Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow.

Rogers, Susan

As an epigraph to the section entitled "Lave Tete," the third section of her novel Praisesong for the Widow, Paule Marshall uses a brief quotation from a poem by Randall Jarrell: "Oh, Bars of my [ldots] body, open, open!" (148). It is in this section that Avey Johnson, the novel's protagonist, becomes aware of her body as a repository of memory, as a place where physical sensation echoes emotional feeling. This awareness is pivotal in Avey's progress from a state of denial to acceptance of her heritage. This essay aims to explore Marshall's construction of a fictional body as a site of cultural expression and memory. Avey's body communicates to her what she has taught her conscious mind to ignore: her disconnection from her own sense of herself and from the African-American and Caribbean heritage which is a crucial part of that self. Through the processes of extreme physical discomfort, illness, purging, healing, bathing, and dancing, Avey is able to make an emotional journey that restores her awareness of he r cultural inheritance. I will argue, however, that the novel's portrayal of Avey's emotional and physical rebirth, while raising important questions about the cultural identity of African and Caribbean Americans, is disconcerting in terms of the suggestion that it is possible to return to an unmediated state of being, to a tabula rasa of mind and body. The idea, suggested in the novel, that Avey's memories of Africa are an essential part of her being, while her American identity is a socially constructed one, is problematic.

In the present time of the novel's opening chapters Avey Johnson has become so detached from her own heritage that she does not consciously recognize that it has been lost. She is alerted to what is missing in her life in two ways: by her subconscious, through the bodily symbols in a dream; and by her physical reaction to her situation, her body's illness. These two developments precipitate Avey's hurried departure from the cruise ship on which she is traveling, but instead of returning to her home in New York as she anticipated, events conspire to take her on a journey of grieving and discovery. The actual excursion upon which Avey is embarked while her metamorphosis occurs, recalls other culturally significant journeys, which Avey must remember in order to restore her physical and emotional health. At significant moments during the Caribbean cruise she is taking, and the subsequent journeys she makes to escape it, Avey recollects childhood trips up the Hudson with people from her neighborhood, trips to her family's old home in South Carolina, a legendary journey of Ibo slaves' return to Africa, and the original journey of the slave passage. In all of these journeys the body is of crucial significance. This paper aims to examine the way the body functions in the text not only as an indicator of personal consciousness, but also as a metaphor for African people's cultural disinheritance created by the African diaspora. It also aims to draw attention to the disparity presented in the novel between acknowledging the body as an avenue of expression and yet wanting to escape its limitations.

Inconsistencies in the portrayal of Avey's body in Marshall's novel convey anxiety about the possible extent and source of bodily located knowledge and power. The text explicitly acknowledges the workings of social practice in contributing to an individual and collective understanding of physicality. Yet, simultaneously, events in the novel present a body's inherent knowledge as a resource for overcoming social and cultural disenfranchisement. Marshall's text does not confront its own contradictions: The differing attitudes to Avey's body are not addressed, but are presented as a coherent solution to her personal crisis. There seems to be no sense of incompatibility between the body as a source of knowledge and the importance of separating mind from body. These disparities will be discussed for what they can productively reveal about the difficulties of negotiating autonomy in a racist society. My thesis is that these contradictions, rather than undermining the novel's integrity, go to the heart of the sense of diaspora disconnection which the book communicates. These tensions are expressive of attempts to escape bodies' limiting associations, while finding in an individual's body a source of identity denied by ideological denigration of black bodies.

In Barbara Christian's article on ritualistic process in Praisesong for the Widow, the first critical response to the novel, she asserts that Marshall's novels demonstrate "how a visceral understanding of their history and rituals can help black people transcend their displacement" (149). The idea of a visceral understanding expresses with wonderful lucidity the process of Avey's experience: a conscious awareness precipitated by bodily response. Yet since Christian's essay no critic has taken up this perspective on Marshall's writing. The term visceral evokes the idea of gut-reaction, and of engagement with the world of ideas without forfeiting attention to bodily interactions. It suggests a slippage between clear distinctions of mind and body. Christian's essay addresses the issue of the mind body dualism in relation to the cultural rituals in which Avey participates, but also redefines the separation of mind and body as a process not of denial, or of concern with hierarchy, but of survival. The separation of mind and body, Christian states, "is characterized not as! fragmentation but as a source of Wisdom" (150). This separation was initially enabling for people of African descent because, while their bodies might have been enslaved, they were able to determine their freedom by recalling Africa "as the source of their being" (152). Christian traces the occasions in the novel when the body is in one place but the mind is in another. What is not accounted for are the instances in which it is the body, not the mind, that proffers knowledge; Avey may mentally fall to comprehend a situation yet experience a bodily response which enables understanding. Christian's conclusion that the novel can be read in the context of African cosmology, that body and mind must not be split, begins to explore just one aspect of the complex construction of bodily existence in this novel.

Despite the avenues for investigation which Christian's essay presents, there has been no sustained study of the depiction of physicality in Marshall's Praises ong for the Widow. The critical work completed on the novel so far has mainly focused on three interconnecting aspects: the account of pan-African cultural reclamations as antidote to diaspora disconnection; the processes of ceremony, ritual, and dance to achieve that reclamation; and one woman's journey of healing and self-discovery as a metaphor for the African and Caribbean communities' potential reconnection with African heritage. Beginning with Velma Pollard's article on cultural connections and continuing with the work of Abena Busia, Eugenia Collier, Gay Wilentz, Dorothy Hamer Denniston, and Joyce Pettis, there has been a concern with the theme of reclaiming lost cultural ground and the process of a return to wholeness. While all these critics note the significant moments of physical change that mark Avey's shifting attitude, none offers an acc ount of Avey's physicality as integral throughout her process of rediscovery, nor do they trace the ways her understanding of her body is pivotal to her understanding of her culture.

