The Columbia History of the American Novel

voices' for commercial gain. For postcolonial writers, who may inhabit their 'home' spaces, or who may inhabit expatriate and immigrant spaces, it is important to distinguish between 'marginality' as a term in academic discourse and the actual conditions of marginality that sustain or disdain their very lives and create or destroy the very conditions of their artistic -666- work. Personal and political configurations within postcolonial writers' lives encompass various marginalities — by race and ethnicity; by geography (literal and metaphoric exile, expatriation, migration); by language (English-language interventions); by class and color (for creoles in the Caribbean); by education.

For postcolonial writers, there is a central contradiction between the modes of production available to them that commodify them in the 'first' world as 'minority,' as 'female,' and their struggles against the actual conditions of marginality in their lives in the 'first' or 'third worlds.' When 'marginal' identities — for example, Lorna Goodison, Jamaican woman writer, and Ama Ata Aidoo, Ghanaian woman writer — are commodified, they set up rigid boundaries of what is expected by publishers, readers, and the market. An exotic enthusiasm for women writers blows hot and cold for reasons that have very little to do with their work. Such commodification can hardly be nurturing for a writer or for a literary field.

Our critical practice must recognize that cultural productionsoral, written — are also commodified in response to audience and literacy levels. Such issues as who makes it into print and what themes are profitable are further complicated because postcolonial societies have large nonliterate populations. The use of oral forms — street theater versus published drama — is strategic for nonliterate audiences. Our critical practice must stretch the boundaries of strictly 'literary,' printed forms (like the novel) and include oral cultural productions, and also put pressure on publishers to recognize and support new literary forms — for example, oral tradition of feminist songs in India, new forms of dance, street theater. This is important since oral forms — for instance, street theater, activist songs organized by women's groups like Saheli, the Lawyers' Collective in India, or the Sistren Collective in Jamaica — are more involved in struggles for social change than, say, the more easily available novels of Buchi Emecheta. A profit-oriented publishing industry capitalizes on the low literacy levels in postcolonial societies so that, ironically enough, even literate people in these societies cannot find or afford books by their own writers who are published in the West. For example, when the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986 was awarded to Wole Soyinka, his books were unavailable in his native Nigeria. In general, African -667- academics speak of a 'book famine' in African countries. This scenario raises serious questions about the control and dissemination of knowledge and cultural productions.

If migrations are undertaken for economic reasons in general, there are also more particular reasons in terms of the realities of cultural productions that face writers within postcolonial societies, ranging from inhospitality to downright hostility, silencing, and various forms of censorship and self-censorship. In a recent essay entitled Twice-Bitten: The Fate of Africa's Culture Producers (1990), Wole Soyinka discusses a very serious condition faced by writers and intellectuals — what he terms 'the internal brain drain,' that is, writers who are silenced, imprisoned by their own governments, or who are forced into exile in order to continue their work. South African writers such as Dennis Brutus who are forced to leave because of the brutal apartheid regime may offer some obvious examples; however, a writer like Ngugi wa Thiong'o has had to live outside Kenya for political reasons, as has Nurrudin Farah of Somalia, Mongo Beti of Cameroon, and so on. This type of internal brain drain, actively supported by a hostile state, is very different from simply blaming the 'West' for a brain drain of skilled workers lured from 'third world' areas into highly paying Western hospitals and academic institutions. Characteristically, Soyinka takes a searing look at the very conditions within African societies, and draws attention to the fact that these regimes have to be accountable and to take responsibility for silencing writers and intellectuals.

