Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones
Article:
Paule Marshall 's 'Brown Girl,
Brownstones ': reconciling ethnicity and individualism. (African
American woman author 's semiautobiographical novel)
Article from:African American Review | Article date:June 22, 1998
Edward Said claims that "students of post-colonial politics 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 …show more content…
as well:
"The mystified notions of home and family are removed from their romantic, idealized moorings, to 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 to 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. In 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 to 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 to 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. In its more extreme forms, this form of ethnic nationalism could pose as an answer to every question in life. Marcus
Garvey, in "African Fundamentalism" (1925), exhorted his readers to
"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 Negro, 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 to 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 race 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 to contribute to 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. In the words of Werner Sollors, "In the complicated American landscape of regional, religious, and ethnic affiliation, it could be very difficult to 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 to 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 to return to 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 to the protagonist are less powerful. A 1975 Negro American Literature Forum article by Marcia
Keizs stresses the novel 's individualism, claiming that Selina rejects the organization most representative of the Barbadian community (The
Association of Barbadian Homeowners) and seeing the tension between
Selina 's parents merely as symbolic of "the existing tension within her" (71).
In the same issue, Kimberly W. Benston acknowledges the novel 's "clash of values (material versus spiritual, pragmatism versus dreaming, old versus young, white versus Black)" (67), but he closes by saying that "it is the expression of self that [Selina], like Stephen Dedalus, prizes above all" (70), thus comparing Brown Girl, Brownstones to the classic Bildungsroman entirely devoted to realization of self. Adam David Miller, in a Black Scholar review of 1972, focuses on the relationship between individual and community in pointing out that "Marshall succeeds in interlocking the lives of her main characters so thoroughly . . . that . . . it is hard to think of them except in relation to one another" (54). However, his review nicely mirrors the forces at work in the novel while exemplifying the external dynamics surrounding the composition of the novel: When commenting on the protagonist 's reaction to a racist incident, Miller objects that "Selina 's reaction was personal" (57) in order to note with approval that the novel depicts the Barbadians ' opening
"themselves up more to intercourse with U.S. blacks. . . . All of which constitutes enlightenment, especially since even now a great many people in the black community are thinking of personal rather than group solutions" (58). Miller castigates Selina for her individualism, while the novel tries to make the reader understand that Selina responds to (and eventually comes to terms with) what she experiences at first as oppressive community demands. In a way, the review illustrates how justified Marshall was in writing her novel.
Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the coming-of-age story of Selina, the daughter of Barbadian immigrant parents, in the context of the people who surround her, and especially in relation to her mother Silla. Selina 's life is lived partly in response to what she sees as the model of ethnicity which Silla embodies for her. Silla dominates her household: She determines economic matters, even against the resistance of the other parent, and attempts to mold her children 's lives. The novel depicts her at times as ruthless and cruel. Resistance against her is apparently futile - but also becomes a mark of the protagonist 's growth and character. In her attempts at resisting Silla 's influence, in her fears of being or becoming like Silla, and in her ability to reach a kind of peace with her, Selina establishes her individuality and her relationship to her ethnicity.
One strategy by which the novel accomplishes the equal affirmation of individualism and communalism involves Marshall 's establishing her heroine as a character a little apart from her family. Though, as a child, Selina immerses herself fully in family and community, she also appears somehow older or wiser. This strategy bases itself on the assumption of the constructedness of ethnicity, since it allows individuals to differ from a group norm (which the novel establishes at a later point) without calling into question their "ethnicness." This difference is also expressive of Selina 's second-generation status: Unlike her parents, Selina has not experienced
Barbados, yet both family and community expect loyalty to "Barbadianness."
Simultaneously, there is also the lure of the "paradigm of 'progress ' embodied by [the] host society, capitalist America." In negotiating a way between the two, Selina has to prove whether she has the strength to realize the potential inherent in her second-generation status to "harmonize past with present to create a truly revolutionary 'New Old World ' presence in the United
States" (Hathaway 129).
Selina shows strength of character early on and appears old beyond her years, while also harboring a wish to escape from her environment. These traits are made explicit when she first appears in the novel as a ten-year-old girl with scuffed legs and a body as straggly as the clothes she wore. A haze of sunlight seeping down from the skylight through the dust and dimness of the hall caught her wide full mouth, the small but strong nose, the eyes deep set in the darkness of her face. They were not the eyes of a child.
Something too old lurked in their centers. . . . She seemed to know the world down there in the dark hall and beyond for what it was. Yet knowing, she still longed to leave this safe, sunlit place at the top of the house for the challenge there. (4)
Selina 's thinness suggests an ascetic side of her character and foreshadows her anti-materialistic outlook on life, which fully emerges later in the novel. Her scuffed legs and strong nose reveal "toughness," an orientation toward action also emphasized by the last sentence of the quotation, which alludes to
her curiosity about the world. But the conflict between these traits, which turn out to be her mother 's, and her father 's sensuality, hinted at through her "wide full mouth," is already outlined here. This conflict makes her a dynamic character and sets up a dialectic out of which will emerge Selina the grown woman as synthesis. Selina 's independence is linked to her attitude toward values which come to be connected with her ethnic group, specifically through Silla. Because Selina is depicted as an independent and strong-willed character, it appears consistent - particularly in terms of the Bildungsroman genre - that she would rebel at some point against what is outlined as the "norm," and in this case
as the "ethnic norm." She perceives this norm to be a form of materialism, a devotion to the project of buying a house which pervades the Barbadian community in New York. As a child, she witnesses her mother 's friend Iris torture her mother with the latter 's failure - which is attributed to Selina 's father
Deighton - to buy a house by naming a seemingly endless list of women who have "bought house" (7374). The community 's insistence on "buying house" as a measure of respectability is epitomized in a communal wedding scene in which Deighton has to suffer "the rejection of the entire community" (Washington, "Afterword" 317) because he has spent money frivolously on luxury items rather than on a down-payment.(2)
That Selina rejects such a value system becomes clear in a scene in which
Iris tantalizes Silla with names of house-owning families. Commenting on
Selina 's physical growth, one of Silla 's friends brushes her hand over Selina 's budding breast, remarking, " 'Tell your mother that you 's no more little girl, but near a full woman like us now that you 's filling out - and that you can hold your tongue like a woman. . . '" (77). Selina is to hold her tongue because Silla has just announced that she will wrest land that Deighton has inherited in
Barbados from him to sell it for a down-payment. Her mother 's materialism and her own physical growth are thus conflated, and the value system embraced by the adults assumes inescapable proportions. Selina 's initiate reaction is to strike out at Silla 's friend 's hand, threatening her with a broken glass. Later, she is "seized by a frenzy of rejection" and tries to rub off the
"imprint," though it proves to be "indelible" (78).(3)
Her rebellion against materialism recurs throughout the novel, as in her assertion to her mother that there are things which cannot be bought in stores, such as love and breath (104), or in her condemnation of her friends other-determined and money-oriented career goals (195 ff.). In the latter scene, Selina 's wish to develop her own goals and not follow a norm set by her ethnic group expresses itself in her observation that her best friend
"Beryl 's face had somehow lost its individual mold, that soft pleasing form she used to gaze at" (195-96). As Heather Hathaway comments, "For Selina, as a character who is both representative of and yet also markedly different from typical second-generation immigrants, the demand to conform to community mandate is asphyxiating" (153). Unlike her peers, she does not wish to fulfill her community 's expectations. Though for much of the novel Selina remains unsure of the values she wants to replace materialism with, she is certain that she does not want to fit the mold that the community seems to have cast for her. Ethnicity, for her, appears to be a kind of conformity to materialism, of which the Association of Barbadian Homeowners and Businessmen is the most visible expression, an expression which she scathingly denounces when first visiting the association. The Association, aptly called "the biggest thing since Marcus Garvey" (196), serves as the novel 's most visible symbol of Selina 's conflict with ethnic nationalism, and as "a testament to the dawning political consciousness of a small black community determined to make its presence felt" (Denniston 21). Though she recognizes admiringly the communal force of her ethnic group and even finds its "surety of purpose . . . enviable," Selina also perceives that "they were no longer individuals" (222) and rejects them at this point as" ' Clannish. Narrow-minded. Selfish '" (227).
