Marshall, Paule

April 9, 1929

Novelist Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Samuel and Ada (Clement) Burke, who had emigrated from Barbados shortly after World War I. Marshall lived in a richly ethnic "Bajan" neighborhood in Brooklyn and visited Barbados for the first time when she was nine years old. At twenty-one she married Kenneth Marshall, whom she divorced in 1963. She graduated from Brooklyn College, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1953. While attending New York's Hunter College in the mid-1950s, she began her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones. Its publication in 1959 was followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960). Later awards include the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute for Arts and Letters (1962) for Soul Clap Hands and Sing, a Ford Foundation grant (1964–1965), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967–1968), the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation for Praisesong for the Widow (1984), and a MacArthur Foundation Award (1992).

During the 1950s Marshall was a staff writer for a small magazine, Our World, which sent her on assignments to Brazil and the Caribbean. Since the publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones, she has been a full-time writer and a part-time teacher. She has taught African-American literature and creative writing at Yale, Columbia, Iowa, and Virginia Commonwealth universities. Since 1996 she has held the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University.

Marshall's writing explores the interaction between the materialist and individualist values of white America and the spiritual and communal values of the African diaspora. With the exception of Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), a collection of four long stories about aging men, Marshall's work is focused on African-American and Caribbean women. Each of her novels presents a black woman in search of an identity that is threatened or compromised by modern society. Marshall's narratives locate that search within black communities that are still connected to ancient spiritual traditions, sharpening the contrast between Americanized Africans and various diasporic modes of Africanizing the New World.

In her essays and interviews Marshall explained the influence of the Bajan community of her childhood on her work. Listening to the "poets in the kitchen," as she called her mother's women friends and neighbors in a 1983 New York Times Book Review essay, she learned the basic skills that characterize her writing—trenchant imagery and idiom, relentless character analysis, and a strong sense of ritual. Her development of her poetic relationship to the community of storytelling Bajan women has made her an intensely ethnic writer, one whose themes and manner measure the difference between the homeland of the West Indies and Africa and the new land of the United States.

Marshall's fiction explores the divided immigrant or colonized self. In Brown Girl, Brownstones, the protagonist Selina Boyce is an adolescent girl torn between the assimilationist materialism of her mother, Silla, and the dreamy resistance to Americanization of her father, Deighton. As she matures Selina learns from both the Bajan community and the world at large how to be her own woman. Each of the four stories in Soul Clap Hands and Sing explores a man in old age who reaches out toward a woman in the hope of transforming a failed and empty life. The stories contrast men defeated by materialism, colonialism, and internal compromise with young women full of vitality and hope. Like the men in numerous stories by Henry James, Marshall's old men cannot connect, and the young women serve as the painful instruments of their self-realization.

Marshall's second novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), is her largest literary conception. The central figure is Merle Kinbona, a middle-aged West Indian woman educated in Britain and psychologically divided in a number of ways. The struggle to resolve the divided self is fully elaborated, here again seen as inextricably related to a community and its history. The rituals of recovery are more broadly drawn here, for they are more self-consciously communal in nature. Merle wants to be a leader in the development of her community, but she is almost literally catatonic with impotence until she comes to terms with her personal past and its relationship to the colonial order that is her communal past. As Merle is both the product and emblem of her divided community, her self-healing and newly found clarity of purpose prefigure the possibilities for the community as well.

Marshall's third novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), presents a middle-class black American woman who, like the old men of the four long stories, realizes the depth of her spiritual emptiness. Unlike the old men, Avatara is able, through dream and ritual, to recover her spiritual past. Daughters (1991) is the complex story of how Ursa McKenzie, the only child of a Caribbean politician father and an African-American mother, comes to grips with her ambivalent feelings about her father's emotional domination. Ursa's liberation involves every aspect of her life—her past in her island homeland, her professional life in New York City, her love life and friendships, and her understanding of political and economic relations between the United States and the island nations of the Caribbean.

After the broad canvas of Daughters, in The Fisher King (2000) Marshall produced a novel as compressed as a short story. The narrative focuses on Sonny, the Parisborn eight-year-old grandson of a famous African-American jazz pianist, who is brought home to Brooklyn by Hattie, his dead grandfather's childhood friend, manager, and lover, to visit his two great-grandmothers, one as yet unreconciled to the elder Sonny's choice of jazz over European classical music and the other still furious at his decision to flee to Europe with her daughter, young Sonny's grandmother. The boy's visits with his aged grandmothers and his great uncle and his family in the Brooklyn community of African Americans and West Indian immigrants subtly suggest movement from wounded anger and alienation toward reconciliation.

In all her works Marshall develops a rich psychological analysis, making use of powerful scenes of confrontation, revelation, and self-realization. Her style, while essentially realistic, is always capable of expressionist and surrealist scenes and descriptions, which are seamlessly integrated in the fabric of the narrative. Marshall's originality—her prototypical black feminism, her exploration of "the international theme" arising from the African diaspora, and her control of a wide range of narrative techniques—places her in the first rank of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American writers.

See also Literature of the United States

Bibliography

Christian, Barbara. "Paule Marshall: A Literary Biography." In Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985.

Collier, Eugenia. "The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction." In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. New York: Anchor, 1984.

Marshall, Paule. "Shaping the World of My Art." New Letters 40 (1973): 97–112.

Marshall, Paule. "The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen." The New York Times Book Review (January 9, 1983): 3, 34–35.

McCluskey, John, Jr. "'And Called Every Generation Blessed': Theme, Setting and Ritual in the Works of Paule Marshall." In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. New York: Anchor, 1984.

Pettis, Joyce. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.

joseph t. skerrett jr. (1996)
Updated by author 2005