Paule Marshall
Iconic Caribbean writer of the people
“My very first lessons in the art of telling stories took place in the kitchen.
My mother and three or four of her friends told stories with effortless art and technique. They were natural-born storytellers in the oral tradition.”
– Paule Marshall
SHE IS the greatest contemporary Feminist writer of the Caribbean. A peer of Toni Morrison, her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a classic and the foremost work of its kind to examine the life of first-generation immigrants from Barbados in New York, was published in 1959, 29 years before Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest
Eyes. All of Marshall’s work is either set on an island or explores the duality of Caribbean and American identity and the rootedness of home.
Given Marshall’s age, pre-TV and social media, it is only natural that her primary example of writing, as the above quote indicates, would come from the oral tradition of her Caribbean mother and her friends. But Marshall has to be situated within a larger cultural context. She was born and came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, perhaps still considered one of the greatest literary periods for black arts. She knew and toured with Langston Hughes. She might have met the Jamaican Claude McKay, even Zora Neale Hurston. Although living in Brooklyn, she was not isolated. She deliberately ventured beyond the West Indian community in which her mother tried to confine her.
She attended Hunter College (my alma
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves – V.S. Naipaul