Two critical works refer directly to the healing process. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's essay on healing focuses on psychological self-renewal as it develops through the novel, but Scarboro does not explore how physiological aspects are integrated into this renewal. Again, while the essay references several of Avey's physical changes, it does not analyze the construction of Avey's body as it pertains to her healing. Paulette Brown-Hinds's article focuses specifically on dance as a healing process. She discusses the social significance of dance, and the stories associated with certain dances, as a measure of cultural connection among America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Brown-Hinds recounts the progression through the novel of dance as an empowering, forgotten, and then rejuvenating element in a process of self reclamation, and in so doing she fleetingly acknowledges the body's engagement with dance. Citing Katherine Dunham's explication of funeral dances as an externalization of energy, she extends this perspectiv e to Avey's experience: "If, as Dunham argues, emotions like anger and grief are best resolved by either violent or rhythmic motor activity, then Avey's physical movement can be read like a text, charting her internal thoughts and emotions" (114). However Brown-Hinds does not expand upon this reading or develop this perspective further.

In considering the role of personal and collective memory in Marshall's novel, G. Thomas Couser emphasizes that, for certain ethnic groups, history may have been suppressed or sanitized to the extent that "the only history is memory" (107). Interestingly memory is understood here in terms of a mind body separation: "Insofar as to remember is to have one's body in one place and one's mind in another, the novel's narrative line, which is determined by Avey's newly activated, volcanic memory, dramatizes the complex dynamics of African American consciousness" (111). Although this observation is helpful in understanding the construction of memory in the novel, what is not explored is the way this perspective is complicated by the novel's portrayal of memory as located in the body and accessed through physical change. Avey's memories of other times and other place are embodied memories, bound inextricably with her physicality.

Thus, while these critics do not fully take up the issue of corporeality, their concern with a return to wholeness and a sense of integrated identity is related to the way Marshall constructs the body in this novel in terms of a search for unity, and focusing on the role of the body in this context raises questions about the validity or possibility of such a return to wholeness. The text conveys the message that there can never be a return to wholeness that erases knowledge of the divisions encountered along the way. The incongruities in the novel, whether presenting diaspora identity in terms of a mind-body dichotomy or in terms of a state of embodied knowledge, signify that, for a descendent of the African diaspora, reconciliation with a culturally specific self will forever contain its own contradictions.

In the dream that signals Avey's first steps toward acknowledging her diaspora heritage, she receives a visit from her great-aunt Cuney, the woman responsible for her naming, and a significant and nurturing figure during Avey's young life. Avey's great-aunt was instrumental in her naming because Cuney's grandmother had come to her in a dream, announcing that the unborn child would be a girl sent by the ancestors. Cuney insisted that the child should be given the grandmother's name: Avatara. As an adult, Avey scorns the name Cuney had given her and also many of the stories she had taught her. It is this rejection that ultimately causes Avey so much pain, and which the dream enacts. Avey had heard the stories from her aunt when, as a child, she spent a month each summer at Cuney's home in Tatem, one of the South Carolina tidewater islands. An important ritual during these visits was her aunt's compelling account of the legend of the Ibo people's arrival on the island in slave ships:

"It was here that they brought 'em. They taken 'em out of the boats right here where we's standing.[ldots] And the minute those Ibos was brought on shore they just stopped, my gran' said, and taken a look around. A good long look. [ldots]

"And they seen things that day you and me don't have the power to see. 'Cause those pure-born Africans was peoples my gran' said could see in more ways than one. The kind can tell 'bout things happened long before they was born and things to come long after they's dead." (37-38)

What the Ibo see causes them to turn around and walk back out across the water toward the ocean. They reject what they see of slavery, even what they see after emancipation, and set off back to Africa. The magnitude of their defiance is communicated in mythical terms of corporeal transcendence. Accepting the stories as a child, Avey becomes skeptical as she grows older. Cuney's faith, however, is in the physical reality of the Ibos' experience, and she will not tolerate her great niece's s doubt. Her faith amounts to a literal belief in the Ibos' story, the belief that it is possible to defy the body's limitations and, in so doing, to escape the bonds of enslavement. Cuney's grandmother, however, saw the legend as describing spiritual release. Cuney says, "'My gran' declared she just picked herself up and took off after 'em. In her mind. Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos [ldots]'" (39). Such a perspective offers a mechanism for enduring, an emoti onal strategy for rising above subjugation. As an adult Avey persists in ignoring the story of the Ibos' rebellion and remains unable to accept the literal translation, or to attach meaning to the story. In this way she is unable to draw emotional support from an account of black resistance to white domination.

So in the dream, Cuney appears as someone from whom Avey wishes to escape. Her aunt invites her to go back and acknowledge this story of African cultural dislocation. She pleads with her to repeat once more the rituals of recognizing these ancestors, which she took part in as a child, but in her dream Avey's body enacts her resistance to her aunt's message and refuses to move. As Avey digs in her heels, Cuney attempts to force her into motion: "In seconds a hand with the feel of a manacle had closed around her wrist, and she found herself being dragged in the direction of the Landing" (43). The image of the manacle here implies Avey's feeling that her aunt wants to chain her to the past, to prevent her breaking free from memory. She clearly sees an engagement with the past as negative, restricting the body and limiting progress. The manacle also clearly signifies the memory of slavery which she is trying to ignore. Avey's determination not to have to go back, not to have to remember, and her aunt's determina tion that she should result in a physical fight between the two women. With hideous force, Avey tries to beat the old woman down, and as Aunt Cuney fights back, Avey clings desperately and unsuccessfully to the trappings of status which clothe her body and which are torn from her.

Equally significant to the dream for Avey is the extreme physical discomfort that she feels the following day. Sitting in the opulent dining room of the cruise ship, she finds herself completely unable to eat a mouthful of the extravagant dessert, to even lift the spoon to her mouth, as she is stricken with a fleeting paralysis. She is startled by this incident and by the stomach upset that accompanies it. Although she has only eaten lightly, she feels that she has gorged herself. She has a "mysterious clogged and swollen feeling" which at its worst feels as though "a huge tumor had suddenly ballooned up in her center" (52). This physical discomfort is indicative of the layers of accumulated wealth and superficial respectability which have left Avey bloated with false values. Excessive consumption has worked to suppress her connection with her past.

