Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels

3 / Dancing Up a Nation: Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow

3 / Dancing Up a Nation: Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow Bambara’s Velma Henry journeys through time from the very local space of a “backless stool” in an Infirmary to organize herself and her community toward wellness. Shange’s women traverse kitchens and the moon as they cook up a nation. Paule Marshall’s Avey Johnson gets a book-length praisesong because she travels, both literally and figuratively, toward African American cultural nationalism. In Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Avey sifts through her individual and collective past, achieves diasporic consciousness, and, ultimately, dances as a practice of nation. Her journey, like Velma’s, is women’s work to “be well.”1 Avey’s migrations bring her to a cultural nation informed by the African diaspora and articulated in dance. Dances on the South Carolina Sea Island of Tatem, in the living room of a Brooklyn apartment, and on the Caribbean island of Carriacou perform self and community as identities that exist only in relation to one another. Meanings of Dance in Praisesong The nation practiced in dance unfolds in four sections in Praisesong: “Runagate,” “Sleeper’s Wake,” “Lavé Tête,” and “The Beg Pardon.”2 In these sections, Avey, an African American widow from New York, feels uneasy while on her annual Caribbean cruise with friends. She leaves the ship suddenly, intending to catch a flight back to her comfortable suburban home. Instead she spends time in Grenada and joins an excursion of “out-islanders” (75) to their nearby homeland, the island of Carriacou, dancing up a nation / 87 where she observes and ultimately joins the annual Big Drum Dance. This is the last of three scenes of dance that span her life: Avey in childhood observing her great aunt Cuney shuffling a Ring Shout on the Sea Island of Tatem, Avey dancing with her husband, Jay, in the living room of their first apartment, and the Big Drum Dance on Carriacou. In Marshall’s 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, the first book of a loose trilogy that Praisesong concludes, Selina Boyce dances her black, female Bildungsroman. In her afterword to Brown Girl, Mary Helen Washington writes, “When Selina dances at the end of the novel we see her way of being in the world. . . . She dances memory and passion, expressing her own individuality, her reflections of other people, and the needs of us all caught in the cycle of life and death” (322). Dance in Praisesong reaches beyond individuality to a collective, embodied articulation of diasporic consciousness. Every moment of physicality in Praisesong, from Avey’s seasickness to sex with her husband to her actual performances of dance steps, is a kind of dance if we understand it in this way. Zora Neale Hurston’s depiction of African Americans practicing self and nation informs my reading of dance in Praisesong. Hurston signals the important work done by storytellers in Mules and Men by noting that they are “lying up a nation” (19). In her fiction and anthropological writings, men telling tales on a storefront porch in an all-black town are nation builders. Her phrase “lying up a nation” depicts lying or storytelling as a practice that articulates a cultural nation of African Americans within the United States. Lying points to both the artifice of storytelling and to resting, suggesting performances that create safe spaces of repose. Examining Hurston’s writings, Susan Willis describes the collective activity of a “lying contest”: “Telling stories like these affirms the group more than its individual members. It allows each participant to experience the force of cohesion. . . . The stories . . . affirm race, but they do not transcend racial prejudice. . . . The stories Hurston records . . . position themselves on the brink of formulating an alternative vision” (Specifying 45). Dance in Praisesong follows Hurston’s storytelling by forming a community defined by race, cultural practice, and “an alternative vision.” Dance, as Marshall portrays it, is a practice with kinship to Hurston’s lying, though with the key difference that Marshall’s arts are practiced largely by women, while the bulk of Hurston’s storytellers are men. In the vein of storytelling, several scholars emphasize the role of griot suggested by Avey’s full name, Avatara.3 The OED defines a griot as “a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and entertainers in North and West Africa, whose duties include the recitation of tribal and 88 / WOMEN’S WORK family...