Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper examines the work of novelist Paule Marshall, whose writings focus on migration, displacement, home, return, and community bonding in the African Caribbean Immigrants in the United States. Paule Marshall’s first novel Brown Girl,Brownstones (1959), focuses on Selina Boyce, a second-generation Barbadian immigrant from the United States, whose search for her roots is informed by an inherent link to the Caribbean through an articulation of the dynamics of belonging. Marshall grants her protagonist the space to challenge familial struggles, and reclaim her voice by relocating to Barbados, her parental home. The protagonist’s enigmatic journey through ambivalent interspaces enables her to reconstruct bridges to the West Indies. Marshall’s examination of her young protagonist’s ‘return to the Caribbean’ reflects wider issues of diasporic identity and belonging connected to ‘home’ spaces, ancestral lands, regions, and origins.