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State University of New York Press - Moira Ferguson

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102 pages

English

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From Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall's novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors. In this, the first critical study to address all of Marshall's fiction, Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall's work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. In creating a space for her characters' interrupted lives and those of their elders and ancestors, Ferguson argues, Marshall trains a spotlight on slavery's wake and engages her fiction in the service of healing deep global wounds.
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Wanting Brownstones; Why Brooklyn?

3. Soul Clap Hands and Sing: Sadness, Resistance, Redemption

4. A “Nation of Diabetics” meets Empire

5. Water and Nomenclature: Praisesong for the Widow

6. Paule Marshall’s Daughter’s: Wars of Independence

7. The Fisher King: New Beginnings and a Culmination

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	02 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438444208
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1498€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A HUMAN NECKLACE
A HUMAN NECKLACE
The African Diaspora and Paule Marshall’s Fiction
MOIRA FERGUSON
Cover: “A new map of the world : with all the new discoveries by Capt. Cook and other navigators : ornamented with the Solar System, the eclipses of the sun, moon planets c. / by T. Kitchen, geographer.” London: I. Evans, 1799. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, address State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferguson, Moira.
A human necklace : the African diaspora and Paule Marshall’s fiction / Moira Ferguson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4419-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Marshall, Paule, 1929– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. African Americans in literature. 3. African American women in literature. 4. Blacks in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 6. African diaspora in literature. 7. Postcolonialism in literature. 8. Caribbean Area—In literature. I. Title.
PS3563.A7223Z67 2012
813 .54—dc23
2011051055
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Martha Jane Starr and Mary Kay McPhee
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction: Paule Marshall’s Fiction
Chapter 2. Wanting Brownstones, Departing Brownstones
Chapter 3. Soul Clap Hands and Sing : Sadness, Resistance, Redemption
Chapter 4. A “Nation of Diabetics” Meets Empire
Chapter 5. Water and Nomenclature: Praisesong for the Widow
Chapter 6. Paule Marshall’s Daughters : Wars of Independence
Chapter 7. The Fisher King : A Culmination and New Beginnings
Epitaph: Triangular Road: A Memoir
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T his book has taken rather a long time as I gradually finalized my transatlantic journey back home. So I have incurred many debts that I am very happy (and relieved) to acknowledge.
First off, I read parts of the book to academic audiences who responded very constructively: at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Oregon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, Oregon State University, George Mason University, and particularly at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
I thank friends and colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom for invaluable support, friendship, and scholarly camaraderie.
Kimberley Banks, Grace Bauer, Duncan Campbell, Anne Cvetkovic, Mantia Diawara, Stephen Dilkes, Alex Djkovic, Paul Gilroy, Avery Gordon, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Cora Kaplan, Daniel Mahala, Orna Neumann, Edward Said, Sabby Segal, Ahmed Sheikh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., Paul Smith, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Vron Ware, and members of book clubs at Harlesden Public Library and Portobello Road. Sherry Harris, Grace Bauer, and Ingrid Johanson deserve a special mention for their cheery and supportive friendship.
David Huet-Vaughn provided venues where several aforementioned individuals discussed cultural/political issues with relish and good humor. At Modern Language Association meetings in New York, Toronto, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Diego, Cheryl Wall, Nellie McKay, Mary Helen Washington, and Debby McDowell created spaces of peace and friendship, where Hortense Spillers, my dear friend, always shone a steady light.
In Kansas City, Maude and Jimi Wahlman welcomed me with a home from home, while in London, Stuart and Catherine Hall helped my re-adjustment, answering worrywart questions with great good humour. Over the long haul, Bobby Watson’s music and bonhomie were always an inspiration at the Blue Room and other venues in Kansas City and, most recently, in London.
