Paule Marshall (1929-). Biography and Creativity

The daughter of Barbadian-American immigrants, Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, on April 9, 1929. As did many immigrants the world over, Marshall’s parents, Samuel and Ada Clement Burke, traveled to the United States hoping to achieve the American dream and the economic prosperity it promised. Despite growing up in an urban environment quite different from the world her parents knew, Marshall was never without Caribbean culture. In her mother’s kitchen, a young Marshall heard of her people’s past, told through the words of other island women.

The rhythms of their voices entranced Marshall at an early age, and she later recognized these women as poets with a lasting and profound influence on her work. Until her first trip to Barbados at the age of nine, these kitchen poets and her parents’ stories were Marshall’s only connection to her parents’ homeland. After witnessing the Caribbean people, culture, and landscapes for herself, Marshall, like the kitchen poets of Brooklyn, was inspired to re-create the majesty of the land through words. She returned from her year-long stay in Barbados with her own accent and several poems celebrating all she had seen. Marshall drew from these experiences in her later writings, in particular the autobiographical short story “To Da-duh, in Memoriam.”

Marshall soon lost her accent after being teased by her Brooklyn schoolmates, but she never lost her fascination with the land of her ancestors. When she was a child, Barbados stirred Marshall to poetry; when she was an adult, island culture inspired her to write complex novels examining the differences between the American and Caribbean ways of life. Marshall’s adult writing began at Brooklyn College, where she majored in English after a friend encouraged her to write. This decision to pursue a career with words was not surprising: In addition to the poetry she heard in her mother’s kitchen, Marshall spent countless hours in the library, reveling in the works of 19th-century novelists such as William Thackeray and Charles Dickens.

Though she lived vicariously through such books as a young girl, Marshall never saw herself in them. Victorian England, distant from Brooklyn and Barbados, led Marshall to believe that in these great works something she “couldn’t quite define was missing” (“Poets in the Kitchen”). What Marshall sought at this young age was a literature that better represented her own heritage and experience, not that of someone else. She eventually found what she was seeking in a collection of poems by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Marshall had heard the African-American dialects found in Dunbar’s poetry before but had never seen them on a printed page. Dunbar’s characters, though without Caribbean accents, reminded Marshall of her own family, and for the first time she met a people like her through the written word.

From this point on, Marshall continued to read African-American authors outside school, complaining much later that such influential and historically important African-American authors as Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth were conspicuously absent from her education. Later, at Brooklyn College, Marshall read great European writers such as Thomas Mann and Joseph Conrad, both of whom she cites as major influences on her work. Upon Marshall’s foray into the literary world, experimentation was increasingly common; many writers began using postmodern techniques, manipulating language and emphasizing the artificiality of their works. Rather than adopting such a style, Marshall clung fast to psychological realism and defended the traditional novel’s value.

She would later prove the form’s worth in her own novels, which provide keen insights into the psyches of her characters. Her work couples the stylistic qualities of the early modernists with the thematic concerns of many African-American writers, whom she would not read with much consistency until her graduation from Brooklyn College in 1953.

Shortly after graduation, Marshall soon found work writing for Our World, a small black magazine similar to Ebony, and enrolled at Hunter College two years later to continue her studies. Marshall also returned to the New York public libraries of her childhood, this time as a librarian. In 1954, she published her first short story, “The Valley Between,” her only work to focus exclusively on white characters.

She married Kenneth Marshall in 1950 and gave birth to a son, Evan-IKeith Marshall, before divorcing her husband in 1963. She would later marry Nourry Menard, a Haitian businessman, in 1970. While writing for Our World, which assigned her to cover stories in the Caribbean and South America, Marshall also began to write about her world. After her workdays writing for the magazine, Marshall spent her nights penning her autobiographical first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959).

Marshall was by no means the only African- American woman writing at this time. Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha was published in 1953, the year Marshall graduated from Brooklyn College. Yet, she would not read or know of Brooks’s seminal novel until the 1960s, along with the works of several other African-American women not mentioned in her schools. Many of these writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, were forgotten relics of the Harlem Renaissance, a golden age of African-American arts. When Marshall’s parents immigrated to the United States in the 1920s and even when Marshall was born in 1929, African- American musicians, painters, poets, and writers received unprecedented critical and public attention throughout the world. The movement lasted into the 1930s, at which point the Great Depression and its economic repercussions overshadowed the success of African-American artists in the previous decade.

Had Marshall written Brown Girl, Brownstones at this time, it would have been very successful. Instead, Marshall’s first novel appeared when African Americans struggled not to be recognized as artists but as people, people worthy of the rights denied them by a segregated America. Marshall began her writing amid the Civil Rights movement, a time characterized by sit-ins, marches, and nationwide protests against unjust laws that denied African Americans equal rights. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) spoke for an African-American population unseen as individuals worthy of equality, three decades after the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison’s novel was an unprecedented success. As one of few authors to address African-American concerns, Ellison had a large influence on black authors, especially Marshall, who later deemed his collection of essays Shadow and Act (1964) her “literary bible.”

