An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women's experiences across the African diaspora. Growing up in World War II era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929 -2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou Marshall's legacy is often overlooked.

Mary Helen Washington’s biography of Paule Marshall provides a thorough consideration of the writer's achievement and a convincing case that her fiction and her public speeches deserve continuing atte...

Paule Marshall’s literary concerns cover key issues of the Black Diaspora such as Black consciousness and the search for wholeness. These two issues connect with the research about the different manifestations of consciousness carried out by scientists such as physicist Peter Russell, nurse Margaret Newman, philosopher Ken Wilber and psychologist Paloma Cabadas. In this essay, I contend that Marshall’s characters experience different aspects of consciousness that take them into a process known as the search for wholeness. Paule Marshall’s writings are also part of the Black Consciousness Movement, inquiring into epistemologies that have their roots in “the workable past”, creating emancipatory knowledge for afro-descendants. The methodology employed to read Marshall’s novels follows the conscious evolution paradigm put forward by psychologist Paloma Cabadas, and the integral consciousness model proposed by Ken Wilber. Both models offer valid routes for analyzing Marshall’s characters in the light of Newman’s concept of expanding consciousness.

@BlueLotusCI Our #MondayMotivation is inspired by #PauleMarshall: A person can run for years, but sooner or later he has to take a stand in the place, which...