Because the novel associates the ethnic community with materialism in a number of passages, it can be read as a critique of the strategy adopted by many African American and immigrant novels of the first decades of the twentieth century, which suggests an "organic" link between anti-materialism
(as opposed to a materialist mainstream) and ethnicity, a suggestion which is
integral to many forms of ethnic nationalism - one may remember here Du
Bois 's formulation, in The Souls of Black Folk: ". . . we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness" (8). Brown Girl, Brownstones thus also writes against what
William Boelhower has identified as the basic plot for most immigrant novels:
"With construction [of the community] as the master topic, goals are still relatively uncomplicated, cultural motives are few, simple, public in character, and usually agreed upon by all. The ethnic project inspires consensus, and consensus inspires the building of an ethnic community" (101-02). Selina does not subscribe to this consensus and demands room outside the parameters it prescribes.
Ironically, the novel 's critique of coercive ethnic solidarity brings it closer to the ideology of individualism, which is a feature of an "Americanism" or mainstream nationalist self-definition the ethnic community finds itself excluded from. Yet the novel is not assimilationist because, rather than accept the definition of ethnicity represented by the strong parent or reject ethnicity as a whole, the novel creates new ethnic boundaries, illuminating, as
Werner Sollors has said in a discussion of Mark Twain 's Connecticut Yankee,
"Frederick Barth 's thesis that ethnicity rests on the boundary, not on the 'cultural stuff it encloses '" ("Ethnicity" 299). Selina 's status as child of immigrant parents more or less forces her into this position, since her parents ' definitions of ethnicity, arising from their cultural experiences and their expectations in immigrating to the U.S., cannot be the same as hers.
She shares neither the same sense of "alienness" nor the same urgency to acquire a sense of material and cultural security in a new environment. This shifting of ethnic boundaries, however, while creating distance between
Selina 's and Silla 's version of ethnicity, does not result in an uncritical embrace of individualism.
The protagonist attempts to establish her independence from the coercive aspect of her ethnic community through a refusal to conform to one of its main tenets, namely acquisitiveness. However, this refusal is not equivalent to a renunciation of ethnicity. Brown Girl, Brownstones provides characters located between absolute ethnic solidarity and unmitigated individualism, and these characters are depicted in positive or sympathetic terms. This strategy becomes necessary because Selina has to establish some kind of truce with her ethnic group since ethnicity, as the novel makes clear, goes into the making of her personality. As Barbara Christian has said of Brown Girl,
Brownstones, "an appreciation of one 's ethnic and racial community becomes necessary for black women in their commitment to selfdevelopment" (Feminist 178).(4)
One character located between individualism and the demands of ethnic solidarity is Deighton, who does not meet the approval of his ethnic community because he does not save money for a house. Percy Challenor, who is something of a community leader, pronounces what the community thinks of Deighton: " 'I tell you those men from Bridgetown home is all the same. They don know a thing 'bout handling money and property and thing so. . . . I tell you, he 's a disgrace! '" (55). Deighton fully embraces his
Barbadian upbringing, but he does not meet all the standards for full community membership.
Suggie, one of the tenants in Silla 's house, is another influence on Selina.
She, too, fully adheres to Barbadian culture and fondly remembers the island.
Yet she, too, is regarded as an outsider by the community because of her promiscuity. Eventually, Silla evicts Suggie, though she is one of Selina 's
best friends. Sensing her own marginality but refusing to give in to community pressure, Suggie comments to Selina:
"My people! I 's hiding from them with tears in my eyes. . . . Y 'know what they want me to do? . . . I must put on a piece of black hat pull down over my face and go out here working day in and day out and save every penny. . . . I mustn 't think 'bout spreeing or loving-up or anything so. . . . But they 's sadly mistaken. . . . I gon spend my money foolish if I choose." (80-81)
Both Deighton and Suggie provide Selina with examples of following the course of life one has chosen for oneself. Though they end up tragically Deighton commits suicide and Suggie moves on to an uncertain existence they give Selina the warmth, affection, and sense of enjoyment of life that is missing in a community focused solely on work and acquisition. Their existence confirms for Selina that being Barbadian is not defined by a kind of value essentialism.(5)
However, Selina discovers that she is very much like the mother she rebels against, who is repeatedly represented as an embodiment of the Barbadian community. At first, she cannot bring herself to acknowledge her mother 's heritage - a strong will and inexhaustible energy - having defined herself as
"Deighton 's Selina" in opposition to her mother and the Barbadian community.
(6) Since Selina perceives the ethnic community as a monolithic block, she derives a deviating self-definition from those whom that community explicitly condemns, namely characters like her father and Suggie. Her choice of a boyfriend confirms this direction: Clive is a struggling artist who does not subscribe to the work ethic of the Barbadian community, but who is paralyzed by self-doubts and unable to create, much like Deighton. Thus, when he perceives similarities between Selina and her mother, Selina has to confront the painful possibility that her oppositional course might have brought her full circle to the ruthless pursuit of goals that is her mother 's mark, even though their goals may differ.
When resolving to leave town with Clive, a plan which will never be carried out,
Selina finds a way to come up with the necessary funds: winning the scholarship offered by the Barbadian Association. However, this scholarship is intended to fund schooling. Knowing this, Selina decides to be duplicitous, to "be contrite, dedicated, the most willing worker they 've ever had" and is convinced that she will "get the money. It 'll take some doing but I 'll get it . .
." (267). Her phrasing resembles Silla 's vow to obtain the money for
Deighton 's land, no matter what it takes: " 'I gon do it. . . . Some kind of way I gon do it '" (75). Here Selina most fully reveals how she has been influenced by her mother 's ruthless determination. But her mother 's influence is not only negative. Selina 's maturation is marked by her recognition of a multiplicity of viewpoints and value systems, without her necessarily condemning one and extolling others. Paradoxically, it is her individualism that, in the end, allows her to respect or at least regard with more tolerance the values of her mother and her ethnic group, even though these values do not really allow for individualism but demand ethnic coherence.(7) She can declare to her mother," 'I 'm not interested in houses! '" But she adds," ' I don 't scorn you. Oh,
I used to. But not any more. . . . It 's just not what I want '" (306). By being clear about what she does not want and insisting on this as her right, she also has to respect that others want things different from her. Through her emerging self-hood, she may begin to be able to see that the "dispossessed gain affirmation through possession because owning . . . is an economic as well as a political and personal declaration of one 's humanity, one 's
humanness, one 's reality" (Dickerson 4), even though Selina wishes to express her own humanity differently.
