The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969). Content and Description

Though Marshall’s second novel shares no characters with her first, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People begins where Brown Girl, Brownstones ends: with a journey from America to the Caribbean. Unlike Selina Boyce, the Americans in this novel do not travel to the fictional Bourne Island in search of their heritage. Instead, the novel follows a group of anthropologists sent by the Center of Applied Research, not to discover the island’s past, but to plan its future.

Yet, as the novel attests, any planning of Bourne Island’s future is ill conceived without first acknowledging the island’s history: The island is a microcosm of the postcolonial third world; with its sugarcane industry and stratified class structure, it is not far removed from its slave trade days. Just as the island represents colonized countries, the anthropologists assume the role of colonizers.

They wish to usher in progress to the people of Bourne Island, but on their own terms. Still, the Americans are not stereotypes of Western imperialism: Saul Amron, a Jewish-American anthropologist, is from a people with a history of suffering; his wife, Harriet, descends from a family who once profited from shipping slaves from the island; and Allen Fuso, a research assistant, identifies more with the island than his native home of America.

Soon after their arrival, the group realizes that their efforts to modernize Bourne Island are futile and that only by revisiting the island’s past can its people then see the future. In The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Marshall explores the two themes most emblematic of her work: “the importance of truly confronting the past, both in personal and historical terms, and the necessity of reversing the present order” (“Shaping the World of My Art” 123).

The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is Marshall’s only novel set exclusively in the Caribbean. Though Bourne Island is one of several islands situated somewhere between North and South America, it breaks from the other islands and faces east toward “the colossus of Africa,” foreshadowing the African traditions and rituals that are the basis for later sections of the novel (13). Flying over the island for the first time, the Americans observe another significant characteristic of the island’s geography. On this isolated island, a small section of land clashes with the rest of the island’s picturesque scenery:

To the west stretched the wide, gently undulating plain with its neatly ordered fields and the town poised at its southern edge. To the east and sealed off from that bright green world lay a kind of valley which occupied less than a quarter of the land space on the island. Viewed from the plane, it resembled a ruined amphitheater whose other half had crumbled away and fallen into the sea. (14)

It is in this “ruined amphitheater” that the stage of The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is set. This ravaged land is Bournehills. When it is viewed from above, the Americans notice a large ridge alienating Bournehills and its people from the rest of the island. When it is viewed from below, among the people of the island, the Americans notice further divisions. As with most of Marshall’s characters, the land is a powerful force in shaping the lives and personalities of the people residing on it.

The residents of Bournehills are the island’s most poor and oppressed; they form the bottom rung of the class system left over from the island’s time in the slave trade. Above them is the island’s working class, and above both classes are the island’s white businesspeople. Hundreds of years have not broken the bonds once placed on the people of Bournehills. The manner in which the past haunts the people of Bournehills is best expressed in the novel’s epigraph, a saying from the Tiv of West Africa: “Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.”

The Americans are quick to perform these “ceremonies of reconciliation”—namely, providing modern technology for the island’s sugarcane industry—but the people of Bournehills are not so quick to forgive. They refuse to use such offerings, even though the machines would ease their burdens in the workplace. Rather, they live their lives in much the same way as the people of Bournehills centuries prior. They cling to such a past; they distrust any move toward the colonization that exploited their ancestors so long ago. Yet, by refusing any sort of change, they remain static characters destined to repeat the past.

The novel’s protagonist, Merle Kinbona, knows the island’s history well: A native of the island, Merle left to study in England, where she also married and had a daughter with a Ugandan student. Her husband left with the daughter for Africa, however, after discovering a secret Merle had kept from him: She was the daughter of a mulatto businessman. Merle, in turn, leaves for Bourne Island when she learns her father is dying. In seeking out her homeland, Merle also seeks herself. Like the land, Merle is divided: She descends from two different races and divides time between two vastly different islands, yet she identifies with her homeland and works to effect change for Bournehills and its people. She realizes what the people of Bournehills do not: that a balance must be struck with modernity in order to guarantee the island’s progress, a balance that preserves the island’s rich heritage. As such, Merle functions as an intercessor between the Americans and the islanders.