Additionally, it gives me great pleasure to thank Paule Marshall herself, who graciously granted my request for an interview. During her tenure as the Frances and Floyd Horowitz lecturer for 2003–2003 at the Hall Center for the Humanities at Kansas University, Marshall gave a keynote address on the “Triangular Quest for Self and Community: Brooklyn-Barbados-Benin.” This talk helped me clarify my ideas about the powerful influence of the African diaspora on her fiction.
As luck would have it, generous funding made research in Barbados possible; thus the landscape that pervades Marshall’s fiction opened up for me. I send a warm thank you to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a Faculty Development Fellowship and the Research Council for a Maude Hammond Fling Fellowship that enabled that research in Barbados. Bookshops in Barbados, moreover, rank high on the list of venues where staffs were constantly friendly and helpful. Many landmarks, especially those huge Boulders on the West coast, both overwhelmed and inspired me; they are a sight to behold, of beauty drenched in tragedy.
At the State University of New York Press at Albany, I thank my editor, Diane Ganeles, for her unintrusive fine work. I extend inestimable gratitude to my publisher, James Peltz, for his generous understanding and attentiveness over many years. He is, in the best possible sense, one of a kind.
As always, I thank students at various institutions for smart perceptions and engaged discussions, research assistants, Margie Kine and Randy Kreifel, and research typists Kristen James and Nancy White for all their invaluable collective work. Rachel Bateman, my research assistant from Kansas University, was unfailingly diligent as well as intuitive about alternate sources. Our discussions enhanced the project. I thank Lisa Cooper for her careful attentiveness to the final draft.
Lastly, I thank my son, Christopher, for steadfast assistance, technical and otherwise. He is a joy to work with.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Paule Marshall’s Fiction
E ach of Paule Marshall’s major works of fiction— Brown Girl, Brownstones, Soul Clap Hands and Sing, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Praisesong for the Widow, Daughters , and The Fisher King —features originally displaced communities of the African diaspora. The protagonists in this sextet, all women excepting the last, travel to geographical and spiritual continents as they face down their complex histories of home and exile. Collectively, these novels and novellas recite a saga of forced migration, of diasporic experience. Marshall herself tellingly suggests the dynamics of these intricate tales in two statements, the first addressing the influence of voyages on her writings, the shorter affirming her own intersecting ethnicities:
I think it is absolutely necessary for black people to effect [a] spiritual return [to origins in Africa]. As the history of people of African descent in the United States and the diaspora is fragmented and interrupted, I consider it my task as a writer to initiate readers to the challenges this journey entails. 1
I am Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American. … I am embracing both these cultures and I hope that my work reflects what I see as a common bond. 2
Bearing Marshall’s statements in mind, I argue that these fictions constitute a long, discontinuous, imaginative saga of African diasporic communities, perhaps the first of its kind. They address a range of topics from colonizers and colonized people in Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, France, and the United States; tradition and the role of elders and ancestors; colonial dehumanization; black female agency; black male leadership; collective insurgency; and urgent quests for identity.
Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) explores the palpable frustrations that abound in the home of Caribbean migrants in a Brooklyn brownstone. 3 A second-generation Barbadian daughter who grows up there, adolescent Selina Boyce slowly embraces a political and sexual awakening in her ambivalent struggle with traditional values. Her reactions to a host of both positive and adversarial mentors ground the narrative. In Carole Boyce Davies’s phrase, Selina is traveling between identities as she ends up voluntarily migrating to the Caribbean diaspora, as her father tried to do. 4 Among the participants in Brown Girl, Brownstones are Silla Boyce, Selina’s tough, first-generation, Barbadian mother; her devil-may-care yet sensitive father, Deighton Boyce; the brownstone denizens; easy-going Suggie Sweet, one of the recurring outcast figures who populate Marshall’s novels; and Miss Thompson, the wise, battle-scarred ancestor-warrior, also a recurring figure, whose love prompts Selina’s maturation; Father Peace, the black community evangelist who transforms Deighton Boyce’s life; Beryl, Selina’s close friend from childhood from whom she gradually drifts apart; and Rachel and Clyde, close friend and lover respectively. After a community tragedy, Selina Boyce recapitulates her father’s return to the Caribbean, but unlike her father Selina survives.
Soul Clap Hands and Sings (1961) stages very old men searching for a loss that underpins their lives and a love to replace it that will comfort them. In the first novella in Soul Cla