Paule Marshall: merging our cultures - Afro-American novelist

Paule Marshall says her parents are part of "the West Indian wing of the great migration north. I was born and raised on the streets of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood," she says. Marshall grew up switching easily between the two cultures. But it was only in her late teens that she began to appeciate how rich an experience it was to hang out at school and in the parks with her African-American friends, where the vernacular was the vivid, urban slang of the day and then be transported to a world of lilting West Indian phrasing and down-island expressions once she entered the gates of her brownstone. Paul Lawrence Dunbar was also a great influence. "I sensed that what Paul Lawrence Dunbar was doing with his use of dialect was like what my mother and friends were doing when they talked--trying to process language on their own terms," she says.

"My work is all about reconciling the two heritages, the two cultures that went into making me," she says, referring to Daughters (Atheneum, $19.95), her eagerly awaited sixth novel, as well as her classic Brown Girl, Brownstones, which was her first book, and the Chosen Place, The Timeless People.

In Daughters we learn most of what there is to know about the making of multicultured Ursa Beatrice Mackenzie, a young woman living in New York who is struggling to be her own woman. That effort plus her at oods with her father, a charismatic, charming but odd-guard politician who is at home on the Caribbean island of Triunion. It also creates some conflicts among Ursa and her American-born mother, her longtime and noncommittal boyfriend, and her female best friends, a southern African-American named Viney. The book is not just about Ursa, though, Marshall says. "It's about all the women who have an impact on her life, about the linkage of Black women," she explosions. "I have a profound sense that my being here is because of a long line of women known and unknown. Daughters uses all their voices--Caribbean, urban--giving the book a sense of the power these women achieve through language. In my own writing, I'm creating a history for myself," she says.

Marshall, who lives in Richmond and teaches creative writing to graduate students at Virginia Commonwealth University, has a grown son, Evan, who lives in London. Perhaps there'll be a southern drawl in works she'll write during her leave next year. "I'm already experiencing the fear of starting a new novel," she says. But readers can be confident that the woman who calls herself" a fussy, meticulous, painstaking writer" will conquer the fear and produce another piece of wonderful writing that strikes a universal chord.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group