Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Content and Description

A winner of the American Book Award, Praisesong for the Widow is often considered Marshall’s finest and most widely read work. The novel makes up the last of a trilogy that started with Brown Girl, Brownstones, followed by The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. Not surprisingly, the novel again charts a journey. At the age of 64, Avey Johnson is much older than Selina Boyce and Merle Kinbona, the protagonists of the trilogy’s earlier novels. Yet, as these women do, Avey travels to the Caribbean to find herself, to discover pieces of herself long since gone.

Avey does not hail from the area, as Selina and Merle do, but traces her connection with the Caribbean to a tale heard as a child: On Tatem Island, off the coast of South Carolina, Avey’s great-aunt Cuney related to her the history of the Ibo, a group of African people who, after being taken to those very same shores as slaves, turned and walked across the water back to their homeland. Through her tales of the Ibo, Cuney instilled in Avey an appreciation for a culture that sprung from the same continent as her ancestors’.

Later in life, however, the adult Avey forgets her aunt and the stories she told, turning away from her African roots in favor of the American dream. After her husband’s death and literally sickened by her current lifestyle, Avey boards a cruise to the Caribbean in hopes of reconnecting not just with the Ibo but with African culture in its entirety. In the final entry of her trilogy, Marshall proves herself a mapmaker of the African diaspora, charting the geographic and spiritual journeys of her characters with the aid of an African legend.

The Ibo people of the legend are important characters in the novel, for they represent the reconnection with Africa that Avey seeks. Having foreseen all the hardships that would befall them in America, they walked across the ocean back to their homeland, despite being bound in heavy chains. Though she is not literally imprisoned, Avey also suffers in America. Early in her marriage, Avey badgered her husband into financial pursuits, despite being happy otherwise.

As a result, her husband, Jay, dedicated the rest of his life to acquiring wealth and status, and the couple’s marriage suffered as a result. Avey’s visit to the Caribbean after her husband’s death represents her desire to identify again with her culture, as first described to her by her great-aunt, Cuney. To do so, Avey must abandon all of the luxuries and comforts of the life she shared with her husband.

At first, Avey’s return to her roots is not a conscious decision but a subconscious reaction. On board the cruise ship, she becomes sick after eating a parfait in the ship’s posh Versailles Room. The name of the ship, the Bianca Pride, translates into English as “white pride.” Similarly, Avey lives in a middle-class New York suburb called White Plains. Avey’s mind and body are finally reacting against the white culture she has consumed for so long. In these references to white culture, Marshall is not disparaging the culture of another race but showing the effects of ignoring one’s own culture for economic reasons.

Not unlike Silla and Deigh- ton Boyce in Brown Girl, Brownstones, Avey and Jay struggle to get by in a Brooklyn apartment, a source of arguments over money. But, whereas Deighton Boyce refuses to accept the American dream and its promises of wealth and success, Jay pursues it, if only in response to his wife’s longings. During the first years of their marriage, Avey and Jay lived in Harlem, an area vastly different from the white suburbs they would later inhabit. It was here Avey encountered many modes of black experience: Negro spirituals on the weekends, her husband’s reciting the poetry of Langston Hughes, jazz and blues music. In addition to their time in Harlem, the two made an annual pilgrimage to Tatem Island, the grounds upon which the Ibo myth took place.

These trips to Tatem Island ceased with Jay’s new approach to life, one exclusively focused on material possessions. In one of the novel’s more poignant passages, Avey remembers not crying at Jay’s funeral because she believed her husband died many years prior. In his wake Jerome Johnson emerged, a slave to materialism and status, concerned more with what others think of him and his possessions than the culture upon which his life and marriage were initially founded.

