Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall

Eugenia C. DeLamotte. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. 1998. 198 pp. $39.95.

Marshall celebrates the power of women's voices not only to sustain their interior lives by recovering what they have lost as individuals, but also to recover history--to find again the collective memories that have been suppressed, and to ensure, both psychologically and politically, that the threat of annihilation will be met with "life persisting."

To the growing body of recent scholarship devoted to the fiction of Paule Marshall, DeLamotte's book is a welcome and valuable addition. Her central argument is twofold: 1) Marshall's contribution to feminism stems from "issues that coalesce around the question of silence and voice"; and 2) Marshall develops a narrative technique of "superimposition" or "double exposure" to represent simultaneously various economic, social, political arid psychological dimensions of her characters' lives. The artist's female protagonists are inevitably affected by the interlinking oppressions of race, class, gender, and nationality--oppressions that have been identified and elucidated by, such black feminist scholars as bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Barbara Christian, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. DeLamotte graciously and generously acknowledges their powerful influence upon her own thought. She also invokes within the body of her study contrasts between Marshall's vision and those of such literary predecessors as Ralph El lison, James Baldwin, and Joseph Conrad. Yet DeLamotte's readings build on, synthesize, and, in some instances, re-vision previous literary and cultural concepts to illustrate with insight and clarity Marshall's distinctive iconography. She illustrates how silence disempowers the dispossessed--particularly women--by sustaining and reproducing oppression. Further, she shows how Marshall portrays women finding agency in the very context of silence. This oppositionality or reflexivity is, in part, what constitutes Marshall's "feminist angle of double vision."

In addition to outlining in her introduction how "double-vision" functions in each of Marshall's novels, DeLamotte describes particular acts of silence/silencing. She argues that they may stem from direct suppressions of voice by dominant ideologies, or they may be induced by the self as a result of psychological repression. Silence may also be viewed as a type of speech which supports dominant discourse by its very refusal to articulate difference. Furthermore, silence may be a form of "ventriloquism" wherein the oppressed speak the words of the oppressor. None of these can exist without a sense of alienation or separation. In order to move toward individual and communal wholeness, then, silence must be transformed into voice.

Before examining this process in separate chapters which focus on each of Marshall's novels, DeLamotte provides in her introduction a cogent, close reading of Marshall's short fictional piece "Brooklyn." Although I would contend that Marshall's first published short story, "The Valley Between" (1954), clearly situates Marshall's early explorations of modernist feminist inquiry, DeLamotte's focus on "Brooklyn" is well chosen in that the story presents "the black woman as subject rather than as object" (despite the white male lens through which the protagonist is dubiously seen). In "Brooklyn" and in later works, Marshall moves beyond drawing a single thread of racial and/or gender domination to weave (superimpose) additional strands which create a tapestry of the interior and exterior lives of her characters. Thus, the protagonist in "Brooklyn" becomes "Marshall's first representation of the dynamic whereby social, political, and economic realities give shape to psychological reality, which may in turn externalize itself in an act of self-decolonization that works to decolonize social, political, and economic spaces." The resolution of this story about sexual harrassment describes a young black woman literally immersing herself in a l ake (an immersion which DeLamotte regards as a conflation of "woman's nature with Nature itself") before she is emboldened to speak her mind over and against the imposition of her seemingly powerful white male antagonist. Her final utterance becomes doubly an act of agency and an acknowledgment of her black female legacy. Since the story is drawn from the author's own experience, DeLamotte abserves, Marshall similarly takes "possession of the place of her dispossession transforming it into one of the first sites of her power as an artist."

Four fully developed chapters show in rich detail how voice and silence function in Marshall's major fiction. In Chapter One, "The Mother's Voice," we see how Marshall conflates realism and allegory in Brown Girl, Brownstones "to convey the social texture of Selina's world" as well as her inner psyche. Unforgettable is the power of Silla's words from scenes in the kitchen to her "acts of ventriloquism" in forging letters in Deighton's name. Silla's words, nonetheless, belie her spiritual emptiness, for "buying house" becomes her all-consuming goal, leaving the brown girl to search for a more wholesome existence. In Chapter Two, "Losses and Recognitions: Allegorical Realism in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People," DeLamotte argues that realism and allegory are again at play as Marshall portrays relations between the First and Third Worlds. While silence, in some instances, is transformed into a liberatory voice and, in others, masks a history of colonization, silence also takes the form of stubborn resistan ce to exploitation and oppression. Chapter Three, "Spirit, Materiality and the Road to Freedom: Third World Feminism in Praisesong for the Widow," explores the notion of spirituality as manifested through corporeality. The "laying on of hands," for example, becomes a type of "re-membering" which connotes both the revival of a forgotten heritage as well as the literal realignment of bodily parts. This conjoining (also a "spiritual reimbodiment") becomes reflective of the early lovemaking Avey and jay enjoyed amidst the patheon of African deities. The final chapter, "Daughters: Conflations of Discourse," focuses on public and private voices which, by their very interplay, impose silence within and between black gender relations. Marshall's shift between geographical, historical, and temporal spaces in the text as well as her focus on "representative [political] voices" that speak for others, suggests still another type of silence: "the double doubleness of the dispossessed voice assigned to speak for another vo ice in a language that is working, all the while, to recolonize the speaker."