Paule Marshall: Novelist who chronicled the African diaspora and gave voice to the marginalised

Paule Marshall channelled the often marginalised experiences of women, African Americans and West Indians into lyrical, passionate and politically charged fiction, notably in her debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones.

The daughter of Barbadian immigrants, Marshall, who has died aged 90, wrote about race, gender and cultural identity, focusing on the African diaspora in the Caribbean and United States. Her protagonists were almost always women – black women – who possessed a power and self-assurance that was rarely seen in print when she began writing in the 1950s.

“Traditionally in most fiction men are the wheelers and dealers,” Marshall wrote in 1979. “They are the ones in whom power is invested. I wanted to turn that around. I wanted women to be the centres of power.”

Although Marshall’s fiction was never polemical, her work examined racism, colonialism and what she described as an oppressive, far-reaching system of financial exploitation. She was perhaps best known for her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story regarded by many critics as the start of contemporary African American women’s writing.

Partly autobiographical, the novel is centred on Selina Boyce, a bookish 10-year-old in a West Indian section of Brooklyn, where she is alternately buoyed and weighed down by her family’s Barbadian heritage. Her eyes, Marshall writes in the opening pages, “were not the eyes of a child. Something too old lurked in their centres. They were weighted, it seemed, with scenes of a long life. She might have been old once and now, miraculously, young again – but with the memory of that other life intact.”

A methodical writer who sometimes spent two weeks searching for the appropriate word, Marshall went years without publishing, only to release a new novel or story collection that reverberated among critics and fellow authors, even as it bypassed bestseller lists.

Her second novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), explored the tension between tradition and modernisation on a Caribbean island. It was followed by Praisesong for the Widow (1983), an American Book Award-winning story of a woman’s spiritual rebirth on Carriacou, an island in the Grenadines.

Marshall drew praise from the poets Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes, who invited her on a 1965 cultural tour to Europe, as well as novelist Alice Walker, who wrote that Marshall was “unequalled in intelligence, vision, craft by anyone of her generation”.

Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn in 1929. Her father juggled low-paying jobs and left the family when Pauline was 11, joining Father Divine’s evangelical “kingdom” in Harlem. Her mother was a housekeeper who spent her days “scrubbing floor”, as her mother and her friends put it, to earn “a few raw-mouth pennies”.

“I grew up among poets,” Marshall wrote in a 1983 essay, recalling the formative hours she spent in the kitchen, where the neighbourhood mothers talked “endlessly, passionately, poetically and with impressive range”.

“For me, sitting over in the corner, being seen but not heard, which was the rule for children in those days, it wasn’t only what the women talked about – the content – but the way they put things – their style,” she added.

Marshall went on to combine the rich vernacular of her childhood kitchen with a literary sensibility, inspired by writers such as African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Not by coincidence, they effectively shared a name, which Marshall said she changed at 13 after deciding Pauline “was a limp name”. She dropped two letters and pronounced Paule without the “e”.

Marshall was studying for a career in social work when tuberculosis forced her to drop out of Hunter College, part of the City University of New York, and spend a year at a sanatorium. Immersing herself in books and letter-writing, she decided to study English upon her return, then transferred to Brooklyn College and graduated in 1952.

Working periodically as a journalist, Marshall was a writer and editor at Our World, a black “picture” magazine, in the mid-1950s. “After several years I became terrified that I was going to spend my life as a hack writer for a third-rate magazine,” she said. “In desperation, I went home that night and started the first novel.” The novel became Brown Girl, Brownstones, a landmark of American literature.

Marshall was active in the civil rights and black nationalist movements and contributed to Freedomways, a leading African-American journal, in the 1960s. She later taught English and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and New York University, and received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.

Her other books include Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), a collection of four novellas; Daughters (1991), about a Caribbean politician’s daughter in Manhattan; The Fisher King (2000), about the death of a jazz legend; and Triangular Road (2009), a memoir.

While some critics pigeonholed Marshall as a black female author writing strictly for black women, she noted that her themes were universal – and if her books had special importance for African Americans or West Indians, so much the better. “Humans are always trying to overcome oppression of one kind or another,” she said. “The extra fillip for the black reader is to see their community given a kind of validity and even sacredness. To see your community in literature is a kind of empowerment.”

Her marriages to sociologist Kenneth Marshall and Haitian businessman Nourry Menard ended in divorce. She is survived by her son and stepdaughter.

Paule Marshall, novelist, born 9 April 1929, died 12 August 2019

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