migrant communities, the African diaspora, and
black women’s experience. Marshall interrogates
the past as a vital step toward constructing the
future—one that is rich with a unifying, timeless
Pan-African mythos. One result of this historical,
spiritual, and feminist revisionist agenda is that
Marshall’s work has sometimes been critiqued as
idealistic. What seems to be most important to
Marshall is posing questions about the diaspora
while offering narrative pathways that help read-
ers realize strengthening continuities of African
culture, as BARBARA CHRISTIAN and other critics
have shown. Her childhood identification with Af-
rica through the MARCUS GARVEY movement was
intensified after visits in 1977 and 1980 to Africa,
where she was welcomed by the people of Nigeria,
Kenya, and Uganda as a long-lost daughter return-
ing home.
In her first novel, BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES
(1959), which is somewhat autobiographical, Mar-
shall portrays a Caribbean immigrant family. Set
in Brooklyn, the story chronicles the coming of
age of Selina Boyce. Selina’s mother, a hardwork-
ing, cruelly honest woman, is fiercely pursuing
the American Dream, while her father alternately
fantasizes about instant American success and re-
turning home to the Caribbean. Over the course
of the novel, Selina and the reader are educated
about love, sacrifice, and African-American his-
tory. Marshall’s focus on a black girl as protagonist
and her exploration of gender dynamics within
the black community were new to American and
African-American literature. Although Brown
Girl, Brownstones was initially well received, it did
not become a commercial success until interest
in black women writers heightened in the early
1970s; it gained widespread recognition when it
was reprinted in 1981.
Marshall wrote Soul Clap Hands and Sing
(1961) while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in
- She takes the title of this collection of four
novellas from William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing
to Byzantium.” In this book, each story depicts an
elderly man of African descent living in a differ-
ent part of the black diaspora who has lost himself
to Western materialism. Each man, in his need to
develop meaningful human relationships, reaches
out to a young woman. In the end, each finds
he has waited too long. This collection earned
Marshall the National Institute of Arts and Let-
ters Rosenthal Award. A Ford Foundation grant
(1964–65) and National Endowment for the Arts
award (1967–68) followed.
In her second full-length work of fiction, The
Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Mar-
shall presents the memorable West Indian heroine
Merle Kinbona. In the novel, set on the fictional
Caribbean island of Bourne, Marshall, through
Merle, the daughter of a white planter and black
servant, explores the troubled West Indian psyche.
Merle is an educated woman who has been abused
by the perverted ideals of British white supremacy.
Merle’s lack of self-awareness has ultimately led to
the end of her marriage with her African husband
and her return to her homeland. When the novel’s
other main character, the Jewish-American anthro-
pologist Saul Amron, comes to the island to con-
duct a preliminary survey that aims to better the
life of the inhabitants, he and Merle develop a ro-
mantic affair that eventually results in the cancella-
tion of Saul’s project, his wife’s suicide, and Merle’s
decision to move to Africa to find her husband and
daughter. In this novel, Marshall’s Pan-Africanist
focus, exceptional characterizations (black and
white, male and female), and subtle handling of
homosexuality, race, and culture were pioneering.
Though there was a lull in her major fiction
works over the following decade, Marshall received
a second grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts (1978–79), which led, in 1983, to the pub-
lication of two books: her third novel, Praisesong
for the Widow, which won the Before Columbus
Foundation American Book Award (1984), and
Reena and Other Short Stories, which includes the
often-anthologized autobiographical “To Da-duh,
In Memoriam” and “The Making of a Writer: From
the Poets in the Kitchen.” In the latter, Marshall
expresses her gratitude to her mother and other
Barbadian women for having taught her the power
of the word as an instrument of communication
and survival. Not only have these two short pieces
been key to our understanding Marshall’s oeuvre,
but they, along with Marshall’s fiction, also have
offered an intimate glance into an Afro-CaribbeanMarshall, Paule 337