The dream and the illness powerfully indicate, with bodily experience as a constant point of reference, the barrier between Avey and any association with her complex cultural origins. While troubled by the events, Avey remains unaware of their significance. What has contributed to this situation is the perspective on the world that she and her husband Jerome developed during the years of their marriage. All pleasure in, and acknowledgment of, themselves became subsumed within an attempt to prove themselves on equal terms with white folks, by accruing material possessions. Avey took her first cruise a year after her husband's death, and on that and following trips she both commemorates, and continues to use, the wealth and status that Jerome strove for all his working life. From the beginning Avey loved the cruises, starting with her first sight of the "dazzling white steel" of the Bianca Pride (15), whose color and name perpetuate the same associations as Avey's suburban home in North White Plains. Her empha sis on the importance of material things in life is demonstrated by the excessive luggage she takes, and her perception that whiteness is synonymous with status is revealed by her ardent desire not to behave any differently from the rest of the (mainly white) passengers, even though, to them, she simply does not exist. In order to maintain her dignity Avey has taken to ignoring anything that challenges her belief that she has gained social parity in the eyes of white society. Yet on this trip reminders of white rejection begin to bother her. Now, four years after her husband's death, Avey's perspective is changing. The dream and the experience at the mealtime, in both of which the body exists as a site of struggle, draw her attention to the process of cultural negotiation and conflict that she is subject to as an African American woman. Finding this unbearable, she determines to leave the ship.

Her response to anxiety initially remains one of avoidance and denial, but even before she has managed to leave the ship her changed awareness dramatically affects what she sees in her surroundings. The shuffle board game appears to her to be people "clubbing each other with the murderous sticks," while the quoit game makes the sound of "some blunt instrument repeatedly striking human flesh and bone" (56). Now that Avey is becoming responsive to her own pain, memories of other people's pain, which she has blocked out, begin to surface. She has ignored the plight of other black Americans, and resisted over the years any knowledge of the developing Civil Rights Movement. Now, suddenly, she remembers watching a black man, innocent of any crime, being beaten by the police. She does not understand why this memory should return so clearly, and feels that her ears and eyes have become unreliable. She has come to rely on her senses to block out any reminders of the difficulties and conflicts of her life as a black w oman in America, but a process of remembering has been set in motion that continues after she leaves the ship and travels to a hotel on the island of Grenada. Waiting in the hotel for a flight back to New York, the return of the extreme discomfort in her belly brings on an interval of violent grieving for what she realizes she and her husband lost in their persistent yearning for wealth and stability. The perceptions that accompany this grieving are consistently framed in relation to her knowledge of her body.

As Avey begins to face up to all that she and her husband have lost, she begins to understand the real value of what is gone: the small personal moments that were, nonetheless, significant rituals and celebrations. She recalls the jazz and blues music which they had loved and to which they had danced together. She remembers fragments of poetry they used to recite, by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. And she recalls the summer pilgrimages they used to make to Tatem. Thinking back, her awareness reaches down deeper to recognize that their own personal rituals were something that connected them with their own heritage in a valuable and affirming way: "Something in those small rites, an ethos they held in common, had reached back beyond her life and beyond Jay's to join them to the vast unknown lineage that had made their being possible" (137). Their celebration of themselves was a celebration of their cultural inheritance, which provided them with a sense of protection and power. Significantly the jazz and blues music that meant so much to Avey and Jerome offers a celebration of hybridity, a demonstration of the positive creative results of cultural interchange. The poetry that speaks to them so vitally is concerned with negotiating spaces for African Americans amongst a population with diverse ethnic origins. The "vast unknown lineage" which Avey wants to avow is a complex lineage of multiple beginnings.

In light of this, Avey's further remarks that the rituals of their early marriage were as fundamental and beautiful a part of their lives as their physicality is disconcerting. Avey says that the things they did "had been as much a part of them as Jay's wing-flared nose and his seal-brown color, and her high-riding Bantu behind [ldots] and the deep earth tones of her skin" (137). The animal imagery in this passage (Jay's "seal-brown color") and the association of woman with nature, with fertile soil seem to glorify the limiting and stereotypical definitions of the body which the novel challenges. Furthermore, the underlying suggestion of an inherent connection between physicality and culture seems awkwardly reductive. Situating African American modes of expression as innately physical ignores the interactive processes to which they actually bear witness. Later in her journey Avey will come to assert the profound need for a separation of spiritual identity and physicality, and yet this view is based on her so rrow that she and Jerome lost touch with a spirituality that was "as much a part of them" as their physicality. On another level, however, this passage communicates that for Avey cultural expression is as important to her, as necessary for survival as her own living, breathing body. It follows then that being disconnected from a supportive cultural environment is as serious a rupture as being disconnected from her body.

This rupture is indeed what happened to Avey and Jay when the denial they fostered during their marriage resulted in a negation of individuality, not only in emotional terms but, Avey recalls, in terms of their physicality.

Jerome Johnson did, and Avey Johnson continues to, exhibit damaged perceptions of their bodies which have resulted from the negative meanings they associate with blackness. Here the novel declares that a sense of inferiority based on a specific physicality, rooted in American justifications of slavery, continues to exert restrictions on black Americans' ideas of themselves. Moira Gatens's essay on corporeal representation and the body politic is relevant here, for she seeks to consider whose bodies are represented within the latter and therefore permitted autonomy and access to power: "Certainly, not any human form, by virtue of its humanity, is entitled to consider itself author of or actor in the body politic.[ldots] Slaves, foreigners, women, the conquered, children, the working classes have all been excluded from political participation, at one time or another, by their bodily specificity" (83). This observation coincides with Judith Butler's assertion that our bodies are involved in a culturally mediate d process which designates those bodies which matter and, by default, those which don't. The way that Marshall's novel initially constructs both Jerome's and Avey's bodies clearly situates them in relation to such understandings of corporeal hegemony. These descendants of the African diaspora, finding themselves assessed as inherently inferior and subordinate on the basis of their physicality, make psychological shifts in identification that are reflected in how they perceive that physicality. The characters' moves toward the material security they associate with white, middle-class acceptability go hand-in-hand with erasing, or alienating themselves from, blackness. It seems to Avey that Jerome wears a mask over his face: "what almost looked like the vague, pale out-line of another face superimposed on his, as in a double exposure" (131). The double exposure suggests Du Bois's concept of the double-consciousness of the African American, but Jerome seems determined not to embrace the duality and complexity of that situation but to position himself within white America.

