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CHAPTER - III
MYTHS AND
BLACK WOMAN
CHAPTER - III
MYTHS AND BLACK WOMAN
1.
Attitude Towards Women As Shaped Through
Tradition
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Brown Girl, Brownstones
Brownstones is … one of the most optimistic texts in
afro-American literature, for it aligns even to an oppressed people the
power of conscious political choice: “They are not victims.”
(Marshall, Brown Girl 322).
Marshall’s next publication was a collection of novels entitled
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– Soul Clap Hands And Sing
Sing.
ing This collection continues her theme of
personal identity within the frame work of cultural history. The titles
“Barbados” ‘Brooklyn’, ‘British’ ‘Guiana’ and ‘brazil’ signal a wider
geographical scope by placing most of the novels in the Caribbean.
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Marshall makes her characters directly confront their African
ancestry. These stories all deal with old men who have to face the
consequences of the denial of their culture and their people. The most
effective of these is Barbados, which tells the story of a Barbadian
who has spent most of his life in America working assiduously so that
he can go home and live like his white cultural oppressors. From an
early age his perceptions have been conditioned “But because of their
whiteness and wealth he has not dared to hate them in stead like a
boomerang had rebounded glancing past him to style all the dark ones
like himself…” (Barbados 55).
The collection is a turning point for Ms. Marshall: using the
Caribbean as the focus for her stories, she consciously explores
political themes. She continues her examination of personal identity
and social analysis in her three short stories Reena to Da – Duh
Duh In
Memoriam and Some Got Wasted
Wasted.
asted
Reena could be a continuation of Brown Girl, Brownstones
Brownstones as it
explores what Selina might become in middle – age. The story takes
place at a wake for Reena’s Auntvi who had worked as a live – in
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domestic, to make money to ‘buy house’ but did not live to achieve
her goal. Because of this Reena contemplates her own choice: the
disappointment of left – wing politics, the restrictions of middle class
marriage and the problems of an interracial relationship. As she
surveys her own life, Reena realizes that the history of the black
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woman is still a part of her:
They condemn us … without taking
history into account. We are still,
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most of us, the black woman who had
to be almost frighteningly strong in
order. For all of us to survive…and
we are still so many of us living that
history. (86).
To DaDa-Duh In Memoriam
Memoriam is one of Marshall’s most moving short
stories. It concerns a nine year old girl’s trip from America back to
Barbados to visit her grand mother. The child represents modernity,
cold and technologically superior, and Da–Duh embodies the history
and culture of black people. The tension of polarities, as one character
tries to show the other how superior their home is. The competition
between them heightens as Da–Duh shows her grand-daughter the
magnificence of her island, abundant fruit colorful flowers and the
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majesty of the island’s trees. The young child counters this with
Manhattan’s magnificence–electric lights, radios and skyscraper. The
empire state building completely outdoes the tall trembling palm and
when the first airplanes fly over Da–Duh’s village, she dies.
The narrator tries to exercise her guilt towards Da-Duh by
acknowledging her grandmother’s traditions and by doing so
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incorporates them into her own life.
She died and I lived, but always to
this day, even with you the shadow of
her death for a brief period after I was
grown I want to live alone like one
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doing, penance in a lost above a noisy
factory and there painted seas of
sugarcane and huge swirling, van
Gogh suns … while the thunderous
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thread of the machines downstairs,
jarred the floor beneath my easel
mocking my efforts. (106).
These short stories foreshadow Paule Marshall’s next novel,
The Chosen
Chosen Place, The Timeless People
People,
eople which takes on the policies and of
the Caribbean England politics and American. The heroine Merle
Kinbona is an amalgamation of black Caribbean culture and western
ideologies. She is middle – aged, and a worldly wise black woman
who grapples with her cultural identity and its viability in a modern
technological world. Marshall’s explains: in Interview With Sandi
Russel
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What I am trying to do in (This) work, is to take the black
women as character to another level, to give her an added dimension.
There’s the quest for self, but at the same time… to suggest that (her)
search is linked to this larger quest which has to do with the liberation
of us as a people…? She (Merle) has been shaped by forces in the
West Indies and by England and so she, in effect embodies the history
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of the hemisphere. (46)
As the embodiment of both culture Merle intersects with the
poor black people of Bournehills, as well as with whites and blacks
who embrace the capitalist system. Her English, female lover who
tries to manipulate her with money, the well meaning white American
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Saul who comes to realize that his company’s technological advances
for Merle’s village are yet another means of oppression and the many
black officials in Bournehills, who, are the actions of a colonial
regime.
