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9 Being the subject and the object: Reading African-American Women’s Novels (1993) If memory serves me right, the first novel by anAfrican-American woman I’d even held in my hand came from a second-hand bookstore in Harlem. It was 1967. I was a graduate student at Columbia, and an English instructor in the SEEK program at CCNY, a program designed to uplift apparently uneducable black and Puerto Rican youth by giving them the skills to enter city colleges. In ways I’d not consciously calculated, I was pursuing two different tracks of training. At Columbia, I was working on a paper on Wallace Stevens, a concession to me from my professors who, mostly, were immersed in British literature and who barely touched onAmerican contemporarywriters,thewritersinwhomIwasmostinterested.AtSEEK, I was fast discoveringAfrican-American writing (in response to which my students suddenly exhibited the writing capacity they were not supposed to have) and was planning classes onInvisibleMan. UsingAfrican-American literature in the classroom sent me on regular treks to black bookstores where I could sometimes find out-of-print books, the category it seemed to which most African-American books then belonged. So it was, that I saw the image of a brown girl on the cover of a cheap Avon paperback and noticed its title, Brown Girl, Brownstones. I’d been in this country, and had studied literature long enough to know that brown girls did not usually appear on book covers nor did they figure prominently in novels. My curiosity aroused, precisely because I was a brown girl, I bought the book for fifty cents, and put it away until at some future date, after I’d completed the Stevens paper, I could read it. The world I entered into in Paule Marshall’s brownstones was unlike any other I’d encountered in books, not even that of James Baldwin or Richard FirstpublishedinGayleGreeneandCoppeliaKahn,eds.,ChangingSubjects:TheMakingofFeminist Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1993), 195–200. Wright, LeRoi Jones or Ishmael Reed. Perhaps because I am a Caribbean woman living in the United States, Brown Girl, Brownstones resonated for me on many levels, some of which I cannot yet articulate. Reading this novel was, for me, an intensely personal and emotional experience. It was not that I’d grown up in Brooklyn, as Selina had, for I’d spent my childhood in the Caribbean. Nor that my mother and father resembled Silla and Deighton—quite to the contrary. Yet I recognized, knew Marshall’s characters—the Boyces, the Chancellors, Suggie, Clive; I spoke their language with its Wunna’s and beautiful-ugly’s. I’d experienced their cultural context without being able to really articulate it, for it was the worldview in which I was raised. I’d tasted every day the gritty dilemmas with which they were contending—without having named them. Marshall’s first novel insinuated itself into my emotional psyche and compelled me, in spite of myself, to remember the rich, sometimes frustrating complexity of my own people, a complexity many of us wanted to ignore, forget about in the black revolutionary fervor of 1967. In particular, Silla’s woman-voice constantly interrupted my mind-voice. Heranguish-ragewarnedmeoftrials I mighthavetoface.Likealioness she stalked the corridors of my imagination even as she challenged the ideal of black womanhood enunciated by ideologues of the sixties. Her fate called on me to act, lest my life resemble hers. Her wonderful and terrible deeds mocked the simplicity of many of the views I held. For at that time, many young black women like myself thought ourselves free enough to be all we could be, at least in the Struggle—only to find that we were enclosed, even in our own communities, in cages of misrepresentations as to who a black woman should be.As many of us were beginning to value, to celebrate the black culture our mothers had been instrumental in creating and passing on, we found ourselves entangled in contradictions about black motherhood, and silenced by versions of history in which we were said to have undermined our own. Supposedly we’d been domineering matriarchs, powerful furies who’d brought the race down and who needed to come down off our high horses so that our men could ascend to the throne—in much the same way that the ancient mother goddesses of pre-history had had to be tamed by the enlightened male gods who vanquished them. How else were black people to survive in the male-centered...

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