When Avey reenacts just these movements years later, in her sixties, thousands of miles away, she effectively restores not just her place but Cuney's as well, in the community she observed in her girlhood. Young Avey recalls the "arms shot up, hands arched like wings" of dancers in the ring (33). Breaking the codes of the ring shout, Cuney is pushed out of a community of dancers. Aunt Cuney is both part of the religious ritual and distinct from it. Early in Praisesong, Avey recalls her Aunt Cuney, "caught 'crossing her feet' in a Ring Shout" and refusing to leave the dancing for this breach of conduct. Difference within unity marks dancing from this first instance of it in Marshall's novel. Avey's geographic and cultural journey to the Beg Pardon, then, bears closer examination.Īvey's journey begins when, in girlhood, she witnesses dance on the fictive South Carolina Sea Island Tatem. Praisesong is a guide to the process of articulating and joining the disaporic homeland embodied in this dance. 3 The moment of the Beg Pardon is thus an important model of diasporic nationality. Marshall's depiction of the Beg Pardon theorizes a diaspora that preserves difference within unity, individuality within collectivity. The dance is powerful because it relies on the individual history of each dancer and the collective history of this ritual performance, which unites the dancers in a shared disaporic culture. The dance, the "Beg Pardon," asks ancestors to forgive the transgressions of the dancers. 2 The dance on Carriacou, occurring in the final section of the novel and marking Avey's success as geographer of the diaspora, is the most concrete of the many manifestations of this cultural and geographical territory in Praisesong. As in Hurston's work, the nation Marshall charts is both imagined and real, determined by geography and a shared culture. Similarly establishing a homeland, Avey Johnson is dancing up a nation in the island spaces and water crossings of Praisesong for the Widow. Zora Neale Hurston signals the important work done by storytellers in Mules and Men by noting that they are "lying up a nation" (19). 1 In Praisesong, Marshall portrays a black woman achieving this wholeness by seizing and using her individual and collective past in terms that redefine nation. Paule Marshall's novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983) is rightly celebrated by a number of critics for protagonist Avey Johnson's journey toward self-expression and wholeness.
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