Paule Marshall was born on my paternal grandmother’s birthday, April 9th. Mary Helen Washington’s biography of her is A MUST READ biography that provides layered literary criticism of her work.
However, Washington’s theoretical focus of Marshall is limited because of its focus on Marshall’s feminism and not Marshall’s more powerful message of Pan-Africanism.
In her Introduction, Washington lists the Awards that Marshall earned in her lifetime: “a Guggenheim (1960), the American Book Award (1984), the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1989), and a MacArthur Fellowship (1991), and the multi thousand dollar advances she received for her novels and her memoir.
She wrote that Marshall insisted on “viewing Black people as part of a world community” (6). However what was more important was that specifically, Marshall insisted on viewing African Americans or Black Americans and Caribbean Americans as united against specifically Western propaganda. Each of her characters served as a bridge between these two geographically separate cultures and in her 2000 interview with Daryl Cumber Dance (who is prominent in this biography) Marshall told her: “all the poor countries and communities including the African American community here…fall prey to the seduction and domination of their former colonial masters because of disunity” (100).
As I wrote in my unpublished article called “Bridge of the Black Diaspora: the fiction of Paule Marshall,” all of Marshall’s “bridge characters” from Selina Boyce to Sonny RESENT being used to disseminate the ideology and values of the dominant white society. So at the end of Washington’s Introduction when she writes that Marshall “insisted on viewing Black people as part of a world community,” this is only scratching the surface: Marshall insisted on viewing Black people as resisting and developing outside any “world community,” especially what Hillary Clinton has described as the “New World Order.”
In Washington’s first chapter, she provides a comprehensive history of her parents Samuel and Adriana Burke, immigrants who were born in Barbados (they were Bajans) and arrived in New York by the end of the 1920s. Washington writes that in the forties her sanctuary was “the Macon Street branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where she discovered literature-–most importantly, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar” (23). Her mother was a devotee of Marcus Garvey and in Marshall’s fiction, the influence of Garvey and his message encouraging unity between African Americans and Caribbean people is clear.
Paule Marshall wanted no other biographer but Mary Helen Washington to write her story, and that she did with the theoretical focus that she used best.
However for this reviewer what makes Marshall the most important American novelist is the journey each of her “bridge characters” take to psychologically dismantle Western propaganda in the mind of her readers. The power of Washington’s second chapter is her quote of Marshall’s description of her first marriage to Bajan Kenneth Marshall: “ours was a mutual apostasy that also rejected traditional marriage, so that while we lived together, slept together, we essentially led independent unfettered lives” (46). It becomes clear that in order to write such unfettered characters, Marshall had to become unfettered herself.
The third chapter describes her graduation from Brooklyn College and her dance with the political left and the Black bourgeoisie before leaving both to be a full time novelist. She was a member of the Harlem Writers Workshop, where her work was read by John Oliver Killens. According to Washington, in Marshall’s 1953 short story “The Valley Between,” Philip Bonosky misread the wife’s ambition to go to college as “a symbol” of her rebellion against her life. However these misreads did not discourage her from staying true to the focus in her novel. She was a staff writer to the magazine titled Our World that was intended for a Black audience and she rejected how its editor John Davis, whom Washington names in her previous book The Other Blacklist as working for U.S. intelligence, featured women who were only light skinned models, and he featured no dark skinned models.
In the fourth chapter, Washington describes how her previous experiences influenced how she would write the main characters in her novels that were like the characters she wanted to see on the pages of Our World: “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, the untruths” (68). Washington begins her analysis of Marshall’s first 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones but misses the key turning point in the novel, when Selina turns down a scholarship by the Barbadian Homeowners Association and how this gesture exemplifies Selina as a bridge character who is determined not to act according to how Western individualism dictates she should act. Marshall’s Selina rejects the token role that many Caribbean immigrants assume. She also describes her being mentored by Langston Hughes. Washington’s fifth chapter covers her thorough literary analysis of Marshall’s 1961 short story collection Soul, Clap Hands and Sing. Washington thoroughly discusses the critical reception of this and all of Marshall’s works. In the short story collection three of Marshall’s short stories, “Barbados,” “Brooklyn,” and “Brazil,” for Washington heterosexual masculinity is tied to dominance and violence, however this reviewer contends that not all masculinities, but a strictly Western masculinity is tied to dominance and violence. This chapter also reveals the real life events in Grenada that is based on Marshall’s fictional character Avey Johnson’s “excursion” in her third novel Praisesong for the Widow. In Washington’s fifth chapter, she analyzes Marshall’s second 1969 novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Washington reads too much into Marshall’s discussion of same sex relationships, and highlights those relationships more than heterosexual relationships. She calls the scene between Vere and Allen “erotic” because they were “tumbling amorously” (175). While Allen had feelings for Vere, what made the scene sympathetic for Allen, was that those feelings were not reciprocated by Vere. Her white male homosexual character Allen, just like Tarell Alvin Maccraney’s Chiron, might have had homosexual feelings, he could barely comfortably express them. This is not a function of Marshall’s homophobia, but of the focus on her plot which is to develop her bridge character which is Merle. Her analysis of this novel misses how its main character Merle Kinbona worked with the anthropologist character Saul Amron to work with the people of Bournehills to run their own sugar factory.