In Avey's eyes, Jerome has undergone what Susan Gubar would categorize as a form of racechange, a term she has coined to suggest "the traversing of race boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability [ldots] panracial mutuality" (5). Gubar explores the levels at which such shifting and ambiguous representations of color function--from highly self-conscious playfulness, through the strategic utilization of the possibilities of racechange, to desperate attempts to grasp acceptability. Gubar recognizes the pitfalls inherent in focusing on the speculative, temporary, or subversive aspects of racechange, and while keen to acknowledge the processes of agency and self-knowledge, she still observes that "racial impersonation and masquerading are a destiny imposed on colonized black people who must wear the white mask--of customs and values, of norms and languages, of aesthetic standards and religious ideologies--created and enforced by an alien civilization" (38). This scenario cle arly impacts Avey and Jerome as they attempt to move toward acceptance in the eyes of white society, disassociating themselves from any connection with black Americans. After Jerome's death Avey refers to all the financial funds that he left behind as the "whole of his transubstantiated body and blood" (88). Since Jerome associated these funds with the achievement of respectability, this suggests that he also experienced a kind of death-in-life when his body was transubtantiated for an ideal of whiteness.

Avey, too, has invested so much in material wealth and superficial status that she has lost the connection with her own body and with blackness. But her racechange manifests itself differently. There is no suggestion of physical whiteness, of a paling complexion: Avey sees her reflection as that of "a black woman of above average height with a full-figured yet compact body," but she has ceased recognizing this reflection as her own (48). It may be that Avey's mirror image is so blandly respectable that she does not recognize any distinguishing features there. Certainly, during the last years of her marriage to Jay, friends teased her that the couple had lost their individuality, appearing extremely familiar and rather formal. More alarmingly, it could be that Avey has so taken on board the mind set of whiteness that she does not recognize her blackness, that she appears to herself as Other. Avey's loss of connection with her own body, her inability to recognize her own mirror image, contributes to a portrait of a woman profoundly alienated from the complex possibilities of her cultural heritage.

The novel does not, however, present material well-being as synonymous with cultural disinheritance. It does not offer a critique of material advancement in itself, but rather when it exists at the expense of cultural identity. The novel stresses the grinding desperation of poverty and the rejection, by the white establishment, of black efforts for improvement that contribute to determined efforts to achieve and acquire at the cost of all else. Marshall also powerfully depicts the sense of loss that Avey feels upon realizing the cost of choices made:

"Too much!" Her sudden outcry caused the darkness on the balcony to fly up for a moment like a flock of startled birds.

"Too much!" Loud, wrenching, issuing from her very center, it was a cry designed to make up for the silence of years. (133)

Avey's refrain of "too much," which is repeated over and over, suggests both the too much which the couple had lost and also the too much which they had acquired, and which smothered them. With the outburst of grief which Avey experiences in the Grenada hotel room, she realizes that she and Jay had behaved "as if there had been nothing about themselves worth honoring!" (139). She comes to question how it would have been possible to acquire the means to provide for themselves and yet safeguard their heritage.

The series of anguished questions she puts to herself considers the processes that allowed her and her husband to devalue themselves and be unaware of that devaluing. Her thoughts are echoed in Judith Butler's considerations:

How does that materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation, which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms? What challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as "life," lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving? (16)

Avey's deliberations lead her to consider whether there was any way that the process of self-denigration could have been avoided or reversed, and whether there is any way forward.

The answer Avey arrives at is the need to possess the four key qualities of awareness, vigilance, strength, and distance. That final quality resonates with the refrain that runs through the novel, for, Avey feels that "a certain distance of the mind and heart had been absolutely essential" and she thinks of her great-aunt's grandmother, whose body was settled in Tatem but whose mind had gone with the Ibos (139). This suggests the importance of being spiritually rooted in one's heritage and keeping material gain strictly for the benefit of the material body, a concept which conflicts with the idea of a connection between heritage and physicality that other parts of the novel propose. It is Avey's body that signals that something is wrong, even when her conscious mind is unperceptive, and although she has trouble defining exactly what the inherent qualities were in the rituals of her early married years, "in a way that went beyond words, that spoke from the blood, she knew" (137). The idea of embodied cultural memory arises again when Avey meets a mentor in the person of Lebert Joseph. He too has memories of Africa "that had come down to him in the blood" (178). The novel gives great significance to the idea of rootedness in a cultural identity and to the body as a channel through which to reconnect to this heritage. Yet in response to the dilemma of preventing the initial distancing from heritage, the novel posits a clear distinction between mind and body. These shifting perspectives indicate an anxiety in the novel between situating the body as a site of cultural assertion and acknowledging the potential reductiveness of this situation.

In light of the association of a specific body with certain cultural memories, the ensuing depiction of Avey's return to an unmediated state of being creates further inconsistencies in the portrayal of the body in this novel. Avey, still on Grenada, wakes from a night of grieving feeling that the process has left her cleansed of previous emotional strife. The novel here posits the idea that such a regeneration, an opportunity for rebirth, is possible. Avey finds that "her mind[ldots] had been emptied of the contents of the past thirty years[ldots]so that she had awakened with it like a slate that had been wiped clean, a tabula rasa upon which a whole new history could be written" (151). The strength of the imagery is powerful here, indicating the extent to which Avey needs to overcome thirty years of cultural denial in order to recover her sense of self. It is interesting, however, that at the age of sixty-four Avey only needs to shed thirty years of memory in order to return to a state of innocence. This assumes that, at the beginning of her marriage, Avey's Afro-Caribbean/American sense of self was an unconstructed self. This issue is complicated by later developments in the novel which propose that it is also possible for Avey to purge her body and return to a state of uninscribed physicality. Such a situation is a highly debatable one, opening up questions about the extent to which the body can ever exist as a "clean slate." Before arriving at that state of innocence, however, she undergoes further traumatic experiences of catharsis.

