Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Tar Baby and Praisesong for the Widow 179
when I was a young girl spoke of Garvey’s “back to Africa”
movement in which they were active participants. . . . When
I began to write my fi rst novel, . . . I experienced a necessity
to make a spiritual return to my sources. . . . I think that it is
absolutely necessary for Black people to eff ect this spiritual
return. . . . I consider it my task as a writer to initiate readers to
the challenges this journey entails. 13
In Praisesong for the Widow, to “initiate” readers to the challenges
of this journey, Marshall selects as protagonist a sixty-four-year-old,
upper-middle-class black woman, Avatara Johnson, and situates her
in fi rst-class accommodations on a Caribbean cruise. To emphasize
that Avey’s journey is a spiritual one, the writer begins the novel
with her psychic dislocation. Nervous, perspiring, and straining to
pack her six suitcases, “blindly reaching and snatching at whatever
came to hand,” Avey has decided to leave her traveling companions
and to desert the cruiser, the Bianca [white] Pride. She is irrational,
fearful, and anxious. Th e source of her anxiety is a dream she has had
two days earlier, a dream in which her great-aunt Cuney, the woman
with whom she spent her childhood summers in Tatem, issues her a
“patient summons.”
Dreams, memories, and hallucinations assail Avey throughout the
novel. Jolted by the fi rst dream, she insists on returning to New York,
but after leaving the cruiser where already she had begun to hallucinate,
she is stranded on the island of Grenada. With her consciousness altered
further by another dream in her Grenada hotel room, she undertakes a
midday trek on the beach, which intensifi es her physical and emotional
exhaustion. Barely reaching a closed rum shop, Avey is rescued and
given sustenance by the shop proprietor, Lebert Joseph, who convinces
her fi nally to join him in the annual excursion to Carriacou.
Suff ering through a physical purging en route to Carriacou, the
embarrassment of vomiting and excretion, she is in a trancelike state
when she reaches the tiny island. Th ere she undergoes a ritual of
healing and cleansing performed by Lebert’s daughter, Rosalie Parvay.
After she is physically and spiritually cleansed, Avey’s disjointed
states of mind are brought together in spiritual and psychic wholeness
when she joins in the Nation Dance, the ritual through which
she discovers and reconnects to African traditions and customs, the
“source” of her being.