A MELUS Interview: Paule Marshall

The following interview was conducted in Ms. Marshall's apartment living room in Richmond, VA, May 28, 1990. The room is tastefully appointed with no excesses, like Ms. Marshall's fiction. One wall is lined with burnished wood shelves filled with books and art objects; on the opposite wall hangs an oil portrait of the wistful girl who appears on the cover of Brown Girl, Brownstones. Ms. Marshall smiles comfortably and talks warmly as she tells about her life's work; she relates information about conceiving and writing Brown Girl (1959) with a freshness that belies how long ago her first novel was published. One gets the singular impression that the ideas and plans for all of her fiction, retained or discarded, remain vibrantly alive in her thinking and imagination to animate her conversation as she recalls planning and researching content or selecting concepts and images to covey her ideas. The fiction of Paule Marshall - Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961); The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969); Reena and Other Stories (1983); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); and Daughters (1991) - is distinct in African American literary tradition for its attentiveness to the necessity of cultural continuity for blacks of the African Diaspora. Ms. Marshall's rare vision encompasses the impact of the peculiar history of people of African descent and discerns that a spiritual return to their source represents their best chance for survival. Interviewer: There are very clear pictures of the Caribbean in your fiction. Would you talk about its importance to you and to your work? Marshall: Well I think the importance of the West Indies in the work started even before my first visit which took place when I was nine years old. It predates that because as I quoted in that essay of mine, "The Poets in the Kitchen," one of the things that was talked a lot about among the women was the whole nostalgic memory of home as they called it, home. It was very early on that I had a sense of a very distinct difference between home, which had to do with the West Indies, and this country which had to do with the United States. For a while it was a little confusing because to me home was Brooklyn and by extension America, and yet there always was this very strong sense in the household of this other place that was also home. I think that it began then, an interest in this place that was so important to these women and that I began to sense it was important in whomever I was going to discover myself to be. So when I started thinking about such weighty topics, not until much, much later in my life, twenties or so, the other home seemed important to me in order to answer certain questions about myself. Really in a sense that's what the work is primarily about; it's my trying to find answers I'm always putting to myself. Interviewer: Were you aware of intraracial conflict growing up in Brooklyn? That theme is minimally present in Brown Girl, Brownstones. Marshall: I was made aware of the fact that I certainly was Afro-American growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, and at the same time there was this other component, this other very strong dimension which was Afro-West Indian. I didn't see any contradiction or difference or problem with the two until I was made aware of some of the conflicts between the two groups. This was very painful for me because I saw myself belonging to both. A conflict would almost suggest that there were parts of myself that were in conflict with each other. Then to reinforce the whole West Indian aspect there was the trip that my mother took us on when I was nine and my sister was thirteen to visit our Grandmother in Barbados. My mother had come into some money from a brother of hers who worked at the Panama Canal; and he had died there, as so many of those men from the West Indies working in the swamps and jungles of Panama didn't make it out. …