The circle is complete when Selina recognizes that her mother, a symbol of ethnic conformity, was once driven by her own individualism. At this point, ethnic communalism and individualism do not appear as incompatible:
"Everybody used to call me Deighton 's Selina but they were wrong. Because you see I 'm truly your child. Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that 's what I want. I want it!" (307)
Interestingly, Selina uses a slight Barbadian English inflection in this passage
("was your own woman") that is not typical for her speech, which is otherwise
American English. This phrase denotes an embracing of ethnicity at the time that she verbalizes the possible co-existence of ethnicity and individualism, citing as an example her mother - for Selina, the symbol of the Barbadian community. The peace she makes with her mother marks also the synthesis of the diametrically opposed ways of being she envisioned before: Either you are like your father - i.e., completely different from your mother - or you become like your mother.(8) Her world view has become more complicated.
But what made this process possible?
Two factors play an important role here: One is a fuller experience of the world outside the home and outside the ethnic community; the other is the experience of racism. Once Selina leaves her immediate environment to go to college, the world there, at least at first, seems empty and shallow to her in comparison to the drama of the ethnic home life she knows, which she perceives as more dramatic and real: "The chill feel of utter desertion she had watching Suggie leave persisted through her first year of college. This was real while everything that happened at school had the unreality of a play viewed from a high balcony" (212). But only after having been treated with cold, racist condescension by the mother of a fellow dancer at a postperformance cast party does Selina reflect on her relationship to the
Barbadian community:
. . . she was one with them: the mother and the Bajan women, who had lived each day what she had come to know. How had the mother endured. . .? She remembered the mother striding through Fulton Park each late afternoon, bearing the throw-offs under her arm as she must have borne the day 's humiliations inside. How had the mother contained her swift rage? - and then she remembered those sudden, uncalled-for outbursts that would so stun them and split the serenity of the house. (292-93)
Recognizing that her mother, too, has experienced racism, Selina not only acknowledges unity vis-a-vis a common oppression but also concludes that she has no right to judge her mother or the community: "Who are we to scorn them?" (293). She begins to understand the acquisitiveness of the Barbadian community as a defense mechanism against racism, the wish to own things as an attempt to fight back against exclusion. As Barbara Christian says, this defensiveness results in the community 's "compelling, urging, insisting that every one of its parts bend to the common goal: the owning of a brownstone, the possession of property, as a bulwark against poverty, racism, failure" (Novelists 82). The pressure to conform can thus be understood as a wish to protect and shelter the younger generation against an essentially hostile white world.(9) Silla 's gesture when hearing of Selina 's plan to leave home bespeaks this wish: "Her arms half lifted in a protective gesture, and
her warning sounded. 'Girl, do you know what it tis out there? How those white people does yuh? '" (306).
At the same time, the ethnic group 's coerciveness expresses its insecure position and the resulting recognition that "individuality can be detrimental to a group needing to cohere in order to survive in a [hostile] nation" (Hathaway
132). Thus, there is something paradoxical about the fact that Selina 's experience of racism - which makes clear to her that "American racism makes no distinctions in culture," that her color rather than her culture will determine her social and economic status (Denniston 24-25) - serves as a kind of "Americanization" in that it blurs ethnic distinctions. While the racist incident helps Selina to understand the motivation for ethnic solidarity, it also points out that color may assume greater significance than ethnic culture.
Ambiguity prevails at the end. In rejecting the scholarship from the Barbadian
Association because she acquired it through pretending false motives, Selina feels the burden of love and experiences a strong sense of ethnic solidarity, maybe for the first time. On her way to the podium to receive the scholarship award, Selina reflects on her community:
Selina moved . . . down the aisle, scanning those myriad reflections and variations of her own dark face. And suddenly she admired their mystery. No, not mystery . . . but the mysterious source of endurance in them, and it was not only admiration but love she felt. A thought glanced her mind as Cecil
Osborne held her face between his ruined hands and kissed her: love was the greater burden than hate. The applause burst afresh and she gazed wonderingly over the smiling faces, which resembled a dark sea - alive under the sun with endless mutations of one color. (302-03)
Her newly reached admiration of her community 's resilience in the face of adverse circumstances happens at the moment that she recognizes herself to be one of them, her own purposeful-ness rooted in theirs ("reflections . . . of her own dark face"), so that her individualism can now be understood as a variation on a theme rather than standing in opposition to it.
At the same time, however, she knows that she is not willing to do the community 's bidding and thus feels utter alienation. Somewhat paradoxically, recognizing her own strength and her community 's strength to be the same
"underpin[s] her purpose" to reveal that she does not share in their goals. This revelation, coming at the moment of greatest harmony between the community and herself, opens up the divide between communalism and individualism afresh. After having declined the award as meaning "something I don 't want for myself" Selina leaves the hall:
The words rang hollow throughout the hall as she hurried down the platform and through the perplexed and unforgiving silence. The loud rustle of her gown . . . bespoke her final alienation. And as the familiar faces fell away behind her, she was aware of the loneliness coiled fast around her freedom.
(303)
Here it seems as if individuality can only be bought at the price of rejecting ethnic solidarity and communalism. However, her final gesture at the end of the book - the flinging away of one of the silver bangles signifying ethnicity
("silver bangles . . . which every Barbadian-American girl wore from birth" [5]) while keeping the other - bespeaks a more complex relationship between those two concepts and puts Selina on a middle ground: While ethnicity is accepted as inevitable, something new and different emerges, a kind of hybrid
ethnicity that is the product of Old World ethnicity variously represented by
Silla and Deighton and the influences of the New World environment.(10)
However, U.S. influences are not specified. Selina lives mostly in an ethnic environment. The influence of U.S. society mostly comes to Selina in an already ethnically mediated form through "the members of Marshall 's
Barbadian Association [who] represent the sector of the West Indian community that most eagerly embraced the American ideal of steadily progressing up the socioeconomic ladder" (Hathaway 146), so much so and by such a majority of the community that reducing this acquisitive tendency of the Barbadian community in the novel to U.S. influences alone seems problematic. Indeed, Joyce Pettis remarks upon the "middleman" role the
Barbadian Homeowners ' Association plays: "The association becomes a mediative group intended to assist the Barbadians in their transformation from recent immigrants . . . to property owners. They will educate their young people with American values and accelerate their union with the dominant economics" (44). Brown Girl indicates what one might call the "ethnicization" of materialism, in that acquisition is a communal goal rather than exclusively an individual one. In addition, as noted above, the non-ethnic world is, at times, perceived as shallow or even as hostile, and first-generation ethnic models for individualist striving do exist in the novel, thus making even an
"American" derivation of individualism less compulsory. Nonetheless, the presence of this almost stereotypically American value as an American value cannot be ignored in a story which tells of a second-generation protagonist moving away from "Old World" definitions of ethnicity.
