Paule Marshall
Paule Marshall was an influential American writer known for her exploration of Caribbean immigrant experiences and the complexities of identity within the African diaspora. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Barbadian parents, she was deeply influenced by her cultural roots, which she vividly captured through her storytelling. Marshall's literary career began with her acclaimed novel, *Brown Girl, Brownstones* (1959), which is recognized as a foundational work in black feminist literature, addressing the challenges faced by second-generation immigrants. Her subsequent works, including *The Chosen Place, the Timeless People* (1969) and *Praisesong for the Widow* (1983), continued to explore themes of resilience, cultural heritage, and community.
Marshall's writing is celebrated for its lyrical quality and incorporation of Bajan vernacular, reflecting her commitment to capturing the richness of her heritage. Throughout her career, she received numerous accolades, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to her literary accomplishments, she contributed to academia, teaching at several universities and serving as a writer-in-residence. Marshall's legacy endures through her significant contributions to literature, particularly in highlighting the diverse experiences of Caribbean Americans and the broader African diaspora. She passed away on August 12, 2019, leaving a profound impact on both literature and cultural discourse.
Paule Marshall
Author
- Born: April 9, 1929
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
- Died: August 12, 2019
- Place of death: Richmond, Virginia
Novelist, feminist, and activist
A novelist, journalist, fiction writer, and essayist, Marshall drew on her Caribbean ancestry for inspiration. She introduced her readers to women-centered narratives filtered through the prism of race and ethnicity, culture, and class.
Areas of achievement: Education; Literature; Social issues; Women’s rights
Early Life
Paule Marshall was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel and Ada Clement Burke, who had migrated to the United States from Barbados in 1919. They brought their love of Barbadian, or Bajan, culture with them to what was then called Stuyvesant Heights, Brooklyn (later known as Bedford-Stuyvesant), where Marshall was reared. Marshall’s cultural and intellectual development was molded by her parents’ allegiance to Barbados. Most of what Marshall learned about Barbados she attributed to the women who often gathered in her mother’s kitchen, the “kitchen poets” who offered life lessons and schooled her in Bajan vernacular and folk ways and national and international politics. A visit to Barbados when she was nine years old also helped shape her worldview.
Marshall mimicked the lyricism of the Bajan language spoken in her home and incorporated its rhythms into the poetry she wrote as a child. Her passion for the written word was fueled by regular visits to the Brooklyn branch of the New York Public Library, where she would devour books that provided a different kind of training for the writing career she would later pursue. While visiting the library, Marshall read the work of many European American writers, but she later developed a fondness for Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry, her gateway into African American literature.
Marshall was formally educated in the New York public schools. After graduating from high school, she briefly attended Hunter College but withdrew because of an illness. Later, she matriculated as an English literature major at Brooklyn College, where she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society and graduated cum laude in 1953.
Life’s Work
After her college graduation, Marshall began working on a master’s degree at Hunter College, but abandoned her studies to become a librarian. She worked for a short time as a librarian before she joined the editorial staff of Our World, a small African American magazine. Marshall, the only woman on its staff, worked as a research assistant and eventually became a full-time writer, traveling to Caribbean countries and Brazil. During this period, she married Kenneth Marshall and had a son, Evan. She also began her first attempt at writing a novel, but faced strong objection from her husband.
Marshall’s autobiographical novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), a bildungsroman examining second-generation American Selina Boyce’s complicated relationship with her Caribbean-born parents and the Barbadian community, was published to fine reviews but initially went largely unread. Because of its emphasis on the centrality of black women immigrants’ experiences, it was heralded as a feminist text and was reprinted in 1981 by the Feminist Press of City University of New York.
After her first publication, Marshall turned her attention to four novellas, making up the collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). Set in different regions of the African diaspora, the novellas—Barbados, Brooklyn, British Guiana, and Brazil—focus on aging men who resolve conflicts of physical and mental deterioration through an emphasis on youth and materialism. Marshall continued writing fiction with African diasporic settings and themes in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969). The novel explores caste and class among a fictional Caribbean island’s inhabitants, whose stories of historical struggles against slavery and the colonial past reveal their resilience and fortitude. In 1983, she published the novel Praisesong for the Widow, in which a middle-class woman embarks on an emotional and spiritual journey to her ancestral home in order to regain her cultural heritage and wholeness of self. A collection of short stories, Reena, and Other Stories, was published in 1983. Daughters (1991) again placed women front and center in the narrative.
Published in the twenty-first century, her novel The Fisher King (2000) features a precocious eight-year-old boy as the main character in a tale set against the backdrop of jazz. Marshall chronicled her own life in Triangular Road (2009). A volume of Marshall’s interviews, Conversations with Paule Marshall, edited by James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway, was published in 2010.
Marshall taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of California at Berkeley and served as writer-in-residence at Oxford and Columbia universities. In addition, she held the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Culture and Literature at New York University. Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960), the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1989), and a MacArthur Fellowship (1992). In 2009 Marshall won the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement award.
Marshall died on August 12, 2019, in Richmond, Virginia, at the age of ninety.
Significance
Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones is considered the beginning of the black feminist tradition in literature. Her work brought attention to the diversity of the African American experience by emphasizing Caribbean immigrant life in the United States. In addition, her fiction often incorporated themes linking people throughout the African diaspora. She was noted for her ability to bring the poetic rhythms and cadences of Bajan vernacular to life, blending oral traditions into the written text.
Bibliography
Baker Josephs, Kelly. “What She Said.” Review of Conversations with Paule Marshall, by Paule Marshall, ed. by James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway. Caribbean Review of Books, Nov. 2011, caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/28-november-2011/what-she-said/. Accessed 20 Apr. 2016.
Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. U of Tennessee P, 1995.
Marshall, Paule. Conversations with Paule Marshall. Edited by James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway, UP of Mississippi, 2010.
Marshall, Paule. “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Reena, and Other Short Stories. Feminist, 1983.
Savory, Elaine. “Anglophone Caribbean Literature.” The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, edited by F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Vol. 2. Cambridge UP, 2004.