In the following essay, Waniek explores the themes of alienation and duality as reflected in Paule Marshall's short fiction.

Paule Marshall is the author of Brown Girl, Brownstones; Soul Clap Hands and Sing; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; and a few short stories and articles. With a remarkable maturity in her work, she displays a subtle understanding of human problems and a mastery of the art of fiction. Some of the major themes in her works concern the identity crisis, the race problem, the importance of tradition for the black American, and the need for sharing to achieve meaningful relationships. In her technique she b...

Apart from the usual review notices in the usual periodicals, there has been no noteworthy discussion of Paule Marshall's major works…. This neglect is unfortunate, because Paule Marshall's major themes are both significant and timely. Her West Indian background (Barbadian parentage) enables Paule Marshall to invest her North American materials with a Caribbean perspective, and in the process she invokes that Pan-African sensibility which has become so important in contemporary definiti...

Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves. The precocious heroine of Brown Girl, Brownstones … comes of age and rejects the class aspirations of her tightly knit Barbadian community in Brooklyn. The willful teacher of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People … is middle-aged and heading toward a sharp turn in her rocky road, one that will take her into battle with developers on her Caribb...

Paule Marshall, who is something of a cuisinière, specializing in Barbadian dishes, has concocted a novel of West Indian life that will greatly enhance her reputation. Not to mince words, "The Chosen Place, the Timeless People," in my opinion, is the best novel to be written by an American black woman, one of the two important black novels of the 1960's (the other being William Demby's "The Catacombs"), and one of the four or five most impressive novels ever ...

Paule Marshall is, I think, one of the best novelists writing in the United States. She has form, style and immense mastery of words. She writes with all her senses as well as with her acute and probing mind. Sometimes I feel she is almost too gifted—or rather, that this plethora of riches is a bit too much on display and needs a sharper restraint…. In "The Chosen Place, the Timeless People" she is writing about an island in the Caribbean which is a piece of land but also a state...

A novel that harbors an intelligent revolutionary politics and a compassionate, penetrating humanism is an event in any time. If the time is now, if the revolution is black, if the compassion transcends race, it is a freak or a miracle, depending on whether or not you trust it. I trust "The Chosen Place, the Timeless People." I think it is an important and moving book. And Paule Marshall seems to me as wise as she is bold, for in compromising neither her politics nor her understanding of peopl...

Paule Marshall has written a monumental book. [The Chosen Place, the Timeless People] is by no means an unqualified success, but it has the virtues of its length of story and depth of commitment: complexity, the evocation of a people, characters whose lives we can follow long enough to see them through major decisions and major life-changes. Set on a fictional Caribbean island, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People concerns the lives of blacks there who would like to move beyond the old strictures of birth ...

Praisesong for the Widow, Marshall's third novel, is uncomplicated yet resonant. The main character, Avey Johnson, a late-middle-aged black woman, widowed but secure in a civil-service job in New York, decides to cut short a Caribbean cruise and return home as speedily as possible. Avey is suffering from some "odd discomfort," more psychological than physical; it seems she has lost a firm grasp on the meaning of her past. But rather than going directly back to New York, she is convinced...

I would have made more space for Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People if the author herself had made less. This is a depth-study of a remote Caribbean village, 'chosen' by a benevolent American organisation for a rehabilitation scheme. The inhabitants of Bournehills are timeless in the fierce pride with which they hold to their customs and their history, but also because the time for their way of life is running out. Paule Marshall's great strength is characteri...

["Soul Clap Hands and Sing"] is something of a renaissance in authentic feeling for real men, women and life. Named for its geographic setting—Barbados, Brooklyn, British Guiana and Brazil—each story describes in terms of natural action and reaction how an aging and dying man attempts to face up to the decline of his virile powers. Each man portrayed is conceived in terms of his relationship with a woman; in fact, Mrs. Marshall—herself the mother of a male child to whom th...