Though Brown Girl, Brownstones does not claim that individualism completely overrules ethnic communalism, the novel recognizes a struggle between these two world views. Selina 's hybrid ethnicity, arrived at against the resistance of a strong parent figure symbolic of the ethnic community, is in an ironic sense the outcome of that parent 's decision to flee more oppressive circumstances to allow for a fuller development of (ethnic) life, not expecting that this decision also might give her children expanded opportunities to decide what shape ethnic life is to take. And it is the resulting hybridity that makes necessary the simultaneous assertion of and uneasy reconciliation between communalist ethnicity and individualism.
Brown Girl, Brownstones thus records ethnic adjustments in the New World.
Selina figures as a pioneer who points the way for developments within the community which are implicitly inevitable. However, the development is not simply from ethnicity to "Americanness" - "ethnicity" and "Americanness" as
Selina experiences them are already hybrids - but to a new kind of ethnicity that recognizes the necessity of solidarity in an adverse environment but rejects the absoluteness to a communal claim to solidarity, which is the hallmark of nationalism. Because the novel supports individualist aspirations, it cannot construct ethnicity in an essentialist fashion as (ethnic) nationalism would, since this strategy would force the implausible claim that the individualist protagonist, in deviating from an ethnic consensus, is simply not ethnic any more but American. This, in turn, would align the novel 's sympathy with "Americanness," which cannot be the intent in a work that in great detail outlines an ethnic world with characters the reader is supposed to like, which points out that racism remains a factor in the life of ethnic groups and individuals, and whose major antagonist is redeemed through the movement of the plot, which has the heroine embrace the antagonist. The simultaneous assertion of ethnicity and individualism must thus be accomplished through a constructionist conceptualization of ethnicity that allows one to see ethnic
solidarity as an original response to an Old World environment that still has validity in the New World, though maybe not the same urgency. This constructionist approach allows for a wider range in definition for the ethnic character and makes possible "a satisfactory synthesis of the best . . . assets where multiple heritages are involved" (Pettis 33).
At the same time, the novel responds to the ideological pressure of ethnic nationalism in that it recognizes that the course of individualism needs justification. This need to justify creates tension: Certain features of the ethnic community must appear as oppressive in order to legitimatize the heroine 's quest for individualism. However, overly negative depiction of the ethnic community would put the protagonist into an almost self-destructive bind, since, having ethnic ancestry, she would have to create herself out of nothing if she wanted to acquire a positive self-image while creating a negative one of her own community. The resulting tension is partially resolved by the depiction of ethnic individuals outside the "ethnic norm" and by the reconciliation between Silla as symbol of the Old World ethnic community and Selina. I say "partially resolved" because Selina experiences unease with the realization that ethnicity is inescapable for her. She stands half-willingly in a tradition which holds ethnic solidarity as the highest duty. While she partly strives to alter this tradition, she is bound to it to the extent that her individualism requires constant justification. Thus, Selina accepts ethnic communalism while pursuing an individualist agenda, creating a new conceptualization of ethnicity in the process.
Notes
1. In an article focusing on the quest of Marshall 's heroines, Missy Dehn
Kubitschek arrives at a similar conclusion from a different angle: "An adolescent, Selina separates from her parents without rejecting them, acknowledges her community while denying its right to determine her personality" (59).
2. Barbara Christian comments, "The novel . . . measures the spiritual prices that many . . . [members of the Barbadian American community] paid to advance economically or even to survive - a primary one being their need to expel or destroy any one of them who did not pursue their common goal" (Novelists 82).
3. See also Collier, "Closing" 300-01.
4. See also Susan Willis: "In Brown Girl, Brownstones, Silla asks her daughter the critical question that Marshall will continue to demand of all her characters: 'But who put you so? '. . . As Selina discovers . . . the answer to this question cannot be obtained by a simple review of personal history, because the personal is inextricably inscribed within the history of black people in this country" (63).
5. Joyce Pettis puts Suggie 's importance for the narrative in psychological terms: "Suggie Skeete . . . illustrate[s] significant variations in negotiating community. Suggie 's example confirms the necessity for cultivating psychological space within the community of one 's cultural kin if one operates contrary to the status quo" (44). However, Suggie is ultimately forced to make more than psychological space, being literally evicted.
6. "Because Selina sees herself as her father 's daughter, she resists not only her mother 's attempts to possess her but the Barbadian community 's as
well" (Christian, Novelists 100).
7. While the acquisition of brownstones is an ethnic goal, Susan Willis demonstrates how this oppositional materialism is at the same time a move toward assimilation: "Marshall demonstrates deep political understanding in
Brown Girl, Brownstones by showing that the desire to own property may well have represented an initial contestation of bourgeois white domination, but because property ownership is implicit in capitalist society, the momentum of opposition was immediately absorbed and integrated into the context of
American capitalism" (74).
8. As Heather Hathaway notes, "Marshall deliberately structures differences between Silla and Deighton to reveal the conflicting models on which Selina struggles to shape her own identity, both through acts of alliance and rejection" (140). Once she recognizes the complexity of her mother 's motivation for her actions, however, neither one of these models of ethnicity is the one she adopts.
9. Carole McAlpine Watson has commented on the protective side of ethnic communalism: "Silla comes to represent not only a certain limited approach to life but also the protective and nurturing aspects of the ghetto. [I do not think, however, that "ghetto" is an apt description of Barbadian Brooklyn.]
Silla and the striving West Indians, represented by the West Indian
Homeowners and Businessmen 's Association, are one" (85). Heather
Hathaway sees the Barbadians ' obsession with "buying house" as indicative of an understanding "that their greatest weapon against poverty and discrimination lay in property ownership" (146).
10. Susan Willis has described the ambiguity of Selina 's gesture: "The bracelet whose arc she traces across the moonlit sky and whose sharp clash marks its fall gives testament to Selina as she has been formed by her community; it also represents her gift to those who remain behind. The bracelet Selina keeps is her visible link to her Carribean heritage" (53). Joyce
Pettis stresses the affirmative side of the gesture in that she interprets Selina as "symbolically acknowledging the people and the environment that have contributed to her development" (15). I think that the gesture, while one of giving, appears also to be symbolic of giving something up.
Works Cited
Anon. Rev. of Brown Girl, Brownstones. New Yorker 19 Sep. 1959:191-92.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father 's House: Africa in the Philosophy of
Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Benston, Kimberly W. "Architectural Imagery and Unity in Marshall 's Brown
Girl, Brownstones." Negro American Literature Forum 9 (1975): 67-70
Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American
Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women
Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985.
-----. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976.
Westport: Greenwood, 1980.
Clarke, John Henrik. Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa. New York:
Vintage, 1974.
Collier, Eugenia. "The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to
Wholeness in Paule Marshall 's Fiction." Black Women Writers (1950-1980):
A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City: Anchor, 1984.295-315.
Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the
Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of
History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995.
Dickerson, Vanessa D. "The Property of Being in Paule Marshall 's Brown Girl,
Brownstones." Obsidian II 6.3 (1991): 1-13.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Bantam, 1989.
Hathaway, Heather A. "Cultural Crossings: Migration, Generation, and Gender in Writings by Claude McKay and Paule Marshall." Diss. Harvard U, 1993.