This was the crux of her second novel.
Instead, Washington privileges Merle’s departure from Bourne Island to Africa as a sort of “transformation” for Merle “to find her daughter and confront her husband” (123). The more compelling dynamic for this reviewer is how Marshall wrote the relationship between Merle and Harriet, the wealthy philanthropist who tried to use her money to control Merle, but failed.
In Washington’s seventh chapter she describes Marshall’s second marriage to Haitian businessman Nourry Menard, her growing reputation as a novelist and the consequent growing academic experience. Marshall was offered a visiting lectureship in the inaugural African American Studies Department at this reviewer’s alma mater, Yale. Marshall was known to host grand parties, enjoyed a rich social life, and was not interested in becoming the devoted domestic that Menard seemed to want, however “Paule would have never traded her life in New York for Haiti” (147). This is the chapter where Washington describes Marshall’s 1977 visit to the FESTAC that Marshall would later detail in her 2009 memoir Triangular Road.
In her eighth chapter Washington analyzes Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and misses Marshall’s point at the end of novel, which is Avey’s renunciation of her bourgeois aspirations. In her ninth chapter Washington analyzes Marshall’s fourth novel Daughters but also reads too much into “an eroticized relationship [of her protagonist Ursa with her father] Primus or hers [Marshall’s] with Sam Burke” (189). In her overemphasis on the father-daughter relationship, Washington misses Marshall’s greater point about how women are efficient warriors fighting neocolonialism, as Ursa was against her father Primus’s plans to individually profit from foreign developers control of his island of Triunion.
At the end of the ninth chapter and the beginning of the tenth chapter is where Washington’s biography shines brightest, when Washington is narrating Marshall’s influence on the younger generation. Washington details Marshall’s profound impact on Bert Ashe, Joanne Gabbin, Edwidge Danticat, Sharon Olds, Shamar Hill, John Keene, Ben Rhodes, and Shay Youngblood. She writes that Marshall initiated the Paule Marshall & the New Generation series at NYU to give young writers a platform for their work. Her tenth chapter analyzes Marshall’s fifth and last novel The Fisher King which focuses on the experience of an eight year old boy who is the grandson of a slain jazz musician.
Washington calls Marshall’s character Hattie the “true fisher king” when there is ample evidence showing that the little boy Sonny is the true fisher king as he unites what Western society tried to permanently separate: an African American family with a Caribbean immigrant family. She writes that “Sonny-Rhett is… nurtured by his mother” when in fact Sonny-Rhett, who is Sonny’s grandfather, is absolutely rejected by his mother for refusing to play classical music (220). His love and talent for jazz, that Western society would take decades to catch up to, is what motivates him to leave his mother’s house, like Marshall, and pursue his work as an artist. Washington also seems to have serious problems with Marshall’s relationship to men. She complains that Marshall “allowed the promotional material for the novel to feature two males” (216). She also claims that “none of her women is able to entirely escape the power of patriarchy” though this reviewer argues otherwise, especially in Daughters and Praisesong for the Widow (222).
Washington’s analysis reflects less of Marshall and more of her own paranoia which is a symptom of the gender war engineered by Western society, part and parcel of the propaganda “part of the domination of colonial masters” that Marshall told Dance about. In Washington’s eleventh chapter, she describes Marshall’s exciting, unpublished manuscript titled Travelin’ Light: People and Places which she intended to send to Beacon Press. Washington here gives a profound look at how Marshall deals with pain from mothers, lovers, and husbands who, for Marshall in certain cases are supposed to make a more valiant attempt at care. What Marshall’s work tells us is that when they don’t, we can’t let that stop our important work which for her was writing. Washington ends her last chapter writing that Marshall “in the pages of the New Yorker, [was] pictures, side by side with Morrison,” when in reality, Paule Marshall needed no comparison to Morrison or any other writer. Her work stands for itself. -RF.