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Merle is torn between these two worlds and undergoes an
arduous journey, geographically and psychologically to come to grips
with, who she is and how to become an effective member of her
community.
Marshall uses the ritual of carnival to bring these tensions to
the force emphasizing the importance of the past in conjunction with
the present Hortense j Spiller’s comments.
The totality of the carnival in
Bournehills allows us to understand
more precisely why this work is
entitled The Chosen Place, The Timeless
People.
eople The agents in that regard do
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not belong, simply to themselves, in
their discrete time and place. Their
renewal is all together essential to a
redemptive historical scheme that
must play itself out. (166).
This ritual of bringing the past to the present is done each year
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by acting out and discussing the famous slave revolt of the region, led
by the Ned Cuffee. The celebration ensures that the people of
Bournehills acknowledge their ancestors and their history and it is
factor, so grievously missing from most of modern life that Marshall
emphasizes in the novel. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
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You have to try and learn from all that’s gone before and again
from both the good and the bad…. Use your history as a guide….
Because many times what one needs to know for the present has been
spelled out in past events that it’s all there if only they would look.
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(215)
In Marshall’s third novel Praise Song For The Widow
Widow,
idow she
continues the theme of the black woman’s search for identity in a
world bereft of ancestral connection.
This is a moving and beautifully written work about an
American – African middle – class woman, who has sacrificed all the
joys of black culture to become a part of the African dream. Avey
Johnson and some of her friends have full blown familiarity. We
know these smartly suited carefully Coiffeured, yet somehow lacking
in luminosity and depth they are pleasant women seeking fulfillment
in beautiful houses sumptuous meals and the accumulation of things.
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Avey Johnson’s story unfolds on a pleasure cruise to the
Caribbean but it is also another journey for Avey – a painful, yet
illuminating encounter with herself and her post. Plagued by recurrent
dreams, she argues with her long – dead great aunt Cuney, who urges
her to follow her back in time. This link with African – American
history and slavery finally overcomes Avey and she leaves her cruise
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in Grenada.
Her guide to the past is Lebert Joseph, who “Saw how far she
had come since leaving the ship and the distance she had yet to go.”
(172).
An avey travel with him to Carriacou and on this journey loses
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all her material possessions. She is also sea-sick and this purging
stands for the break with her bourgeois life. But Paule Marshall uses
this scene on the ship not only for loss, but also for the gain of
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historical connections.
She was alone in the deck house yet
she had the impression as her mind
flickered on briefly of other bodies
lying crowded in with her in that hot
airless dark. A multitude it felt like
lay packed around her in the filth and
strength of them, just as she was their
means, rising and falling with each
rise and plunge of enlarged upon the
one filling her own head. Their
suffering – the depth of it the weight
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of it in the cramped space – made
hers of no consequence. (209)
In Praise Song for the Widows
Widows,
idows Marshall fuses the physical with
the physic as Avey Johnson gives back in time, to re-evaluate her old
life and emerge anew.
Paule Marshall uses traditional narrative form in all of her
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work. In a period of literary fragmentation and experiment, this
wholeness comes out of a desire to give coherence to the history of
disrupted people. Susan Wills Discuss’s this:
Clearly the desire for totality and the urgent need to invent a
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narrative capable of producing closure exists only for people who
realize they no longer have totality in their lives but remember that
such a state once existed. I think this summarized Paule Marshall’s
position as a writer and as an immigrant. (Describing
Describing Arce Of Desire
Desire
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Specifying 67).
It is not only in the structure of Marshall’s works that, we black
people, experience ‘closure’ but also through the values that inform
them.
2.
View Of Society Through Myths
It is with an unerring eye and ear that Paule Marshall presents
characters who, through their language and actions, speak
metaphorically for a larger group. Susan wills observed that.
“Marshall’s great talent as a writer is her insightful portrayal of
individual characters as they particulate the complex of a
community’s actions and desires.” (54).
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Paule Marshall’s first novel Brown Girl, Brownstone was
published in 1959. Like Gwendolyn brook’s novella Maud
Maud Martha,
artha it
was ahead of its time. Most of the people came to know Marshall’s
work when it was re-issued in the early 1980’s & Barbara Christian
comments on what has so often happened and continues to happen –
to the works of America’s best black women writers:
subject
matter,
the
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Marshall’s
development of a brown girl into a
woman within the rituals and mores
of a black cultural context had yet to
be seen as important…… it was being
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used as a book juvenile just as Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye would be
despite their complex language and
psychology. (Black
Black Feminist Criticism
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107).
