Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones: Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism

Abstract

Edward Said claims that students of post-colonial have not . . . looked enough at the ideas that minimize orthodoxy and authoritarian or patriarchal thought, that take a severe view of the coercive nature of identity politics (219). Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones does exactly that: It explores the potential of coercion behind the notion of ethnic solidarity. What Carole Boyce Davis has said about autobiographical writings by black women holds true for the semi-autobiographical Brown Girl, Brownstones as well: mystified notions of home and family are removed from their romantic, idealized moorings, speak of pain, movement, difficulty, learning and love in complex ways. Thus, the complicated notion of home mirrors the problematizing of community/nation (21). As Davies's remark implies, the struggle the protagonist has go through is expressive of the narrative's struggle with cultural nationalism. Paule Marshall, in From the Poets in the Kitchen, explains the influence which the conversations of her mother and her friends had on her writing career. these conversations, Marcus Garvey played a pivotal role: If F.D.R. was their hero, Marcus Garvey was their God. The name of the fiery, Jamaican-born black nationalist of the '20s was constantly evoked around the table (5). Small wonder, then, that his spirit, in the form of ethnic solidarity as ideal, hovers over the novel. But far from simply subscribing Garveyism, the novel is locked in a dialectical struggle with the notion of ethnic solidarity. It is thus characterized by dualities: Its protagonist rebels against a communally prescribed ethnic identity and yet comes a kind of reconciliation with her community(1); the novel harshly criticizes and yet celebrates the Barbadian community. The result for the protagonist is a reluctant but inescapable hybridity. Garveyism was one of the most important expressions of ethnic nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. its more extreme forms, this form of ethnic nationalism could pose as an answer every question in life. Marcus Garvey, in African Fundamentalism (1925), exhorted his readers remember always that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first a Jew; the white man is first a white man under all circumstances, and you can do no less than being first and always a and then all else will take care of itself (qtd. in Clarke 158). Race appears here as the basis of all action. Know who you are, racially, and you know what do. Solidarity underwrites both the more extreme and the more moderate forms of nationalism; black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Negritude all begin with the assumption of the racial solidarity of the Negro, as Kwame Anthony Appiah says (6). This is most obvious in the work of Marcus Garvey, where becomes a program in and of itself, but echoes of it can also be heard in Du Bois's view, elaborated in The Souls of Black Folk, of the gifts that every race has contribute humanity. Brown Girl, Brownstones resists the idea that ethnicity is destiny and embraces individualism as an important value. However, its protagonist still feels that responsibility towards her ethnic group or ethnic heritage is one of her duties and that ethnicity is inescapable after all. the words of Werner Sollors, In the complicated American landscape of regional, religious, and ethnic affiliation, it could be very difficult construct the self as autonomous individual and as fated group member (Beyond Ethnicity 173). Yet Marshall's novel attempts just that. Early readings of the novel recognized that the book deals in dualities and oppositions, but these readings tended overemphasize the novel's individualism except for a 1959 New Yorker review which identified the novel's main conflict as that between Deighton's longing return Barbados and Silla's eagerness to make a down payment on the old brownstone in which they live (191) and which focused on ancillary characters (and thus on the community) while oddly claiming that the chapters devoted the protagonist are less powerful. …