After leaving the hotel Avey wanders out into a physical landscape which echoes her mental state. She roams along the beach, a long stretch of sand untouched by human presence. There is an Edenic quality about this landscape which reinforces the implication of a return to innocence. Avey walks for hours until she stumbles on a wooden shelter, a rum shop, where she encounters Lebert Joseph, a charismatic old man whose attitude and questions intrigue and confuse her. Their conversation focuses on the annual excursion of "out-islanders" back to the island of Carriacou for celebrations to honor the ancestors, a trip for which Lebert is preparing. He talks with enthusiasm about those making the trip who can still identify the African nations of their ancestors and recollect remnants of their songs and stories. His identification with this history is echoed in his appearance: He presents a countenance with lines "like the scarification marks of a thousand tribes" (161). Despite her initial indignation and confusio n in response to his horror that she lacks knowledge of African stories and rituals, his obvious sorrow at her situation propels Avey to confide in him. Initially, she is resistant to his determined pleas that she accompany him on the excursion, to discover her own ancestral connections, but she agrees to go when thoughts of returning "home" instead bring back the intense discomfort in her stomach.

On board the schooner, en route to Carriacou, Avey has deviated far from the isolated, stifling luxury of the cruise ship. She is surrounded by women who remind her of the venerable old women of her mother's church, and sitting supported by them her mind wanders back to that time. The sermon Avey remembers is crucially relevant to her current situation, and as the schooner rocks harder, she becomes more and more troubled by the words she remembers. The preacher's admonishment to roll away the stones that have buried the spirit pervades Avey's consciousness, and she becomes seized by a terrifying fit of vomiting, her body contorted and wracked by a series of convulsions. Her sickness is unsparing:

She vomited in long loud agonizing gushes. As each seizure began her head reared back and her body became stiff and upright on the bench.[ldots] Then, as her stomach heaved up she would drop forward and the old women holding her would have to tighten their grip as the force of the vomiting sent her straining out over the railing.[ldots] (204-05)

To Avey's horror, when she finally finishes retching, the discomfort moves down into her bowels, and she experiences uncontrollable diarrhea. Avey's extreme affliction is clearly a purging of the intense bloatedness she has been suffering, brought about by her swallowing of false values.

Lying in the schooner's deckhouse, recovering from her affliction, Avey has an intense sensation that indicates the potential she now possesses to reconnect with her past. Apart from the dirty pallet mattress on a shelf of planks which is Avey's bed, "the rest was darkness, a fetid heat and the airlessness of a hold" (208). In this environment, floating in and out of consciousness, Avey becomes aware of another presence: "She had the impression as her mind flickered on briefly of other bodies lying crowded in with her in the hot, airless dark. A multitude it felt like lay packed around her in the filth and stench of themselves, just as she was" (209). This moment of relation with the slaves of the middle passage is pivotal in Avey's transition from disavowal to acceptance. Having purged herself of the violation of false values, and allowed real sensation to breach her barricades of denial, Avey finds that strong, vital recollections emerge. The first "memory" that surfaces is the earliest possible memory rel ating to the experience of African Americans. It is a collective rather than individual memory that Avey experiences, initiated by physical experience, and itself a memory of the body. Avey's profoundly disturbing illness conveys the extent of the damage resulting from cultural dislocation created by the forced transition of Africans to America.

When Avey arrives on the island, the earlier depiction of her mind as a clean slate is reinforced by a parallel deptiction of her physicality: "Her body under the sheet covering her had remained motionless. Flat, numb, emptied-out, it had been the same as her mind when she awoke yesterday morning, unable to recognize anything and with the sense of a yawning hole where her life had once been" (214). In the context of Avey's journey to Carriacou, for a celebration to honor the ancestors, the process of her mind becoming a tabula rasa, and her body, in conjunction, being "emptied out," is situated as a positive process. It is presented as a return to a place of potential and recovery. However, the novel's construction of Avey's being as a blank, a "yawning hole." risks evoking damaging perceptions of black women as negligible, people without autonomy.

Mae G. Henderson, in an analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved, discusses Sethe's body as one that has been painfully inscribed by white male domination. Her body has been scared by a white man's whip, to punish her for speaking. A white woman and a black man both offer readings of the marks on her body, but as black women neither she nor Baby Suggs, who helps clean the wounds, have responsibility for making the inscription, or the ability to read it. Henderson comments:

The presumption is, of course, that black women have no voice, no text, and consequently no history. They can be written and written upon precisely because they exist as the ultimate Other whose absence or (non)being only serves to define the being or presence of the white or male subject. The black woman, symbolizing a kind of double negativity, becomes a tabula rasa upon which the racial/sexual identity of the other(s) can be positively inscribed. (69)

Henderson equates the notion of black woman as tabula rasa with the perception of black woman as non-being. This places the idea of a black woman's body as clean slate as a root of the problem, rather than the first step toward a solution. Yet Marshall's imagery here could be read as challenging such conceptions by reworking the understanding of a tabula rasa as a space where others can place inscriptions. The literal translation of a tabula rasa as an erased tablet draws attention to the very inscriptions of domination with which the novel is concerned. The experience of purging has erased those white hegemonic inscriptions and allows Avey to begin a process of drawing on her own cultural resources.

