The Bajan voice that reimagined Black identity
Paule Marshall is a towering figure in Caribbean and American literature, her work bridging the Atlantic with profound explorations of migration, identity, and cultural memory. Born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn in 1929 to Barbadian parents, Marshall’s voice—shaped by the rhythms of Barbados and urban America —continues to resonate as a defining contribution to global literature. Her parents, Ada and Samuel Burke, carried a fierce attachment to their homeland, evident in their speech and aspirations.
At nine, Marshall was sent to live with her grandmother in the Barbadian village of Carrington, an experience that shaped her understanding of belonging. Immersed in the island’s rhythms and storytelling traditions, she described this time as a vision of the world before slavery, where black people lived with dignity and autonomy. Barbados became the wellspring of her imagination, a recurring setting for her stories of cultural renewal and resistance. Her literary foundation was further shaped in Brooklyn, where her mother and her friends, mostly domestic helpers, transformed the kitchen into a lively space for reflection and storytelling.
In her essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” published in The New York Times (1983), Marshall wrote: “They taught me my first lessons in narrative art. They trained my ear. They set a standard of excellence... The best of my work must be attributed to them; it stands as testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the workshop of the kitchen.” These women, whom Marshall called “poets,” used a language layered with metaphor, wit, and defiance, blending Caribbean rhythms with linguistic invention. This cadence became the lifeblood of her fiction.
Her debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), is a luminous portrayal of Selina Boyce, a Barbadian-American girl caught between her mother’s unrelenting drive to own a home in Brooklyn and her father’s longing to return to Barbados. The novel, praised in Black World for its “authenticity and compassion,” evokes the complexities of immigrant identity with lyrical precision. Marshall’s most acclaimed work, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), centres on Avey Johnson, a middle-aged African-American widow who journeys to a Caribbean island and reconnects with ancestral traditions she had long suppressed. The Guardian called it “a masterpiece of cultural rediscovery, exploring how history and memory inform identity.”
Her 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, set on a fictional Caribbean island grappling with colonial scars, further established Marshall as a writer of immense range. The Guardian described it as “a masterful fusion of personal and communal history.” Marshall’s characters defy stereotypes. In a 1982 interview, she explained her refusal to reduce Black women to social statistics: “A female character created by me is not raped by her father, or her stepfather, or her mother’s boyfriend ... she is not, in other words, a social statistic.”
Her meticulously crafted stories, whether set in Barbados or Brooklyn, reflect the contradictions of human experience, balancing ambition, loss, and historical weight. Marshall’s literary achievements earned her the Dos Passos Prize in 1989 for exploring American themes and a lifetime achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards 2009. Her final novel, The Fisher King (2001), returned to the Brooklyn of her youth, while her memoir, Triangular Road (2009), offered a deeply personal reflection on the physical and emotional landscapes that shaped her art.
The following is a brief excerpt of an essay by Marshall that appeared in the New York Times on Jan. 9, 1983
“I grew up among poets. Now, they didn’t look like poets—whatever that breed is supposed to look like. Nothing about them suggested that poetry was their calling. They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers, my mother included, who dressed in a way (shapeless housedresses, dowdy felt hats and long, dark, solemn coats) that made it impossible for me to imagine they had ever been young. Nor did they do what poets were supposed to do—spend their days in an attic room writing verses. They never put pen to paper except to write occasionally to their relatives in Barbados. Rather, their day was spent “scrubbing the floor,” as they described the work they did.
“Several mornings a week, these unknown bards would put an apron and a pair of old house shoes in a shopping bag and take the train or streetcar from our section of Brooklyn to Flatbush. There, those who didn’t have steady jobs would wait on certain designated corners for the white housewives in the neighbourhood to come along and bargain with them to overpay for a day’s work cleaning their houses. This was the ritual even in the winter. Later, armed with the few dollars they had earned, which in their vocabulary became “a few rawmouth pennies,” they made their way back to our neighbourhood, where they would sometimes stop off to have a cup of tea or cocoa together before going home to cook dinner for their husbands and children. Some people, they declared, didn’t know how to deal with adversity. They didn’t know that you had to “tie up your belly” (hold in the pain) when things got rough and go on with life.
“There was no way for me to understand it at the time, but the talk that filled the kitchen those afternoons was highly functional. It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends. Not only did it help them recover from the long wait on the corner that morning and the bargaining over their labour, it restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth. Through language, they were able to overcome the humiliations of the workday. “But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy they possessed. They were women in whom the need for self-expression was strong. Since language was the only vehicle readily available to them, they made of it an art form that - in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one - was an integral part of their lives.
“Language is the only homeland,” Czeslaw Milosz, the emigre Polish writer and Nobel Laureate, has said. This is what it became for the women at the kitchen table. “It also served another purpose, I suspect. After all, my mother and her friends were the female counterparts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Indeed, you might say they suffered a triple invisibility, being black, female and foreigners. “They didn’t count in American society except as a source of cheap labour. But given the kind of women they were, they couldn’t tolerate their invisibility, their powerlessness. And they fought back, using the only weapon at their command: the spoken word.
“For me, sitting over in the corner, being seen but not heard, which was the rule for children in those days, it wasn’t only what the women talked about—the content—but the way they put things—their style. The insight, irony, wit and humour they brought to their stories and discussions and their poet’s inventiveness and daring with language which I could only sense but not define back then. They had taken the standard English taught them in the primary schools of Barbados and transformed it into an idiom, an instrument that more adequately described them -changing around the syntax and imposing their own rhythm and accent so that the sentences were more pleasing to their ears. They added the few African sounds and words that had survived, such as the derisive suck-teeth sound and the word “yam,” meaning to eat. And to make it more vivid, more in keeping with their expressive quality, they brought to bear a raft of metaphors, parables, Biblical quotations, sayings and the like.”
End of excerpt by the late Paule Marshall credited to the New York Times (January 1983.) Paule Marshall remains a vital link between the Caribbean and the African-American experience, a writer whose work continues to illuminate and inspire.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days. Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail. com Website: www.irasroom.org.