In Brown Girl, Brownstones
Brownstones,
nes we are placed in a black Caribbean
Neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York in 1939. Much of the story
mirrors Marshall’s own up bringing. Thousands of Barbadians from
1900 to 1940 went to America to escape poverty and lack of
opportunity in that British colony. They worked incessantly to
become a part of the American dream and ‘Buy House’. This desire
however tended to push them further away from their own history and
culture and closer to the values of American capitalism. The subtle
self –hatred that this kind of behaviour engendered can be seen when
the association of Barbadian homeowners and business men meet
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“We Ain white yet. We small timers…but we got our eye on the big
time….” (221).
The novel revolves around the Boyce household with Selina
Boyce as the keen eyed daughter of Silla and Deighton Boyce, first
generation immigrants to America. Marshall etches out these and
other characters with remarkable skill. We feel the power of the
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strong willed Silla, the proud confused yearnings of Deighton and
evolving clear sighted bravery of the young Selina. Silla is the most
forceful character in this work head strong, and armed with the
powerful cadencies of her oral tradition. She knows that to make it
“In this white men world you got to take Yuh mouth and make a
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gun.” (70).
Sitting around her kitchen-table, she admonishes, praises,
advises and gives instructions to family and friends alike from issues
concerning god to the causes of World War II and the allegiance of
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Barbadians to England. Selina’s words slash the air. “You think cause
they does call Barbados “LITTLE ENGLAND” that you is
somebody? What the king knows bout you–or care?” (69-70), and her
perceptiveness takes the political exploitation of her people: “The rum
shop and the church join together to keep we pacify and in ignorance”
(70).
Silla’s realization of the injustices done to her people drives
her, but in her relentless determination for money and property she
destroys her family. She frightens her daughter Ina into submissive
meekness, and secretly sells her husband’s land in Barbados to buy a
brownstone. When he learns this, his fragile pride crumbles and he
eventually commits suicide. Paule Marshall closely examines the
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intricate questions of assimilation, materialism and how black people
can endure without loss. She poses all of these questions in the
character of Silla. Mary Helen Washington observes that:
Silla’s life is a paradigm of the
Barbadian community. She is the
touchstone, for she proclaims aloud
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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 are theirs. Her
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lights and shadows are theirs. (After
After
Word In Brown Girl, Brownstones 315).
Selina grows up in the midst of this absorbing culture and
confusion as Silla stands for the history of the abused and ignored
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black women. Silla stands as its new hope, she is the bearer of this
culture, yet the one who questions the means by which one survives
while keeping that culture alive and she unlike her mother has
choices. Selina is aware that no matter what choices she makes, she
will embody her culture as well as having her own selfhood. This
then is a novel of hope:
3.
Myths Internalized
When at the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones,
Brownstones Selina Boyce
removes one of her silver bracelets and tosses it high into the air, she
performs a highly, symbolic act that articulates, not only her position
as a young black women, the daughter of Barbadian, immigrants,
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ready to embark on her future, it also describes Paule Marshall’s
position, as a writer who as a young woman and immigrant closely
resembles her fictional character. Selina’s bracelet is one of two, she,
like all Barbadian girls in the New York community, has worn since
birth. The bracelet is a sign reminding her of her folk heritage. One
bracelet thrown, one bracelet kept these two silver bands testify to
Marshall’s role as writer, whose task has been to articulate the
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difficulties of being in two worlds at the same time and the need to
unite the afro – American cultures of North America and the
Caribbean.
One bracelet thrown, one bracelet kept – Selina, Marshall’s
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figural self, bids good-bye to the childhood and the Chauncey street
tenements and brownstones where she grew up. The bracelet, whose
arc she traces across. The moonlit sky and whose sharp clash marks
it’s fall, gives testament to Selina as she has been formed by her
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community. It also represents her gift to those who remain behind.
The bracelet which Selina keeps is her visible link to her Caribbean
heritage. It also gives reference to all the lessons Selina has learned in
the process of growing up and away. The delight of coming into an
adult sexuality, the heart of break of couple relationships as they are
defined under capitalism by property, the brutally demeaning nature
of racism – these are the lessons Selina will take wherever she goes.