Beyond questioning the association of a black woman's body with a tabula rasa though, there is a need to query the plausibility of the latter at all. The possibility of bodies existing as places of unmediated physicality is a point much debated in contemporary theories of corporeality. Judith Butler, who has devoted considerable attention to elucidating the extent of the cultural construction of bodies, resists the idea that there exists at some point a "natural" body that lies outside of, or prior to, culture. In fact, in her study Bodies That Matter, Butler challenges the concept of constructivism, on the grounds that it assumes the existence of an unconstructed surface upon which culture acts. Early in her discussion she poses a set of questions, in relation to the rethinking of the oppositional constructions of sex and gender, that are helpful in considering the depiction in Marshall's work of a body returned to a state of innocence:

I want to ask how and why "materiality" has become a sign of irreducibility.[ldots] Is materiality a site or surface that is excluded from the process of construction, as that through which and on which construction works? [ldots] What occupies this site of unconstructed materiality? And what kinds of constructions are foreclosed through the figuring of this site as outside or beneath construction itself? (28)

In Marshall's novel the description of Avey's mind and body as a tabula rasa upon which a new history can be written clearly perpetuates the idea of the body as a site of unconstructed materiality upon which culture inscribes itself. Avey's experience of purging supposedly wipes clean damaging inscriptions of whiteness, literally the inscriptions of white chalk upon a black slate, and allows her to return to her essential state. Appropriate cultural inscriptions can now be applied, but applied to what? The paradoxical implication is of a specific radicalized and gendered tabula rasa. This contradiction in terms indicates some confusion about the extent to which Avey's identity results from cultural mediation or from certain intrinsic qualities. This dilemma is extended when the story unfolds to reveal not necessarily the writing of a new personal history but the restoring, through a process of physical cleansing and healing, of a collective memory that had been lost. Avey's body is not, it seems, a space whic h can be inscribed upon, but one where embodied memories can resurface. Avey's reconnection with her body, her awakening to physical sensation, triggers a series of memories from throughout her life that help her recontextualize her experiences. It also triggers, however, the surfacing of collective memories of an African past.

The task of restoring Avey's memory is now taken up by the third in a line of her spiritual mentors, Rosalie Parvay, Lebert's daughter. The theme of the body as a site of memory is elaborated here, for it is through Rosalie's touching of Avey's body, while helping her to bathe, that her sedimented memory is shifted, stirred up, and rises to the surface. The cleansing seems like a ceremonial process as Rosalie first washes and then oils one limb at a time, while singing a rhythmic chant. Avey is being attended to as though she is a helpless newborn, perpetuating the idea of rebirth, of beginning again. When Rosalie has finished washing Avey she begins an even more intensified process of massaging her legs. She gives her whole attention to vigorously kneading Avey's thighs, "as if challenged by the sight of the flesh there, which had grown thick and inert" (223). Gradually, the work that Rosalie is doing begins to take effect and Avey senses the return of feeling in her body, until her whole being is overtaken with an intensely powerful response:

The warmth, the stinging sensation that was both pleasure and pain passed up through the emptiness at her center. Until finally they reached her heart. And as they encircled her heart and it responded, there was the sense of a chord being struck. AU the tendons, nerves and muscles which strung her together had been struck a powerful chord, and the reverberation could be heard in the remotest corners of her body. (224)

This process of restoring energy to the body, carefully, limb by limb, until the whole body responds, is a highly suggestive play on the process of re-membering. It seems that both Avey's body and memory needed reconstructing, piece by piece. The return of connection with the body is directly linked with the return of memory. Mae G. Henderson engages the suggestiveness of re-membering in her discussion of the body as historical text in Toni Morrison's Beloved. She extends Morrison's creation and use of the term re-memory to explore the process by which the characters transcend the (literally) haunting memories of the past, especially the psychological dismem berment of slavery. The process of rememory "functions to re-collect, reassemble, and organize into a meaningful sequential whole through [ldots] the process of narrativization" (71). Significantly, after the cleansing experience Avey tells Lebert," 'Your daughter has been putting me back together again'" (229). The memories which surface for Avey begin t o put her experiences in a context that eventually will allow her to tell her own story.

After this restorative experience Avey is accepting of traditions she had previously found "demented." The lighted candle and the ear of corn left for the Old Parents remind Avey of the plates of food left by the coffin at funerals in Tatem, as she experiences "another long forgotten fragment drifting up to imprint itself [ldots] on the empty slate of her mind" (225). At the celebration for the ancestors held that same evening, the sounds of the music and the rhythms of the dancing have a similar effect on Avey as did the bathing: They return to her consciousness memories of personal and community rituals for which she now has a context. Listening to the powerful rhythms of the music at the "Beg Pardon," Avey finds herself drawn more and more into the dancing, as her body seems to remember instinctively what to do. At first the movement is simple and slight: "Her feet of their own accord began to glide forward, but in such a way they scarcely left the ground." The steps she takes recall those of the Ibos wal king back to Africa, because she treads cautiously "as if the ground under her was really water" and as if to test whether it would take her weight (248). She gradually gains confidence with the dance, and as she focuses on the movement the present time fades away and she becomes transported by her memory to a scene in Tatem. She situates herself in a past moment standing with her greataunt watching a group of worshipers performing a dance, The Ring Shout, in their church. The key element of the dance at Tatem and at Carriacou is that the soles of the feet do not leave the floor. During the dance the performers must remain grounded, for this is a dance "designed to stay the course of history" (250). In fact the shuffling steps are not supposed to be a dance, but to Avey, watching as a young child, it had "felt like dancing in her blood, so that under cover of the darkness she performed in place the little rhythmic trudge" (35). She could not enter the church and join the community in their ceremony because he r aunt was in voluntary exile after an argument with church members. Carried away with herself, Cuney had once crossed her feet in the dancing and overstepped the significant limits of rootedness set for the ritual. Indignant at the temporary exclusion that resulted, Cuney refused ever to return to the church. So, although Cuney stands as a recurring symbol of Avey's need to reconnect with her heritage, she also stands as a reminder of Avey's childhood desire to belong within the community.

