect the disregard
the distortions and untruths I wanted them to be center
stage. “(Marshall 1991:6)
Right from Cassie in the story "The valley Between" to Ursa Beatrice in
Daughter, all Marshall's heroines are the persons who are "primary
beings" and "agents of change" and embodiment of "power principle".
They are the ones who challenge the domain of placeless and
marginality and assert a definite place in the society. Silla, Selina,
Reena, Merle Kinbona and Ursa Beatrice are not prepared to be muted,
mutilated, midnight, caged birds content with remaining within the
confines of racist and patriarchal society but most articulate creators and
dwellers of "wild zone", a sphere outside the dominant male culture.
Spatially the term "Wild zone", to paraphrase Showlalter,
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“denotes a no man's land, a place forbidden to men,
experimentally, it stands for the aspects of the female life
style which are outside of and unlike those of men,
metaphorically, it refers to the imaginary realm of the
unconscious not accessible or structured by language.
Marshall has created her black women wild zone to
compensate for their double alienation from the while and
male cultures.”(Showlalter1981:262)
In Brown Girls Brown Stones, Silla Boyce's strong insistence on buying
the brownstone does not simply express her desire for material
acquisition but a strong will to resolve the problem the larger society and
her own husband have created for her and children. Her desire is "to be
mistress of her own space, to control territory, to command a foothold
against white society", (Brock1987:85) as well as to provide a protective
barriers for herself and her children.
All Marshall Women are the wild-zone dwellers. In Silla's kitchen the
Barbadian American women folk enjoy large "wild zone" in which free
wheeling talk covers a wide range of affairs, from child-birth, marriage,
pregnancy, and weddings to obeah (conjuring) and politics. A similarly
unrestrained atmosphere prevails during right time conversation between
Reena and Pauline at their Aunt VI’s wake. They discuss the issues
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related to the “Wild zone ", their college years, their love affairs, their
search for job, marriage and divorce. All Marshall's women hold centre
stage in their lives. Through their speech and acts they create a definite
place for themselves. They speak and see the same speech as followed
by action. They chart out their own course of action and they redirect
their own destinies. Silla, Selina Avey Johnson, Ursa Beatrice are
basically committed to making radical choices so as to control definite
space in their lives. It is through this choice that they make the "arcs of
recovery" (Willis 1987:53) and establish that they are not victims. In
making the choice to go to Barbados or Carriacou to begin again, Selina
and Avery Johnson symbolize their personal and collective need to order
themselves to recognize their loss in materialistic America, to reclaim
their lives and seek unity and coherence of vision so badly needed to
reshape their lives. Ursa Beatrice must throw off the shackles of her
womb and liberate herself from the red rock patriarchy in order to
recreate her own self Marshall's fictional scope "assigns even to an
oppressed people the power of conscious political choice: they are not
victims". (Washington 1981:322) Marshall is pioneer even in creation
space for women and granting centrality to them in fictional possibilities.
"avant-garde constructs… as early as 1959 … to raise an
issue clerical for women's literature: Namely, that in order
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for (black) women writers to create characters that are both
multi faceted and self defined, rather than simply
portraying morally refined and "good" heroines serving as
victims for and of identification strategies applied by
authors and readers like, spaces for women in fiction
cannot remain places. Only envisioned in dreams…only
beginning in the 1970's and 1980's however, will women
writers be able to employ to a fuller extent various literacy
devices in answering Marshall's call".( Brock 1987:10)
“The simple act of telling a woman's story for a woman's point of view
is a revolutionary act".(Christ 1986:7) Right form Lola Le Roy (1892) to
Maud Martha (1952) black women novelists have exploited women's
lives for the propagandistic purpose of racial advancement. Except Zora
Neale Hurston, none of these novelists really focused on telling
"woman's story" from "a woman's point of view" Gwendolyn Brooks did
write a woman's story but could not somehow or the other articulate the
voice of Maud Martha, could not establish this point of view. She could
not pull Martha from the snare of silence. Telling a story from a
woman's point of view is not merely to establish a rhetorical approach to
their lives but also to learn to value everything about being a woman. It
is also to overcome "false naming" and to make important what is in
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significant and trivial to patriarchy's domain. It is Paule Marshall who
incorporated such a point of view in her texts as early as 1959. Her
female characters like Selina Boyce learn to value the life giving
potential of her monthly bleeding and celebrate her body's connection to
nature. Cassie, Ursa, Reena and Miss Williams are the Marshall heroines
who are deeply concerned with the problems of marriage, motherhood;
abortion and sexual harassment. They are the ones who celebrate those
old women who defied conventional roles. They celebrate also their
connections with other women's and positively name them "sisterhood".
