Traversing the Triangular Road

The third chapter reads transnational identity as based on cultural heritage rather than physical location. In Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island, Paule Marshall and Andrea Levy utilize the historical novel to reify the importance of cultural connection. As the works reveal, the new homeland can occasion a series of negotiations for immigrant families. As second-generation immigrants born of Caribbean parents, Marshall and Levy explore the relationship between migration and belonging. Through fiction, they highlight the trauma of the immigrant experience and position exile as a painful consequence of leaving one’s homeland. The works suggest that the condition of estrangement can both propel and function as a result of migration.

Subversive Invisibility during the Cold War: Paule Marshall’s “Brooklyn”

This essay explores how Paule Marshall engages issues of leftist politics and homosexuality in “Brooklyn,” her only fiction set during the Cold War. On the surface, this novella, the second in Marshall’s 1961 collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing, is a story of sexual harassment that, she has explained, was based on an experience she had at Brooklyn College. Marshall’s boldness in confronting the sexual and racial politics of the 1950s in the story’s depiction of an African American woman’s sexual harassment by her white professor has been noted by many. But less remarked is the fact that beneath the surface narrative of this story, Marshall has incorporated transgressive subtexts that address leftist politics and homosexuality, two issues that were deeply contested during the McCarthy years. A close examination of “Brooklyn” highlights the previously unrecognized narrative strategies that Marshall employs to both produce and conceal these subversive subtexts, thus creating a story that seems to reject communism at the same time that it incorporates a pro-communist political statement, and that seems to reflect the dominant culture’s assumption of heteronormativity while simultaneously endorsing the necessity of existential choice in the area of sexuality. In addition, Marshall shapes her characters so as to make existential choice more broadly the core theme of the story. This essay also situates the narrative in the context of Marshall’s own political activism as well as in the context of the negative impact that the Cold War political tensions had on African American writers during the 1950s.

CONTINUITY OF AFROCENTRIC TROPES ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY FORMATION IN THE NOVELS BY PAULE MARSHALL AND GLORIA NAYLOR

African American literature that is fundamentally a socially symbolic linguistic construct, seeks different ways to expand and continue the use of Afrocentric vernacular tropes of personal and collective identity formation. The five residual oral forms – oratory (including everyday speech acts), myth/ritual performance, legend, tale, and song – as well as satire, irony, and paradox are used by contemporary African American novelists. This paper points to how the legendary black ancestors and elder members of the community, the gifted and often rebellious orator, musician, artist, the spiritual leader, and the messianic figure are equally enduring symbols and tropes. The aim of this work is to show the way in which the contemporary African American novelists Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor use these (above mentioned) characters and symbols to reconstruct their long struggle as individuals and as community against anti-black racism. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on continuity of Afrocentric tropes in African American personal/collective and female/male identity formation as represented in selected novels by Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor.

Some Connections of Africa and the U.S.A in American World Literature

The plots in some novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Paule Marshall, to name but a few, remind the African readers of some sociological realities on the black continent. That interconnection of Africa and the U.S.A., through literature, reinforces the idea of American literature as world literature. If the U.S.A. was a child, we could assert that his or her parents are Africa and Europe thanks to their irrefragable contributions to the making of the country. There is undoubtedly an interconnection of Africa and the USA in quite a few fields, especially in works of fiction Kimberly Crenshaw’s feminist theory of intersectionality is very much present in quite a few American novels. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the ostracism of Hester Prynne, a wife in seventeenth-century Puritan America, after she gave birth to an illegimate child, is tantamount to a “social death” in Africa, where women are still required to be paragons of virtue, especially when they are married. Under no circumstances, should espoused women, in many African societies have paramours and indulge in such a turpitude. Obinna Udenwe expounds on that issue in her short story “Bedfellows.” In Maya Angelou’s Gather Together in My Name, Rita’s early pregnancy is similarly a poignant problem in Africa, where some girls are married as young as 12 or 13. That situation recurs in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, with Pecola who is impregnated at 12. As for Paule Marshall, her novel Praisesong for a Widow is full of African cultural representations and supernatural rites like the ceremony of “lave tête”.

Notions of Home: Re-Locations and Forging Connections in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones

Focusing on the African Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, this paper examines the work of novelist Paule Marshall, whose narratives document issues of migration, displacement, home, return, and community bonding. Paule Marshall’s first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), focuses on Selina Boyce, a second-generation Barbadian immigrant from the United States, whose search for her roots is informed by an inherent link to the Caribbean through an articulation of the dynamics of belonging. The notion of ‘home’ as a contradictory and contested trope is vital, for the writer’s foremost concern is on the overarching effect it has on the diasporic subject. Marshall grants her protagonist the space to challenge familial struggles, and reclaim her voice by re-locating to Barbados, her parental home. The protagonist’s enigmatic journey through ambivalent interspaces enables her to reconstruct bridges to the West Indies. Marshall’s examination of her young protagonist’s ‘return to the Caribbean’ reflects wider issues of diasporic identity and belonging connected to ‘home’ spaces, ancestral lands, regions, and origins.

Womanism and Women in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

African-American women have been inappropriately and unduly, stereotyped in various contrasting images as slaves post-slavery, wet nurses, super women, domestic helpers, mammies, matriarchs, jezebels, hoochies, welfare recipients, and hot bodies which discloses their repression in the United States of America. They have been showcased by both black men and white women in different ways quite contrary to their being in America. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, to name a few writers, have put forth the condition of black women through their works. They have shown the personality of many a black women hidden behind the veils of racism, sexism, classism and systemic oppression of different sorts. Walker coined the term Womanism in her 1984 collection of essays titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Womanism advocates consensus for black women starting with gender and proceeding over to race, ethnicity and class, with a universal outlook. Womanism offers a positive self-definition of the black woman’s self within gendered, historical, geographical, ethnic, racial and cultural contexts too. Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar 1989 is a womanist treatise putting forth the importance of womanist consciousness and womanist spirit. The novel is a tribute to the strength, endurance and vitality of black womanhood. The novel revolves around three pairs of characters and their lives to showcase the lives of African Americans and coloured population in America. The three couples namely Suwelo and Fanny, Arveyda and Carlotta, Lissie and Hal showcased in the novel, belong to different age groups and different, mixed ethnicities. Through them, Walker depicts the lives of marginalized population in America, and the umpteen trials they face for being who they are. Furthermore, this paper showcases how Womanism as a theory can really enliven the life of the black community, especially black women when put into practice.

The Daughters Debt: How Black Spirituality and Politics are Transforming the Televisual Landscape

The spectrum of black women's spirituality in television has become nearly as diverse as the portraits of Afro-Atlantic spiritual practices that became central to key literary works of black feminist authors of the 1980s, such as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. While many are the spiritual and televisual daughters of the authors mentioned above, this essay argues that the appearance of this wider range of black women's spirituality and activism in episodic television owes its greatest debt to two films from the 1990s, Julie Dash's, Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve's Bayou (1997). I focus here on two shows which were themselves created by Black women feature film directors, Shots Fired (Gina Prince Bythewood with Reggie Rock Bythewood) and Queen Sugar (Ava DuVernay). I examine how characters like Pastor Janae (from Shots) and Nova Bordelon (from Sugar) use their spiritual practices in service of social justice, family, and community healing in ways that connect them to the women of Dash and Lemmons’ earlier films.