The process of recovering her memories begins even before Rosalie has touched Avey, when, lying in the bed, "emptied out," recollections are initiated by her surroundings. The bare, sparse furniture of the room reminds her of the off-casts her parents had to make do with. She recalls the chagrin that her mother felt upon receiving her possessions second hand from people Avey's father worked for. Yet she also recalls the comforting associations that became attached to the furniture as they made it their own. When Rosalie arrives in the middle of her reverie, Avey realizes that this same woman had attended to her during the night, but that she had confused her presence with that of other significant women from her life. At various moments Rosalie reminded her of her mother, the nurse at the hospital where she gave birth, and, thirdly, the towering figure of her great-aunt. Recollections of her aunt surface again as Rosalie begins to bathe Avey, because the galvanized wash tub Rosalie is using reminds Avey of the tub that was used for the weekly washing when she stayed in Tatem. The memory becomes so powerful that it becomes Avey's reality once more: "The memory took over, and for long minutes she was the child in the washtub again" (221). When Rosalie begins the massage, Avey is reminded not of her own childhood but of her experience as a mother tending babies. She remembers the times in Halsey Street when they were small, massaging their bodies and admiring their perfection. Finally, when Rosalie returns life to the "sluggish flesh" on her thighs, Avey has erotic memories of her early years with Jay before their relationship was brutalized and deadened by their efforts to get ahead. The process of remembering puts Avey in touch with memories that confirm a continuity of nurturing and support, which she received both from family and community and which she passed on to her children. These memories bear witness not to the importance of financial success for the individual but of a person's existence in a context which affirms and sustains them.

This aspect of Cuney's role has been repeatedly misread by critics. In otherwise insightful and illuminating commentaries, Gay Wilentz, Keith Sandiford, and Barbara Frey Waxman all wrongly associate Cuney, rather than the church congregation, with the dance Avey is so pleased to remember. They also emphasize the limiting authority of the church in relation to the empowering potential of the individual. Actually, Avey "used to long to give her great-aunt the slip" and join the dancers in the church who were performing the Ring Shout (248). These misreadings impose a false unity on the novel's portrayal of Avey's cultural reawakening. The cultural knowledge Avey reconnects with does not have one unified origin but a number of sources: different people and groups who have clung to disparate stories and events, attaching their own significance to them. From her aunt, Avey received the knowledge of the Ibo legend and her ancestral name. From the people of Tatem, she received a knowledge of ritual dance and a sens e of groundedness and community. In this context Avey's comment to Lebert that "'your daughter has been putting me back together again'" gains renewed significance. As Avey gets in touch with the separate parts of her body--the soles of the feet, the limbs, the stomach--and celebrates their functioning as a whole, so too she reconnects with different elements of her diasporic heritage.

As Avey becomes increasingly a part of the dancing group she equates the Tatem Ring Shouters with the out-islanders on Carriacou and, continuing the metaphor of the body, feels that "the elderly Shouters in the person of the out-islanders had reached out their arms like one great arm and drawn her into their midst" (249). In an image that communicates the process of separate elements forming a whole, Avey's sense of joining the body of the community is conveyed. This collectivity is extended further when Avey re-experiences a feeling of connection that has occurred at other important moments in her life. She first experienced the sensation as a young girl, waiting on a wharf with the neighborhood community in New York, and also in Tatem, when she felt linked with those around her by slender but strong threads emanating from their hearts and navels. This was not a sensation of bondage or restriction but of energy, connection, and support. These were significant moments not only because Avey had a powerful fee ling of community, but because she felt it in terms of her physicality. This feeling of being joined by these threads had returned when Avey was waiting for the boat trip to Carriacou and returns now during the dancing; "Suddenly, as if she were that girl again [ldots] she felt the threads streaming out from the old people around her. [ldots] From their seared eyes. From their navels and cast-iron hearts. And their brightness as they entered her spoke of possibilities and becoming [ldots]" (249).

This feeling of belonging intensifies, in turn, the exuberance of her dancing. Not only does her body respond to the music, but it seems to contain within it the knowledge of how to dance, an embodied memory of the movements: "Just as her feet of their own accord had discovered the old steps, her hips under the linen shirtdress slowly began to weave from side to side on their own, stiffly at first and then in a smooth wide arc as her body responded more deeply to the music [ldots]"(249). As the dancing continues, Avey experiences the "sudden unleashing of her body," and a strange thing happens. The people in the crowd notice her in a different way, then start bowing toward her. Lebert begins the action when he offers her "a profound, solemn bow that was like a genuflection," and then one after another people file past her to do the same (250). One woman stops to introduce herself and stops to ask Avey her name. For the first time in years Avey gives the name her aunt had chosen, in the way she had taught her to say it: "'Avey, short for Avatara'" (251).

Avey's full name suggests the idea of an avatar, meaning the manifestation of a deity or the embodiment of a concept. With her name shortened its signification was obscured, its power abbreviated. Her acknowledgment of her name returns the power to connect with the past. Such an invocation appears to have occurred when Avey's dancing figure summons recognition and adulation. This incident and Avey's claiming of her birth name reinforce the notion of Avey's body as a repository of memory. She embodies the concept of an African past lost and the longing to reclaim it. This notion of Avey as an avatar, of embodying an ancestral figure, is also interesting in the context of her strong sensation of connection via threads from her navel, which she experiences during the dancing. This image carries echoes of pregnancy, reinforcing the perception that Avey carries another life within her; a life which will carry elements of the past into the future.

Embodied memory is also invoked by the effect of the music at the Beg Pardon. The powerful chord that reverberated out from Avey's heart and through her body at the culmination of Rosalie's massage, prompting the surfacing of bodily memory, is now echoed by the powerful sounds of the notes played at the celebration. These notes seem to emanate from the "bruised still-bleeding innermost chamber of the collective heart." The music conveys the essence of the community's "subliminal memories," which are more enduring than the history of pain from which they have come (245). Avey too seems to experience these subliminal messages. Yet insisting that a certain body has encoded within it a certain set of cultural memories proffers an awkwardly reductive notion of identity. There are clear moments during the novel when Avey's knowledge of Africa is situated not in lived cultural experience but seems inherent to her biology, as embodied memory that comes to her across the generations. Still, the novel does go beyond a one-sided exhibition of cultural retrieval. The shifting and seemingly anxious attitudes about the implications of identity rooted in physicality acknowledge the complexities of bodily interactions with society. Avey's response to her newly revived sense of self moves beyond a simplistically essentializing reaction to diaspora identity. Instead, Avey's contact with remnants of African ritual adds another dimension to the mediation of an African American identity.

