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Acts of Forgiveness
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20181 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,670 Words |
| Author
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Roberta Rubenstein
Roberta Rubenstein is professor of literature at American
University in Washington, D.C., and the author, most recently,
of Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and
Mourning in Women's Fiction Palgrave/St. Martin's Press,
2001).
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DAUGHTERS
Paule Marshall
New York: Altheneum, 1991
408 pp., $19.95
Some writers are like supernovas; they burst with a flash onto the literary scene with a particularly vivid or explosive novel and then disappear. Other writers produce a strong, constant glow; their works appear like the full moon, rising slowly above the horizon and then remaining far longer in the mind's eye. In this latter group belongs Paule Marshall.
During a career that has spanned more than three decades, Marshall has continued to write fiction distinguished by a quiet power that has steadily increased in depth, resonance, and vision. In her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), begun while she was a student at Hunter College in New York City, Marshall incorporated many of her own experience as a first-generation American of Barbadian parents in the character of Salina Boyce, a complex, intelligent girl who struggles to define herself both a woman and as a person of West Indian descent. The novel, now acknowledged as a classic in the tradition of African-American fiction, directly and effectively challenges both racial and gender stereotypes.
The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), and Praisesong for the Widow (1983) are richly textured narratives of self-discovery spanning the dual territory that Marshall claims as her imaginative terrain: the West Indies of her forebears and the northeastern United States of her own experience. A volume of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), explores the lives of characters whose geographical roots reflect the diversity of African-American experience; the collection of short stories, Reena and Other Stories (1984), further attests to the range of Marshall's subjects and themes.
What is distinctive in all of Marshall's fiction is its vigorous oral quality. When people talk to each other, as they frequently do in her novels and stories, one hears their voices; soft, perhaps, but compelling. Marshall learned her first lessons in the art of storytelling by listening as a child to the stories her Barbadian (Bajan) mother and her mother's West Indian friends swapped over the kitchen table at the end of their day spent as domestic workers in Brooklyn homes. She regards these "poets in the kitchen" as her collective muse of the spoken language. Honoring those women whose oral stories so centrally inspire and infuse her fiction, Marshall commented in an interview
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