Praisesong For The Widow

6 Pages 1391 Words

America is a country with people of various cultures all-trying to mingle in or in some cases trying to integrate themselves. Many people, especially in America go their whole lives not knowing their true identity, because they’re to busy trying to assimilate into another culture to feel accepted and wanted from the dominant group. As for Avey Johnson who is an African-American woman who obtains many leisure’s, is sought to be a lost and complex character.
In the novel Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall is a about a middle class African-American widow, Avey Johnson who sets off into the Caribbean in a cruise ship, Bianca Pride with two of her friends. As the ship disembarks in Grenada she is haunted by nightmares of her Great aunt Cuney. Her nightmare awakens in her an emptiness and longing for something that she cannot initially explain. Her life about that point had seemed successful, especially in the eyes of others, almost like the American dream. Within this part of the novel a journey of reclamation and healing of a past that has been largely of her younger years and obtain in the American dream of financial security and a White-defined respectability.
Paule Marshall takes the reader into a journey of a confused troubled widow on an expensive cruise, who then finds herself and liberates herself into a deeper understanding
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of her cultural and familial heritage. Within the beginning of the novel, the reader can predict a sense of lost identity within the character, when her daughter, Marion addresses her as to why she feels the need to go on these cruises with people who don’t fully accept her as an equal.
When she finally looked up it had been all she could do, from her expression, not to reach out and grab her mother by the shoulders and shake her the way she might have one of her pupils. To shake sense into her. “Why go on some meaningless cruise with a bunch of white folk...