For Caribbean writers as well, on the surface, those who struggle to work in extremely difficult conditions of cultural production have a more difficult time than those who leave and migrate to the everbeckoning North, projected via satellite communication as the desirable reality in which one can be transmogrified literally or in fantasy. The entrance of international aid agencies and at times their patronizing of 'the arts' creates a visibility for the artist, ironically supported by neocolonial tendencies that await validation of one's own writers from the outside. As Honor Ford-Smith of the Sistren Collective has noted, there are complicated levels of dependency that have effects on the kinds of cultural work that are allowed with particular types of aid. For example, aid agencies sometimes raise the -668- question of whether the arts, particularly those aimed at education, can be truly 'productive.' Aid agencies are also totally productoriented. At the end of a specified time frame, the product has to be delivered and all responsibility toward the group ends. Such commodification of cultural products leads to their value being judged solely on their marketability.

In historicizing the diverse representations of 'American minorities' in contemporary times, a chronological view is a useful vantage point from which to examine the experiences of internal colonizations and metaphoric exile of so-called American citizens — Native Americans, Africans involuntarily transported into the New World, Chinese, Japanese, Chicanos. Since the 1950s, the ravages of United States wars have brought in Filipino, Vietnamese, and Central American peoples, and, most recently, 'voluntary' migrations for economic and professional reasons have allowed entry to South Asian, Caribbean, and African peoples. First-, second-, and third-generation 'minorities' must still struggle on the borderlands of literal and metaphoric exile, of the myth and reality of a return 'home,' of fluctuating identities as immigrant-expatriate-citizen — from Ellis Island to J. F. Kennedy airport, as well as other ports of entry, not to mention 'illegal' border crossings.

Within these ethnically diverse groups, the exclusion in this chapter of non-English-language writers among recent immigrants into the United States and a focus on the novel form with its high profile and public promotion circumscribe this study even as it speaks volumes for the hegemony of academic and publishing institutions. One must acknowledge that the oral transmission of cultural memory through song, dance, festival, that is, through nonprint media, is extremely significant — often these forms are more resonant in preserving ethnicity and in giving participants a sense of belonging. The essential communal nature of activities is distinctly different from the isolated production and consumption of a novel.

Race, ethnicity, and difference, along with broad commonalities of a search for belonging, mark the novelistic production of writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Paule Marshall, Maxine Hong Kingston, among others noted earlier. Apart from the significant linguistic and formal contributions to the contemporary novel in Eng-669- lish, the work of these writers is instructive in the critical reception accorded to them within the United States marketplace, eager to commodify 'third world' bodies and products. In looking at expatriated identities such as Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua-United States), Michelle Cliff (Jamaica-United States), or Marlene Nourbese Philip (TobagoCanada), and their insider/outsider positionings, one gets an illuminating perspective on, say, American- born writers like Paule Marshall (who grew up in the Barbadian community of New York) or Audre Lorde (Grenada- New York). Lorde, in moving from New York to St. Croix, has made a reverse move geographically from the majority of writers dealt with here.

Paule Marshall recreates a vivid Caribbean world from the vantage point of her New York upbringing. Personal and collective histories unfolding within particular cultural contexts guide her work. Her autobiographical novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), portrays a memorable story of girlhood and adolescence caught in the parameters of American dreams and Caribbean values strongly held by recently immigrated parents. In an essay, Shaping the World of My Art, Marshall acknowledges the influence of women of her mother's generation on her own linguistic and artistic sensibility — what she learned from 'the wordshop of the kitchen.' Although the novel was reviewed favorably, it 'was a commercial failure,' notes Barbara Christian, a commentary perhaps on the times. The novel was relegated to the juvenile shelf, a fate that also befell Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) — novels that American society found too uncomfortable. None of Marshall's other novels, such as Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), have been commercial successes, partly because she does not write stories about overt racism and violence as expected by a marketplace that commodities 'black women writers.' She deals with themes of black community, old age, the struggles to integrate experiences from different cultures into the 'home' spaces of the West. As Avey in Praisesong for the Widow rediscovers her ancestry and her name, Avatara, she touches the depths of her own history.

The writing of India-born Bharati Mukherjee and Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, both first-generation immigrants (Mukherjee passionately embraces her 'naturalized' status as American citizen since -670-), is revelatory as much in terms of their explorations of identities as in the critical receptions that they have received. In