738 Marshall, Paule
a nigger after all,” does Selina realize her oneness
with Miss Thompson, with “the whores” and the
“flashy men” on Fulton Street, and with “the mother
and the Bajan women.” Selina at last embraces
her blackness even as she pursues her dream of
self-expression and fulfillment, working to undo—
rather than internalize or deny—the ideology of
white supremacy that has shaped her life and the
lives of her people.
Joyce Zonana
Sexuality/SenSuality/eroticiSm in
Brown Girl, Brownstones
Sexuality, sensuality, and eroticism play a cen-
tral role in Brown Girl, Brownstones. In the third
paragraph, the narrator invites readers to envision,
behind the forbidding façades of the Brooklyn
brownstones, “bodies crouched in the posture of
love.” At the conclusion, when the central character,
Selina Boyce, chooses to seek “the center of life,”
we see her nipples growing hard as she walks down
Fulton Street. Along the way, we encounter numer-
ous scenes of sexual desire and its fulfillment or
frustration, we witness at close hand Selina’s sexual
initiation, and we are offered vivid descriptions of
the lush Caribbean landscape that stirs the senses
and opens its inhabitants to a full and free partici-
pation in life.
Sexuality in Brown Girl, Brownstones is quite
explicit. Most of the characters unabashedly embrace
and act on their desires, and the narrator describes
their action in graphic language: A woman’s body
is “warm and impatient” as she she pulls her lover
down “between her insistent thighs”; a man, after
caressing a woman’s breasts, “burrow[s] his face into
the warm oblivion of her stomach.” The action of
the novel begins on a Saturday night, a time for “love
in dark rooms.” Those who, like Selina’s mother
Silla, are excluded from that “circle of love” feel “old
and barren.” Yet the narrator shows that such exclu-
sion stems from a choice: Silla, consumed by grief,
resentment, and a hard determination to triumph
over life, has closed herself to her own “burst[s] of
passion.”
The intense sexuality of the Bajan immigrants
grows out of the sensuality associated with the sun,
the landscape, the food, and the music of their island
life in Barbados. This life in and of nature is erotic as
well; even in New York the natural world embodies a
bursting energy identified with life itself. Thus, on a
spring morning, the adolescent Selina sensesthe earth swollen with life and heaving in its
blind act; she smelled the sad, sweet, fecund
musk of birth. All over the ruined yard green
tufts nudged toward the sun and their own
brief life. New leaves craned in the wind.
Aching, she thought of the lovers tonight in
the pavilion and the silence that would seem
loud with the sound of their mouths and
hands.Earlier, in Prospect Park, she associates the sun, the
growing grass, a woman’s menstrual blood, and the
passion of young lovers.
The strong sexual emphasis of the novel is
embodied most fully in Suggie, a woman whose
“domain” is “love, its rituals and its passions.”
“ ‘You’re a summer woman,’ ” 10-year-old Selina tells
her neighbor. Suggie spends each Saturday night
carousing in her creaky bed; she has no steady man,
yet she is defiantly indifferent to the gossip of her
neighbors. Suggie’s voluptuousness is “so natural
that it was innocent.” Her passion emerges directly
from her continued identification with the Carib-
bean landscape. Even in Brooklyn, as she prepares
a traditional meal of cuckoo—cornmeal, okra, and
codfish—“she could see the yam patch . . . and the
mango tree with its long leaves weighted down by
the dusk, and beyond, all down the soft-sloping hills,
a susurrant sea of sugar cane.”
Suggie’s sexuality also emerges from music and
dancing. She recalls her youth in Barbados: “Danc-
ing—the music licking sweet—and sea-bathing” and
“loving-up,” and she encourages Selina to follow her
example. We will not be surprised or judgmental
(like her mother) when Selina enters into a passion-
ate affair at the age of 17 and becomes a dancer.
Paule Marshall portrays sexuality as a redeem-
ing, essential force, associated with freedom and
full participation in life. Yet for the novel’s Bajan
characters in Brooklyn it is also compensatory. The
characters use sex as a means of escape from their
difficult lives as disenfranchised, black-skinned,