Triangular Road: A Memoir (review)

While renewed or increased dissections of the influences on an author’s life and work often occur after the author wins some prestigious award, suffers a grave illness, or on the heels of his/ her death, Triangular Road, Paule Marshall’s 192-page memoir, treats audiences to an intimate look at the bodies of waters, people, and places that influenced the writer’s trajectory. In the memoir appropriately titled Triangular Road, Marshall credits (broadly speaking) the United States (specifically New York and Virginia), the Caribbean (particularly Barbados and Grenada), and Africa for providing some of the most transformative people, places, and experiences in her work and what she calls her “tripartite self.” With a clarity and honesty that one garners with time and age, Marshall, now 80 years strong and five decades after the publication of her first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), provides a lasting blueprint for writers embarking on their own professional journeys and to Africa’s children, wondering/wandering through the existential experiences of diaspora. From her retrospective emerges these important lessons: mentor and encourage young writers; nurture and make room for one’s passions, including family, friends, and writing; and pay homage through a literal and or spiritual return to one’s lineage and heritage.

Fittingly, Marshall begins her memoir with a serenade to Langston Hughes, whose acts of kindness and encouragement mentored the talent and inspired the confidence of the writer early in and throughout her career. Describing their sojourns throughout Europe (London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen) in 1965, Marshall credits Hughes’ two travel memoirs, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, with her vow to become “... not only ... a writer, but a travelin’ woman as well” and the writer himself, who “... became a kind of West African griot, a tribal elder passing down black American culture and history ...” for her ongoing desire to become an ethnographic scholar of the world. However, not all of Marshall’s mentors were famous outright. Virginia (her lifelong friend and the American state after which she is named), the “Kitchen Poets,” the Barbadian women who gathered in her mother’s kitchen in Brooklyn conversing in their lyrical Bajan dialect about the events and “scandals” of their tight-knit community, her grandmother, aunt and the other relatives she meets during her extended stays in the Caribbean, later gain their fame through Marshall’s writings. Connecting them all are the bodies of water and the watery bodies that flow amongst them: the James River in Virginia, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. In her own reverse journey, just as emotionally fraught with the memories of loss, death, and abandonment, Marshall describes how these bodies—human, geographic, and aquatic—greeted her slave ancestors during their first point of entry and ports of call in the New World, now transport her to memories of her past.

Triangular Road ends where the journey of Marshall’s ancestors began—in Africa, which she calls “... the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know.” Describing her attendance in 1977 at FESTAC, the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts in Lagos, Nigeria, not only does the journey back spark a passion to rediscover her African heritage, but it also highlighted the chaotic nature of the African American struggle for political and civil rights with which she was involved as early as the 1940s, calling her people “Unprepared. Unrehearsed. Improvised. Disorganized.” At 80, Marshall shows no signs of slowing down, a testament perhaps that the memoir does not spell her impending demise. She leaves her fans not only with the promise of a commentary “... about that limited and frustrating East African experience,” what appears to be some discovery since 1977 about the African portion of her “tripartite self,” but also that she will return to “... her primary love: the novel, the short story” (p. 165). Omowale Paule! We salute your “return”!