Keizs, Marcia. "Themes and Style in the Works of Paule Marshall." Negro
American Literature Forum 9 (1975): 67+.
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. "Paule Marshall 's Women on Quest." Black
American Literature Forum 21 (1987): 43-60.
Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. 1959. Old Westbury: Feminist P,
1981.
-----. "From the Poets in the Kitchen." Reena and Other Stories. New York:
Feminist P, 1983.3-12.
Miller, Adam David. Rev. of Brown Girl, Brownstones. Black Scholar 3 (May
1972): 56-58.
Pettis, Joyce. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall 's Fiction. Charlottesville:
UP of Virginia, 1995.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American
Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
-----. "Ethnicity." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and
Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 288-305.
Washington, Mary Helen. "Afterword." Marshall, Brown Girl 311-24.
Watson, Carole McAlpine. Prologue: The Novels of Black American Women,
1891-1965. Westport: Greenwood, 1985.
Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.
Martin Japtok teaches English and African American Studies at West Virginia
State College.
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Paule Marshall 's 'Brown Girl,
Brownstones ': reconciling ethnicity and individualism. (African
American woman author 's semiautobiographical novel)
Article from:African American Review | Article date:June 22, 1998
Edward Said claims that "students of post-colonial politics 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 …show more content…
as well:
"The mystified notions of home and family are removed from their romantic, idealized moorings, to 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 to 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. In 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 to 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 to 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. In its more extreme forms, this form of ethnic nationalism could pose as an answer to every question in life. Marcus
Garvey, in "African Fundamentalism" (1925), exhorted his readers to
"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 Negro, 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 to 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 race 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 to contribute to 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. In the words of Werner Sollors, "In the complicated American landscape of regional, religious, and ethnic affiliation, it could be very difficult to 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 to 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 to return to 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 to the protagonist are less powerful. A 1975 Negro American Literature Forum article by Marcia
Keizs stresses the novel 's individualism, claiming that Selina rejects the organization most representative of the Barbadian community (The
Association of Barbadian Homeowners) and seeing the tension between
Selina 's parents merely as symbolic of "the existing tension within her" (71).
In the same issue, Kimberly W. Benston acknowledges the novel 's "clash of values (material versus spiritual, pragmatism versus dreaming, old versus young, white versus Black)" (67), but he closes by saying that "it is the expression of self that [Selina], like Stephen Dedalus, prizes above all" (70), thus comparing Brown Girl, Brownstones to the classic Bildungsroman entirely devoted to realization of self. Adam David Miller, in a Black Scholar review of 1972, focuses on the relationship between individual and community in pointing out that "Marshall succeeds in interlocking the lives of her main characters so thoroughly . . . that . . . it is hard to think of them except in relation to one another" (54). However, his review nicely mirrors the forces at work in the novel while exemplifying the external dynamics surrounding the composition of the novel: When commenting on the protagonist 's reaction to a racist incident, Miller objects that "Selina 's reaction was personal" (57) in order to note with approval that the novel depicts the Barbadians ' opening
"themselves up more to intercourse with U.S. blacks. . . . All of which constitutes enlightenment, especially since even now a great many people in the black community are thinking of personal rather than group solutions" (58). Miller castigates Selina for her individualism, while the novel tries to make the reader understand that Selina responds to (and eventually comes to terms with) what she experiences at first as oppressive community demands. In a way, the review illustrates how justified Marshall was in writing her novel.
Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the coming-of-age story of Selina, the daughter of Barbadian immigrant parents, in the context of the people who surround her, and especially in relation to her mother Silla. Selina 's life is lived partly in response to what she sees as the model of ethnicity which Silla embodies for her. Silla dominates her household: She determines economic matters, even against the resistance of the other parent, and attempts to mold her children 's lives. The novel depicts her at times as ruthless and cruel. Resistance against her is apparently futile - but also becomes a mark of the protagonist 's growth and character. In her attempts at resisting Silla 's influence, in her fears of being or becoming like Silla, and in her ability to reach a kind of peace with her, Selina establishes her individuality and her relationship to her ethnicity.
One strategy by which the novel accomplishes the equal affirmation of individualism and communalism involves Marshall 's establishing her heroine as a character a little apart from her family. Though, as a child, Selina immerses herself fully in family and community, she also appears somehow older or wiser. This strategy bases itself on the assumption of the constructedness of ethnicity, since it allows individuals to differ from a group norm (which the novel establishes at a later point) without calling into question their "ethnicness." This difference is also expressive of Selina 's second-generation status: Unlike her parents, Selina has not experienced
Barbados, yet both family and community expect loyalty to "Barbadianness."
Simultaneously, there is also the lure of the "paradigm of 'progress ' embodied by [the] host society, capitalist America." In negotiating a way between the two, Selina has to prove whether she has the strength to realize the potential inherent in her second-generation status to "harmonize past with present to create a truly revolutionary 'New Old World ' presence in the United
States" (Hathaway 129).
Selina shows strength of character early on and appears old beyond her years, while also harboring a wish to escape from her environment. These traits are made explicit when she first appears in the novel as a ten-year-old girl with scuffed legs and a body as straggly as the clothes she wore. A haze of sunlight seeping down from the skylight through the dust and dimness of the hall caught her wide full mouth, the small but strong nose, the eyes deep set in the darkness of her face. They were not the eyes of a child.