They celebrate this "Wild zone" not in shame but in full pride. Many
critics acknowledge Marshall's avant-garde explorations into feminist
themes.
"If it (Brown Girl, Brown stones) had been published in
1979, rather than 1959, she would have been Toni
Morrison.
Marshall
explored
a
black
women's
consciousness and broke out of convention. It was too early.
“(Washington 1985:2)
Brown Girl, certainly looks inward since it first presents itself as a
bildungsroman, it describes the growth of its heroine, Selina Boyce, who
is ten years old when the story begins in 1939 and twenty when it ends.
The novel shows different stages in her development as she goes from
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innocence to experience, testing the various phases, doubts, fears, hope
and conflict of an adolescent girl. Selina experience puberty and sexual
anxiety and expresses them freely. She "speaks the unspeakable", and
celebrates the "abhorred" and the "abhor able." Selina experiences
menses and feels “the bloods bursting each month inside her, the sun the
seared grass and the earth even she … was part of the mosaic. (Marshall
1981:62) Innocent of child birth still, Selina asks Beryl, her girl friend.
“Whaddya talking about - chop loose your stomach"
"Don't you know yet that's what they do when you have
baby”? That's not so. They don't chop anything it just pops
out." Pops out”? She laughed. "Pops outta where"?
"Underneath"… "Underneath, where"? … I saw my mother
naked once and she didn't have any scars on her stomach."
(Ibidem: 57)
Marshall gives voice to female sexuality in almost all her works.
“In the warm pool of light from the lamp beside the bed, the
woman's stomach was flat smooth, a snow white plain, with
the navel like a tiny signpost pointing to the silken forest
below. Jay could not get over the flatness. Stroking it, he
would tell her - his against her ears, her lips what it did to
him, how it moved him … until, under thus caress and the
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quiet power of her voice, the woman would try out and pull
him down between her arched, widespread legs." (Marshall
1983:59)
Besides sexuality, motherhood, marriage abortion, relationships with
husbands and children are also some of the major subjects which
Marshall incorporates in her fictional canon. Her short stories "The
valley Between” and "Reena" present cassie’s and Reena as women
showing frustrations and vulnerabilities in marriage and child rearing.
They are the women who are struggling hard to strike a balance between
the restrictions imposed by the paternalistic institution and personal
accomplishment and independence. A college dropout, Cassie wants to
finish the remaining two years of college but her aspirations remain are
thwarted by her husband who having been locked into gender/role
expectations tells Cassie “Look, in the town I come from, a girls gets
married and she settles down to take care of her house and kids; she is
satisfied with that." (Marshall 1983:18) By effectively juxtaposing
Cassie's rebellious female voice with her husband's sexist intonations
right throughout the story, Marshall wants to stress the need to redefine
sex roles operative in the patriarchal American Society. The story
written as early as 1954 "anticipated themes that are current in women's
literature today. It’s been called a '50s' story twenty years ahead of its
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time." (Ibidem: 15) Marriage and divorce are the subjects Marshall
introduce in "Reena." Marshall presents a young college educated black
woman named Reena, who in spite her efforts to fit into the gender/role
expectations of her husband’s Dave, and to become a devoted mother
and a house wife is accused of being a woman interested in "pointing up
his deficiencies" and "wanting to see him fail unable to stand such false,
sexist accusations, Reena seeks divorce, an act which Cassie could not
dare commit. Abortion which is exclusively a woman's domain is the
subject that Marshall explores in her most recent novel Daughters. Ursa
Beatrice, the protagonist aborts the child of her self - obsessed lover and
testifies that women can exercise free and complete control over their
bodies, that they can make radical choices to prove that they are not
victims of sexists husbands and lovers. Marshall feels that this is
absolutely necessary because “women find their answers only when they
are able to overcome the male, who is … blocking their view from the
sun …" (Marshall 1991:32)
Another theme that contributes to the feminist pattern of Marshall's
writing is the bond of sisterhood which constitutes a resilient, womencentered network of relationships between daughters, blood mother,
other mothers, grand mothers, sisters and aunts. The most integral part of
this bond is the relationship between black mothers and daughters.
