A Human Necklace by Ferguson Moira;

Author:Ferguson, Moira;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Fisher King

A Culmination and New Beginnings

In Paule Marshall’s words, within “the three great wings of the black diaspora, Brooklyn, Barbados, and Benin,” her characters initiate and reenact the histories of their lives and those of their elders and ancestors.1 I argue that Marshall’s most recent novel, The Fisher King, recapitulates and synthesizes themes in earlier novels—just as a symphony’s last movement recaps earlier themes, enabling readers to admire individual narratives as well as the overarching saga they comprise. This saga that unfolds over half a century begins and ends in diasporic Brooklyn—from Brown Girl, Brownstones in 1959 to The Fisher King in the new millennium.2 The latter, moreover, ties Brown Girl, Soul Clap Hands and Sing, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Praisesong for the Widow, and Daughters to one another as well as to itself. The Fisher King, that is, while remaining open-ended, brings this body of fine fiction to a resting point.

Additionally, it redraws the consistently feminized angle of vision by featuring (not counting the novellas) a male protagonist, eight-year-old Sonny Carmichael Payne. He is raised modestly, not like Selina by biological family members, but by Hattie, a city orphan, drug addict, stripper, his grandfather’s lover, and Sonny’s dearest friend. The text centers on the couple’s arrival in Brooklyn from Paris to attend a commemoration concert in honor of his deceased grandfather, born Everett, nicknamed Sonny Rett Payne, an internationally renowned pianist extraordinaire. In a sense, eight-year-old Sonny stands in for, or “recorporealizes” his grandfather to the Brooklyn community from which Sonny Rett as a teenager sought exile in jazz-loving Paris, itself another African diasporic community. Young Sonny’s amazingly varied relatives via his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and other cross-generational relatives, hail from multiple sites of slavery. Through his centrality within this human nexus of relationships, the boy epitomizes Marshall’s brilliant saga of African Americans, African Caribbean, and African people. He does so because his ancestors, elders, and relatives, his non-consanguineous “stepmother” Hattie, and his Parisian minder, a madame Molineaux, are natally linked to the English- and French-speaking diaspora, from the African west and northwest (Guinea and Algerian) coasts, from different parts of the Caribbean, from the United States and France. Synaesthetic threads—of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell in various combinations—link the past, present, and future. The community’s sensory experiences are virtually complete as Sonny Rett “reappears” in the person of his grandson. To address the novel’s title, the grail knight Perceval has come to heal posthumously the maimed fisher king, his grandfather; the youngster will represent, unknowingly or not, the musical genius of the community’s thrice-exiled son whose history chimes with that of countless self-exiled black musicians of his generation.3 He is the son of Ulene, a Barbadian immigrant who shares Silla’s persistent goal in Brown Girl, Brownstones to own a brownstone. Nothing matters more. As an inspired Sonny’s piano playing matures in 1930s Brooklyn, demonstrating a prodigious talent, Ulene demeans his creativity to crush his burning spirit. Any intrusion on her brownstone dream threatens to shatter it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.