Something too old lurked in their centers. . . . She seemed to know the world down there in the dark hall and beyond for what it was. Yet knowing, she still longed to leave this safe, sunlit place at the top of the house for the challenge there. (4)
Selina 's thinness suggests an ascetic side of her character and foreshadows her anti-materialistic outlook on life, which fully emerges later in the novel. Her scuffed legs and strong nose reveal "toughness," an orientation toward action also emphasized by the last sentence of the quotation, which alludes to
her curiosity about the world. But the conflict between these traits, which turn out to be her mother 's, and her father 's sensuality, hinted at through her "wide full mouth," is already outlined here. This conflict makes her a dynamic character and sets up a dialectic out of which will emerge Selina the grown woman as synthesis. Selina 's independence is linked to her attitude toward values which come to be connected with her ethnic group, specifically through Silla. Because Selina is depicted as an independent and strong-willed character, it appears consistent - particularly in terms of the Bildungsroman genre - that she would rebel at some point against what is outlined as the "norm," and in this case
as the "ethnic norm." She perceives this norm to be a form of materialism, a devotion to the project of buying a house which pervades the Barbadian community in New York. As a child, she witnesses her mother 's friend Iris torture her mother with the latter 's failure - which is attributed to Selina 's father
Deighton - to buy a house by naming a seemingly endless list of women who have "bought house" (7374). The community 's insistence on "buying house" as a measure of respectability is epitomized in a communal wedding scene in which Deighton has to suffer "the rejection of the entire community" (Washington, "Afterword" 317) because he has spent money frivolously on luxury items rather than on a down-payment.(2)
That Selina rejects such a value system becomes clear in a scene in which
Iris tantalizes Silla with names of house-owning families. Commenting on
Selina 's physical growth, one of Silla 's friends brushes her hand over Selina 's budding breast, remarking, " 'Tell your mother that you 's no more little girl, but near a full woman like us now that you 's filling out - and that you can hold your tongue like a woman. . . '" (77). Selina is to hold her tongue because Silla has just announced that she will wrest land that Deighton has inherited in
Barbados from him to sell it for a down-payment. Her mother 's materialism and her own physical growth are thus conflated, and the value system embraced by the adults assumes inescapable proportions. Selina 's initiate reaction is to strike out at Silla 's friend 's hand, threatening her with a broken glass. Later, she is "seized by a frenzy of rejection" and tries to rub off the
"imprint," though it proves to be "indelible" (78).(3)
Her rebellion against materialism recurs throughout the novel, as in her assertion to her mother that there are things which cannot be bought in stores, such as love and breath (104), or in her condemnation of her friends other-determined and money-oriented career goals (195 ff.). In the latter scene, Selina 's wish to develop her own goals and not follow a norm set by her ethnic group expresses itself in her observation that her best friend
"Beryl 's face had somehow lost its individual mold, that soft pleasing form she used to gaze at" (195-96). As Heather Hathaway comments, "For Selina, as a character who is both representative of and yet also markedly different from typical second-generation immigrants, the demand to conform to community mandate is asphyxiating" (153). Unlike her peers, she does not wish to fulfill her community 's expectations. Though for much of the novel Selina remains unsure of the values she wants to replace materialism with, she is certain that she does not want to fit the mold that the community seems to have cast for her. Ethnicity, for her, appears to be a kind of conformity to materialism, of which the Association of Barbadian Homeowners and Businessmen is the most visible expression, an expression which she scathingly denounces when first visiting the association. The Association, aptly called "the biggest thing since Marcus Garvey" (196), serves as the novel 's most visible symbol of Selina 's conflict with ethnic nationalism, and as "a testament to the dawning political consciousness of a small black community determined to make its presence felt" (Denniston 21). Though she recognizes admiringly the communal force of her ethnic group and even finds its "surety of purpose . . . enviable," Selina also perceives that "they were no longer individuals" (222) and rejects them at this point as" ' Clannish. Narrow-minded. Selfish '" (227).
Because the novel associates the ethnic community with materialism in a number of passages, it can be read as a critique of the strategy adopted by many African American and immigrant novels of the first decades of the twentieth century, which suggests an "organic" link between anti-materialism
(as opposed to a materialist mainstream) and ethnicity, a suggestion which is
integral to many forms of ethnic nationalism - one may remember here Du
Bois 's formulation, in The Souls of Black Folk: ". . . we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness" (8). Brown Girl, Brownstones thus also writes against what
William Boelhower has identified as the basic plot for most immigrant novels:
"With construction [of the community] as the master topic, goals are still relatively uncomplicated, cultural motives are few, simple, public in character, and usually agreed upon by all. The ethnic project inspires consensus, and consensus inspires the building of an ethnic community" (101-02). Selina does not subscribe to this consensus and demands room outside the parameters it prescribes.
Ironically, the novel 's critique of coercive ethnic solidarity brings it closer to the ideology of individualism, which is a feature of an "Americanism" or mainstream nationalist self-definition the ethnic community finds itself excluded from. Yet the novel is not assimilationist because, rather than accept the definition of ethnicity represented by the strong parent or reject ethnicity as a whole, the novel creates new ethnic boundaries, illuminating, as
Werner Sollors has said in a discussion of Mark Twain 's Connecticut Yankee,
"Frederick Barth 's thesis that ethnicity rests on the boundary, not on the 'cultural stuff it encloses '" ("Ethnicity" 299). Selina 's status as child of immigrant parents more or less forces her into this position, since her parents ' definitions of ethnicity, arising from their cultural experiences and their expectations in immigrating to the U.S., cannot be the same as hers.
She shares neither the same sense of "alienness" nor the same urgency to acquire a sense of material and cultural security in a new environment. This shifting of ethnic boundaries, however, while creating distance between
Selina 's and Silla 's version of ethnicity, does not result in an uncritical embrace of individualism.
The protagonist attempts to establish her independence from the coercive aspect of her ethnic community through a refusal to conform to one of its main tenets, namely acquisitiveness. However, this refusal is not equivalent to a renunciation of ethnicity. Brown Girl, Brownstones provides characters located between absolute ethnic solidarity and unmitigated individualism, and these characters are depicted in positive or sympathetic terms. This strategy becomes necessary because Selina has to establish some kind of truce with her ethnic group since ethnicity, as the novel makes clear, goes into the making of her personality. As Barbara Christian has said of Brown Girl,
Brownstones, "an appreciation of one 's ethnic and racial community becomes necessary for black women in their commitment to selfdevelopment" (Feminist 178).(4)
One character located between individualism and the demands of ethnic solidarity is Deighton, who does not meet the approval of his ethnic community because he does not save money for a house. Percy Challenor, who is something of a community leader, pronounces what the community thinks of Deighton: " 'I tell you those men from Bridgetown home is all the same. They don know a thing 'bout handling money and property and thing so. . . . I tell you, he 's a disgrace! '" (55). Deighton fully embraces his
Barbadian upbringing, but he does not meet all the standards for full community membership.
Suggie, one of the tenants in Silla 's house, is another influence on Selina.
She, too, fully adheres to Barbadian culture and fondly remembers the island.
Yet she, too, is regarded as an outsider by the community because of her promiscuity. Eventually, Silla evicts Suggie, though she is one of Selina 's
best friends. Sensing her own marginality but refusing to give in to community pressure, Suggie comments to Selina:
"My people! I 's hiding from them with tears in my eyes. . . . Y 'know what they want me to do? . . . I must put on a piece of black hat pull down over my face and go out here working day in and day out and save every penny. . . . I mustn 't think 'bout spreeing or loving-up or anything so. . . . But they 's sadly mistaken. . . . I gon spend my money foolish if I choose." (80-81)
Both Deighton and Suggie provide Selina with examples of following the course of life one has chosen for oneself. Though they end up tragically Deighton commits suicide and Suggie moves on to an uncertain existence they give Selina the warmth, affection, and sense of enjoyment of life that is missing in a community focused solely on work and acquisition. Their existence confirms for Selina that being Barbadian is not defined by a kind of value essentialism.(5)
However, Selina discovers that she is very much like the mother she rebels against, who is repeatedly represented as an embodiment of the Barbadian community. At first, she cannot bring herself to acknowledge her mother 's heritage - a strong will and inexhaustible energy - having defined herself as
"Deighton 's Selina" in opposition to her mother and the Barbadian community.
(6) Since Selina perceives the ethnic community as a monolithic block, she derives a deviating self-definition from those whom that community explicitly condemns, namely characters like her father and Suggie. Her choice of a boyfriend confirms this direction: Clive is a struggling artist who does not subscribe to the work ethic of the Barbadian community, but who is paralyzed by self-doubts and unable to create, much like Deighton. Thus, when he perceives similarities between Selina and her mother, Selina has to confront the painful possibility that her oppositional course might have brought her full circle to the ruthless pursuit of goals that is her mother 's mark, even though their goals may differ.
