Places of silence, journeys of freedom: the fiction of Paule Marshall

Eugenia C. DeLamotte. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. 1998. 198 pp. $39.95. Marshall celebrates power of women's voices not only to sustain their interior lives by recovering what they have lost as individuals, but also to recover history--to find again collective memories that have been suppressed, and to ensure, both psychologically and politically, that threat of annihilation will be met with life persisting. To growing body of recent scholarship devoted to fiction of Paule Marshall, DeLamotte's book is a welcome and valuable addition. Her central argument is twofold: 1) contribution to feminism stems from issues that coalesce around question of silence and voice; and 2) Marshall develops a narrative technique of superimposition or exposure to represent simultaneously various economic, social, political arid psychological dimensions of her characters' lives. artist's female protagonists are inevitably affected by interlinking oppressions of race, class, gender, and nationality--oppressions that have been identified and elucidated by, such black scholars as bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Barbara Christian, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. DeLamotte graciously and generously acknowledges their powerful influence upon her own thought. She also invokes within body of her study contrasts between vision and those of such literary predecessors as Ralph El lison, James Baldwin, and Joseph Conrad. Yet DeLamotte's readings build on, synthesize, and, in some instances, re-vision previous literary and cultural concepts to illustrate with insight and clarity distinctive iconography. She illustrates how silence disempowers dispossessed--particularly women--by sustaining and reproducing oppression. Further, she shows how Marshall portrays women finding agency in very context of silence. This oppositionality or reflexivity is, in part, what constitutes feminist angle of double vision. In addition to outlining in her introduction how double-vision functions in each of novels, DeLamotte describes particular acts of silence/silencing. She argues that they may stem from direct suppressions of voice by dominant ideologies, or they may be induced by self as a result of psychological repression. Silence may also be viewed as a type of speech which supports dominant discourse by its very refusal to articulate difference. Furthermore, silence may be a form of ventriloquism wherein oppressed speak words of oppressor. None of these can exist without a sense of alienation or separation. In order to move toward individual and communal wholeness, then, silence must be transformed into voice. Before examining this process in separate chapters which focus on each of novels, DeLamotte provides in her introduction a cogent, close reading of short fictional piece Brooklyn. Although I would contend that first published short story, The Valley Between (1954), clearly situates early explorations of modernist inquiry, DeLamotte's focus on Brooklyn is well chosen in that story presents the black woman as subject rather than as object (despite white male lens through which protagonist is dubiously seen). In Brooklyn and in later works, Marshall moves beyond drawing a single thread of racial and/or gender domination to weave (superimpose) additional strands which create a tapestry of interior and exterior lives of her characters. Thus, protagonist in Brooklyn becomes Marshall's first representation of dynamic whereby social, political, and economic realities give shape to psychological reality, which may in turn externalize itself in an act of self-decolonization that works to decolonize social, political, and economic spaces. …