As a history teacher as well as a native of the island, Merle understands the importance of tradition coupled with social progress and equality. More than any of the novel’s characters, Merle is capable of wedding the island’s past with a more prosperous future. In addition to political change, Merle facilitates personal change. In particular, she forms an intimate bond with Saul in which the two reach a greater self-awareness. As Merle does, Saul begins to realize how important the local customs and rituals are to the people of Bournehills, and the two share similar visions for the island’s development. Saul’s Jewish heritage allows him a more sympathetic view of the islanders, though he can never assimilate into their culture completely. In their relationship, both Saul and Merle heal themselves in order to heal the land, for as Marshall’s novel attests, political change begins with personal revolution.

Harriet, of course, does not desire a revolution. With ties to the country’s slave trade, she represents Western imperialism and its often myopic idea of development, which thrives on global technology and abandons local tradition. Harriet views Bournehills as a “mysterious and obscured region of the mind which ordinary consciousness did not dare admit to light” (21). Her perception of the foreign land is much the same as Marlow’s upon first entering the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella Marshall cites as an early influence. In both works, these ominous descriptions dramatize the oppressor’s fear of the oppressed, a fear of bringing to light what has been cloaked in darkness for so long.

Wary of change, the people of Bournehills remain in darkness, unsure of how to reconcile the pain of the past with a progressive future. Yet in their annual reenactment of Cuffee Ned’s slave rebellion, they show themselves desirous of change if not quite capable of it. Every year, they relive their past through Cuffee Ned’s uprising; every year, they witness Cuffee Ned murdering those who enslaved him. If for only a few days a year, the people of Bourne- hills believe such change is possible. The account of Cuffee Ned reiterates a major theme of the novel, that political change can be and often is ignited by an individual. At the novel’s conclusion, Saul reflects on the possibility of such a change:

Because it’s true in a way what everyone’s always saying about the place, that it’s not going to change—at least not on any terms but its own. I’ve come to believe that also. But I felt that if we went about the project the right way we might do some good, if only in helping Bournehills people to feel a little less powerless and forgotten. Then, hopefully, they’d take matters into their own hands. (453)

Saul leaves for America, Merle for Africa, and it is unclear whether the people of Bournehills will rise up and demand the change of which they dream. But at least they dream: Every year, with drums echoing and hands clapping, the people of Bournehills rejoice about what was and will be, and the past seems evermore the present.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a seminal text in understanding the psychology of imperialism. How are the Africans depicted in Conrad’s novel, specifically by Kurtz and Marlow? How are these perceptions similar to or different from the ways the Americans perceive the islanders in Marshall’s novel? Consider particularly ideas of civilization: What does it mean in the Western world to be civilized? Who are the most civilized characters in each novel?

2. Throughout much of her fiction, Marshall uses the automobile as a symbol of Western technology. In The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Vere builds a race car as a status symbol yet is ultimately killed while driving it. How is the car, perhaps more than any other machine, symbolic of Western industrialism? Be sure to consider Marshall’s description of Merle’s Bentley.

3. In the novel, Harriet, whose family once profited from Bourne Island’s slave trade, represents colonizing countries, whereas the residents of Bournehills, who have made little progress from those slave days, represent the colonized. Though such characters seem quite opposite, compare the ways in which Harriet and the people of Bournehills are similar, noting how each refuses to change. Why can or will these characters not change, and what does this mean for their futures? Is one future more promising than the other?

4. Every year the people of Bournehills reenact the slave rebellion of Cuffee Ned. In doing so, they idolize the hero for his actions, yet because of this they fail to see the possibility of change within “ordinary” people like them. In what ways does such hero worship suppress their potential for change? What does Marshall seem to be saying about the relationship between hero worship and social change? By depicting a people who remain stagnant—preferring to live in squalor and remembering the one act of rebellion committed by their ancestors—is Marshall implying that the people of Bournehills need to change the way they venerate Cuffee Ned? Write a well-developed essay in which you take a firm stance on this issue, using evidence from the text to support your statements.