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It should be noted that the Black mother-daughter relationship had not
received any attentions in literary analyses before Paule Marshall,
Moreover emphasis in Brown Girl; Brown Stones on the complexity of
such relationship as a significant theme in literature was not recognized
until the second wave of American feminism questioned conventional
assumptions about the bond. Here again, Marshall stands as unique
writer in Afro-American literary tradition. Unlike some of the black
women writers of the 1970s and the 1980s, she did not idealize the
mother-daughter relationship. Rather, she celebrated it by probing its
complexity and demonstrated how that so natural bond is affected by
societal context. The relationship between Silla and Selina in Brown
Girl, Brown Stones, between Ursa Beatrice and Estelle in Daughters
therefore, are totally ambivalent. They are adversaries as well as the
closest of friends. They meet, mingle embrace yet confront and
contaminate each other. They hiss and boil at each other, yet carry
intense love and respect for each other. To Selina, her mother is no more
an autocratic, cruel 'Hitler' but a certain rock, an invincible resource
from which the mystique of exultant black feminine character is molded.
Selina must learn not only from her biological mother but also from,
what Rosalie Troester calls, "other mothers". (Troester 1991:89) Racism
sexism, and poverty or what Marshall calls "triple headed hydra" often
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produces situation in which many black children will have other
mothers, who care them and fill in for blood mothers, who cannot be
theirs. For black daughters, these women bring certain revelations in
"female" art which the real mothers call it, stands to the core of
relationship between these mothers and daughters. Gloria Wade Gayles
writes that Black women like Paule Marshall present:
"… Complex mother-daughter relationships that have no
simple equation for friendship, no self formulae for
bonding. They write of anger and love, Suspicion and trust
conflict and understanding, estrangement and bonding".
(Wade 1984:89)
Basic to this conflicted relationship is the brutality of racism and sexism
which young Selina, for instance, cannot understand. She fails to
comprehend her mother’s predicament in hostile environments. It is only
in the end that Selina is able to grasp that her mother had to be
suffocative by being protective and fierce so as to mold her daughter into
whole and self actualizing person in a society that continually cannot.
For Selina, Suggie Skeete, Miss Thompson, and Miss Mary are those
other mothers who imbue Selina with an innate vision. Suggie teaches
Selina the pleasures of flesh. Miss Thompson who comes from the
American south tells Selina the implications of sexism and racism by
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nursing a male inflicted wound that refuses to heal. Through Miss
Marry, Selina learns that she has other, more global, contexts than the
ones she currently experiences. Marshall presents a similar design in her
most recent novel Daughter. In the aftermath of the abortion, Ursa finds
herself subjected to a virtual storm of memory, in which she summons
up every mother. From Celestine she learns the futility of living without
a sense of self. From Forde she learns the vanity of living only for
material gain. From Viney she learns what is to become the moral
imperative of Daughters - that to be human, one must be of use. From
her biological mother she learns that in order to be of use, men and
women must work together and that the relationship between the sexes is
far more complicated than she has ever imagined.
Included in the bond of sisterhood are also a few grandmothers. "The
guardian of the generations", who are the acknowledge story tellers who
pass on the family history and who know who is Kin to whom. Celestine
in the Novel “Daughters”, Great Aunt Cuney in “Praise Song”, Leesy
Walkes in “Chosen Place.” Da-duh in "To Da-duh In Memoriam" and
Miss Thompson in” Brown Girl” are those figures who stand as the
preserves of the African - extended family, as the repositories and
distributors of family history, wisdom and black lore and also as the
retainers and communicators of values and ideals which support and
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enhance their families and their community the role these mothers, other
mothers, and grandmothers play is the role of what Carole Boyce Davies
calls "mother-healers". (Davies 1985:43)They not only nurture and
provide emotional support to their daughters but even help them resolve
ambiguities and aspirations of their sexuality. Selina, Ursa, and other'
daughters' in Marshall's fiction acknowledge how their mothers provided
roadmaps and patterns which enabled them to create and define
themselves as they moved from childhood through adolescence to
adulthood. Though these daughters forge an identity which is separate
from their mothers, they frequently acknowledge that a part of
themselves is truly of their mothers, the nurturing female community of
these grandmothers and other mothers often encircles their daughters in
order to ensure some familiarity in their Journey into a world
characterized by uncertainty and even hostility. All Paule Marshall's
daughters seem to acknowledge: "what these mothers passed on would
take you anywhere in the world you wanted to go." (Washington
1984:161)
Paule Marshall points out that "there's been a … womanish perspective
in my work from very early on". (Dance 1991:32) Womanish vision,
according to Alice Walker, is "committed to survival and wholeness of
entire people, male and female". (Walker 1983:23)Though intensely
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committed to the cause of black womanhood, Marshall does not believe
in separatist ideology that would fracture the black community. She
insists that the black people must build a world of harmonious
relationship and understanding without ever allowing self erasing self
surrendering homogeny. She feels that the black community should not
only survive but survive whole as well. She is frankly looking for a new
value which would promulgate aesthetics of unification by obliterating
the artificial and excessively egotistic sexual polarization alienating
black man from black woman. And herein lays Marshall's ethnic
feminism which differs considerably from the feminism of her sister
novelists of the 1970s and 1980s.