In addition to remembering the early days of her marriage, Avey dreams of her great-aunt Cuney and is plagued by memories of her childhood. These dreams and memories are symptoms of Avey’s sickness. To illustrate Avey’s vertigo further, Marshall often employs a stream-of-consciousness technique, much like of that the modernists James Joyce and William Faulkner. The past haunts Avey, and yet she knows it was only during this time that she was ever happy. She leaves her friends aboard the ship and walks alone along a beach, thinking of her past.

When she meets Lebert Joseph, an owner of a rum shop, Avey is given a chance to acknowledge this past in a ceremony called the Carriacou Excursion, a trip to the island of Carriacou to honor the island’s ancestors. Lebert is something of an authority on these “Old Parents” and asks Avey from which African nation she comes (165). Though Lebert rattles off a long list of nations— Arada, Cromanti, Yarraba, Moko, Temne, Mand- ing—Avey cannot name the nation of her descent. In taking Avey, an “out-islander,” on the trip to Carriacou, Lebert intends to reunite her with her nation, for he knows well the importance of knowing one’s ancestry: “They can turn your life around in a minute, you know. All of a sudden everything start gon’ wrong and you don’ know the reason. You can’t figger it out all you try. Is the Old Parents, oui” (165). Over the course of the novel, Lebert introduces Avey to her heritage and thus heals her of her sickness.

Though Avey is not familiar with the dances and rituals on Carriacou, they remind her of her days in Harlem and the sense of community among the other African Americans in the city. Overwhelmed by emotion at the Dance of Nations, Avey joins the dance even though she is an “out-islander” who does not know her heritage. The dance is natural for Avey; she remembers doing similar dances on the shores of Tatem Island with her great-aunt Cuney.

After seeing Avey dance, Lebert is sure that she descends from the Arada people of Africa. Of course, Avey will never know for sure; she is too far removed and displaced from her “Old Parents.” Yet, through Lebert and the Dance of Nations, Avey reconnects, not with her specific heritage, but with her African roots in general. After the dance, Avey once again goes by the name her great-aunt Cuney gave her so long ago: Avatara. Because she does not claim a specific people but rather the entire continent of Africa, Avey represents all people displaced from Africa, whether they live in Carriacou, Tatem Island, or Harlem. Though Marshall celebrates her Caribbean heritage in her life and work, she proves herself a pan-Africanist in Praisesong for the Widow, honoring all people displaced from Africa.

Upon returning to the States, Avey—now Ava- tara—intends to share her experience with others removed from Africa, envisioning herself as a wild woman shouting wisdom to a younger generation. She wishes to unify all of these displaced people under a single black heritage consisting of many different nations and cultures. Though she will never know which nation she belongs to, Avatara ultimately identifies with the continent of Africa as a whole. As do Selina Boyce of Brown Girl, Brown- stones and Merle Kinbona of The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Avey Johnson embarks upon a search for herself in the lands of her people. At the novel’s end, Avatara remembers something her great-aunt Cuney said of her grandmother: “Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos” (254-255).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. A distinguishing characteristic of the Ibo people is their ability to see into the past and future. As a result, they see time in a cyclical, rather than linear, fashion. Read One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garda Marquez. Though Marshall and Garda Marquez have markedly different styles, the view of time presented in these two novels is very similar. Write a well-developed essay exploring this cyclical view of time, noting any differences you find. How does Avey see time in a cyclical fashion? What do her recurring dreams and memories suggest of her perception of time? How do these novelists incorporate a cyclical view of time into their narratives?

2. Read Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “To the Diaspora.” In a well-developed essay, compare Avey’s journey and psychological transformation with the speaker of Brooks’s poem, noting especially its first two lines, “When you set out for Afrika / you did not know you were going” (1-2). Though Avey never reaches Africa, how can her experience be seen as emblematic of all people displaced from the continent?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Billingslea-Brown, Alma J. Crossing Borders through Folklore: African-American Women’s Fiction and Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

Brownley, Martine W. Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

Christian, Barbara. “Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow” Callaloo 6 (Spring-Summer 1983): 74-84.

Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.