Paltry Things

As a first-generation West Indian-American and the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, Paule Marshall gives evidence in her work of a marginal duality similar to that felt by immigrants. While not herself an immigrant, Marshall grew up in an immigrant community whose legacy to her and her work is a share of its alienation. Marshall's first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones,' may explain the source of that marginality. The basic conflict of this novel, between the protagonist's mother and her father, overshadows the protagonist's coming of age and her search for her identity. The mother has accepted the crass values of the upwardly-mobile Barbadian immigrant community in which the family lives, while the father maintains a dreamer's futile pride in the cruel face of American racism and disappointment. Their daughter, Selina, vacillates between these two extremes, neither a Barbadian nor an American, but a permanent and unhappy outsider. The novel ends with her escape to Barbados, where, we presume, her alienation will continue-if not deepen. In her second book, the collection of short fiction entitled Soul Clap Hands and Sing,2 Marshall explores through different characters the alienated marginality seen in Selina. The four stories comprising the collection are set all over the Americas: in Barbados, Brooklyn, British Guiana and Brazil. Each story focuses on an elderly marginal man and the point at which he realizes the extent of his alienation. Despite the implication of the volume's title, a line borrowed and modified slightly from Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium (An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress), the concern of the stories is not with the age of the men who are their protagonists, but with their souls. Each of the protagonists has lost, as he has gained partial admission into the dominant culture or the ruling class, his soul-his faith in God, in his fellows, and in himself. The seventy-year old protagonist of the first story is known only as Mr. Watford, his lack of a forename indicating the extent of his distance from the people around him. The story opens with a visual image of his alienation: he is in bed, a black face within white sheets, surrounded by the white interior walls of his white Colonial American house. After an exile of fifty years in America, he has returned home

Archaeology · Art · Immigration · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History

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• Subversive Invisibility during the Cold War

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