To Marshall, the gesture of negative male portrayal is no indication of
that negation for affirmation ideology so very crucial to the making of
feminist revolution but an "artistic tribalism" and blatant gender warfare
leading the black community hopelessly as ever deeper into the morass
of distrust and fragmentation. Marshall admits "that they (male
brutalities) do exist but that it is not the total story of our community.”
(Marshall 1984:202) She feels that the sexist oppressions of black
women must be explored in literature but with utmost care. Marshall, a
"meticulous" writer, is not prepared to dig the same holes which black
male writers made for black women. Her meticulousness finds
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expression in almost all her works. For instance, in Brown Girl, Silla
Boyce starts a fierce quarrel with her romantic husband, Deighton, but
feels deeply tormented over his loss. She tells Selina "I did do it out of
hate, its just that I can’t bear to see him suffering".(Marshall 1981:305)
In "Reena" the title character come in conflict with her husband Dave,
finds it hard to continue living with him but without making any
compromise with her self-respect and self pride. She walks coolly out of
his life. In Daughters Ursa Beatrice engineers her father Primus
Mackenzie loss at the pole, upsets his domestic life by destroying the
configurations of polestar and constellation that involves other women,
but such an action is designed not to defeat him but rather to restore him
to his original commitment and values.
Marshall tells us:
"Whatever feminist note is struck in the novels is not meant
to obscure … the need for Black men and women to come
together in wholeness and unity". (Marshall1991:34)
She does celebrate black womanhood but does not accept the notions of
polarization, antagonism, gender warfare and fragmentation. She accepts
synthesis and balance and cultural solidarity but not self glossing
homogeneity or summarily totalizing concepts of gender, race and
subjectivity.
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Her six books reflect a consciousness that she writes both from and
about a zone that is "outside" of literacy convention, that disrupts white
ideological confines and modifies patriarchal inscriptions, Marshall does
write in difference, does inscribe the "wild zone" but not at the cost of
cultural solidarity. She presents a zone in terms that emphasize rather
than minimize cultural otherness.
To sum up, Paule Marshall reconstructed black womanhood and
introduced a new iconography in African-American literature. She
defined black female characters in relation to the community they lived
in, insisting on the relationship of woman as self and as part of a
community. She "prefigured the major themes of black women fiction in
the 1970's the black woman's potential as a full person and necessarily a
major actor on the social, cultural and political issues of our times".
(Christian1985:105) She made the silent speak. She made the invisible
visible and the repressed to make an explosive return. She set her women
out to claim the "Wild Zone", an authentic black female space which
they could use as the basis for reference and action. Without viewing
gender and racial identity as mutually exclusive polarities, Marshall used
them both as equally liberating points from which to construct a
language or to create a literature that is political in form as well as in
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subject matter. She emerged from a landscape where every signpost
signified tantalization and otherness of female experience and culture.
“She had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not
whiteness, not lady hood, not anything. And out of the
profound desolation of her reality. She may very well have
invented herself". (Morrison 1971:63)
“It was very inhospitable climate in which I started writing.
I had no mentors, no one that I could turn to.” (Marshall
1991:15) Fellow poet and playwright Alex De Veaux
praises Marshall as one “who went the road alone with no
vehicle to make her comfortable journey.” (Veaux 1979:71)
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