To explore this concept, it is interesting to return to the occasion when Avey becomes one with the groaning hordes held in misery below deck on the slave ships. The purging that Avey endures leaves her open to this memory of her collective ancestors' suffering, to experiencing the time slippage which connects her with the original journey of separation. This revelation occurs to Avey while she is on a journey which reverses the original experience of psychological and physical separation from the homeland. Abena Busia emphasizes Avey's journey as a symbolic reversal of the original slave passage in her discussion of Marshall's novel. According to Busia, Avey's journey "reverses the location of the promised land, which now, rather than being the United States as represented in the prosperity of the plantations or, today, the Fulton Street of Jerome's success, becomes Africa as represented by Carriacou" (207), one of the most easterly of the Caribbean islands, and therefore physically closest to Africa. This reversal of the location of the promised land makes clear the falsity of the idea of America as an arcadia for the people of the African diaspora. The novel, though, does not propose a literal return to Africa, but rather a return to America with a renewed awareness of African origins.

The experience of dancing is the culmination of the process of illness, purging, and cleansing that restores Avey's recognition of her own body and all the implications that it carries for her in contemporary American society. Avey's response to this awareness is not to seek a place in an idealized vision of Africa, but to acknowledge the complex origins of her heritage and to return to America and tell the stories of her history. In this way the novel manages to avoid what Paul Gilroy finds a problematic perspective: "Modern black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes"(19). Avey comes to understand her own identity through a series of journeys, physical and emotional, literal and symbolic, that help her piece together the elements which contribute to her sense of herself as an African American in the late twentieth cent ury.

Avey does not recover a complete or unadulterated knowledge of African ceremony and ritual, far from it. It is clear that the celebrations in which she takes part, and the memories she recovers, offer only fragments of an African heritage. Avey may have been put back together physically and emotionally, but the African-originated practices she encounters on Carriacou provide just the "bare bones," a strong supporting framework which she must flesh out in terms of her own identity with a lifetime of cultural references. Avey feels initially disconcerted by the stark, makeshift nature of the scene that greets her when she arrives for the Carriacou fete. Having watched the small group of old and fragile people dance for their lost African ways and their children spread far and wide across the world, the reality of the situation dawns on her: "All that was left were a few names of what they called nations which they could no longer even pronounce properly, the fragments of a dozen or so songs, the shadowy forms of long-ago dances and rum kegs for drums. The bare bones. The burnt-out ends" (240). Avey does not pity these people, however, but feels awe and respect for their determination to preserve their heritage against the odds. Furthermore, their fete livens up when they begin the creole dances which acknowledge not a specific traceable connection with African groups but a general ancestral connection. The diaspora journey broke links, erased distinctions, and dislocated identities until all that remains left to claim is a general association. The younger people who now join the dancing, swell the numbers at the celebration, and lift the mood of the event are motivated by a longing to be included in this repudiation of the loss their ancestors sustained.

After the event Lebert is still keen to identify Avey's specific African ancestral group. She however is more concerned with her return to Grenada in the first stage of flying back to America. It is the United States that is more real to her than Carriacou, for passing over the island in the plane it seems "more a mirage rather than an actual place" (254). Yet her visit to the island has irrevocably altered her perspective, and as she flies, she considers how she would explain her newfound understanding to others. The two aspects of her personal and collective history that she is most keen to tell are, significantly, related to balancing the material needs of the body and recalling a cultural heritage which counters attempts to denigrate and deny that body. Avey wants to tell those who are unaware, unprotected, lacking memory" of her ancestor's perspective of a body grounded in Tatem but a mind "long gone with the Ibos" (255). In conjunction with this, she wants to recount her own memory of dancing to jazz a nd blues, during the early years of her marriage, on a wooden floor that felt "like rich and solid ground under her" (254). The novel's conclusion, then, posits a solution to Avey's crisis of cultural disinheritance that calls attention to the plural origins of African American culture. However, although much of the novel proposes that cultural identity has a certain grounding in physicality, its conclusion, by repeating her ancestor's refrain, remains anxious about such a grounding. The shifting approaches to physicality within the novel, therefore, communicate powerfully the impact of cultural disinheritance created by the African diaspora. In Marshall's novel the body, as a source of collective memory, functions as a crucial symbol of the need to discover, to recall the self, outside of hegemonic social and political prescriptions. Yet the text also imparts an astute awareness of the dangers, for black Americans, of focusing on corporeal locatedness in a society whose ruling classes designate blackness as subordinate. Despite Avey's search for a culturally complete self, the novel is unable to reconcile two very different understandings of bodily existence. Yet through this irreconcilability, as much as through the depiction of cultural reclamation, the novel exposes a pivotal feature of the diaspora experience it is concerned with relating.

Susan Rogers is a graduate student at Hull University in England. She is currently completing her Ph.D. thesis on constructions of embodiment in contemporary fiction concerned with the legacies of slavery.

Works Cited

Brown-Hinds Paulette. "In the Spirit: Dance as Healing Ritual in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow." Religion and Literature 27.1 (1995): 107-17.

Busia, Abena P. A. "What Is Your Nation?: Reconnecting Africa and Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow." Changing Our Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 196-211.

Butler Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledgo, 1993.

Christian, Barbara. "Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow." Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon P, 1985. 149-58.

Collier, Eugenia. "The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction." Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. 295-315.

Couser, G. Thomas. "Oppression and Repression: Personal and Collective Memory in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony." Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Ed. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. 106-20.

Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture and Gender. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995.

Du Bois, W. E. B. "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989. 3-12.

Gatens, Moira. "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic." 1996. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 80-89.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. New York: Verso, 1993.

Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Henderson, Mae G. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text." Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991. 62-86.

Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Pettis, Joyce. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995.

Pollard, Velma. "Cultural Connections in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow." World Literature Written in English 25.2 (1985): 285-98.

Sandiford, Keith. "Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. The Reluctant Heiress, or Whose Life is it Anyway?" Black American Literature Forum 20 (1986): 371-92.

Scarboro, Ann Armstrong. "The Healing Process: A Paradigm for Self-Renewal in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and Camara Laye's Regard du Roi." Modern Language Studies 19.1 (1989): 28-36.

Waxman, Barbara Frey. "Dancing Out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange and Walker." MELUS 19.3 (1994): 91-106.

Wilentz, Gay. Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.