When resolving to leave town with Clive, a plan which will never be carried out,
Selina finds a way to come up with the necessary funds: winning the scholarship offered by the Barbadian Association. However, this scholarship is intended to fund schooling. Knowing this, Selina decides to be duplicitous, to "be contrite, dedicated, the most willing worker they 've ever had" and is convinced that she will "get the money. It 'll take some doing but I 'll get it . .
." (267). Her phrasing resembles Silla 's vow to obtain the money for
Deighton 's land, no matter what it takes: " 'I gon do it. . . . Some kind of way I gon do it '" (75). Here Selina most fully reveals how she has been influenced by her mother 's ruthless determination. But her mother 's influence is not only negative. Selina 's maturation is marked by her recognition of a multiplicity of viewpoints and value systems, without her necessarily condemning one and extolling others. Paradoxically, it is her individualism that, in the end, allows her to respect or at least regard with more tolerance the values of her mother and her ethnic group, even though these values do not really allow for individualism but demand ethnic coherence.(7) She can declare to her mother," 'I 'm not interested in houses! '" But she adds," ' I don 't scorn you. Oh,
I used to. But not any more. . . . It 's just not what I want '" (306). By being clear about what she does not want and insisting on this as her right, she also has to respect that others want things different from her. Through her emerging self-hood, she may begin to be able to see that the "dispossessed gain affirmation through possession because owning . . . is an economic as well as a political and personal declaration of one 's humanity, one 's
humanness, one 's reality" (Dickerson 4), even though Selina wishes to express her own humanity differently.
The circle is complete when Selina recognizes that her mother, a symbol of ethnic conformity, was once driven by her own individualism. At this point, ethnic communalism and individualism do not appear as incompatible:
"Everybody used to call me Deighton 's Selina but they were wrong. Because you see I 'm truly your child. Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that 's what I want. I want it!" (307)
Interestingly, Selina uses a slight Barbadian English inflection in this passage
("was your own woman") that is not typical for her speech, which is otherwise
American English. This phrase denotes an embracing of ethnicity at the time that she verbalizes the possible co-existence of ethnicity and individualism, citing as an example her mother - for Selina, the symbol of the Barbadian community. The peace she makes with her mother marks also the synthesis of the diametrically opposed ways of being she envisioned before: Either you are like your father - i.e., completely different from your mother - or you become like your mother.(8) Her world view has become more complicated.
But what made this process possible?
Two factors play an important role here: One is a fuller experience of the world outside the home and outside the ethnic community; the other is the experience of racism. Once Selina leaves her immediate environment to go to college, the world there, at least at first, seems empty and shallow to her in comparison to the drama of the ethnic home life she knows, which she perceives as more dramatic and real: "The chill feel of utter desertion she had watching Suggie leave persisted through her first year of college. This was real while everything that happened at school had the unreality of a play viewed from a high balcony" (212). But only after having been treated with cold, racist condescension by the mother of a fellow dancer at a postperformance cast party does Selina reflect on her relationship to the
Barbadian community:
. . . she was one with them: the mother and the Bajan women, who had lived each day what she had come to know. How had the mother endured. . .? She remembered the mother striding through Fulton Park each late afternoon, bearing the throw-offs under her arm as she must have borne the day 's humiliations inside. How had the mother contained her swift rage? - and then she remembered those sudden, uncalled-for outbursts that would so stun them and split the serenity of the house. (292-93)
Recognizing that her mother, too, has experienced racism, Selina not only acknowledges unity vis-a-vis a common oppression but also concludes that she has no right to judge her mother or the community: "Who are we to scorn them?" (293). She begins to understand the acquisitiveness of the Barbadian community as a defense mechanism against racism, the wish to own things as an attempt to fight back against exclusion. As Barbara Christian says, this defensiveness results in the community 's "compelling, urging, insisting that every one of its parts bend to the common goal: the owning of a brownstone, the possession of property, as a bulwark against poverty, racism, failure" (Novelists 82). The pressure to conform can thus be understood as a wish to protect and shelter the younger generation against an essentially hostile white world.(9) Silla 's gesture when hearing of Selina 's plan to leave home bespeaks this wish: "Her arms half lifted in a protective gesture, and
her warning sounded. 'Girl, do you know what it tis out there? How those white people does yuh? '" (306).
At the same time, the ethnic group 's coerciveness expresses its insecure position and the resulting recognition that "individuality can be detrimental to a group needing to cohere in order to survive in a [hostile] nation" (Hathaway
132). Thus, there is something paradoxical about the fact that Selina 's experience of racism - which makes clear to her that "American racism makes no distinctions in culture," that her color rather than her culture will determine her social and economic status (Denniston 24-25) - serves as a kind of "Americanization" in that it blurs ethnic distinctions. While the racist incident helps Selina to understand the motivation for ethnic solidarity, it also points out that color may assume greater significance than ethnic culture.
Ambiguity prevails at the end. In rejecting the scholarship from the Barbadian
Association because she acquired it through pretending false motives, Selina feels the burden of love and experiences a strong sense of ethnic solidarity, maybe for the first time. On her way to the podium to receive the scholarship award, Selina reflects on her community:
Selina moved . . . down the aisle, scanning those myriad reflections and variations of her own dark face. And suddenly she admired their mystery. No, not mystery . . . but the mysterious source of endurance in them, and it was not only admiration but love she felt. A thought glanced her mind as Cecil
Osborne held her face between his ruined hands and kissed her: love was the greater burden than hate. The applause burst afresh and she gazed wonderingly over the smiling faces, which resembled a dark sea - alive under the sun with endless mutations of one color. (302-03)
Her newly reached admiration of her community 's resilience in the face of adverse circumstances happens at the moment that she recognizes herself to be one of them, her own purposeful-ness rooted in theirs ("reflections . . . of her own dark face"), so that her individualism can now be understood as a variation on a theme rather than standing in opposition to it.
At the same time, however, she knows that she is not willing to do the community 's bidding and thus feels utter alienation. Somewhat paradoxically, recognizing her own strength and her community 's strength to be the same
"underpin[s] her purpose" to reveal that she does not share in their goals. This revelation, coming at the moment of greatest harmony between the community and herself, opens up the divide between communalism and individualism afresh. After having declined the award as meaning "something I don 't want for myself" Selina leaves the hall:
The words rang hollow throughout the hall as she hurried down the platform and through the perplexed and unforgiving silence. The loud rustle of her gown . . . bespoke her final alienation. And as the familiar faces fell away behind her, she was aware of the loneliness coiled fast around her freedom.
