Conversations with Paule Marshall (review)

Heather Hathaway and James C. Hall provide “a valuable and multifaceted view” of both the writer and the woman Paule Marshall (vii). In their introduction they describe her as the “vital link” between the writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, and Margaret Walker in the 1950s and the writing of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in the 1970s (ix). She not only links these writings, but “spans” them as a novelist, publishing works from 1959 to at least 2009. These fifteen conversations from 1970 to 2009 chart the growing recognition of her significance as a writer. Hathaway and Hall identify five main themes in her work: the artistic influences that shaped her conception of language and literature; explorations of how dismissive society is because of race and gender; the important relationship between art and politics; the importance of “staying the course” as a solution to dealing with marginalizing expectations; and the possibility of unity and reconciliation. What is most significant, however, in all these interviews is Marshall’s underlying interest in her work being able to contribute to the liberation of all readers from racial oppression at the personal level and the community level. On the personal level Marshall tells Sylvia Baer in 1991, “I hope . . . personal liberation is evident in the work” (123). On the community level Marshall tells Daryl Cumber Dance that same year that her writing is about “the coming together, the working together not only of Black men and women, but of the entire community throughout the world” (99).

Marshall’s interest in communal liberation is most evident in her 2001 interview in this collection when she details her relationship with Malcolm X that included her membership in the organization he led, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) whose goal, recently quoted by Manning Marable, was “to unify the Americans of African descent in their fight for Human Rights and Dignity” (Marable 350). The function of Paule Marshall’s art, since the OAAU’s founding in 1964, remains this goal. This is a goal that no other living writer can claim with such longevity. The first interview that deals with Marshall’s underlying concern of personal liberation is a 1977 interview with Molara Ogundipe-Leslie that justifies the importance of a Black aesthetic that negates and corrects all the negative images the West imposed on Black people. Her comprehensive summary of the Black aesthetic speaks to Hathaway and Hall’s third theme of how Marshall’s fiction and her politics go hand in hand. In it we see how her fiction has a clear political focus of showing Black characters that boldly fight white supremacy in a positive light, in an attempt to help liberate her readers, at a personal level, from believing negative images about Blacks: “I don’t think a people can really progress until they think positively of themselves” (35). The setting of her fictional stories is in the past because she sees it as key to fighting racial oppression of the present: “I feel we have to go back and re-create the past so we can use the lessons from that to aid us in the present struggles” (39).

In her brief 1981 interview with Marshall, Mary Helen Washington seems most concerned with Marshall’s underlying concern for the reader working towards his or her own personal liberation from the assumed norms of white supremacy. Washington identifies four important themes in her work that sum up concerns in her interviews heretofore: concern with oppressed people engaging their history, facing up to colonial oppression, moving to control their own lives, and refusing to be dominated by the materialism of the Western world (58). Washington shows how the act of writing for Marshall wrested her from the domination of her mother who did not support her writing. Washington relates the experience of Marshall’s character Silla to the experience of Linda Brent in order to underscore what Marshall herself wants to underscore the commonalities between African American and Caribbean peoples, speaking most directly to...