With racial tension reaching fever pitch across the United States, many readers embraced novels like Invisible Man regardless of their race. Authors such as Ellison sought to illuminate the African- American’s individuality and humanity. While the majority of the reading public knew the works of African-American male writers such as Ellison and Richard Wright, female African-American authors, including Brooks and Marshall, remained obscure and unappreciated: Brown Girl, Brownstones, though applauded by critics, did not garner much attention outside the literati.

Marshall received similar reviews for her collection of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), as well as her second novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969). Like her first novel, these works were reviewed favorably by critics but virtually ignored by the public. Marshall remained in relative obscurity until 1981, when the Feminist Press republished the then-out-of-print Brown Girl, Brownstones. Much had happened in the two decades following the book’s initial publication to warrant a second printing: Women joined the Civil Rights movement alongside African Americans and other minorities in the struggle for equality, igniting a demand for literature that represented such marginalized groups. Feminist criticism emerged, and within it black feminist criticism.

These efforts to balance what many viewed as a homogeneous, white, and European literary tradition helped bring Marshall’s works to light, as well as works by Brooks and other African-American women. In the years before the reprinting of Marshall’s first novel, a newer generation of African-American women writers surfaced, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. These women would tackle in their literature the themes Marshall had 20 years prior. Their works, as do those of Marshall, investigate not only what it means to be black but what it means to be black and a woman. Marshall’s first novel and its second printing helped usher in a new group of writers equally dedicated to examining the inner consciousness of the black woman in America.

In this way, Marshall transcends what W. E. B. DuBois called “double-consciousness”—the problem of being black and an American—and reveals the complexities inherent in being black, female, American, and of Caribbean descent. As such, literary critics have branded Marshall as a writer with myriad classifications: feminist, pan-Africanist, African American, Caribbean. Marshall is none of these and yet all; she falls into many categories because she focuses on themes and characters that provoke many questions about identity. Marshall’s characters do not just face the “two warring ideals” of which DuBois spoke.

Rather, they journey across foreign lands and ideologies searching for a single identity pulled from multiple sources. Marshall encountered this upon growing up in Brooklyn as a black female: The landscapes of the Caribbean are as much a part of Marshall’s own identity as the brownstone apartments in which she lived. Her life and works emphasize the theme of reconciliation, of synthesizing often different or contradictory lifestyles into a single identity.

Reconciliation and identity are universal themes found not only in Brooklyn and Barbados but the world over. Specifically, however, Marshall targets the African diaspora, a term referring to people of African descent throughout the world. Many Africans were taken aboard slave ships bound for the United States, but a large number were also transported to South America and the Caribbean. Thus, Marshall and her family trace their ancestry from Africa to the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to the United States. As her characters do, Marshall possesses a hybrid identity composed of several geographies and lifestyles. In her texts, she paints beautiful pictures of her characters’ island homelands.

Yet, this is not to say she focuses solely on the lands from which her characters, as well as she, are displaced. She never loses sight of America, setting the Caribbean lifestyle against the American way of life, as seen most notably in her second novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. In Marshall’s fiction, America is as influential a setting as Africa or the Caribbean, for it represents an important shard of a splintered identity. As the title of Brown Girl, Brownstones suggests, Marshall’s conception of her own identity was formed in Brooklyn long before spreading to the shores of Barbados.

All of Marshall’s works exhibit this delineation between place and displacement, between home and homeland. Rather than advocating a return to a geographic location, her works encourage a return to and reappraisal of the past. Her third novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), which won the Before Columbus American Book Award, relies heavily on African folklore and mythology. As Marshall’s autobiographical character Selina Boyce demonstrates, it is through the past that people— especially displaced people of the diaspora—better understand themselves: By knowing where they are from, they can more firmly grasp who they are. Postcolonial critics, who are often concerned with how to reclaim cultural identity and autonomy after they have been effaced and repressed by imperialism, have praised Marshall’s works for their penetrating insights into the effects of colonialism on the colonized.

Marshall published her collection of short stories Reena and Other Stories in 1983, again with the aid of the Feminist Press. In 1991, she published Daughters, a novel focusing on a father-daughter relationship much like hers with her father. A year later, in 1992, she received the MacArthur Prize Fellowship for lifetime achievement. She published her fifth novel, The Fisher King, to positive reviews in 2000. In addition to her writings, Marshall has taught or lectured at such esteemed institutions as Yale University, Oxford University, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Students and scholars continue to read Marshall’s work, especially as interest in feminist, postcolonial, and cultural criticism increases. As so many black women writers have attested, Marshall’s work has inspired multiple generations of authors and has led many to rethink their definition of blackness. She affords her readers a vision of the modern, multiethnic woman of color struggling to survive in a racially divided world. Through her apt characterizations and poetic language, Marshall leads us to imagine possibilities: the many ways we can rethink and re-create, out of the dustbin of the past, a culture that preserves the vitality of what has been and envisions what may be.