(303)
Here it seems as if individuality can only be bought at the price of rejecting ethnic solidarity and communalism. However, her final gesture at the end of the book - the flinging away of one of the silver bangles signifying ethnicity
("silver bangles . . . which every Barbadian-American girl wore from birth" [5]) while keeping the other - bespeaks a more complex relationship between those two concepts and puts Selina on a middle ground: While ethnicity is accepted as inevitable, something new and different emerges, a kind of hybrid
ethnicity that is the product of Old World ethnicity variously represented by
Silla and Deighton and the influences of the New World environment.(10)
However, U.S. influences are not specified. Selina lives mostly in an ethnic environment. The influence of U.S. society mostly comes to Selina in an already ethnically mediated form through "the members of Marshall 's
Barbadian Association [who] represent the sector of the West Indian community that most eagerly embraced the American ideal of steadily progressing up the socioeconomic ladder" (Hathaway 146), so much so and by such a majority of the community that reducing this acquisitive tendency of the Barbadian community in the novel to U.S. influences alone seems problematic. Indeed, Joyce Pettis remarks upon the "middleman" role the
Barbadian Homeowners ' Association plays: "The association becomes a mediative group intended to assist the Barbadians in their transformation from recent immigrants . . . to property owners. They will educate their young people with American values and accelerate their union with the dominant economics" (44). Brown Girl indicates what one might call the "ethnicization" of materialism, in that acquisition is a communal goal rather than exclusively an individual one. In addition, as noted above, the non-ethnic world is, at times, perceived as shallow or even as hostile, and first-generation ethnic models for individualist striving do exist in the novel, thus making even an
"American" derivation of individualism less compulsory. Nonetheless, the presence of this almost stereotypically American value as an American value cannot be ignored in a story which tells of a second-generation protagonist moving away from "Old World" definitions of ethnicity.
Though Brown Girl, Brownstones does not claim that individualism completely overrules ethnic communalism, the novel recognizes a struggle between these two world views. Selina 's hybrid ethnicity, arrived at against the resistance of a strong parent figure symbolic of the ethnic community, is in an ironic sense the outcome of that parent 's decision to flee more oppressive circumstances to allow for a fuller development of (ethnic) life, not expecting that this decision also might give her children expanded opportunities to decide what shape ethnic life is to take. And it is the resulting hybridity that makes necessary the simultaneous assertion of and uneasy reconciliation between communalist ethnicity and individualism.
Brown Girl, Brownstones thus records ethnic adjustments in the New World.
Selina figures as a pioneer who points the way for developments within the community which are implicitly inevitable. However, the development is not simply from ethnicity to "Americanness" - "ethnicity" and "Americanness" as
Selina experiences them are already hybrids - but to a new kind of ethnicity that recognizes the necessity of solidarity in an adverse environment but rejects the absoluteness to a communal claim to solidarity, which is the hallmark of nationalism. Because the novel supports individualist aspirations, it cannot construct ethnicity in an essentialist fashion as (ethnic) nationalism would, since this strategy would force the implausible claim that the individualist protagonist, in deviating from an ethnic consensus, is simply not ethnic any more but American. This, in turn, would align the novel 's sympathy with "Americanness," which cannot be the intent in a work that in great detail outlines an ethnic world with characters the reader is supposed to like, which points out that racism remains a factor in the life of ethnic groups and individuals, and whose major antagonist is redeemed through the movement of the plot, which has the heroine embrace the antagonist. The simultaneous assertion of ethnicity and individualism must thus be accomplished through a constructionist conceptualization of ethnicity that allows one to see ethnic
solidarity as an original response to an Old World environment that still has validity in the New World, though maybe not the same urgency. This constructionist approach allows for a wider range in definition for the ethnic character and makes possible "a satisfactory synthesis of the best . . . assets where multiple heritages are involved" (Pettis 33).
At the same time, the novel responds to the ideological pressure of ethnic nationalism in that it recognizes that the course of individualism needs justification. This need to justify creates tension: Certain features of the ethnic community must appear as oppressive in order to legitimatize the heroine 's quest for individualism. However, overly negative depiction of the ethnic community would put the protagonist into an almost self-destructive bind, since, having ethnic ancestry, she would have to create herself out of nothing if she wanted to acquire a positive self-image while creating a negative one of her own community. The resulting tension is partially resolved by the depiction of ethnic individuals outside the "ethnic norm" and by the reconciliation between Silla as symbol of the Old World ethnic community and Selina. I say "partially resolved" because Selina experiences unease with the realization that ethnicity is inescapable for her. She stands half-willingly in a tradition which holds ethnic solidarity as the highest duty. While she partly strives to alter this tradition, she is bound to it to the extent that her individualism requires constant justification. Thus, Selina accepts ethnic communalism while pursuing an individualist agenda, creating a new conceptualization of ethnicity in the process.
Notes
1. In an article focusing on the quest of Marshall 's heroines, Missy Dehn
Kubitschek arrives at a similar conclusion from a different angle: "An adolescent, Selina separates from her parents without rejecting them, acknowledges her community while denying its right to determine her personality" (59).
2. Barbara Christian comments, "The novel . . . measures the spiritual prices that many . . . [members of the Barbadian American community] paid to advance economically or even to survive - a primary one being their need to expel or destroy any one of them who did not pursue their common goal" (Novelists 82).
3. See also Collier, "Closing" 300-01.
4. See also Susan Willis: "In Brown Girl, Brownstones, Silla asks her daughter the critical question that Marshall will continue to demand of all her characters: 'But who put you so? '. . . As Selina discovers . . . the answer to this question cannot be obtained by a simple review of personal history, because the personal is inextricably inscribed within the history of black people in this country" (63).
5. Joyce Pettis puts Suggie 's importance for the narrative in psychological terms: "Suggie Skeete . . . illustrate[s] significant variations in negotiating community. Suggie 's example confirms the necessity for cultivating psychological space within the community of one 's cultural kin if one operates contrary to the status quo" (44). However, Suggie is ultimately forced to make more than psychological space, being literally evicted.
6. "Because Selina sees herself as her father 's daughter, she resists not only her mother 's attempts to possess her but the Barbadian community 's as
well" (Christian, Novelists 100).
7. While the acquisition of brownstones is an ethnic goal, Susan Willis demonstrates how this oppositional materialism is at the same time a move toward assimilation: "Marshall demonstrates deep political understanding in
Brown Girl, Brownstones by showing that the desire to own property may well have represented an initial contestation of bourgeois white domination, but because property ownership is implicit in capitalist society, the momentum of opposition was immediately absorbed and integrated into the context of
American capitalism" (74).
8. As Heather Hathaway notes, "Marshall deliberately structures differences between Silla and Deighton to reveal the conflicting models on which Selina struggles to shape her own identity, both through acts of alliance and rejection" (140). Once she recognizes the complexity of her mother 's motivation for her actions, however, neither one of these models of ethnicity is the one she adopts.
9. Carole McAlpine Watson has commented on the protective side of ethnic communalism: "Silla comes to represent not only a certain limited approach to life but also the protective and nurturing aspects of the ghetto. [I do not think, however, that "ghetto" is an apt description of Barbadian Brooklyn.]
Silla and the striving West Indians, represented by the West Indian
Homeowners and Businessmen 's Association, are one" (85). Heather
Hathaway sees the Barbadians ' obsession with "buying house" as indicative of an understanding "that their greatest weapon against poverty and discrimination lay in property ownership" (146).
10. Susan Willis has described the ambiguity of Selina 's gesture: "The bracelet whose arc she traces across the moonlit sky and whose sharp clash marks its fall gives testament to Selina as she has been formed by her community; it also represents her gift to those who remain behind. The bracelet Selina keeps is her visible link to her Carribean heritage" (53). Joyce
Pettis stresses the affirmative side of the gesture in that she interprets Selina as "symbolically acknowledging the people and the environment that have contributed to her development" (15). I think that the gesture, while one of giving, appears also to be symbolic of giving something up.
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Martin Japtok teaches English and African American Studies at West Virginia
State College.
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