In creating Selina as a figural representation of herself and her life
struggles, Marshall lifts her character out of the individual and
particular of the purely auto biographical mode and achieves through
symbolic representation a means of expressing both the deep
sensitivity of individual experience and the concerns of much larger
community. As we shall, see Marshall’s great talent as a writer is her
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insightful portrayal of individual characters as they articulate the
complex of a community’s actions and desire. One bracelet thrown,
one bracelet kept–this figural act also embodies, Marshall’s
development as a writer, growing with each book and leaving, a little
something behind us – her community of readers – these documents
of experience that are her three novels.
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The path traced by Selina’s bracelet as it flies, through space,
defines an arc on which we may plot Marshall’s three novels, as these
constitute generally defined points in a woman’s life. Here, too, the
individual expands into the historical as each of the three periods
come to suggest a different politically defined mode. Brown Girl,
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Brownstones is Marshall’s novel about childhood. In focusing on the
process of Selina’s growing up, the novel moves from a bony and
boisterous little girl to a supple and courageous young woman. Her
childhood defined by partial knowledge Selina attains womanhood
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having challenged the adult world and arrived at a deep understanding
of her parents and the forces that have shaped their community. This
novel’s notion of history might also be characterized as youthful, at
the novel’s conclusion, with everything possible and nothing
predictable, Selina prepares to step into the future. This view into
history captures the spirit of the sixties, the civil rights movement,
racial awareness, and Cultural Revolution. Like Selina, history stands
on the brink of unforeseen, transformation, exuberant with potential,
but unable to grasp its specific nature.
Published ten years later, in 1969, The Chosen Place, The Timeless
People is Marshall’s novel of middle age; Merle, the protagonist, a
woman in her late forties, embodies the burdens of racial and social
problems born with colonialism and the slave trade and reshuffled –
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but not solved – during the radical politics of the sixties. Her body no
longer supple, a little loose flesh here & there, Merle represents a
historical mode that has come to recognize its limitations and chooses
to tackle only immediate, practical problems. This is a vision of
history, no longer capable of utopian imagination but determinedly
focused on a grim and contradictory reality. The transformation of
history seems no longer to be possible but the novel sees very little
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hope for changing history through reform. Its crucial scrutiny of
development project in the third world leaves the reader with a
bankrupt sense of the future.
In contrast Marshall’s most recent novel Praise Song For The
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Widow captures again some of the enthusiasm generated by her first
novel and suggests, if not the utopian aspirations of the sixties, then a
visionary sense of renewal through the recovery of culture. It remains
to be seen whether this will be an effective political strategy for the
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eighties. One certainty is that Marshall’s notion of culture (And the
people who produce culture) bears very little resemblance to the
countercultural activities of the sixties, which were largely based in a
youthful population. Instead, Praise Song is Marshall’s novel of
maturity whose sixty four year old protagonist Avey Johnson blends
life’s sobering lessons with the rediscovery of the child’s aspirations.
Her body encased in a long line girdle, her middle-class aspirations.
Avey, by undergoing process of liberation, rediscovers self race and
community. Here, history is defined by a curious combination of
transformation through cultural practical, which is then welded to a
very American notion of what constitutes a utopian society, based, as
we shall see on the return to the rural small town.
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So Marshall’s writing does not span the generation in order
finally to come full circle but streaks off on her arcs of recovery
always into the future whose specific content cannot be known except
by suggestion at the end of each of the novels or by reverse
implication as a more recent novel sheds light on a previous one.
In tracing her arcs of recovery, Marshall implicitly raises the
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question of the urban environment and specifically whether American
cities have proved to be fertile ground for the aspiration of black
people. We might take Paule Marshall’s writing as an example of
how contemporary black women writers define themselves against
the urban while at the same time recognizing the significant
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contribution. City culture (And specifically the Afro-American
culture born in the cities) made to their development. In writing Praise
Song,
Song Marshall dedicates her book to her grandmother. Taking these
as clues to the novel’s motivation, we sense that Marshall’s primary
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Endeavour is to retrieve the culture that shaped her mother’s
generation. This was the blues of the twenties and thirties, decades
whose young people would be the adults of the forties. This was also
a period deeply influenced by the Harlem renaissance and the great
vision of the city, so often depicted in Langston Hughes’s poetry, as
the new heart of the American black community.
