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In her autobiographical sketch "From the Poets in the Kitchen" s (1983), Paule Marshall places the Barbadian-American women who dominate her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), in the context of perhaps the most significant work of recent African-American literature: "My mother and her friends were after all the female counterparts of Ralph Ellison's invisible man. Indeed, you might say they suffered a triple invisibility, being black, female, and foreigners" (26-27). Marshall's claim of affinity between her early work and Ellison's modern classic should not be taken lightly. It indicates how Brown Girl, Brownstones exists in a sophisticated dialogue with the themes and ideas of more widely discussed works from the 1950s. For this reason alone Brown Girl deserves a degree of exclusive attention and should not be read as merely a stepping stone to Marshall's later novels, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) or Praisesong for the Widow (1983).1 More than this, however, Marshall's comment reveals her intention not just to explore but also to resignify contemporary models of African-American consciousness. Her emphasis on triple invisibility suggests how even a literary examination of black double-consciousness as complex as Ellison's needs revision when seen from a female, immigrant perspective.
This essay reevaluates a neglected novel by exploring Marshall's complex representation of black identity. Brown Girl, Brownstones reveals a prism-like sense of selfhood, reflecting a series of differences that are rooted in issues of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and nativity, immigration and urban experience. Perhaps the reason that Brown Girl has failed to attract an adequate level of literary criticism is that the "black diasporic woman's quest for wholeness" (Christian 225)-a central theme throughout Marshall's work-remains incomplete in this particular novel. By combining an examination of diasporic sea imagery and the racial dynamics of vision in Brown Girl, we can appreciate how Marshall exposes not so much the possibilities as the problems of establishing a unified black consciousness in a world riven by competing definitions of the self.
The title of Marshall's first novel immediately establishes her distinct perspective on black identity. This is a novel of urban experience, says "Brownstones"; it is a novel seen from a female viewpoint, says "Girl"; and it is a novel that concerns not so much the American idea...