Found on Amazon.com and The News & Observer.com on 20 March 2009
Paule Marshall: Triangular Road - A Memoir
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books (March 2, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465013597
SBN-13: 978-0465013593
Starred Review. This elegant, passionate, elliptical memoir of self-exploration and revelation transports the reader well beyond its origins as a series of Harvard lectures. The title is an allusion to novelist and MacArthur fellow Marshall’s (The Fisher King) geographic, intellectual and emotional triangulation among the peoples and locales that shaped her—Barbados and Grenada; the Bajan community of Brooklyn; and Africa. Marshall begins with a 1965 State Department–sponsored tour of Europe in the company of her idol, Langston Hughes, when she was a young author and civil rights activist. The book continues as a meditation on Bodies of Water (the theme of the original lecture series) as diverse as the James River, the principal port of entry for African slaves in the 18th century, and the Caribbean. Among other personal stories that give her book artistic flair are Marshall’s early encounter with the redoubtable editor Hiram Haydn; her disturbing experience with another editor, who was giddy over her upcoming tour of a Virginia plantation (Our association ended shortly thereafter, Marshall writes drily); and her father’s odd devotion to Father Divine. When the USIS again taps Marshall, this time for a mission to Nigeria, the reception she and other U.S. representatives elicit from some of their hosts—welcome combined with shame over their ancestors’ complicity in the slave trade—is revelatory. 6 illus. (Mar.)
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The language of life paves her ‘Road’
Paule Marshall was exploring racial and cultural identity before Barack Obama captured the national spotlight speaking about what it is to be an American.
Now 79, Marshall is on tour and reading from “Triangular Road” (Basic Civitas, $23), her memoir about the places that shaped her as a writer. The book recounts her friendship with African-American poet Langston Hughes, her parents’ native Barbados and what she considers her ancestral home, Africa.
The daughter of Caribbean parents who moved from Barbados to Brooklyn for a better life, Marshall is probably best known for “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” her autobiographical first novel published in 1959.
Marshall, a second-generation American, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation genius award and written five novels, including “Praisesong for the Widow” and “The Fisher King,” and two collections of short stories.
She will be reading from her new work at 7:30 tonight at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, and at 7 p.m. Friday at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham.
Between stops on her tour, Marshall, who lives in Richmond, Va., took time to answer a few questions about her new book.
Q: How did the memoir come about?
This book is an adaptation of a lecture series delivered at Harvard University in 2005 on the theme of “Bodies of Water” — specific rivers, seas and oceans — and their profound impact on black history and culture throughout the Americas.
Q: How did America, Barbados and Africa shape you as a person and a writer?
There was first of all Brooklyn, where I was born, that was my dominant experience for quite a number of years. I was part of an immigrant movement mainly through Brooklyn and New York — a number of immigrants coming from the West Indies. They came working on the Panama Canal. At the same time, black Americans were coming from the deep South, moving North.
I came during that period of movement from those areas. I wanted to somehow suggest how we came together as a triangular road. Even though I am a born Brooklynite, there was a great curiosity on my part about who were my people. …
Three places formed my road — Brooklyn, Richmond, the Deep South and so on in America, the islands in the West Indies, then Africa.
Q: Some literary critics consider your “Brown Girl, Brownstones” the beginning of modern African-American writing for women. What do you think?
Books are open to all kinds of interpretation. I find it very flattering, in a way. I was simply trying to define and reflect on this world I found myself in.
I was curious about it as a young women growing up in an immigrant community. What fascinated me was how my family members functioned in this society as an American Brooklyn person?
Q: What is your legacy as a writer?
I am very pleased when young readers come across a book of mine — and that it’s been important to them, that I have spoken to them.
That’s especially been true of “Brown Girl, Brownstones.” I was just writing it to find myself as a writer. I was trying to capture some of the quality of the lives of both African-Americans and West Indians in Brooklyn — what they were doing in the language.
Q: Who were your writing influences?
There were a number of them, including a circle I call the mother poets around the kitchen table. What they did with language and their ability as storytellers amazed me. …
I had read Zora Neale Hurston , and what she did with Southern speak is akin to what I heard around the kitchen table, black people playing with the language, making it theirs.
I heard it and wondered at it, it was so vivid.
These were women that wanted a house of their own, a brownstone, and they did day work. When they left those day jobs, they needed to recover.
So they would meet at one of their homes, have some cocoa and tea around the kitchen table.
They returned home through language. They were restoring their identity. It was way of looking at the world.
What they were doing was taking a language imposed on them and finding a way of creating and devising a speech and intimacy that was their own. And it had a kind of lyricism to it [that] I tried to capture.