This is a poetry, which recognized the poverty and inequality
of black people in comparison to the white world, yet nevertheless
captured the great energy and the strong hope the city held for black
people newly emerging from rural poverty. Very little of this is
present in Marshall’s portrayal of the city, except for brief moments
when Selina gazes into a Fulton street bar room and recognizes there
in the talk, the songs and the music. The great vitality of urban life,
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the city is cast as the means for integrating black people into a
grinding labor mill out of which a few will emerge as the upwardly
mobile black bourgeoisie, destined for the stifling life of the suburbs.
Nevertheless, the culture that defined city life is one of the
things Marshall’s writing works to retrieve. The other is the rich folk
heritage of black people whose roots lie in rural peasant society. As
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someone whose own history includes the land based economy of
Barbados and the New York immigrant community, Marshall is well
placed to articulate the twofold stream of cultural influence that has
shaped all Afro – American people. It is clear in her writing that the
importance of the rural comes to predominate over the urban as she
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constructs images of the future. The reason why this is so has much to
do with the fact that see focuses on a segment of the American black
population, which by access to the professions, arrived at the
wasteland of the suburbs. The city is thus equated with the breakdown
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of culture not seen as the site for culture renewal. Marshall’s overall
project as a writer is to salvage those culture components generated
by urban life that vitality shaped her mother’s generation and then
welds these to the folk tradition. The well spring of the future is then,
folk, society-but a very particular folk society, which likes Avey
Johnson, bears the scars inflicted by urban life.
Because the return to the folk tradition is primary, the most
important arc traced in Marshall’s writing is through geographic
space from New York City and the years of her formation to the
Caribbean, the land of her birth. Although this arc plots the recovery
of black history in the new world and Afro – American culture, it
does not exclude the personal or generational histories of Marshall’s
characters. Marshall’s arcs are multi dimensional and simultaneously
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include the individual and particular as well as the historic and
communal.
If there is one thing that predominates in contemporary writing
by black American women it is journey (Both Real And Figural) back
to the historical source of the black American community. For
contemporary writers, the journey back probably originates with
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Hurston’s flight from the city back to the south to drive the black
roads, spend time in the small towns and sawmill camps, and collect
the material that comprises her land mark text of Afro – American
folklore. By comparison to the black American literary tradition by
male writers from Richard Wright to Raph Ellison, Hurston
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represents and alternative tradition- one schooled in anthropology and
devoted to the recovery of the source of Afro – American culture life
because culture is inextricably linked to the family and the
community. It necessarily informs the nurturing roles performed by
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women. If there is something of a mother line running from the work
of Hurston to that of contemporary black woman writers, it is
constituted largely on woman’s intimate knowledge of how nurturing
is performed in culture and their deep interest in strengthening culture
identity contemporary versions of the journey back include Paule
Marshall’s Praise Song For The Widow
Widow and Toni Morrison’s Song Of
Solomon,
Solomon which should be read as companion text. Morrison’s version
sets its protagonist, milkman, on an arduous journey away from the
northern industrial city of his birth, back to his families on wings of
myth, to the spiritual homeland in Africa. Milkman’s overland trek
becomes a metaphor for the recovery of racial and cultural identity as
all the trappings of his Detroit city life and bourgeois class
background are stripped from him – his watch, his expensive shoes
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and his shirt all fall by the wayside. Morrison uses something of the
same paradigm, but in a more abstract form in her most recent book,
“Tar
Tar Baby
Baby”, whose journey of recovery terminates in the Caribbean, as
it does in Marshall’s writing. In “Tar
Tar Baby”
Baby as in other texts, the
Caribbean is finally not the journey’s end so much as its imaginative
point of departure for the spiritual recovery of maroon and voodoo
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culture.
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WORKs CITED
Marshall, Paule.
Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York:
London. Feminist Press, 1981. Print.
.
Barbados.
New
York:
London.
.
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Feminist Press, 1981. Print.
Reena And Other Stories. In Merle,
1986. Print.
.
To Da – Duh In Memoriam. In Merle,
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1986. Print.
.
Interview With Sandy Russel. 1985.
Print.
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.
.
Hortense, J. Spiller’s.
The Chosen
Chosen Place, The Timeless People.
New York: London. Vintage Books,
1984. Print.
Praise Song For The Widow. New York:
London. Virago, 1983. Print.
The Chosen Place, The Timeless People.
Some Fig Rations On The New World. In
Conjuring, 1985. Print.
Wills, Susan.
Describing Arcs Of Desire. Specifying,
1986. Print.
Christian, Barbara.
Black Feminist Criticism, 1984. Print.
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Washington, Mary Helen.
Afterword In Brown Girl, Brownstones,
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1981. Print.
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